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Fractured Families by Chua Beng Huat and Vineeta Sinha
The Singapore government has consistently insisted on the idealogy that the
‘family’ is the fundamental institution of the society, the basic
building block which the society is built up on. The government is determined
to shore up the family institution. In spite of the fact that like in every
contemporary society, divorce rates are going up, marriage-age for men and women
are rising and, the number of children per married couple is dwindling or none
at all and, finally, singlehood is increasingly common, if only because of the
absence of the ‘right’ marriage partners or by ideological commitment to
singlehood. Consequently, it has many pro-family policies in place that try to
encourage marriage and family formation, propagating preferably the extended family.
As a result,
there is a tendency in Singapore, among the government and the people, to
project the family as an ‘ideal’ social institution of warmth, love and harmony. The reality of the family is, of course, far from this ideal.
It is frequently fractured and fragmented in multiple and different ways. This
fracturing and fragmenting provide grist for the mill for the Singaporean
filmmakers featured in this compilation of short films on the family. In
focusing on the cracks, these films not only insert realism back into the
concept of the family but also serve as critiques of the government's ideology.
Furthermore, the commentaries in these short films challenge the idea of the hetero-normative, nuclear family
as a
somewhat universal structure in all contemporary societies, beyond the boundaries of the
island-nation.
Labour of Love - the Housewife, by Rajendra Gour, made in the 1970s,
appropriately features a normal family by focusing on the daily, mundane
activities, i.e. ‘housework’, of the housewife, with two young children. The
film meticulously details the daily chores - cleaning the house, doing the
laundry, cooking, feeding, playing, comforting, educating and disciplining the
children, managing the household budget, and attending to the husband;
the housewife does all this repetitively, endlessly, and above all, uncomplaining. She seeks as reward
nothing more than her husband’s acknowledgment and derives meaning in raising a future
generation. The film ends ironically. When asked by a team of visiting surveyors
if she is working, she replies reflexively, ‘No I am not.’ This surprises even
her and she asks herself: “What have I been doing all day?” The dedication of
the film to ‘the housewife in the labour of love,’ only serves to intensify the
irony.
One way in which family harmony is disrupted is by the death of a family member. K.
Rajagopal’s Absence, opens with a scene of two women, clad in white, who sit
grieving before a garlanded photograph of a man, the departed, in a ritual of
chanting prayers to appease feelings of separation, loss and remembrance. Rikesh, the son, an
aspiring photographer and artist berates his mother for ‘all this crying and
praying’, rejecting the religious tradition that offers solace to his mother.
Yet, the Hindu priest who officiates at his father’s death anniversary prayers
fascinates the young man. The audience is led to believe that the fascination is
aesthetic, as he photographs and sketches the priest. But the depth of his
longing for the lost father is revealed in a scene where, in trance, he reaches
out for physical contact with the bathing priest as the father figure. The
mistaken reaction of the older man makes the young one recoil in confusion and
embarrassment. His confusion and delusion is further enhanced when he returns home one
afternoon to find the priest and his mother in slumber. When a family falls
apart, it does so in more ways than one.
Ryan Tan Wei Liang’s Mandarin and Teochew film, Yesterday’s Play
continues the theme of mother and son. The unemployed son suffers daily, verbal
abuse from his mother for being a ‘good for nothing’. His presence in the house is
a persistent source of annoyance and irritation to the mother who resents his
dependence on her for all his needs, including nourishment. This interaction
between mother and son, filled with frustrations and anger on both sides,
becomes routine, normal. Yet, they cling on to this negative intense
relationship. They cling on to each other literally, as the son forcefully
embraces his mother, a gesture that she seems to resist but not entirely and not
too convincingly, lending a moment of uncertain tenderness or desperate
reciprocity of dependency and need, respectively.
Absence is not always a cause for despair. Michael Tay’s Wet Season, is a
moving tribute to the memory of a loved one whose absence haunts those who are
left behind. The pain of separation, the emptiness, the lack of meaning and
motivation to live, created by the absence of a faceless man, whose identity
remains a mystery till the very end, in the life of the man/character on screen
are captured through the range of complex and powerful emotions evoked,
including anger, disappointment and affection, as the latter fondly remembers
intimate and humorous details of their relationship and experiences. The audience’s
interest is captivated by the ambiguity and complexity of the missing man’s
identity and the intensity of the relationship between the two men. The
patchwork, montage nature of the film, together with clever animation and
visuals, make the film a memorable experience.
In Wet Season, homosexuality remains private to the character-on-screen;
however, due to the activities of civil society groups like Action for Aids and
People like Us, homosexuality has been brought into the light of day, debated in
parliament, and thus is no longer a suppressed topic for public discussion.
Nevertheless, for gay individuals to ‘come out’ to one’s own family remains a
difficult hurdle to cross. Loo Zihan’s Autopsy is a documentary which
records the ‘coming out’ conversation between a mother and her gay son. The
difficulties of portraying homosexuality on screen is cleverly handled by an
intentional ‘disconnect’ between visuals of conventional and normal school days
where boys and girls mingle, and the voice-over conversation between the mother and
son, the visuals and the dialogue run in parallel. Only in the opening scene
where
waves are used to signify the ‘emotional’ state of the character, is the difficult conversation
made evident.
Throughout the film, the son is invisible and the mother appears only towards
the end. There is the suggestion of a film within a film in which the son appears
in the nude and the mother’s insistence that she will, of course, watch it, is
her way of expressing her painful acceptance of the son’s sexuality.
