Notes

1. “Slavoj Žižek: Capitalism with Asian Values,” Al-Jazeera, November 13, 2011, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/talk-to-al-jazeera/2011/11/13/slavoj-zizek-capitalism-with-asian-values.

2. “Asia lite” has appeared in a broad range of publications, including The Washington Post and Times Higher Education. “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” was the title of an article by William Gibson in Wired, April 1993.

3. https://annual.cfainstitute.org/2013/05/16/10-facts-about-the-singapore-financial-market/.

4. David Martin, Singapore on the Thames: Model for a Post-Brexit UK?, https://www.rsis.edu.sg/rsis-publication/rsis/singapore-on-the-thames-model-for-a-post-brexit-uk/#.XrtgLsYRU6g.

5. “Where Public Housing Apartments Can Go for More Than $1 Million,” New York Times, May 24, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/world/asia/singapore-public-housing-program.html.

6. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living Survey. Janice Lim, “Singapore No Longer World’s Most Expensive City, as Prices Fall amid Pandemic: Survey,” Today, November 18, 2020, https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/singapore-no-longer-worlds-most-expensive-city-prices-fall-amid-pandemic-survey.

7. Most famously, with some of the smaller Riau Islands. This was a cause of serious environmental concern; see Deni Ghifari and Fadli, “Return of Sea Sand Exports Sparks Controversy in Indonesia,” Jakarta Post, May 30, 2023, https://asianews.network/return-of-sea-sand-exports-sparks-controversy-in-indonesia/. See also Joshua Comaroff, “Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk,” Harvard Design Magazine 39 (2015).

8. Victor R. Savage, “Human Environment Relations: Singapore’s Environmental Ideology,” in Imagining Singapore, ed. Ban Kah Choon, Anne Pakir, and Tong Chee Kiong (Times Academic Press, 1992), 200–201.

9. Brigadier-General George Yeo, at the Harvard Club of Singapore annual dinner, January 27, 2007.

10. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge University Press, 1990). It is an interesting fact that Singapore is increasingly in the business of exporting its own models of governance and development, across Asia and beyond. See Chua Beng Huat, “Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts,” in Worlding Cities, ed. Aihwa Ong and Ananya Roy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

11. This period is most commonly referred to, simply, as Ghost Month.

12. Eurasian is an official racial category in Singapore, referring to a long-standing community of mixed South Asian, Chinese, Malay, and mixed European ancestry. Portuguese surnames are common among these families, which hearken back to the expansion of colonial settlement into the straits from Goan outposts. More recently, the term has come to refer to anyone with mixed ancestry and most commonly to children of Chinese and Anglo-American parents.

13. “Drivers” plural, as more than one attempt was made to raze the old structure. This is a common trope of ghost interventions that we will encounter again. The comparison of bruising, fatigue, and nausea to radiation sickness is borrowed from playwright Jonathan Lim, Between Gods and Ghosts: Our Supernatural Skyline (Marshall Cavendish, 2005), 53.

14. For a detailed description of this historical relationship, see Joshua Comaroff, “Ghostly Topographies: Landscape and Biopower in Modern Singapore,” Cultural Geographies 14, no. 1 (2004): 56–73.

15. Thorough engagement with this subject required a kind of “whole of society” approach, as participation in ghost-practices is not—as often believed—confined to lower-middle-class Taoists, educated in Singapore’s Chinese-language schools (education in English, as opposed to Chinese, is stereotypically considered to be of higher status). The reality is much more complex. Among those I have interviewed on this subject, fewer than a quarter of believers were from the lower income brackets. The rest hailed from all points along the nation’s economic scale.

