EXALTING THE PAST: NOSTALGIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HERITAGE IN CHILDRENS LITERATURE LILY KONG Senior Lecturer Department

of Geography National University of Singapore 10 Kent Ridge Crescent Singapore 119260 Tel: 65-8743861 Fax: 65-7773091 Email: lilykong@nus.edu.sg

AND

LILY TAY Graduate Department of Geography National University of Singapore

EXALTING THE PAST: NOSTALGIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HERITAGE IN CHILDRENS LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

In a collection of six short stories, Wee (1990b) wrote lyrically about the life of a group of children living in a modern housing estate, in juxtaposition with the life of a group of village children, both located in Singapore. In one story, Jevan and his friends from the modern housing estate are portrayed as engaging with Eric and his village friends in friendly rivalry on the football pitch. On the other hand, in another story, they work together to form a club to patrol the neighbourhood and to plan a Christmas party. Through the lives of these children and the settings in which they are portrayed as growing up in, Wee illustrates the rapid urban development in Singapore, and infuses the stories with a sense of nostalgia and heritage consciousness.

In this paper, we examine Singapore childrens literature, that is, all English-language creative writing intended for children that have a local setting,1 and which are authored by locals. The analysis is confined to such literature produced from the 1980s since this was when the bulk of childrens literature began to be produced. We were persuaded to a large extent by the argument that to understand a literature, it is necessary to situate the work and the authors within the context of production, examining the socio-cultural, economic and political conditions surrounding the production of the text. We therefore sought to document and analyse the portrayal of Singapore in local childrens literature, to understand why such a portrayal was prominent, and to what effect.

GEOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE

Since the 1970s when the humanistic approach in geography gained ascendancy, geographical analysis of literary works has gained space on the research agenda. This stemmed especially from the acknowledgement that literary works allow for an exploration of the nuances of experience and the meanings and value systems of environments and societies (Teather, 1990:220) and serve as a means of penetrating the complexities that underlie human relationships with, and their cognition of the environment. Pocock (1981:345) captured the value of novelists insights when he suggested that they were able to very succinctly articulate our own inarticulations.

This refers to a Singapore setting in the post-independence (1965) years, excluding the rural hinterland of Malaysia which, together with Singapore, formed part of the Federation of Malaysia between 1963 and 1965.

Geographical studies of literary works have adopted different approaches. These may be categorised as the regional, humanistic and structural approaches. Regional geographers interested in literature turned to the regional novel to discover the character, personality and identity of regions (see Gilbert, 1960). Examples of studies adopting the regional approach are abundant. Jay (1975) studied the Black Country of Francis Brett Young, who, through his novels, conveyed the personality of the place, in terms of the landscape and life of the region. Hudson (1987) focused his attention on Arnold Bennetts works, particularly his Five Towns novels, which contained portrayals of middle England. Indeed, Hudson (1987:416) hails Bennett as one of the regional novelists with the ability to capture the spirit of place and evoke particular landscapes in prose. Likewise, Simpson-Housley and Paul (1984) analysed D. H. Lawrences works in a regional sense, according to four major themes: the idyllic landscapes of rural England; the despoiled industrial landscapes; the harmonious Italian landscapes; and the awesome American landscapes. Lawrences novels were also studied by Spolton (1970), who looked at the spirit of place in Lawrences depiction of the East Midlands. Such studies are reminiscent of Darbys (1948) early work, in which he studied Hardys portrayal of south-central England in his Wessex novels. Regional novels thus serve as a means of allowing geographers to access the character and personalities of regions.

Humanism gained ascendancy in the 1970s within geography with the main premise that understanding human experience is crucial in appreciating human-environment relationships. The aim of humanistic geography, according to Jeans (1979:207), is to raise our awareness of how people live in the world and how they structure it so as to impart meaning to their lives and the institutions they have founded to cope with the world. He contends that the central concept is meaning, and that place may be defined as coming into existence through men [sic] according meaning to locations (Jeans, 1979:208). Jeans (1979:211) premise is that humanist descriptions of a place should express the atmosphere of that place, which can only be a subjective response and which literary works provide well. This is reinforced by others of like persuasion. For example, Datel and Dingemans (1984) and Mallory and Simpson-Housley (1987) also argue that literary portrayals are crucial to the understanding of the complex bundle of meanings, symbols, and qualities that a person associates with a place (Datel and Dingemans, 1984:135; see also Tuan, 1976; Lowenthal and Prince, 1976; Porteous, 1985). In working through these ideas in the specific context of Malcolm Lowrys works, Porteous (1987) illustrates how Lowrys vision of the city is purely topophobic, with six levels of topophobia being apparent. In ascending order of disquietude, cities are regarded as placeless, as sources of sensory overload, fundamentally inorganic, symbols of evil, predators, and ultimately as the creators of deathscapes (Porteous, 1987: 34). More recently, Preston and Simpson-Housleys (1994:1) collection on Writing the City also continues this tradition of acknowledging and interrogating the city, not in terms of bid-rent curves, traffic flows, demographic patterns and

