Winter Becomes Spring Becomes Summer … Singapore

Didn't sleep much the night before flying to Singapore. Who can sleep? We're on the far side of the world and about to go farther, much farther south. As close to the equator as I've ever been. Never been south of Florida before!

After a few hours in very comfortable bulkhead seats, watching our flight path on overhead digital monitors as we soar over the South China Seas, following the eastern shoreline of Vietnam and passing close to Ho Chi Minh City, our plane turns sharply for the final descent over Singapore. And I get my first glimpse of what looks to me very much like LeGuin's Earthsea: a large patch of land surrounded by tiny islands.

Singapore is a potatoe-shaped island city-state, straddling the straits between the longitudinally long arm of the Malay peninsula and the long latitudinal arc of Indonesia … Our plane swoops down to the potatoe's international airport, and upon entering the arrivals terminal the differences between HK and Singapore are readily apparent. Beyond the terminal's outer glass walls it looks like a hot summer day. People are dressed in sandals and shorts and saris. And within the terminal, there are plenty of families with babies and small children, waiting for loved ones to arrive.

We meet up with Kath's cousin Chui Lin and her husband Tian Soon, our hosts on this island. They explain that Singapore has undergone a baby boom in recent generations, as the 2-child-only policy of the 70's has been lifted, allowing people to have more children. But perhaps the biggest factor affecting the number of young children is the housing situation. In Singapore, citizens have to attain approval for housing; and for young unmarried singles, housing is next to impossible to get. So to move out and have your own apartment, the primary option is to marry.

In Singapore, almost everyone marries early, and has babies soon after …

Staying with Lin and Tian gives me an inkling about why the huge generational gap in HK is really more morph than gulf. Lin and Tian have two children: a 14 year old daughter Ying Ying, and an 11 year old son Tze Hong. Lin and Tian's lives are, naturally, focused upon their children. They nurture Ying Ying and Tze Hong's generational leap forward, encouraging the kids' instincts to be web-savvy, watching Much Music Asia with them, and family TV shows that manage to fuse the region's past with its future. One evening we all watched an episode of Ten Brothers, a show that combines the superhero features of Manga with the history of occupation, invasion, oppression and war.

Such is Singapore's history, as we discovered a couple of days later at the Museum of Asian Civilizations ... South East Asia is a place where enormous generation gulfs are bridged by familial bonds that seem stronger than in the West---few children move far from their parents here. And those fashionista teens teeming through Kowloon were always respectful of the elders they swarmed past.

Swarming has a darker meaning in the West, where respect between generations is a lost treasure …

On our second day in Singapore, Kath's charming and charismatic dynamo-of-an-aunt Margaret took us on a whirlwind driveby of the city's titanic commercial districts. Singapore is one big mall. And the wealth of both the island's port and its financial sector have overflowed, so that the past can be hard to see here: everything seems modern and mammoth, recently built or under construction. Condo complexes cover the island. We have seen no houses at all in Asia, not here nor in Hong Kong.

Aunt Margaret drops Kath and I off in the heart of the city, and we set out for Chinatown, one of the older outdoor market districts just beyond the Singapore river, a waterbody that was once the lifeline of the city's commerce, but is now mainly for pleasure boating. In the old Chinatown, we find a welter of South Asian fashions, and are now hunting for Kiera and Sarah, as the clothes are primarily for beautiful young woman …

Again, our gift-hunting turns up surprises. Stumbling into a tiny Chinese Heritage Center tucked into the heart of the hawker-stalls, we pick up some gifts for Mom and Dad. And with time running out before we have to head back to the Bishan district where cousin Lin lives for dinner, I spot the coolest teen t-shirt I've seen anywhere: it's for Dan, and it combines film and philosophy!

We rush back for a wonderful meal at a restaurant on the far side of the island, where I watch Kath continue the fall back into her childhood that began when she met up with cousin Peter in HK (Peter's early years were spent in Ottawa, so he and Kath had many memories to share). Kath drops into Cantonese at the dinner table, and her hesitant, faltering cadence with the language has vanished; I listen to my wife speak to her cousins in the rapidfire of her earliest years.

And remind myself to improve my Mandarin before we meet Maeve ...