16. This is described in Comaroff, “Ghostly Topographies.”

1. The term was coined by Susan Strange in Casino Capitalism (Blackwell, 1986).

2. This notion will return later. This analysis of Singapore as a system dependent on the ongoing creation, sale, and rental of lucrative land and architecture is proposed in Anne Haila, Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). Further clarifications and extensions of Haila’s argument are given in Ho Kong Chong, “Land and Housing in Singapore: Three Conversations with Anne Haila,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 80, no. 2 (2021): 325–51. Importantly, the tender of sites has also served as a lever for the state to control the nature and quality of development through tight regulation. See Lee Kah-Wee, “Regulating Design in Singapore: A Survey of the Government Land Sales (GLS) Program,” Environment and Planning C 28, no. 1 (2010): 145–64.

3. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s statement, and its consequences for the spirit world, are discussed in chapter 4.

4. A number of these authors’ works have informed what follows. Those looking for an introduction to forms of ancestral and deity worship should see Tong Chee Kiong, Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore (Routledge, 2004); Terrence Heng, “Hungry Ghosts and Urban Spaces: A Visual Study of Aesthetic Markers and Material Anchoring,” Visual Communication 13 (2013): 147–62; Heng, “Interacting with the Dead: Understanding the Role and Agency of Spirits in Assembling Deathscapes,” Social and Cultural Geography 10 (2020): 1–24; Heng, Of Gods, Gifts, and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces (Routledge, 2020); Kit Ying Lye and Terence Heng, eds., Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City (Routledge, 2024); and Jack Meng-Tat Chia, “Who Is Tua Pek Kong? The Cult of Grand Uncle in Malaysia and Singapore,” Archiv Orientální 85, no. 3 (2017): 439–60.

5. This book concerns Chinese discourses about ghosts as the subject of a systematic financial imaginary (and again, not in any general ethnological sense). This is not the result of a Sino-centric perspective. My fieldwork made clear, time and again, that a Singaporean Chinese is as likely to exchange stories of smelling a Pontianak as of seeing a putatively “Chinese” ghost; however, they will not attempt to court a Pontianak with hell money. It should be noted that studies of spirits, cosmologies, and ancestral practices among Singapore’s Malay and Indian cultural and religious traditions involve other questions and hold other consequences for the consideration of the present. These have been the subject of excellent research across fields. For example, see Kenneth Paul Tan’s “Ghosts, and the Possessed: Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema,” Asian Studies Review 34, no. 2 (2010): 151–70, Ad Maulod’s “The Haunting of Fatimah Rock: History, Embodiment, and Spectral Urbanism in Singapore” (BS thesis, National University of Singapore, 2009), or Nicholas J. Long’s “Haunting Malayness: The Multicultural Uncanny in a New Indonesian Province,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (2010): 874–91.

6. Hantu denotes a world of ghosts and demons native to Indonesia and the Malaysian Peninsula. A few of these, including the Pontianak, commonly appear in Singaporean ghost stories and are discussed later.

7. I use this term as defined by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009).

8. As discussed in part 1 of Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Routledge, 1956). Marcuse argues, from Erich Fromm, that dissatisfaction “haunts” the successfully internalized subject. We return to this principle in the conclusion.

9. See the conclusion.

10. For the notion of the hauntological as concerning the failure of progressive and utopian expectations (and the melancholia of radical movements), see Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014). For the dysregulating temporality of dead labor, see James Tyner, Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Death (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

11. L. Randall Wray, “The Origins of Money and the Development of the Modern Financial System,” Working Paper 86, Jerome Levy Economics Institute at Bard College and University of Denver, March 1993; David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Profile Books, 2010); Stuart Banner, Speculation: A History of the Fine Line Between Gambling and Investing (Oxford University Press, 2018); Gayle Rogers, Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia University Press, 2021).

12. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2007), xix.

13. Harvey, Enigma of Capital. See also Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism Versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover,” Review of Radical Political Economics 53, no. 4 (2021): 557–73. While some representatives of industry (notably James Dyson, who later relocated to Singapore) argued for Leave, a groundswell of Remain sentiment was expressed by “business.” This was repeatedly highlighted by the BBC and others. “EU Referendum: More Than 1,280 Business Leaders Sign Letter,” BBC, June 22, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36592782.