economic potential, but as (quoting Saul Bellow) the expression of the human experience it embodies, and this includes all personal history.

Even while the regional and humanistic approaches informed geographical studies of literary works, others were arguing for more structural analysis. Proponents of this approach, such as Silk (1984) and Thrift (1983), argue that there is a need to venture beyond the realm of the experiential, towards a structurally and contextually-grounded understanding of literature (Silk, 1984:151). In this perspective, the author is no longer the creative individual that humanist geographers assume him/her to be, to be understood beyond the social, economic and political forces within which he/she exists. Instead, he/she is now very much a product of a particular society, and reflects and reveals the ideology and values of that society. This emphasises the importance of situating any analysis within an understanding of particular historical and geographical contexts.

Extremist proponents of this perspective adhere to the Marxist approach, insisting that the context within which literary works is set is that of the bourgeoisie, with its associated notions of class, conflicts and oppression. As Eagleton (1976:55) states:

Literature is an agent as well as an effect of [class] struggles, a crucial mechanism by which the language and ideology of an imperialist class establishes its hegemony, or by which a subordinated state, class, or region preserves and perpetuates at the ideological level an historical identity shattered or eroded at the political. Silk (1984:166) further explained the role of literature in analysing the complex social relations associated with particular times and places, drawing on the example of patriarchal values in Jane Austens novels. For particular social classes in late eighteenth century England, relations between property and patriarchy meant that daughters were at once regarded as an encumbrance and ironically as potential assets simultaneously. This contradiction would be resolved only if the

daughters married well (Silk, 1984:170). Silk argued that Austens novels provided a way by which to explore the structures that governed English society at that particular historical moment.

In part, the above categorisation of existing research too neatly avoids many inflections in perspectives that are apparent with the rise of a retheorised cultural geography, with influences from gender studies and post-colonial studies. A brief review of such studies at this juncture will reveal how the conventional narrative I have used above is a useful and convenient, though incomplete, framework.

Cresswell (1993:253) summarises the way in which the retheorised cultural geography has influenced geographical analyses of imaginative literature. Citing as examples the work of Monk and

Norwood (1990) and Silk and Silk (1985), he suggests that central questions asked include: how does an image of a place become dominant? How are such images subverted? What role does literature play in such a struggle over the meaning of places and other geographical themes? Central to his thinking are the themes of dominance and resistance, arising from the acknowledgement of a plurality of cultures. Cresswell (1997) illustrates this strand of enquiry through his own analysis of Kerouacs On the Road. There, he shows how the novel is a cultural site of contestation over the meaning of mobility. Specifically, mobility is used as a form of resistance against ideals of family and home, while reproducing the established American mythology of mobile, male outlaws. This, he argued, should be cast within the context of the counter-culture of the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S.A. when young people were resisting the presuppositions of rootedness, family values and the American Dream. Mobility was therefore inspiring, Cresswell posited. In countering this interpretation of mobility, McDowell (1996) argues that Cresswell ignores the different locations of readers, suggesting that many women readers (and some men too) were not likely to have been inspired by mobility, tending instead towards anxiety. In so doing, McDowell further illustrates Cresswells fundamental argument that imaginative literature is a site of struggle over meaning.

