The Undeadness of Haw Par Villa
“They’re so... non-interactive,” Beng mused, staring at a statue of Madam White Snake breaking free from a pagoda. Near us, life-sized monuments of sumo wrestlers thrusted beefy arms to the sky. Fantastic scenes of battles undertaken by the Eight Immortals cohabited with a statue of Opium War hero Lin Zhe Xu. In the distance, Buddhas towered overhead like benevolent skyscrapers, and a replica of the Statue of Liberty with an ‘Asian face’ raised her flame to the clear Singapore sky.
Haw Par Villa is an eclectic “Asian cultural park.” Other times, it is known as a “Chinese mythology park,” or "Singapore's largest outdoor art gallery," with more than 1000 sculptures and dioramas on its grounds. Opened to the public in 1937, it was a phantasmagoric spin on the traditional concept of a Chinese garden; where statues and dioramas of religion, folklore, history, and stories burst out of an otherworldly dreamscape. Located near the National University of Singapore, its flamboyance somehow quietly tucked out of view, the place has always been a strange bygone relic at the back of many a Singaporean’s imagination.
The park derives a large chunk of its emotional power from being a monument overlooked by modernity. It was ransacked by the Japanese during their occupation of Singapore, then vandalized by locals after World War 2. Miraculously, it escaped the culling that accompanied the aggressive urban planning and land optimization of the 60s to 80s, and the demolition of so many places of heritage in the 90s. Still the statues stand, frozen in their pantomimes of celestial or domestic dramas, their morality plays. It is precisely this sense of having, by some benevolent glitch of the system, narrowly escaped the dispassionate mouth of a bulldozer, or the kiss of a sledgehammer, that lends the place its particularly odd and emotional character.
Aesthetically, the place thrills. Experiencing Haw Par Villa involves falling into wordless rhythms of exploring hidden caves, navigating twisty pathways, and stumbling across delightfully miniature stairs. The jarring and delightful shifts of scale and style have prompted visitors to christen the place a "Chinese Wonderland." The elaborately sculpted friezes and grottoes presented themselves through mixed metaphors of storytelling— Buddhist, Burmese, Chinese, and Taoist beliefs amalgamated without any sense of incongruity. The statues and scenes are both awe-inspiring and outlandish: the Monkey King Sun WuKong frolicking in a peach garden, a lactating Lady Tang offering her breast to her starving mother-in-law as a show of filial piety, beings frozen mid-reincarnation: lobsters with human torsos, a giant crab with a tiny human face... Figures that delight, soothe, and frighten in equal measure.
One has to admire the resonating originality of the place, the muscular dreaming, the piety and grandstanding. Behind the outrageous garden is a great story with fabulous personalities, rotating around entrepreneur Aw Boon Haw's outsized personality. He is one half of the millionaire brothers behind the creation of Tiger Balm, an ointment and beloved household staple in Southeast Asia. The biographical details are tantalizingly juicy: multiple teenaged wives, Russian princesses, luxurious villas, and high-stakes gambling... Aw even had an automobile with the face of a tiger that could roar.
Historically, Haw Par Villa has always been a shape-shifter, its cultural identity changing with the times and demands of the titanic Aw family and the Singapore Tourism Board. What started as a philantropist’s private garden became in its heyday the popular public park Tiger Balm Gardens, where Chinese coolies came for recreation. At its bleakest, it was the ill-starred Dragon World, an ‘Asian theme park’ with Disneyfied techno-gimmicks, with its infamous 10 Courts of Hell swallowed into a Wrath of God flume ride. Its many reincarnations have included a museum about overseas Chinese communities in Singapore, as well as a short-lived accompanying Tang Dynasty Village.
