Day 1: An Eye-Opener

Day One, 4 January 2015.

Heritage at CMU!

It’s officially the first day of the trip! Our group went to Chiang Mai University (CMU) for a workshop conducted by a professor from their faculty, Dr. Vithi Panichapan, and our own professors, Prof Andrea and Prof Walsh. When we reached their university, I saw a huge plot of land, much like that of NTUs but with one major difference. A lot of their land was undeveloped. CMU was founded in 1964 while NTU was founded in 1955. We are only 9 years ahead of them but look where we are now. I feel extremely proud and privileged to be part of NTU. I realised that I’ve taken university education in Singapore for granted. The luxury of undergoing an extremely developed curriculum in a vibrant campus is not something all university students get to experience.

Upon arrival, we went to a nice meeting room they’ve prepared for us and sat in on their prof’s lecture on the Lanna Kingdom which used to be Northern Thai. It was a very informative lecture and I learnt a lot from it. However, after the lecture, when our group decided to interview Dr. Vithi about his perceptions of heritage in Chiang Mai, we found out that our assumptions we had while thinking of the research questions were extremely flawed. Just as I predicted in the pre-trip reflections, we have already encountered our first unforeseen circumstance.

We also conducted a focus group discussion with a group of female students. We asked them what they thought their heritage was. All of them agreed on a single point that their heritage comes from knowing who they really are and where they come from. Which is basically what Dr. Vithi earlier also told us. The girls told us that they were from Northern Thai and their heritage and culture stems from their identity as Northern Thais. The way they dress, the way they prepare food, the practices in those parts of Thailand.

When I heard this, I felt extremely impressed by how heritage and culture has been taught to the people in Chiang Mai. I’m pretty sure that if I asked people in Singapore what they would consider as heritage, it would be hard to get a collective answer from a group of people. I wouldn’t be surprised if people in Singapore didn’t even know where they come from, even though Singapore can be seen as extremely similar to Chiang Mai in the regard that we are both cities which originated as a business hub, where people from different regions congregated together to do business.

We also asked them how they were taught about their heritage and they said that it is something that their parents would teach them when they were little kids, something as important as basic education.

When I heard that, I felt extremely ashamed of myself. I always tell myself to be grateful for my roots. But to me, I always thought of my parents as my roots. I’ve never bothered to find out more about my own background. I knew I was Hokkien but that was it. I did not even know about my own ancestral background and practices. I don’t even know how to speak the dialect! Yet these people place so much importance in their heritage that they teach it to their children from young.

In Singapore, I assume that parents in Singapore are more preoccupied with teaching their children math, languages, life skills etc. These are not wrong ways to raise a child so as to ensure that he or she will have a better and easier life in future but are we missing out on something? Singapore and Chiang Mai are both extremely similar in terms of how our cities came about into existence. Yet why are they so particular about preserving their heritage and we on the other end of the spectrum are so seemingly indifferent about it? Did Singapore develop too fast? Just because we developed rapidly, does it necessarily mean that our cultural roots and heritage is not preserved? These were all the questions that went into my head the moment I heard the answers from these girls 2-3 years younger than me but knew so much of their own cultural heritage.

On the bus ride back after we collected even more interviews from professors and students from CMU, I thought about it more in depth. Chiang Mai has been a city around for hundreds of years. Yet, it is relatively undeveloped compared to Singapore. However, the result of this slow development is a reason how they have managed to preserve their teachings and cultures from their past to the present so effectively.

After an internal debate, I came to a personal conclusion that development and urbanisation will definitely erode cultural heritage. It is easy to say that we should find a sweet spot to balance between heritage preservation and urbanisation but how many countries have done this effectively? And for Singapore who has obviously developed at a rapid pace, is there a way for us to try to preserve whatever knowledge we have left of our roots such that more people in Singapore can be aware of our past heritage? Should we even try to preserve heritage if it came at a cost of hindering development?

I mentioned in the start of this reflection that I was grateful for Singapore to have NTU which has such a wonderful campus. But if we tried to preserve more of our culture and slow down our pace of development, Would NTU be a university like CMU and not the modern campus we see now? Do I still want to preserve culture over benefits such as a higher standard of living? Sadly, I feel like a hypocrite reflecting about this in a 5-star hotel room. Thanks to my country’s development which brought us a higher standard of living, I am able to comfortably lie on a bed and reflect about this. I might not even have had this chance to do this research trip if Singapore didn’t develop itself the way it did… Isn’t it just ironic? That maybe we’re only thinking about heritage preservation because we’ve had the luxury of having a good quality of life? As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side.

Upon reaching the hotel, we needed to have an emergency meeting in the hotel that night which lasted for 2 hours because all our assumptions we made in our pre-trip research were wrong. We had to decide on new research questions to better suit our new found data and knowledge. It was a heated debate where all of us had many different opinions and suggestions but eventually, we managed to find a solution and changed our research question into something everyone felt was towards a better direction. Whether our improvisation has succeeded will only be revealed tomorrow when we go around conducting interviews again.

I went to sleep that night with many questions in my head but no answers to them at all.