The influence of post-colonial theory is also apparent in geographical analyses of imaginative literature. Perhaps one of the most prominent advocates of this is Said (1993), who argues that Europeans charted the world in cartographic and literary maps and then colonised it. Indeed, the nineteenth century push in Europe to map and write about other places also represented extended efforts to colonise and consolidate imperial power. This is borne out in the empirical work on adventure stories by Phillips (1997), for example, where he argues that adventure stories constructed a cultural space that was motivated by a clear political agenda, namely, imperialism. Specifically, Phillips (1997:3) writes about Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, and illustrates how the character of Marlow, in dreaming of terra incognita, does not hold a harmless and private or innocent dream, but reflects instead the dream of a white boy, growing up in an age of empire. His childhood dreams, ostensibly innocent, of spaces of delightful mystery, later became coloured by experience: [h]is seemingly personal dreams of adventure connected with social worlds and social politics, in particular the politics of European imperialism in Africa and imperial masculinity in Europe. In that sense, European empires and European masculinities were imagined in geographies of adventure (Phillips, 1997:3). Reflecting yet another inflection, within gender studies and post-structuralist thought, the issue of authorial subjectivity is addressed. Here, in contrast to the reductionism of structuralist writings, it is argued that it does matter who is speaking and/or writing. For example, as Blunt (1994:54) argues, the conditions under which men and women write are materially different, the social construction of gender affects how the writings of men and women are read, and the

interpretations of texts are influenced by the gender consciousness of individual readers. As a result, Blunt argues for the usefulness of the notion of author positionality, which reveals the different sites at which identities are constructed and contested through space and time. This takes the argument away from structuralist positions about the death of the author and humanist arguments that the author is an originating genius, creating aesthetic objects outside of history (Walker, 1990:560). It acknowledges the role of historical formations but does not take away the role of agency.

GEOGRAPHY AND CHILDRENS LITERATURE

While geographers have increasingly recognised the vast potential of literary works to geographic research and clearly explored different perspectives towards its study, much of the existing research (see Jay, 1975; Hudson, 1987; and Herbert, 1991, for example) largely focus on the literary classics, or high literature, neglecting a large bulk of literary work belonging to the genre of low literature, which is considered to be of lesser repute. Alongside this neglect of popular literature is a similar lack of attention to childrens literature, which is often considered too inconsequential for serious academic research. While most childrens literature may be deemed to be of little literary significance, they are nevertheless geographically valuable for their precise focus on the ordinary, the everyday and the taken-for-granted. Their value for an understanding of the

geography of everyday life parallels more recent interest in children and their geographies (see, for example, Valentine, 1996).

A few studies of childrens literature illustrate the potential value of analysing such works. For example, in her article, Brooker-Gross (1981) studies the Nancy Drew mysteries and illustrates how landscapes are imbued with symbolic meanings. She concludes that the landscape in these stories is not merely a passive setting for the use of landscape constitutes a sort of tutelage in moral geography (Brooker-Gross, 1981:63). Specifically, moral judgements are attached to the landscape, and relationships are established between the environment and the social stereotypes they reinforce.

Nancys home, for example, is described as a large red-brick house, the sturdiness of the brick being symbolic of Nancys steadfastness and trustworthiness. Other attributes of Nancys house equate it with the pastoral setting - green spaces reminiscent of the countryside surround her home invariably evoking a sense of goodness (Brooker-Gross, 1981:62). While romantic and pastoral imagery symbolises morality in the Nancy Drew mysteries, dirt and decay suggest crime. Villains live in environments that are the reverse of the positive characters abodes. The two distinguishing features of the villains abodes are seclusion and neglect. In sum, a conscious effort at discouraging

neighbourly interaction, and a general dirtiness in place setting is the norm used to identify shady dealings or characters. In the Nancy Drew mysteries therefore, the landscape is hardly passive, but reflects the moral judgements attached to it.

The adventures of Peter Rabbit form the substance of Squires (1991) study. In her 1991 dissertation, and then in a 1993 paper, she examined how different people (for example, native Britons and Japanese tourists), through Potters writings and the associated plethora of merchandise (for example, crockery and furniture illustrated with Peter Rabbit and company), mediate images of rural life and values. The Beatrix Potter landscape was widely taken as representative of the countryside and at the same time, indelibly linked with Romantic notions of Englishness (Squire, 1993:7). Her writings thus perpetuate a view of what the countryside should encompass, ascribing a certain Romantic virtue to it. The tourism generated from Potters books also helped perpetuate such images of rural English life, through the preservation of Hill Top Farm as a tourist spot. In addition to the effects of tourism, such romanticised images of the countryside also persisted because they were premised on separation from the city. To many, the countryside, and not the city, is a representation of real England. Like the Nancy Drew stories, such a dialectic between the rural and the urban reflects a dominant value system ascribing virtue to country settings while evaluating cities negatively (Squire, 1993:8).

