Singapore’s Understory

By Kyle D. Hegarty

Eighty percent of Singaporeans live in one of the one million government-built apartment units. They’re agreeable, pleasant even. Slide open a large window in the living room or bedroom, and you will likely find two small hooks embedded in the painted concrete facade roughly one meter apart.

To understand Singapore, these little hooks are a good place to start.

These hooks exist to display the Singapore flag. But you would be wrong if you were picturing one million flags draped in unison. Displaying the flag is not required; it is optional. One could imagine a head of state insisting that those little hooks be used always, and that would have made Singapore a very different place. No, these hooks come with a more practical and limited set of instructions. Not only is it optional to fly a flag, but a flag can only be hung up from July 1st through the end of September. Nationalism is good, but too much or too little can lead to problems. This “Goldilocks nationalism” seems to work here.

Oh, and no other flags are allowed to be displayed, thank you very much.

Yes, this is a place that likes to plan. Someone planned this, and someone executed it, and a series of rules and laws took the plan from theory to reality. Singapore is a place not only comfortable with rules, but it is a place that seeks them out before moving forward. Past proofs are better than future gambles. In an era of growing uncertainty, Singapore continues to engineer a society with a fairly robust, protective umbrella, right down to those painted hooks.

And speaking of umbrellas, cast your gaze down from the high-rise towers with the sporadic red and white flags (assuming it’s flag season) and consider the rain trees that line so many roads crisscrossing the 190-kilometer city-state. Like many of the citizens, these gorgeous trees are transplants from other parts of the world. Singapore truly is an island of immigrants. These trees create a practical wide canopy that protects everything underneath. They rarely shed their leaves, preferring not to litter. In other words, these trees fit right in.

It’s easy to appreciate the canopy of a rain tree and its functionality, but if you want to understand Singapore, really understand Singapore, pay special attention to the branches that squirm and twist in all directions underneath the clean protective canopy. Some branches look arthritic and disorderly, others spread out almost horizontally, defying gravity, yet they work. They are the only things that make the canopy effective. This, too, is very Singaporean, and this uneven system makes Singapore a place worth getting to know.

Now look at the ground underneath the rain tree. Look at the roots that slowly rise and frequently break through the concrete. Is that even allowed here? Sometimes the rules must be broken to protect the rules. Or maybe, like the flag hooks, these roots have options, more than we are led to believe. Perhaps it is in those twisted support structures and the cracks where new life thrives.

When I think about Singapore, I think about those hooks, both used and unused, and I think about the rain trees that protect us while they quietly break apart the organized path on which we walk. And there’s a lot we can learn from both.