Gourmet Baby by Sandi Tan nicely weaves the other Singaporean ideological
self-representation, namely Singaporean’s obsession with food, to that of the
family. A Singaporean man who returns home after two decades abroad, finds the
adult Singaporean unadventurous in taste for different foods, contrary to the
common boasts of Singaporeans being ‘foodies’ and Singapore a food paradise. Only
in his seven-year old niece, Winnie, does he find a willing culinary partner who is
open to what the man considers as refined, sophisticated tastes and flavour of
foreign foods. She is his ‘gourmet baby.’ Unfortunately, babies grow up and
become conventional. As Winnie grows into her teenage years, typical teenage preference for
fast food is a sign of normality. The knowingly peer-determined plebeian taste
of fast food has displaced the eating of ‘fine’ food which was no more than an
ignorant practice, mistaken by her uncle as intrinsic adventurousness. For the
teenager, the Uncle’s companionship becomes a source of irritation and
embarrassment, his aloneness a source of suspicion and speculation of his
‘abnormality’, especially his sexuality. The Uncle’s final failed attempt to
revive her ‘interest’ in food discloses Winnie’s altered attitude not just to
gourmet food but to him as a person as well.
The harmony of a family is often maintained by conspiracy to secrecy not only
among its adult members but amongst the children as well. Boo Junfeng’s Spanish language
film – an oddity among Singaporean filmmakers – A Family Portrait, starts
with an image of Sergio, a 17-year old young man with the conventional adolescent
curiosity about the female anatomy, gleaned from a book. Sergio was discomforted
by his younger sister’s question of ‘what is sex’, asked on account of her
classroom discussion on love. Sergio struggles to provide a harmless and
innocuous response as he recalls the unconventional, threesome sexual tryst
involving his mother, bisexual father and an uncle, which he inadvertently
witnessed as a child. But the family secret had to be suppressed, and ostensibly
to prolong if not save his sister’s innocence. He tells her that ‘sex’ as a
‘beautiful’ part of love and marriage. The latter concludes happily, ‘then sex
is love’ and a moment for truth was transformed into a moment of illusion, of
misinformation, if not exactly falsehood.
The government’s encouragement of marriage and family is also manifested in
the individual Singaporean’s desire for partners. Unfortunately, the tendency of
women to marry upwards in social class and status has left many lowly educated
and low social status men without marriage partners. However, given the
inequalities of development between nations, the lowly status of these
Singaporean men is reconfigured by the superior economic condition of Singapore
into relatively ‘high’ status regionally, enabling some of them to ‘purchase’ a
‘mail order’ bride elsewhere from the region. Mirabelle Ang’s film, Match
Made, documents one man’s, Ricky, process of sourcing for his bride in Vietnam. The
highly organized process turned out to be an ‘international’ enterprise: ‘Sin Ye
International Matchmaker’ in Singapore is owned by a Taiwanese man, Mark Lin,
whose Vietnamese counter parts source for potential brides, bringing them to Ho
Chi Mind City. The entire process of securing a wife takes only five days - from
the point of viewing
of the available girls, selecting, preparing for the wedding and the marriage
itself. Ricky’s marriage ends unhappily, with his 19 year-old bride being sent back to
Vietnam within three months of arriving in Singapore. The illustrative case
refers to all the unknown cases of such unequal and abusive unions that mirror
the inequalities between nations, of Singapore’s relative economic superiority
and resentment by the regional others.
Foreign women do not enter Singapore just as ‘brides’. The overwhelming majority
of them come in as domestic ‘maids’ on short term contracts, without any claims
to permanent residency and, ironically, no rights to marriage to low-wage
Singaporean men. Brian Gothong Tan’s Imelda Goes to Singapore showcases
the renowned actress Nora Samosir, as a Filipino maid in a Singapore household.
An ‘escape’ from the alienation in a job of cleaning up after others and
isolation in the employer’s flat is to outfit oneself, with plastic bags for the
baggy sleeves of Filipino traditional fashion, in the image of Imelda Marcos,
former First Lady of the Philippines, singing the one Filipino love ballad that
is made familiar to others by Filipino bands performing in hotel lounges all
over Asia, Dahil Sa Iyo (Because of You) – to the beat of daily household
chores. The soulful, musical rendition of the song and the entire mise-en-scène
offers a highly ambiguous mix of comedy, satire and political commentaries on,
among other imaginable themes, the life of foreign contract maids who have been
hailed as ‘national heroes’ by the government in the Philippines.
Taken together this set of short films chronicles not only the relatively
permanent features of the realities of family life but also provides critical
reflections and commentaries on the political relations between Singapore and
some of its neighbouring countries, an unequal and economic hierarchical relation
that strangely reflects and recalls the patriarchal and hierarchical structure of
the male dominant family.
Biography of authors: Professor Chua Beng Huat and Associate Professor Vineeta Sinha are colleagues in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.
Professor Chua Beng Huat is a regular commentator on
Singapore current affairs, is currently Professor in the Department of Sociology
and the Asia Research Institute. His publications include Life is Not
Complete without Shopping
(Singapore University Press, 2003), Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore
(Routledge, 1995) and Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in
Singapore (Routledge, 1997). He is also founding co-executive editor of the
journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge).
Associate Professor Vineeta Sinha teaches social theory in the Department of
Sociology, National University of Singapore. She is the author of A New God
in the Diaspora?: Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore (Singapore:
Singapore University Press, 2005).
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