Celebrating Our Pioneers and other Singaporean Quirks

The word is officially out. Instead of a bevy of scantily clad beauties atop a 155mm Howitzer turret, this year's National Day Parade will feature our old pioneering spirited "samsui" construction women in their trademark red boxed headgear and samfoo.

Now that is a lot better than a meat rack show I reckon by a 20-to-1 vote .

But alas! The PA actually got their headgear and samfoo collaring all wrong on the humongous cardboard cut-out depicting this particular first national species. I have no comment on the head-dress but the collar!

Any young child with heightened acuity could have easily spotted the fiasco. It was a mandarin collar for christ's sake. Why would a sun-toiler, brow-beaten and back-broken, want to attire herself in a samfoo buttoned up to her chin.

The mandarin collar as its very moniker suggests is meant for the mandarins starting from Han Wu Di's reign . This was when the Han dynasty officially declared itself a Confucian state, taking after the ideology of the heaven-designated "king without a throne" wise state-craftsman Confucius.

The high-browed sort.

What would our samsui jie jie and a po want to do with a suffocating, stifling, hot and stiffened high collar? I also like the Chinese saying they mouthed in Cantonese at the end of the interview. It went something like " Gao shang peng nghoh hoe kor yang shang chou sey".

This year too will see a retinue of armoured armament threading their way round the island in a magnificent display of fire power and military might. I remember when I was no younger than an elementary school-goer when that same float display caught my attention in the same neighbourhood where I now reside.

Back then it was a contingent of the Chinese zodiac animals and I think that year was the ferocious tiger and they had this huge animal caricature of the same cruising down the streets.

And yes I have a 1980 Oxford University Press cartography of our island and when you compare that with a 2005 Phillips' version, our green areas have shrunk to half.

I have always thought that our last tiger in the 1930s should have been left free to roam our reserve. It would have been our pioneer of sorts too, the marauding attraction that it could have been.

Speaking of which I understand some new infrastructure is being planned to cut across some of our reserve yet again. When that happens if it ever, I will be the first to personally lead an army of fellow like-minded conservationists, marching all the way to Parliament House holding aloft placards declaring : "Preserve our only natural heritage or face Dooms Day"

The reserve as it is now is already cut into two by the Bukit Timah Highway. So you can imagine the flora and fauna being separated into two halves, with one not being able to migrate to the other. Sometimes my imagination gets the better of me and I start thinking of all those heartrending scenes of these poor animal species missing out on their relatives because of this Berlin Wall.

Son Red eared terrapin : OMG OMG! Mommy is on the other side of the wall. Boo hoo! Boo hoo!

Mommy terrapin: Oh Dear!My only child! When will I ever see you again!

And looks like Mendelian cross-breeding experiments will not very likely take place here either.

Which also brings me to my favourite theory that there are indeed crocodiles in our reserve. Because when I examine that 1980 map with an 1800 one, many of our coastlines were mangrove swamps and thus highly brackish. Anyway the estuarian crocodile still exists in Sungei Buloh!

I have actually chanced upon this deep and low bellow which must surely belong to a much larger animal than our common frog when I jogged in the reserve once.

But I think the mystery has probably been solved as I heard a long-tailed macaque bellowed the same way only as recently.

As for the Chinese crocodile's travail, it must have swum from the South China Sea up our Whampoa River, stopping on the way to gaze at one of the "1001 places to see before you die" attractions, our very own Singapore icon "The Raffles Hotel". And that is when it landed up in our reserve.

Incidentally the infrastructure developers have bungled far enough. Think. White elephant electronic message billboards and razor-thin, sloping bus stop seats which can only sit anorexically and anatomically slanted buttocks.

And yes, our galls in their pinafores. That pinny must surely have been our pioneers' dream suit and which is now in some schools hung up in a museum.

The history must have gone thus: our pioneer pin-up girls wore aprons during their cooking classes as school then had all these girly education: sewing, housekeeping, Latin and art. One day they got so tired of always putting on and taking off their aprons, they decided to sew up a permanent one and that is when history was made.

Ah Mui :Aiyo, the flame beri hot leh. And this apron got to take off and put on again. Beri troublesome.

Ah Tang: (head bulb lighting up) I know! Let us sew a permanent one. That way we don't have to keep doing that and our cakes wont get all burned out (smiles wickedly)

Suddenly a flame bursts high up, flaming their cakes and food into one charred and gooey admixture.

NB: By a stroke of genius, their combined names actually read "Mui Tang" which means "servant" in Cantonese. Lol. No coincidence meant.

So much for the history of the pinafore. I hope the old tradition continues. Cooking, sewing , housekeeping, Latin and art. Otherwise a lot of the guys are going to do this themselves and if they can do it, why will they ever need galls?