Hope Street

sceptical ampulets getting all body-arty at the Stamford Art Centre on Waterloo St.

We took last Friday off work with plans to have no plans. But Ma J's acupuncture session in the city made us feel guilty for not having gone to visit her the whole week, so we trooped down to be with her instead and stumbled into the busy street of hope.

Well, the truth is that we were also feeling doubtful about this whole acupuncture business. We both had a mental image of a dried-up old Chinese man smelling of axe oil, wearing a black gong fu get up and waiting for Ma J in his dark cockcroachy room where there are dusty bottles of pickled lizards and snakes in some urine-coloured fluid.



Of course, once there, we were relieved to find a gentle professional TCM practitioner from He Nan and his clean, modest clinic, albeit located in a dark corridor of this HDB block just across from the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple at Waterloo Street. Next to this temple for the Goddess of mercy is the Hindu Sri Krisnan temple. Devotees at the one appeared to also offer incense at the other - definitely no religiously-motivated antagonism here! Beggars and vendors hawking incense and lotus flowers dot this busy pedestrian street, in front of shop windows with buddhist amulets, "healing" crystals and other assorted luck/health/properity-giving objects. How inappropriate that a street appearing to proffer hope should be named instead after a battle!




Top Lady Luck outside the Kwan Im Temple Middle Outside the Sri Krishnan Temple Bottom: Outside the St Joseph Church just round the corner at the adjacent Victoria St. All photos by J

J's siblings have avoided accompanying Ma and Pa J to the acupuncturist thus far. This is because not only had her doctor at the hospital remained non-committal about acupuncture, she had instead only issued Pa J the warning to "avoid the vital points". I guess therefore no one wanted to volunteer to share Pa J's decision (and responsibility) to finally send Ma J to an acupuncturist regardless.

J tried to explain Pa J's decision to his sister this way - "If your spouse was ill, wouldn't you try anything that has the slightest chance to make him/her better? How can you live thinking that there is this one possible cure that you did not try?"

Hope - whether false, misguided or well-placed - is tenacious, even if in small doses.

self promotion

Despite our complaints about Singapore designers' love for self-promotion and style over social and intellectual engagement (wah!), ampulets confess that we cannot resist the 1819 supermovement which, under a banner of patriotism, provides for expressions of unabashed devotion, sincerity, ironic inflection, contrivance or artful indulgence. In other words, we're just happy our submission here got accepted for the Majullah Stickapura Series 3!


the stickers are supposed to be on sale somewhere, but we're not sure where yet.

a penny for this?

A narrow 5-storey shophouse designed by Chan Soo Khian from the award-winning SCDA Architects, the private MINT museum of toys is located at Seah Street, right beside the Raffles Hotel. At the basement is a cafe with seats upholstered in a specially-made robot pattern brocade!

There was an article in the papers about the the museum recently, so I shan't describe the museum in any detail - except to say it's a great place to spend a slow lazy weekend afternoon.


I want a name card like this...

I guess one of the perks of my job is that I get to go to a museum on a weekday afternoon and call it work!

But what's better is being brought round the museum by its owner, Mr Chang. An engineer in his 50s who started collecting toys since he was a kid, Mr Chang now has a 3000 sq ft warehouse full of toys. On display at the museum are just 5% of his collection of pre-80s toys of every genre imaginable. But how did an engineer get to start and own his own museum?!? By living modestly otherwise. His wife revealed that their 3 children share 1 bedroom. They don't own a garage full of fancy cars.

It's all about choice. That's what Mr Chang taught me that day. And passion - sustained and pursued without compromise.

Once, when asked to choose 1 toy to speak to a group of schoolkids about, Mr Chang chose a penny toy made in Germany in the 30s. A simple tin toy of a woman pushing a cart, but beautifully and carefully made. He wanted to use the toy to illustrate the lesson that no matter how menial or unimportant your job may seem, do it to the utmost and do it with pride. Though it cost only a penny, whoever designed and made the tin toy did so carefully and with obvious attention to detail. Now that's a trait many of us Singaporeans are not brought up to value. Instead, we are taught to judge everything and weigh our effort pragmatically against the financial return or reward received.

Mr Chang also showed us his special collection of Micale Dolls, each handmade by the late Michael Lee - a 4 feet tall man with a big heart, giving all the money he made to refugees in Hong Kong.

The only disappointment was the cliche blown up in the museum's elevator, "He with the most toys, when he dies, wins." Surely someone who professes to admire Michael Lee and espouses the virtues of the penny toy cannot believe this ridiculous cliche. I comfort myself that his branding consultant must have insisted on this.

J and I don't have a museum. But for nothing, not even a penny, ampulets share with you some of our favourite stuffed toys here.