We visited after a nine-month closure for refurbishing, marketing, and the setting up of a new museum on its premises; the intriguingly named Hell's Museum. The new paint jobs cohabited with peeling plaster— a cornucopia of excess mixed with the forlorn curiosity of a wasteland. Rice Media published an article titled, "Is Haw Par Villa Selling Out?” where it dubiously asks, "can the new Haw Par Villa become lucrative?" In other words, was this large park with decaying statuary worth the miserable effort to repaint, rebrand, and respruce into something families and tourists would want to go to regularly?
Aw had intended for the public gardens to remind overseas Chinese of the cherished traditional stories of their culture, as well as to impart moral values that now seem out-of-date. A huge Virtues and Vices Tableaux expounds on the importance of charitable works and fidelity while condemning gambling and cabaret dancing. Other dioramas are frozen in a kind of natural history museum of Chinese legends and folktales— cultural touchstones of wrath and sorrow, evils and misdeeds paralyzed into unmoving didactic scenes of moral edification. For example, after Madam White Snake was kidnapped by an obsessed monk, her filial son Meng Jiao prayed so fervently the heavens freed her from an enchanted pagoda. Lesson: filial piety! Another diorama shows how, unlike his compatriots in Journey to the West, Pigsy was tempted by lust and humiliatingly bound to a tree. Lesson: abstinence!
I returned to Haw Par Villa with T. We wandered around, awestruck, and studied the helpful commentary. I read aloud the romanized names of the Eight Immortals, knowing that my tonal pitching for the Chinese characters is tragically off. “Is Ne Zha the one with the magic rings? Who are these scantily-clad women tempting Tripitaka and Sandy?”
We had once, a long time ago, known these stories. But somewhere in the last few decades, there was a generally ambient feeling among the anglophone Chinese community that the traditional canon of myths and folk-tales in our Mandarin textbooks were no longer important plot points in the story of our lives. Thee myths fell by the wayside, diminished sideshows of a canon that had stopped speaking to us. My distance from these stories made the dioramas feel like images stranded without context to make them flow back into life. The painted eyes of the statues had a vacant fervour that seemed like stories straining to be told. We interacted with them as if we knew the words but had forgotten the grammar. As if face to face with an archive we didn't know how to decipher. T and I read as many of the commentaries stationed around the statuary as we could, politely repenting.
How to relate to them? And with what kind of gaze? I scoured the internet, scowling, looking for some dazzling article or erudite analysis that could instruct me on how to understand these intractable statues and stories I seemed unable to reach. An abiding criticism against the continued existence of Haw Par Villa is that the stories it portrays are too China-centric, and that many Singaporeans do not regard them as part of our national heritage. And yet, the site is a place many of us have grown up with, and we have formed our own dazed and amazed relationships to its chimerical aesthetic, our private affinities with its kitsch.
Tripping our way around the outdoor dioramas, I matched statues with a "Haw Par Horrors" Telegram sticker set. The painted physiognomies of the dioramas with their mute eloquence translated ticklingly well into the stunned, reactionary language of online speech. With too little despair, I idly wondered if the actual dioramas have become decayed matter left over once my meme-circulating machinations are done. I wanted to be touched by the organizing spirit of the past, for all these stories to come together in some kind of cultural orchestra. Instead, I greeted the garish colors and awkwardly transformed human-animal statues with a bewilderment and awe that struggled to find language, and that instead lodged inside of me as a kind of swallowed, hysterical giggle.
I snapped a photo of two gigantic crickets, their huge insect faces pressed intimately, lovingly, against each other. Their nakedness is highlighted because their audience is clothed— a rhinoceros in office wear, an ox in a preppy yellow vest. But there's an air of menace hanging around. A nearby elephant threateningly wields a rifle, and a tiger has a voyeuristic camera held to its face, aimed towards the crickets like the aperture of a gun.
They’re in love! my mind screeched. But when I scanned the QR code in front of the diorama, I was brought to a Google Form that reads, "FIGHTING CRICKETS. What do you think the diorama in front of you is about? Give us your take here!" It seems even the stewards of the park don’t know what some of the dioramas signify.