Squire (1991) also highlighted the fact that the interest in Potters works not only revolves around an interest in the rural landscape, but also reflects diverse issues, some only peripherally related to her books, for example, advertising, product marketing, television documentaries, and exhibitions, all of which contribute towards influencing Potters appeal. As such, Potter no longer remains as just another author of childrens books, but has instead been appropriated symbolically into a wider cultural context and system of communication (Squire, 1993: 9).

Like Brooker-Gross (1981) and Squire (1991; 1993), Loyd (1974) also looked at landscape signification in childrens books. Urban settings, according to Loyd (1974), do not generally feature prominently in childrens stories. If and when they do appear, they are usually portrayed in a negative light. This noticeable absence of urban stories reflects the adults cognition of the urban landscape, viewing it to be too complex, too dangerous, or too evil to present to children (Loyd, 1974:16). This anti-urban trend lasted till the 1960s. In 1965, the Civil Rights Acts, along with the growing awareness of Blacks in America, and the increased educational opportunities for Black and other underprivileged children set the stage for change. As a result of these changes, a new generation of books set within urban areas, which the inner-city child could identify with, were produced (Loyd, 1974:17). What such unmistakable changes in childrens books point to is the fact that the political

and social climate of a country influence the landscape cognition of adults, and consequently the landscape imagery within the texts they produce.

CHILDRENS LITERATURE IN SINGAPORE

Locally written childrens literature only emerged in the 1980s with writers such as Jessie Wee and Bessie Chua while consumer interest only really gained momentum in the 1990s. In the 1980s, publishers were understandably reticent, their main concern being the insufficient readership and therefore the low volume of sales. This in turn stemmed from the fact that education (and relatedly, literacy) became an important cornerstone of the governments developmental policy only from 1965 when Singapore gained independence. It was only subsequent to that concerted emphasis that the general populace learnt to put a premium on education, and the habit of reading began to be developed as part and parcel of the learning process. In the 1970s especially, but also till today, childrens extra-curricular reading material tended to be focused more on non-local literature, evidenced, for example, in the popularity of the Ladybird series. Nevertheless, Wees ten-book series on The Adventures of Mooty Mouse published in 1980 marked a milestone in creative local childrens literature. While in the previous decades, a handful of locally written childrens books were

produced, these were predominantly in the form of supplementary readers published by the Ministry of Education (MoE). Wee is therefore often seen as the pioneer in the local creative writing scene for children. She writes for various age groups, the very young reader (from four to eight years old) as well as the older child (nine to 12 years old). Today, she is still the most prolific among locals writing childrens books, and has over 20 titles to her name. It is for this reason that the subsequent analysis is based largely though not exclusively on her works.

While locally authored childrens literature is still very much in its infancy, the 1990s has witnessed a relative boom in the publication of these books.2 For Wee, as for many other local writers today, it [is] the passionate belief that our children in Singapore [need] stories they [can] identify with, stories they [can] call their own (Wee, 1990/91: 38), that is the driving force behind their writing. As a result of their clear agenda, their stories are infused with local colour, and as such, serve as a repository of descriptions of local landscapes, customs, traditions and values. The local

authorship of childrens books has indeed grown, and continues to grow in view of increasing public interest and acceptance.

Sales figures are however unavailable, and the size of the market, a reflection of the popularity of such literature, is unfortunately not available.

Despite the growing body of local childrens literature, little work has been done in analysing their production and consumption. Where local geographers have dealt with literary works, they have been concerned with adult literature (see Kong & Savage, 1986; Chan, 1989/90; Savage & Kong, 1994). Lai (1981), who has attempted to redress the dearth of research on Singapore fiction for children, has however written as a student of literature, and her work has focused on analysis of themes such as sex, violence, humour, exotica and heroism in Southeast Asian childrens literature. In what follows, we devote our analysis to a presentation of evidence of the recurrent motif of nostalgia in Singapore childrens literature, revealed in repeated portrayals of past time and past place. We then draw this analysis onto a broader canvas by illustrating how the return to a heralded past is not confined to this literary product alone, nor limited to the tendencies of an idiosyncratic few among the writing class. Indeed, as we illustrate, a similar recovery of pastness is evident in other cultural spheres as well. We develop the argument further by suggesting that through nostalgic recollections of the past, a particular sense of heritage is being constructed in both the discursive and cultural domains. We conclude by engaging the question of what such constructions may imply in the development of collective memories and, by extension, imagined communities.