14. I refer here to Ron Sim, founder of personal technology company Osim (known for its massaging devices), and Sam Goi, so-called “Popiah King,” who sells the skins used to make southern Chinese–style spring rolls (popiah in Hokkien dialect). Goi is famous for his huge home—often confused with the embassies located nearby—and collection of Ferraris.

15. For example, many Singaporeans suffered during the 2007–8 subprime implosion, as they did during the 1997 tiger markets crash. The problem, in the more recent cases, did not arise from “pure” finance. Rather, it was the repackaging of near-worthless loans on real-world inputs, through layers of “securities” that appeared to make them both safe and valuable. The complex relationships between productive economy and finance are well understood, if only in general terms, among Singapore’s financially literate public.

16. Youyenn Teo, “The Singaporean Welfare State System: With Special Reference to Public Housing and the Central Provident Fund,” in The Routledge International Handbook to Welfare State Systems, ed. Christian Aspalter (Routledge, 2017).

17. David Harvey, “The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory,” Antipode 7, no. 2 (1975): 9–21, and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1991); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Verso, 2011).

18. We need not argue with Moishe Postone, or others, who hold that labor is still the root of value under capitalism. This is an important argument, made in Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Of course, it is possible to object that money markets and abstruse “products” produce money, not value, or that labor serves as a variable standard for general social value, or that price and value are distinct and often confused.

19. Allison Schrager, An Economist Walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Find Risk (Portfolio, 2019). Of course, the perception of contemporary existence as saturated with risk was clearly articulated by Ulrich Beck in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (SAGE, 1992) and more recently in Zygmunt Baumann’s study of precarity, Liquid Life (Polity, 2005).

20. See Roger Farmer, “Confidence Crashes and Animal Spirits,” Economic Journal 122 (2012): 155–72; Timothy Geithner, Stress Tests: Reflections on Financial Crises (Crown, 2014); Benjamin Friedman, “A Predictable Pathology,” keynote address at the BIS annual conference, Lucerne, Switzerland, June 27, 2014; Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber, Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (Princeton University Press, 2014); Martin Wolf, “The Challenge of Halting the Financial Doomsday Machine,” Financial Times, April 20, 2010.

21. Anne Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth Century America (Cornell University Press, 1990); Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard University Press, 2012); also Banner, Speculation.

22. Because risk has become so fundamental to most forms of contemporary value, it must increasingly lie at the heart of any Marxian analysis, alongside labor. Increasingly, economy is marked by a “two-tier” class system, divided between those who contribute value through work in service and production and those whose income is tied to probability. This should be put in dialogue with David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” theory, which fails to explain why remuneration should be inversely related to “useful” work, in Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon and Schuster, 2018). Probability is of no use; it is gaming. Regardless, it sits at the center of modern capital. Those who increasingly participate in the perpetuation of its dealings are thus disproportionately rewarded, and their work retains a certain glamour. Production, by the same logic, becomes infinitely devalued, and service jobs are merely grist for the continuance of the system.

23. This is described by Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma in Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Duke University Press, 2004). Of course, it may be objected that this has long been the case. And certainly modes of capitalism and proto-capitalism based on risk are as old as the hills. Weber provides a summary of adventurism going back to the commenda and before. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Routledge, 1930), xxvi. However, as a burgeoning literature (see note 20) makes clear, this is ever more a problem of generalized national and global concern. As risk-based trade occupies an increasing—and increasingly integrated—share among dominant economic practices, the dangers of risk become highly acute and pervasive. At the same time, the glamour of disproportionate rewards appears increasingly difficult to resist.

24. The difference between these techniques is poorly understood and almost always discussed incorrectly in popular analyses. Diversification might include a varied portfolio, in a common market of industry, of assets that might all be subject to devaluation from a common influence—as a range of different stocks might be to a market crash. Hedges typically split risks into nonrelated fields; this would be the case, for example, if one bought stocks and invested in real estate.

