I’m preparing for the last of the transitions that have marked this year for me. I’m beginning writing this post in the early morning in our Bukit Gombak HDB flat. It’s not yet light, and the housing estate is just beginning to stir into life. The MRT has started up, and lights are beginning to come on in the flats across the playground from us. By the time that I post this, we’ll be back in Vancouver after that long direct trans-Pacific flight. The only continuity, I expect, will be the rain, from the monsoon here, and in Vancouver from the various atmospheric rivers that flow out over the ocean and reach land in the Pacific North West.
One space of storytelling that has been inescapable in both Canada and Singapore in the past year has been the narrative of the nation-state. In Canada, US tariffs prompted a sudden burst of patriotism. In Singapore, we’ve marked an anniversary. SG60, the commemoration of sixty years since Singapore became a sovereign nation in 1965, hasn’t touched me as much as SG50, ten years ago. I’ve been away for a substantial part of the year, and haven’t felt so actively part of things. In the last month. However, in the last month, I attended two exhibitions that mark SG60, accompanied by my partner and by friends, curious about how historical narratives reach back and then project themselves into the future. And then, a week later, I read a novel that made me realise some of the perils of exhibitions and the stories they tell.
The first of the exhibitions looked forward. The SG60 Heart&Soul Experience, at what used to be the Orchard Library, moved, after a brief race through past events that thankfully didn’t make reference to Stamford Raffles, to the future. On entering the exhibition space were given handheld devices, designed our own avatars. Later we entered into a future Singapore, both as part of an immersive experience of everyday living projected in a massive screen and then, later, in an area of the exhibition where were could consult books, look at future projects, and question our future selves. In all, I found the experience of the exhibition disappointing. The technology was frequently laggy, and the experience of being projected into the future felt like walking through a contemporary BTO website or magazine, with the addition of blocky animations. The future seemed to be pretty much a cleaned-up version of the present, with a few additions such as robot dogs. In the final section of the exhibition, where we could stroll between a number of different stations, narrative momentum was lost. One highlight, potentially, was the use of generative AI. You could centre a booth and ask three questions of your future self. However, the dataset had obviously been curated and limited. I asked whether the death penalty had been abolished in a future Singapore, and was left with a spinning disc on the screen, and no answer.
The second exhibition, which was much more accomplished, looked back. This was The Albatross File: Singapore’s Independence Declassified, at the National Library on Victoria Street. The exhibition covered the political negotiations leading up to Singapore’s Declaration of Independence when the country left Malaysia on August 9, 1965. As its title suggests, much of the material in the exhibition was taken from the recently declassified Albatross file, a collection of documents assembled by Goh Keng Swee, Singapore’s first Minister for Finance, and a key player in the negotiation process. The exhibition consisted of four spaces. We first entered a large room with a timeline and a central “atlas” — an animated circular hub showing how the last negotiations developed. In a mini theatre with plush stools for seats, we crowded together to watch a dramatized reenactment of events and negotiations leading up to separation. In a third, smaller room, original documents and recordings were available for us to examine. Finally, in a fourth space we had the inevitable generative AI. Using a suitably ancient-looking keyboard, we could ask questions about the historical events.
The Albatross File exhibition was much slicker than Heart&Soul, and also approached its subject in greater depth. From an interpretative standpoint, of course, there was much to question. Some of my instant impressions were trivial observations, which only in retrospect seemed important. Why, for instance, did the dramatization of events in 1964 and 1965 feature actors who were clearly much younger —and better looking — than the real historical characters at that time? S. Rajaratnam would have just turned 50 at separation, and yet the actor who played him appeared to be in his 20s. The actor who played Goh Keng Swee didn’t have his distinctive receding hairline, already very visible in 1965!