THE PAST IS AN EXALTED COUNTRY: THE MEMORIALISED KAMPUNG3

[Siva] held his wristwatch up to the bright moonlight ... [He] took a deep breath ... crept silently out of the flat ... and ran down the stairs. He did not stop until he was standing on the path that snaked drunkenly through the new housing estate. Soon, he came to the kampung ... it lay sleeping peacefully under the soft glow of an August moon (Wee, 1990d:1). At once, the old is juxtaposed with the new and Wees choice of imagery to describe the kampung and the housing estate suggests her own cognition of past and present landscapes. While the kampung of old is often portrayed as peaceful and idyllic, the modern housing estate is often portrayed as bright and jarring, and as a place where crime and boredom are constant problems.

One of the pervasive images in local childrens literature -- textual as well as illustrative -- is the idealisation of a past time and place, epitomised in the kampung. In this recurrent portrayal of the kampung, there is simultaneously a back-handed critique of present lifestyles and places, encapsulated

A kampung refers to a traditional village, usually inhabited by Malays, who constitute about 15 per cent of Singapores population. The rest comprise Chinese (75%), Indians (7%) and others (3%). The term has, however, also often been used to refer to villages inhabited by Chinese. In this paper, the term is used to refer to both Malay and Chinese villages.

in the near-ubiquitous modern Housing and Development Board (HDB)4 landscapes. Given the modern city-state that Singapore is and the governments continued relentless drive towards developed country status, replete with a tropical city of excellence (Living the Next Lap, 1991), it is important to understand why authors of childrens literature are harking back to the past, and explicitly so for an audience of children whose fates are to live in and enjoy the future.

Many stories in local childrens books are set in past landscapes.

The contemporary

landscape, when depicted at all, is either used as a vehicle to exalt the past, or is left very much a void, the landscape often poorly developed in the story. Several examples will illustrate this. Lims (1991) Granny, a story about a little girls relationship with her grandmother, starts off in an urban, contemporary setting -- a HDB flat -- but that is intended only as the opening scene, after which the reader is rapidly transported to a time past, filled with vibrant colours, sights and sounds. It is a past world of colourful Chinese operatic performances (wayangs) and of traditional shops such as the Chinese medicinal hall.

Like Lim, other writers also constantly recall a more idyllic past, setting a good number of stories in the carefree days of time gone by. For example, Wees (1992) A Home in the Sky, gives an account of the move from a traditional kampung to a modern HDB housing estate, contrasting one with the other. In the kampung, the first sounds that greet the morning are the sounds of nature, with:

... the birds stirring in the trees. Their chirping and twittering grew louder and noisier as the sky slipped into its soft, pink glow of morning (Wee, 1992:2). A sense of serenity pervades the description of the kampung, contrasting with the harsher HDB estate. Here, because of the stark, concretised landscape, the heat of the sun is relentless, probably increased by the urban heat island effect. Even the moon is said to shine relentlessly (see also Wee, 1990d:1). The urban HDB setting is portrayed in a stark manner with its general whiteness, evoking a sense of sterility and even coldness. This contrast is replicated in several of Wees books in the Spider Readers series (Wee, 1990a-d). The kampung is portrayed as clothed in a soft and warm glow (Wee, 1990d: 20), while the HDB estate is said to be brightly-lit (Wee, 1990d:24).

In most of the books analysed, it is not merely the text that enhances the sense of the past. The memorialised moments and places are also often greatly enhanced by the illustrations, with page after page of vibrant kampung scenery or of past market scenes. In Lims (1991d) Granny, for example, the traditional Chinese wayang is portrayed in resplendent glory, with vibrant colours of costumes and
The HDB is the statutory board in charge of providing public housing in Singapore. Over 80 per cent of Singapores population is housed in HDB flats.
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make-up, while the traditional Chinese medicinal hall is portrayed with its characteristic pink paper packages hanging with medicine after having being weighed up using the qing, the Chinese weighing scale.