25. The name, perhaps, should have raised concerns—despite the claim that this system was derived from consistent wins in the casino of the same name. Zack O’Malley Greenburg, “Bye-Bye, Billionaire: Ryan Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media Files for Bankruptcy,” Forbes, July 30, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2015/07/30/ryan-kavanaughs-relativity-media-files-for-bankruptcy/.

26. Strange, Casino Capitalism.

27. Securities are based on stocks and shares, not on the underlying companies (as stock and shares ostensibly are). The advent of complexities like “put” and “call” prices and horizon timings for sale or purchase makes these far more complex than traditional stock positions.

28. Lee and LiPuma, Financial Derivatives; Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 191–213.

29. Simon, interview, April 22, 2019.

30. This quote appeared in Berkshire-Hathaway’s annual letter from 2002. However, Buffet is known to have openly used options in his long-range financial strategies. Mark Sebastian, “Warren Buffett Loves Quietly Using These Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction,” The Street, March 16, 2018, https://www.thestreet.com/investing/options/warren-buffett-loves-quietly-using-these-financial-weapons-of-mass-destruction-14525447. While participants in this sector in Singapore have told me that so-called day trading (comprising short-term positions by retail investors) is a gamble, others employ long-term derivative strategies that bet on the continuous growth of the market.

31. Mervyn King made this argument in The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Global Economy (Abacus, 2016) and later, with John Kay, in Radical Uncertainty: Decision Making Beyond the Numbers (W. W. Norton, 2020). King’s point is that national banks were seen to be making global markets more secure, while they were in fact providing incentives for ever-risker bets.

32. Lydia Lim, ed., Singapore’s Economic Development: Retrospection and Reflections (World Scientific, 2015), 8.

33. Clearly two of these would be the disavowal of so-called big government and the privatization of industry (or, at least, of keeping the state out of the life of business). As we will see, Singapore’s approach has been built on public–private partnerships, and the government is heavily invested in a range of private firms. Although the latter would appear to be a contradiction, it is important to note that Singapore’s avowed ideology of “pragmatism” has historically allowed for a mixing and matching among philosophies and policies. The PAP remains fully committed when it comes to other cornerstones of neoliberalism: ideas of personal responsibility (as against welfarism), value-production above all else, and the elevation of corporate management technique as a model for areas of statecraft. When it comes to “small government,” several authors have pointed out inconsistencies within strains of neoliberal thought, some of which are far less averse to state interventions in economy or personal life. Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner, “Neoliberalism Resurgent? Market Rule After the Great Recession,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 2 (2012): 265–88. We might also point out a shift in many neoliberal nations toward illiberal governance; see note 42.

34. Gavin Peebles and Peter Wilson, The Singapore Economy (Edward Elgar, 1996); Linda Low, The Political Economy of a City-State Revisited (Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2006).

35. https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/singapore-local-switzerland-asias-wealthy.

36. Government-linked developers and their role in nation building are discussed in chapter 4.

37. Tiffany Fumiko Tay, “Gaming Remains Main Revenue Driver for IRs amid Expansion,” Straits Times, April 5, 2019, https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/gaming-remains-main-revenue-driver-for-irs-amid-expansion.

38. See Lee Kah-Wee, Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress, and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity (NUS Press, 2020). For more on the expansion into casino capital, see also Derek Da Cunha, Singapore Places Its Bets: Casinos, Foreign Talent, and Remaking a City-State (Straits Times Reference, 2010); Joan Henderson, “Betting on Casino Tourism in Asia: Singapore’s Integrated Resorts,” Tourism Review International 10, no. 3 (2006): 169–79; Lionel Wee, “Neoliberalism and the Regulation of Consumers: Legalizing Casinos in Singapore,” Critical Discourse Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 15–27. Daniel P. S. Goh has argued that the integrated resort at Marina Bay Sands has come to play a central role in the image of the city itself in “Choreographing Singapore’s Utopia by the Bay,” in Tourist Utopias: Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces and Mobile Imaginaries, ed. Tim Simpson (Amsterdam University Press, 2017); see also, on this subject, Erica X. Y. Yap, “The Transnational Assembling of Marina Bay, Singapore,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 34, no. 3 (2013): 390–406.