"They're not fighting," T typed furiously into the Google Form. "They're making out!" Faced with the determinism of these recalcitrant statues, we project our desires and longings, as a way to make their otherworldliness legible. We shorten the distance, and in this way we make them kin.
"We're going on a tour of hell now," I texted my sister, as if telling her I was doing something dangerous— Panic if you don't hear from me!
The newest iteration of Haw Par Villa has a museum on its premises— "the world's first museum dedicated to exploring concepts of death and the afterlife." Hell’s Museum promises to "take [me] on a personal journey through death and beyond, as envisioned by cultures, civilizations, and religions across space and time." Haw Par Villa’s notorious 10 Courts of Hell, once free to the public, are now part of this new museum, which charges an admittance fee.
“You mean… we now have to pay to enter hell?” friends sarcastically quipped.
Everything in the new museum seemed cosmologically heavy as well as a big secular joke. Upon entering, I was welcomed by a cheery blood-red sign that read 'TICKETS TO HELL'. In the middle of the tour, a museum manager yelled at us from the side-lines, "A gentle reminder to socially distance yourself, if not you'll really go to hell!" I muffled guilty laughter beneath my face mask. Perhaps I did somehow wish that something cataclysmic would happen on our tour, just so the divine or sacred might not be rendered commercial gimmicks, easy puns.
Our guide was an emphatic man with long arms who emphasized that his last name is spelled S-E-E, just in case any Hokkien-speakers got too pantang being led around hell by someone with a name so close to the transliteration of the Chinese character for death, 死 (sǐ). He had a pressing desire to quiz and educate Singaporeans about local history— "When did the British arrive in Singapore? What was Singapore's first Christian cemetery? Why are Muslims buried vertically??" He enthusiastically applauded when correct answers lobbed over, and sighed whenever he got radio silence.
Our un-dead docent of the afterlife gave us a mini lecture comparing the thanatology of some of the world's oldest religions. A large world map in Hell’s Museum ambitiously plotted out the vast range of cultural beliefs and practices of death and the afterlife around the world. The accompanying write-up declared its grand intention: “Mapping Humanity’s Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Afterlife”. I learnt that in Japan, Ainu folklore believed that the spirits of the dead proceeded to a realm where time was reversed, and the dead walked upside down, like "flies on the ceiling." Oceans and centuries away, on the island of Tikopia, souls of the wicked were cast into the astonishingly-named "Rubbish Pool".
The comparative elements of world death rituals and beliefs slid frictionlessly to the local. The exhibits in this section had dramatic, sweeping titles such as “Transforming the Landscape of Death in Singapore,” and “From Burial to Cremation: 200 Years of Handling Death in Singapore.”
I read lines such as:
As Singapore’s kampung (village) dwellers were resettled en-masse to high-rise flats, the landscape and architecture of death in Singapore were similarly transformed: sprawling cemeteries were replaced by columbaria housing the dead in neat, apartment-like niches.
Today, there is only one cemetery still open to burials— Choa Chu Kang Cemetery, in the west of the island.
More than 80 per cent of Singapore’s dead are cremated, most of them in Mandai Crematorium […]
Mandai Crematorium is the culmination of a century of official efforts to regulate death in Singapore, and is a symbol of Singapore’s pragmatic approach towards death.
Something about these sentences, their glancing compression of the past, the accomodating teleology, the lonely finality of their conclusions— made me feel kind of empty inside.
Kind of like the coffin I stood on.
Our guide Not-Named-Death assured us it is a "real coffin with zero content!" Sponsored by Singapore Indian Casket Services, the coffin is displayed as a recreation of a burial crypt in Choa Chu Kang Cemetery. The narrow layout of the room led everyone to shuffle around the edges to avoid stepping on the glass-encased coffin. The message is clear, even if not explicitly stated: burials take up space. A lot of it. Space Singapore doesn’t have.