Apart from the textual and artistic portrayals of past physical landscapes, the past is also portrayed as characterised by strong communal ties pervading the kampung. This is reproduced almost nostalgically, with illustrations of the kampung folk gathered in oneness, either tackling a problem, like when Mek, the goat ran amok and chased a terrified Ho Seng, or in a discussion, as in their dialogues on the impending move to an HDB estate (Wee, 1992). The nostalgia for this sense of togetherness is apparent in the dialogues but also simply in the very portrayal of past scenes, now clearly gone from present day living. While the sense of neighbourliness features in the kampung, the HDB estate, on the other hand, alienates by virtue of its sheer size:

Sadly, Ho Seng walked round the new neighbourhood. He did not know there were so many blocks of tall flats all looking so much alike. This place was so much bigger than his old kampong. How was he ever to find his friends (Wee, 1992: 27)? Apart from the lack of neighbourliness and camaraderie, the HDB estate is also portrayed as unsafe. In Match of the Year, Wee (1990b) writes of the crimes in the HDB estate, where snatch and petty theft and robbery seem common. In the three books on the Adventures of Constable Acai (Kamil et al., 1987; Tong et al., 1989; Tong & Chia, 1992), HDB housing estates are similarly fraught with crime. This crime-rich urban area comes as a shock to the kampung children, their nonplussed reaction contrasting with the nonchalance of the estate children, with the implication that urban children were more used to such disorder and breakdown of the social order:

Sue-Ann, Ali, Joe and the others looked at one another in alarm. What if such things happened in their own peaceful little kampung (Wee, 1990b: 26)? The kampung thus epitomises peace, quiet and security -- hence the open door of Razalis grandfathers atap5 hut in When Owls Hoot (Wee, 1990d:18). Lees (1989) recollection of life in the kampung captures this same feeling of security:

People in our kampong lived a friendly and secured [sic] life. The houses were grillefree and fenceless, and their doors were usually open from dawn till late at night (Lee, 1989:82).

Thatch, usually made of fronds of the nipa palm.

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While it is the sense of security in the kampung that allows the open-door practice, it is precisely this practice of keeping doors open at all times that resulted in a very high level of unintended public surveillance in the kampung. Visual familiarity enabled the dwellers to spot a stranger quickly (Chua, 1995).

The re-imagined past also marked happier and more cohesive ties in both familial and social relations, with kampung folks being more united. The sense of community in the kampung is an unintended consequence of the active provision of some collective needs by the kampung dwellers for themselves, due to the negligence of Singapores earlier colonial administration6 (Chua, 1995:13-14). Having to take care of their own collective needs, a corresponding sense of community developed. Thus, this translates into happier relationships, and a childhood filled with friends and things to do, as against the boredom in the public housing estates (see Wee, 1990b:10). As Jevan and his friends contend:

Why, the kampung children really knew how to enjoy themselves. They really knew how to live (Wee, 1990b:14). Furthermore, the kampung children seem to have benefited from the social cohesion, being a less suspecting and friendlier group. For example in Twos Company ... Threes A Crowd (Wee, 1990d), Siva and Razali happily welcome and play with a boy who remained a stranger to them:

Siva shrugged, it did not matter - they could play happily together without a proper introduction. He did not want to be unnecessarily curious about the new playmate he had never seen around in the kampung ... (Wee, 1990d: 19). Similarly, in Fort Alamak, a short story in Match of the Year (Wee, 1990b), the village children share their picnic basket with the housing estate children despite the fact that the latter were not initially invited to the picnic, and did not contribute anything to it.

While A Home in the Sky and the stories in the Spider Readers exemplify social unity in the kampung, the short stories in Wees Nightmare in the Air (1982) and Grandpas Remedy (1989) show off the closeness of familial ties. In Kusu, a short story in Nightmare in the Air, the division of labour in an extended familial unit is described:

I eyed my mothers food basket longingly. I had watched her prepare the yellow nasi kunyit and even helped her paint the hard-boiled eggs a bright vermilion. First Aunt had packed the red and yellow traditional candles together with joss-sticks and joss6

Singapore gained independence from the British in 1963 when it became part of the Federation of Malaysia.

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paper while Second Aunt had prepared the food offerings in separate baskets ... (Wee, 1982: 18). This division of labour is seen yet again in Vampire Aunt, a story in Grandpas Remedy (Wee, 1989:20):

First Aunt is occupied with the laundry, Second Aunt with household chores, Third Aunt with the cooking, my own mother with balancing the household accounts and Fifth Aunt with the sewing and mending. The sharing of chores among the adults in an extended family frees the children of household chores, allowing them to have more fun than the adults who ha[ve] various duties to attend to (Wee, 1989:20). This contrasts with Chuas (1981) Meilis New Years Eve, where 11-year-old Meili of a modern nuclear family is left in the lurch, having to prepare the Chinese New Year Eve Reunion dinner for her father and brother when her mother is admitted to the hospital for delivery. The disadvantages of a nuclear family are made even more apparent in Lohs (1981) Kims Tree, where Kim, the child protagonist is forced to give up her childhood delights: There was no more hugging her rag doll, no more making mud pies in the backyard, or having great fun with the make-believe cooking (Loh, 1981:3), as a result of her mothers death.