More crucially, the declassified information used as the bait to get audiences interested was highly selective and curated. Bite-size extracts were given from Kwa Geok Choo’s oral history, but the full oral histories by her and her husband Lee Kuan Yew are not available to researchers. In the recent CNA documentaries about separation, many of the sources used were drawn from declassified Australian and British documents, which inevitably gave their authors’ points of view. What was missing were internal government papers that must exist showing the points of view of the Singapore and Federal Malaysian governments; these were similarly absent from the exhibition. I’m also curious about the status of the declassified Albatross file itself. Go to Archives Online and you can, as a researcher, order it up: I didn’t had time to do so before I flew off. Yet the file description as I write on 20 December 2025 only lists certain pages, and not others: have these been redacted, or simply not included in the overall description? It was interesting to see the contrast between the crowds at the exhibition and the normally deserted reading room at the National Archives in Fort Canning. Perhaps a more generous and open attitude towards declassification might encourage Singaporeans to become more actively engaged in interpreting their own history?
Back to the exhibition. Several friends, in conversation, have pointed out that its premise is overly sensationalised. It purports to show a new interpretation of history — that Singapore wasn’t expelled from Malaysia, but that separation was an active, if reluctant, choice made by Singapore’s leaders at the time. In the words of a code-switching conversation I overheard while watching the movie, “他们不是 kick 我们的，我们就是 kick 他们”。Yet this has already been known by historians for some time, although it hasn’t really entered the popular consciousness. There’s also a second element to the exhibition that is hinted at, but the consequences of which are not fully explored. From the evidence the exhibition presents, Goh was authorised by Lee Kuan Yew to explore with his Malaysian counterparts “any proposal for any constitutional re-arrangements of Malaysia,” but it’s likely that in suggesting full separation he went beyond this brief. We could criticize Goh for exceeding his authority. Alternatively, we could argue that he, not LKY, is thus the father (maintaining skepticism about the connotations of this metaphor, in what is a very male-focused story) of an independent Singapore. Thus, the presence of a limited number of original documents in the exhibition opens up possibilities of different interpretations; despite the careful curation, history isn’t monolithic and tends to escape a single interpretative lens.
As with SG60 Heart&Soul, I and people who accompanied me also played with the generative AI. The responses in The Albatross File were more sophisticated, drawing — as a former student who had worked in the exhibition told me in conversation — on a dataset that was consciously limited but which included a number of historical studies and documents from NAS and NLB. Yet they also had boundaries. In the letter authorizing Goh to negotiate with the Tunku and Tun Razak, Lee also explicitly instructed him to lie if asked about his course of action: “In the event of any leakage taking place he is to deny any allegation of any agreement on his part.” Was it right, we asked the chatbot, for Goh to lie? The chatbot was quite perceptive in decoding the subtext of the question — is it ethical for a politician to lie under any circumstances? — and reflected this back to us. However, it then noted that we were asking for a “personal opinion” and ducked the question. It did produce several examples, mostly from transcripts of Legislative Assembly and Parliamentary debates leading up to 1965, in which politicians had been accused of or had accused others of lying. Yet it did not make a judgment about this: much, I am sure, to the relief of its designers, given current political news.
In the last few days of the month, I read Jeremy Tiang’s translation of Yeng Pway Ngon’s last novel, The Colour of Twilight, although I’ll fly before the launch on January 10th. In a spatial coincidence, the majority of the action of the novel happens in an area close to the National Library, where The Albatross File exhibition is hosted. Ming Wai, Yeng’s protagonist, reads in the National Library, and meets friends in the cafe downstairs. He frequents Chinese bookstores in Bras Basah Complex, and then returns home to his HDB flat in the heartlands via the MRT from Raffles Place. There was another coincidence that gave me pause: at the beginning of the novel, Ming Wai is precisely my age now, and I too have developed a rhythm of coming down to the National Library to write, meeting friends, and returning to my own heartland flat. The novel begins with a scene of reading, Ming Wai so deeply part of the world of a novel that he “needs to be dragged back to real life” (7). And it ends with Ming Wai writing his own novel, spending most of his days “hanging out with my fictional characters” so that he experiences solitude, but not loneliness (224). Exhibitions entertain us, curate stories for us, smooth out contradictions. Processes of deep, attentive reading and of writing are more difficult, but even as they draw us away into ourselves they also draw us into history, into the landscape of the city, and a more complex relationship to those places we call home.