39. See Chua Beng Huat, Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation: The Political Economy of Singapore’s Public Housing (NUS Press, 2024).

40. A BTO flat can be resold after a minimum occupancy period of five years—increased to ten in 2024 for Plus and Prime flats, which are in more attractive locations—and almost always generates profit. https://www.hdb.gov.sg/residential/selling-a-flat/eligibility. Life decisions are, increasingly, made around this timeline. Cara Wong, “BTO First, Propose Later: Young Couples Don’t Regret Applying for Flat First,” Straits Times, June 4, 2017, https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/entertainment/biting-the-bto-bullet.

41. Interestingly, in HDB literature, the three- or four-year wait for one’s BTO lottery number to come up is described via a rhetoric of planning, not of chance. The young couple is supposed to marry early—an incentive, supposedly, to increase the birthrate—and to “BTO” at the right stage in their life-building plans, alongside career advancement and savings through the CPF scheme.

42. This is the source of highly sensitive debate around the success of the savings scheme. See Chia Ngee-Choon, “Adding a Basic Pillar to the Central Provident Fund System: An Actuarial Analysis,” in Lim, Singapore’s Economic Development, and the introduction by Lydia Lim in the same volume. Certainly the overwhelming emphasis on homeownership by the PAP has led to many purchasing homes to the detriment of liquid retirement savings.

43. At least, there is a sense of a crisis in confidence in long-standing Western models. See Cherian George, “Neoliberal ‘Good Governance’ in Lieu of Rights: Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore Experiment,” in Speech and Society in Turbulent Times: Freedom of Expression in Comparative Perspective, ed. Monroe Price and Nicole Stremlau (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

44. Daniel Bell, David Brown, and Kanishka Jayasuriya, eds., Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (1997): 22–43; Václav Štětka and Sabina Mihelj, The Illiberal Public Sphere: Media in Polarized Societies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Boris Vormann and Michael D. Weinman, eds., The Emergence of Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phenomenon (Routledge, 2021).

45. This can include such acts as drawing a sketch, dancing, or looking around. See Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us (Bloomsbury, 2020).

46. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994), 7 and 11.

47. Derrida, 9.

48. Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Athlone Press, 1998).

49. See, e.g., Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Viking, 2014).

50. With these authors, we see, I believe, a contrary tendency—the application of the spectral to lives grounded in material conditions. For Mbembe, the ghost becomes (not metaphorically) a category of person in the contemporary dispensation, a being that has slipped beyond the stabilizing bounds of ethnic nationhood and human reciprocity. What is expressed through Tutuola’s work is a lived human condition that simply cannot be described otherwise. Achille Mbembe and R. H. Mitsch, “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 1–26.

51. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019).

52. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin Modern Classics, 1963).

53. Appadurai’s analysis deals with the spectral in a manner similar to Derrida in the chapter of Specters of Marx that considers exchange-value. It is interesting, however, that fictive or projective valuations here are “fixed” to specific buildings and places—and the recitation of these becomes a mode of social performance. See Arjun Appadurai, “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 627–51.

54. This stands in rather marked contrast to a dominant strain of spectral studies that operates primarily through representations of the ghost or the uncanny in arts, literature, and media.

55. Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (State University of New York Press, 1987); Erik Mueggler, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2001); Andrew Alan Johnston, Ghosts of the New City: Spirits, Urbanity, and the Ruins of Progress in Chiang Mai (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014); Joseph Bosco, “The Supernatural in Hong Kong Young People’s Ghost Stories,” Anthropological Forum 13, no. 2 (2003): 141–49; Julie Y. Chu, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010); Tine M. Gammeltoft, Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014); Kenneth Dean and Peter van der Veer, The Secular in South, East, and Southeast Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Kenneth Dean, Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China (Princeton University Press, 1993). Though perhaps less intensively ethnographic, this book has benefited from the methodological examples of Steve Pile, Real Cities (SAGE, 2005), and Karen Till, “Mapping Spectral Traces,” in Mapping Spectral Traces (Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Affairs, 2010).

56. See Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Free Press, 1995), 47, and Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Cornell University Press, 1967). It is perhaps obvious that this distinction denoted categories into which actual objects, spaces, and practices were divided, as well as modes of parsing abstract natures. Like Pierre Bourdieu’s Kabyle house, the physical arrangement and demarcation of spaces are sometimes tightly interdigitated, to the point of being inextricable. In other cases, structured oppositions are far more abstract in character and loosely/variably joined to the physical world or built environment (as in day/night, dry/wet). In Derrida’s taxonomy, the “outside” of death—as beyond or external to the realm of the living or the social world of human life—is rather different to the space “outside” the city wall or the national border.

57. In effect, the conceptual connections of the ghost are at once symbolic and ecological—and, as such, operate in two very different registers to the ordering of state. This is discussed further later. For a helpful definition of the distinction between metonymy and other modes of connection, see René Dirven and Ralf Pörings, Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast (de Gruyter, 2004).

58. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 42.

59. In A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 28, Bill Brown insists that the resistant physicality of the table contributes a great deal to its awkward and contradicted nature. Hence Marx doubles down on the materiality in his description, its “wooden brain,” and so on. In Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007, 85), Bruno Latour argues that the example of fetishism here contains a surfeit of meaning that extends beyond Marx’s example—suggesting, in a Derridean sense, a kind of textual surplus and indeterminacy that cannot be resolved.

60. As opposed to a traditionalist, “concrete” notion that would see the object as an isolated, idiographic instance. Postone, in Time, Labor, and Social Domination, has emphasized that the universal aspect of both labor and the commodity—the abstract character that builds on, and elides, the concrete—operates as a “total” form of social mediation.

61. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 45–46.

62. See chapter 2.

63. Spectropoetically, it is a “becoming-god.” Its godhood is fetishism. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 42.

64. Derrida, 41. In this account, “Marx always described money, and more precisely the monetary sign, in the figure of appearance or simulacrum, more exactly of the ghost” (45). Money and the monetary sign are the same, and this only moves further into the realm of simulation.

65. These are, in fact, merely two ways of saying the same thing. As we will see, the buyer causes an object to be haunted by overpaying for it; by the same operation, the object comes to be valuable because this process “haunts” it (so to speak).

66. There is no account in which such houses are resold in the ghost-realm. To the contrary, these appear to be what blockchain programmers call “soulbound”: the inalienable property of a particular being.

67. This is why, for example, paper money must be burned only after being distributed in circles and rosettes. The notes are understood to embody value (the cost of their purchase in Singapore dollars) and are thus a “real” substance, from the ritual standpoint. Fire—alongside paper, in its role as potential fire—is also assumed to possess unique physical properties essential to the exchange. At the same time, the fact that this is a cyclical and reciprocal gesture must be represented by the form, or arrangement, in which the notes are offered. This is not mere politesse; the arrangement of the bills is assumed to have a direct effect on their efficacy. See chapter 6 for discussion of this rite. This “technical” relationship between materials and signifying forms would not have surprised Durkheim at all; his comments on the instrumental character of magic in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life define this logic precisely.

68. An insightful summary can be found in del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013), 57. This is also a recurrent theme in Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and in discussion of depression and failed utopian subjects by Mark Fisher.