In general then, writers depict the kampung folks as being of a happier mien, the natural surroundings nurturing their creativity, and contributing to their general joy:

The wind carried their [the kampung kids] happy shrieks up to the trees-tops, and across the road to the ears of Jevan and his group of friends ... Jevan was bored and so were the others. There was nothing to do in the housing estate (Wee, 1990b:10). The exaltation of the past is thus evident. This happy recollection and recreation of the past is an amalgamation of a sense of nostalgia, a desire to educate the child about the past landscape, and also a lament on the loss of social and familial unity in present society. As Chua (1995:6) states, Nostalgia is ... an immanent critique of the present; the past as lived experiences are invoked as a mirror of the present. Similarly, Lowenthal (1985:xvii) argues that an exoticised visage of the past is often sought to contrast with a humdrum or unhappy present (Lowenthal, 1985:xvii). Memories of the past are refigurations, the result of intentional partial amnesia, a selective erasing and deletion of certain aspects of the past, while certain elements are exhorted, embellished and exaggerated. The past is thus refigured, guided only by the logic of nostalgia (Chua, 1995:5).

A MODERN CITY-STATE: IN SEARCH OF A PAST

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This selective recollection and idealisation of the past is evident, not only in childrens literature, but in other cultural forms produced and cultural activities consumed recently in Singapore as well. As Kong (1996) illustrated in the context of xinyao (Mandarin ballads by Singapore youths), one of the themes that recurs is a yearning for time past and previous place. This past time and place is often characterised as the time and place of childhood in which life was simpler, when children had more freedom and time to themselves so that they could be children: to engage in childhood pranks, to enjoy the laughter and tears of child's play and not to worry about the rat race. Similarly, local theatrical productions such as Kampung Amber (a 1994 musical performed at the Singapore Festival of Arts organised by the National Arts Council) selectively recreate a past landscape and lifestyle while television productions such as Rollin Good Times (on air in 1993 and 1994) valorise music of the 1950s and 1960s. Participating in this nostalgic revivalism independently are individuals and groups, mainly performers of old, who organised nostalgia nights in night clubs and community centres, bringing back local versions of Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley and the like in the 1980s (The Straits Times, 9 February 1982; 22 March 1987; 19 April 1987; 5 September 1989). Less ad hoc and perhaps even more indicative of the strength of this revival was the fact that commercial enterprises were banking on the big wave of nostalgia. In 1989, lounges for oldies were mushrooming virtually overnight (The Straits Times, 30 June 1989). Ballroom dancing, which had gone out of fashion by the early 1980s was making a comeback in the late 1980s, with the business picking up in dance studios teaching the waltz and cha-cha and nightclubs opening which were dedicated to dancing the oldfashioned way as opposed to discos (The Straits Times, 6 July 1986; 11 July 1986). Indeed, in 1996, the National Archives staged an exhibition Retrospin on popular music history and hosted a public forum on popular music heritage in Singapore.

Concomitant with this search for the past through what is often termed retro culture is a similar recovery of pastness in other non-artistic arenas of life as well. This is perhaps most evident in urban conservation efforts because of its materiality. These efforts reflect a recognition of the value of Singapores architectural and historical heritage (Kong and Yeoh, 1994) and were egged on by the desire to seek an anchor for Singapores Asian identity. Although not an uncontested process (see, for example, Kong and Yeoh, 1994), such conservation certainly reflects the states concern to objectify selections of historical place and time for various social, economic and political purposes (Kong, 1997). Indeed, conservation is used to anchor a larger agenda, that of building a national identity by, inter alia, reminding Singaporeans of their roots as concretised in place.

Exercises in recovering the past have therefore emerged both in public activity as well as in state agendas. Why has this focus on the past surfaced in Singapore in recent times? This renewed focus must be understood in the context of Singapores development up to the 1980s. Of utmost significance is the rapidity of economic change which had brought in train various social impacts,

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resulting in what Kwok (1993:7) terms the complexity of our cultural condition. Among the social and indeed political implications is a people dislocated from the past, with little sense of history and heritage. This condition in which people face a radical discontinuity with the past has had individual as well as national repercussions.