It felt disrespectful to walk over a coffin but also true— we walk over our dead everyday. There was a large map of Singapore that plotted all known cemeteries on the island, past and present. I read about the burial grounds of Peck San Theng, which collectively, had formed one of the largest cemeteries on the island, before it was exhumed for the high-rise flats of Bishan town. I learnt about how Thomson Road Jewish Cemetery was exhumed for the construction of Novena MRT Station. How the multi-faith Bidadari Cemetery for Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Sinhalese Buddhists was exhumed to build the sprawling Bidadari housing estate.
We wandered into an outdoor area called The Graveyard, and were greeted by a wake. Specifically, a mock-up of an elaborate 1980s Hokkien Taoist void deck wake of a fictitious Chinese woman; ‘void decks’ being the communal space on the ground floor of public housing in Singapore. The constructed wake is lavish— paper effigies of Golden Boy and Jade Maiden frame a realistic mold of a gigantic roasted pig’s head and numerous other bowls of food offerings. Pointing at the photo of the fictive deceased, our diligent Virgil of the afterlife barked, “A composite from five photographs!” The exhibit read, “From the 1990s, evolving [public housing] block designs have resulted in more complex, less spacious void decks. Hence, more Chinese funerals are being held in funeral parlours instead […] the traditional Chinese funeral is becoming a thing of the past.”
Continuing this narrative arc, The Graveyard also had a mock-up of a traditional Chinese grave where this fabricated woman might have been buried; with tumulus, altar, headstone, side panels, and grave court. The write-up states baldly, “Dying Cultural Heritage: The Traditional Chinese Grave.” It tells me that “the art form is endangered,” because “most Chinese in Singapore are now cremated, not buried, and fresh graves in Singapore must be exhumed after 15 years.”
There is an odd and painful self-awareness to this reconstruction of a wake and grave, something dazed and pitiless in this nostalgic presentation that nevertheless keeps the ache at bay. Hell’s Museum mourns the death of death rituals in Singapore even as it celebrates the faultless pragmatism that necessitated their endangerment. It is a kind of belated apologia for the dispassion that has rendered Singapore a necropolis made amnesiac by concrete and the Urban Redevelopment Authority. It is at once evidence of the nation becoming more reflexive about the stories it tells about death, as well as testimony to the epistemological limitations such introspection necessitates. In tone and intent, the exhibits read like an apologetic wince, sincerity balanced with a shrug, a band-aid over an amputation site. I thought back to that ambitious world map that plotted out the practices of death and the afterlife around the world and what our inclusion might entail. —“Neat, apartment-like niches?”
As we walked out of The Graveyard, another tour group came in. I saw a woman startle at the reconstruction of the void deck wake, and quickly press her palms together in prayer or respect. My mouth opened to tell her, it’s not real. But I bit my tongue— in a museum of dying death rituals, her piety seemed fragile, unbearably important.
“It’s haunted, I tell you,” said H. “Why do you like this cursed place??” bemused friends sighed.
The main attraction of Haw Par Villa is the fearsome 10 Courts of Hell (十殿阎罗), a darkened tunneled network of mini dioramas and statuettes showing Taoist and Buddhist punishments in the afterlife.
The first time I visited the 10 Courts as a university student, I trailed behind an older Chinese woman who held up a little boy in her arms, calmly walking along the gory punishments of the underworld. "This," she pointed to a miniature diorama of some soul having its guts viciously pulled out. "This is what will happen if you lie to me."
Like the haunted attractions of evangelical Protestant Hell Houses in the United States, Haw Par Villa's 10 Courts of Hell uses body horror to deter sinners from the sin. Each court of Hell could be considered a canto in Dante's Inferno, except that instead of the funneled shape of hell as one circles down into increasingly terrible sins, the physical structure of the 10 Courts is that of a winding cave, and it feels strongly that we are crusading along the dark, winding bowels of a massive sandworm from Frank Herbert's Dune.
