ACROSS THE CAUSEWAY

Novelist Tash Aw reflects on the future of Singapore through the works of artists Heman Chong and Ming Wong

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As a child growing up in Malaysia, I didn't know anyone who didn't have family in Singapore. Distant aunts and cousins would visit us regularly. Some of them had only recently moved across the causeway in search of new jobs and had inevitably settled there. They'd bring gifts of beautifully packaged biscuits or electronics that we couldn't get at home. They'd also bring stories of their lives, which could be summed up simply as: everything is better over there.

It's impossible not to be dazzled by Singapore - not just by the glassy skyscrapers arranged neatly around Marina Bay but by the statistics that measure the performance-obsessed island nation: the highest GDP per capita in the world when adjusted for purchasing power parity, a 98 percent literacy rate, the world's sixth safest country. Can numbers really tell us the story of a small, young country and its people?

Singapore celebrated its 60th year of independence this year, and with this landmark came a new set of statistics, more revealing and, to me, more moving. A child born in Singapore in 1965 had a life expectancy of 65; a child today can expect to live beyond 86. In reading tests conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Singaporeans over the age of 35 came close to the bottom of rankings, whereas 15-year-olds emerged at the very top. All this speaks not just of rapid progress in a short space of time, but of total change in which the act of transformation itself has become a way of life, even a kind of national aesthetic. Time takes on a different meaning; it is accelerated and collapsed. The body is caught up in this whirlwind of change, at once a participant and yet, somehow, held at a distance from it.

The arc of Singapore's story is dramatic, almost cinematic.