Vintage??

Scene one: I’m trying to write an essay about Bata shoes. It’s going fine, except for a question that befuddles me: why are Bata shoes so often treated like retro icons, even though they’re still bought and sold today? Children still wear them, right? And there are Bata stores scattered across the island. So why is the shoe always on listicles like ‘If You Are a 90s Singapore Kid, These Things Will Make You Cry’?

Then it hits me: maybe the shoe is vintage for us 90s kids because now, we can afford Nike.

Another scene. I’m at a cafe where the working theme is, clearly, ‘retro’: old film posters on the walls, ‘70s pop, menus in carefully stylish sepia. The food, I realise, is also meant to be retro. This means desserts served on old-fashioned crockery, shaped to look like ‘childhood classics’— think jelly tarts that look like ang ku kueh, and mango sweets that resemble bak chor mee.

But are ang ku kueh and bak chor mee really such throwbacks, I wonder. After all, they’re still common staples in other eateries— albeit ones with fewer instagrammers, and less photogenic decor.

Whom, exactly, are these things vintage for?

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Most Singaporean ‘classics’ seem to lead a strangely dual existence, bifurcated across time.

Take the Hokkien dialect. For some of us, it has morphed into an old-school icon, splayed across all manner of kitsch from children’s phrasebooks, to greeting cards that read ‘Huat lah!’ Like a Barthean version of Japanese, it has gone from a language that actually functions, to an aesthetic that signals a distant world.

One suspects, for instance, that few of Chye Seng Huat’s customers could tell you what the three characters Chye, Seng, and Huat literally mean. Yet, most could probably explain what the Hokkien script itself stands for— traditional methods, local pride, and an older, more authentic world of craft.

But is this true for everyone? Clearly not; for some, Hokkien is totally shipworthy, alive and kicking. It’s how you take down your customers’ orders or make gossipy phone calls. It is something mundane— a quotidian part of contemporary life, not a symbol of the past.

The same might be said of most things that we so call ‘vintage’ today— tutu kueh pins, iced-gem earrings, and kopitiam keychains. At many levels of the Great Singapore Story, these things still function as workaday objects, free from the soft touch of nostalgia. To call them retro is to announce your own difference from them— to separate yourself from the socio-economic milieu that they represent, if only symbolically.

Is ‘vintage’, then, as much about class as it is about time? Kopi-O an exoticism for the millennial who usually drinks lattes, but not for the Ah Pek scrimping on his CPF?

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Here is an explanation of how tourism works, courtesy of the Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid.

That the native does not like the tourist (she writes) is not hard to explain.

Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality. Every native would like to find a way out. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor...

So when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom. They envy your ability to turn their banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

Imagine— if you will— the local chaser of vintage trends, reconstituted as a tourist-in-time.

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One last flash-cut: a friend and I are walking through Little India. Somehow, the conversation turns to our memories of Singapore ‘s 50th birthday, and the glitzy, vintage-themed parade that was commissioned to celebrate it.

I thought it was especially weird (says my friend) how that year right, they had someone pose like Stamford Raffles, while all these kids dressed like labourers danced around him. We’re so comfortable celebrating that part of our history, with all its inequalities of power and privilege.

Why not? (I say) That stuff is super vintage la, so far away in the past. We don’t live like that anymore, why not bring it back for the parade.

Then we look around us, at the South Asian migrants who have just spent a long day toiling at various construction sites, and are just coming back to their cramped dorms.

Really? says my friend. Or still here but not in your line of vision; stuffed down the social scale, somewhere out of sight?

No such thing as ‘vintage’ one.