Tanjong Burger

My congenital lack of a sense of direction is rendered all the more stark by my wife’s prowess in this domain. I’m not complaining (much) because she has led us on some wonderful expeditions in Singapore and abroad. Just recently, she guided me through a four-park hike from Kent Ridge to Mount Faber. If I had been reading the directions, the government would now be telling its troops to keep on eye out for me while they beat the bushes for Mas Selamat. I can hear the officer apprising his men: “Don’t worry. You won’t confuse him with the escapee. He’s white, and according to his wife, will insist that he’s not lost.”

I have lived in Singapore for almost two years now, and am amazed at how slow I have been to orientate myself on scales large and small. At home, it took me 6 months to learn which way to turn after exiting the elevator so as to avoid walking into the swimming pool. My success rate is now a comfortable 70%.

After a year of bafflement, during which I concluded that my wife’s patience is endless, I have finally figured out how to negotiate our local wet market, using the now-familiar hawker stalls as points of reference. Yes, I often take a route three times longer than needed, but I assure you that I am canvassing the menus.

In my own defence, Singapore is not entirely accommodating to an ang mo with a spinning internal compass. Place names continue to be tongue- and mind-twisters. Oh, the unfortunate cabbies who have been struck dumb as I pronounced my intended destinations as Butik Gambok, Loon Bay Way, Ang Mo Kill, or Tanjong Burger.

And for someone raised on designations such as Saint Catherine Street West and Saint Lawrence Boulevard East, it is a formidable challenge to put that “East” or “West” at the middle position in something like “Bukit Batok East Avenue 5.” How many times did I tell a cabbie to head to “Bituk Ballok 5 Avenue East. Or is it 3?” Ah, just take the average and go to 4.

And who decided that the Ayer Rajah Expressway should be abbreviated as AYE instead of ARE? Or that the Kranji Expressway should be KJE rather than KE? Don’t they know I have enough trouble already?

Taxi drivers can tell instinctively that I don’t really know where I’m going. No matter how confidently I tell them which way to turn, they verify obsessively:
“Which way, Mr. Mark?”
“Turn left, please”
“Turn right?”
“No, please turn LEFT.”
“Turn left, ah?
“That’s right.”
“Turn right?”
“NO!”

Perhaps they’ve heard about that famous incident my wife loves to recount at dinner parties. Returning us home one day, the taxi driver asked for directions. Quite sure that I recognized the terrain on my left and right, I beat my wife to the punch and commanded, “Go straight!” I gave her a look, fed by equal parts disdain and chagrin, when she pointed out that “go straight” would put the car into an HDB living room.

I have persevered despite such discouragement, and was recently heartened by my discovery of a quicker route from NTU campus to home. A clever taxi driver confided that we could skip from the PIE to the KJE and take a new exit, avoiding the rush-hour congestion at Bukit Batok Road. Imagine. Me. The possessor of an insider’s knowledge of a shortcut home. I NOT STUPID!

I used the route successfully a number of times, even introducing it to poor, ignorant cabbies who were not as street-savvy. It was somewhat disconcerting, then, when I learned that all the while I had been mispronouncing the name of the new exit, calling it “Brick Lane” when, in fact, it is “Brickland.” Did I mention that my wife was the one to bring this to my attention?

Only mildly chastened -- after all, my “Brick Lane” had got me home, hadn’t it? -- I resolved to memorize the correct name. “BrickLAND, BrickLAND, BrickLAND,” I intoned to myself the next day as I waited for a cab. When it arrived, I delivered the instructions with aplomb, enunciating “Brickland” with such clarity as would bring tears to a speech therapist’s eyes. Then, with a warm glow suffusing my body, a warmth that could only be understood by those confrères who had similarly battled for orientation in a foreign land, I sat back to read my newspaper.

So confident was I, so self-assured in my hard-won mastery of Singaporean topography, that I didn’t look up again until we were on the exit ramp. I searched for the sign bearing the exit’s name, spotted the gleaming, crisp, incontrovertible letters, and called my wife.

“I’ll be a little late, darling.”
“Why? Where are you?”
“Woodlands.”

The writer is a professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, and lives somewhere in Bukit Batok, when he can find his way home.