By Bay Jia Wei (17S06R)
All HDB flats look alike. Cookie-cutter homes clustered together, it is easy to lose yourself in a neighbourhood of buildings plastered by the same shade of rectangular splotches. Perhaps the only thing that differentiates the tall columns are the block numbers attached to them. Yet, a few days ago, when I visited the HDB flat that I used to live in, a wave of nostalgia followed. Every flat around me was similar, but returning home felt different.
By Justin Lim (16A01B)
“Ew-noi-va? Innova? The new school’s name sounds like that school in Woodlands – that Innova, right?” I can’t help but sigh as my mother offers her own take on Eunoia JC’s rather unique name: not because it’s yet another detraction from the proposed pronunciation of “Eu-no-ya”, but because after three whole days, the furore hasn’t been settled. It’s not just my mother who seems to put her own charming spin to pronouncing the school’s name, even “language experts” who’ve studied Greek seem to be proposing their own alternatives – my favourite being “Eff-ni-ah” by an Edward C. Yong.
by Md Khairillah (16A01B)
Teater Ekamatra staged Geng Rebut Kabinet (GRC), a play set in another Singapore, vastly differing in form but in essence, unchanged. We see this Singapore through the lens of protagonist Catherine Seah, the minority Chinese candidate contending in Chai Chee-Commonwealth GRC and her attempt to defend Chinese rights in a world of Malay SAP schools, walls plastered with words in Jawi (the Malay script rendered in Arabic), and Malay-dominated armies ever ready against the ever-looming threat of China, roughly an entire sea away.
Substitute the words Malay with Chinese, and you get Singapore really.
Continue reading “The Yellow Elephant in the Room: The Race Issue”
By: Samuel Loh (16A01A)
Few other developed countries employ foreign labor to the extent we do in Singapore, and fewer still do so with as little pretension as us. There is ostensibly nothing to gloss over the untamed bareness of it all – burly workers toiling alongside heavy traffic, the characteristic yellow of their hardhats matched only by the dirtied shade of boots they fashion; groups clustered around Race Course Road to call home; temporary dormitories built from prefabricated shipping containers exude some kind of ephemeral quality that’s oddly part charming, part brutish.
Continue reading “Nationally Speaking: Personalizing Aliens”
By Sean Lim (16A13A)
Till recently, it has been awhile since we’ve seen blue skies. Continue reading “Hazy Days”