A true success of the 10 Courts of Hell is that, in the Singaporean imaginary, a part of it is truly scary. “You might have to hold my hand,” T said, before we entered. “Will you be bringing Quinn? It might frighten her,” someone else asked. In a review of Otto Fong’s 2013 novel Bitter Suites, which features Haw Par’s 10 Courts, Clara Chow shudders at “the brutal, boiling, blinding grinding-bodies-into-mince-meat variety” of hell that this strange, ghastly place offers.
However, walking through the 10 Courts of Hell now, digested into the neat plotting of a museum of death, things seem a little different. The fear of gruesome karmic cause-and-effect is located elsewhere, diluted. During our tour of the 10 Courts, we got shunted to the back, and were unable to hear our guide hold court in the afterlife. "I can't believe there's a hold-up in hell," I griped. "We're being processed," T dryly commented, surrounded by miniature reminders of the bureaucracy of Chinese hellhood.
In the 10 Courts, death isn't final. It is a bureaucratic nightmare that might take 3 years after death, while the dead are judged, processed, and relegated into the appropriate level of hell to suffer punishment for sins committed while alive. Even though we didn’t truly believe, in the simplest sense of the word, something about this streamlined version of the afterlife felt familiar, not in a past tense but a future one, had the uneasy taste of inevitability, something tap, tapping on my brain.
We spent our time in hell matching sins to the punishment— You cheated on an exam? Girl, you're gonna be flayed!— a kind of wry self-confrontation that was unserious, ironic, but still, the tiniest bit respectful— because well, we’re Chinese, right?
The trip through the 10 Courts of Hell took 10 minutes, and ended with a reminder of samsara, the Buddhist cycle of rebirth. I arrived at the end curiously absolved from the moral armageddon. Like any good horror, it ends, and we left the underworld blinking stupidly into the surprise of the sun.
Back at the outdoor gallery, a ghostly, warbling rendition of 但愿人长久 (Wishing We Last Forever) played unevenly over an old PA system; the timeless Song dynasty poem by Su Shi turned into popular Mid-Autumn Festival song. The lyrics tremble with emotion: the poet is drunk, heartbroken from being separated from his lover, disoriented. The song quality is dated, and it crackles and pops as if playing from a scratched vinyl record. The timeless melancholy of the lyrics and its aspirations towards romantic eternity animated the unmoving, painted faces of the statues of Haw Par Villa in a way that was past perfect in tense, unreachable.
Haw Par Villa’s satisfactions are uneven and unwieldy— the gratification is frankly, hard to decipher and even harder to articulate. Every time I left the park unable to come to sort of decision about it and its character. It is too full, too perplexing; a lucid dream of painted smiles, empty coffins, and fictitious dead people. Today’s Haw Par Villa is at once a flamboyant mausoleum of increasingly distant myths, as well as a grasping museumification of local death rituals taking their last breaths. The park is a gallery of the deserted and abandoned telling their stories, a teeming landscape of Aw’s wildly proportioned ambitions, as well as a portrait of whimsical stagnation. It is an uneasy site where Chinese chauvinism tussles with the threat of deculturization. An archive that is also a graveyard. A curious existence in a land-scarce country where the old is often unsentimentally cleared for the new.
Singapore is a shallow container for memory. It is difficult to recall the shape of our losses, as history is quickly paved over with new concrete. The ways by which we remember our dead has become increasingly thin with its clean efficiency, and the rapid obsolescence of deities and the lesser gods of culture are prompting the search for narratives Singaporeans will find true. Which is why the continued existence of Haw Par Villa feels at once like a miracle and a crutch— an unstable threshold and vigil for forgotten stories as well as the stories we’d like to know. Experiencing it and its shortcomings involves a spiritual but not necessarily intellectual lengthening, extending like a reverie of the past. Still it stands, a haunting but strangely solid aberration, refusing to be forgotten.