At an individual level, for those who might have felt somewhat overwhelmed and/or overtaken by the massive changes in Singapore society, the search for an anchor through the past may have been a personal search for stability in a shifting world. Such might have been the case with some of the authors whose works are analysed here. At the same time, such personal quests were very likely to have been given added impetus by the larger conditions within which they wrote. These were conditions in which the state was drawing up several nation-building and national identity formation projects in its quest to develop and inculcate a Singaporean identity which would anchor Singaporeans in an imagined community. These projects too were built in part on recoveries of the past, as we will go on to illustrate.

In the 1980s, the countrys leaders were increasingly expressing concern that Singaporeans were losing their roots, a view reflected in the then First Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tongs declaration that

We are part of a long Asian civilisation and we should be proud of it. ... We should be a nation that is uniquely multiracial and Asian, with each community proud of its traditional culture and heritage (Goh, 1988:15). Similarly, a Committee on Heritage Report7 (1988:6-8) highlighted the view that an understanding of ones roots and the past can help younger Singaporeans balance our Asian values and western influences. With the rapidity of social change therefore came an emphasis on history, roots and heritage that the state deemed necessary for political reasons. Considerations of the past through constructions of history and heritage have thus entered both official and public discourses. As illustrated above, this reconstruction of the past did not end at the discursive level but pervaded the sphere of cultural activity as well.

CONCLUSIONS

The Committee on Heritage was a joint ad-hoc public-private sector committee tasked to make recommendations to the government on how to assess the progress made in identifying, preserving and disseminating awareness of our heritage and suggest measures to improve such work; and to identify factors and propose measures which will encourage Singaporeans to be more widely informed and appreciative of our multi-cultural heritage in the context of modern Singapore (Committee on Heritage Report, 1988:12).

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We have illustrated in this paper how Singapore literary writings for children are characterised by, inter alia, a nostalgic recollection of past times and places. The epitome of social and physical landscapes of the past in childrens literature are most notably, though not exclusively, reflected in the kampung. As we have also illustrated, this emergence of the past as an important concern in Singapore is not isolated to the literary arena. It reflects a larger condition, a kind of bittersweet nostalgia for a time and an experience that is now irretrievably lost. What emerges from the analysis is that nostalgia is characterised by the interlocking nature of place and time, a yearning to transcend the constrictions of present place and time and to recapture a lost past, characterised by a lost place and a lost social world.

As Chase and Shaw (1989) point out, nostalgia is most likely to surface when society has been confronted with such rapid change that people come face to face with reminders of the past and vastly differing conditions of the present all in the same lifetime. The phenomenal changes in Singapore, well documented in the dramatic changes in its landscape, thus set the conditions for the transformation of history and collective memory into nostalgia. This is well exemplified in other work (Chua, 1995; Seet, 1995 on kampungs), in which a common line of argument is that elements of the past tend to be treated with sanctity and characterised as constituting "loss", worthy of recapturing. In all these various examples, the stance of nostalgia highlights the importance of place as symbolic referent: nostalgia is linked to the loss of the ubiquitous kampung with its idyllic lifestyle and its close-knit social world. Yet, in harking back to a lost place and time, a selective amnesia and concomitant mythologising is at work. Deprivations of the past are erased from recollection while other daily routines are elevated to metahistorical status. Hence, as Seet (1995:220) poignantly points out, "even a banal task like pounding belacan8 at one's liberty" is accorded a certain sanctity while Chua (1995) emphasises the point that the sentiment surrounding the loss of the kampung remains just that -- a sentiment -- with little question of hauling the past in toto into the present.

What then are the possible implications for children who look forward to the future while they are selectively reminded of the mythologised past? The likelihood is the development of a collective memory that valorises certain values associated (rightly or wrongly) with the past, such as social integration, community support and close family ties. For Singaporeans who hark back to the past as a means of coping with the present, such a development is incidental to their search for self and stability. For the state, however, the issue is whether such values may be transposed into

contemporary Singapore to serve larger nation-building agendas.

One of the common processes in Malay food preparation entails pounding chilli, often with belacan, a prawn paste, to produce a sauce to accompany food.

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