1. See Wang Gungwu, China and the Overseas Chinese (Times Academic Press, 1991); Kwa Chong Guan and Kwa Bak Lim, A General History of the Chinese in Singapore (World Scientific, 2019); also Donald Nonini, “Shifting Identities, Positioned Imaginaries: Transnational Traversals and Reversals by Malaysian Chinese,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (Routledge, 1997), and Chang Chak-Yan, “The Overseas Chinese,” in Fujian: A Coastal Province in Transition and Transformation, ed. Y. M. Yeung and David K. Y. Chu (Chinese University Press, 2000).

2. Tang-ki is a word in the Hokkien dialect meaning “divining youth.” The mandarin cognate is jitong.

3. Russell Kirkland, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition (Routledge, 2004).

4. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.

5. Home and temple can be, in fact, very blurred in function. See Goh Ze Song Shawn, “Making Space for the Gods: Ethnographic Observations of Chinese House Temples in Singapore,” Religions 11, no. 7 (2020): 349.

6. Margaret Chan, Ritual Is Theatre, Theatre Is Ritual: Tang-Ki—Chinese Spirit Medium Worship (Singapore Management University Press, 2006).

7. https://www.singstat.gov.sg/publications/cop2010/census10_stat_release1.

8. In the same census, the number of identifying Buddhists was 1,032,879.

9. These occupy adjacent sites, and worshippers visiting one and then the other to light joss sticks is common.

10. https://soch.wordpress.com/2006/07/03/a-visit-to-waterloo-street-kuan-yin-temple/. I have even seen Yoruba statuary on altars in small eateries along Rangoon Road. When asked, the owner of one told me that Nigerian workers in the oil industry would eat lunch there, and this was a sign of respect.

11. Mrs. Tan owns a landscaping company with her husband and identifies herself as Taoist and also “a little bit Buddhist.” This was common to many respondents, who would list aspects of these faith traditions that they believed in. The question of Taoism’s polytheistic emphasis appeared to be an important determinant. Interview conducted April 2, 2009.

12. Interview conducted June 20, 2010. Rojak is a popular local dish, a “salad” of fruits and vegetables that is covered in a dark prawn paste and tamarind dressing. The term is used in Singlish to refer to a “hodgepodge.”

13. An interesting aspect of Chinese religion is that individuals often self-identify as being closer, in orientation, to one contributing tradition than another.

14. The generic ghost tends to be characterized primarily through the notion of hunger (see later). This tends to apply to unknown ghosts, the “mob” considered to be “out there,” and less in the case of familiar spirits.

15. We will see this in the coming chapters with conceptions of the death process; of the afterlife and conditions of ancestor and ghost; and of health, cosmology, geomancy, ritual protocol, and spirit money. While these carry clear influences of Chinese conventions, we see a great diversity in knowledge and understanding that a traditional Chinese might see as “confused” or underinformed. This stands in contrast to belief systems chronicled in Anna Siedel, “Review: Buying One’s Way into Heaven: The Celestial Treasury in Chinese Religions,” History of Religions 17, no. 3–4 (1978): 419–32; Evelyn Sakakida Rawski and James L. Watson, Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (University of California Press, 1988); Joseph Needham, Biology and Biological Technology, vol. 6 of Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Chu, Cosmologies of Credit, or, alternately, by Robert P. Weller’s “Bandits, Beggars, and Ghosts: The Failure of State Control over Religious Interpretation in Taiwan,” American Ethnologist 12, no. 1 (1995): 46–61, or in Malaysia in Ong’s Spirits of Resistance.

16. Such accommodations are reminiscent of those in Korea between shamanic practices and Christianity. See Andrew Eungi Kim, “Christianity, Shamanism, and Modernization in South Korea,” CrossCurrents 50, no. 1/2 (2000): 112–19.

17. Charles D. Orzech, “Mechanisms of Violent Retribution in Chinese Hell Narratives,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 1 (1994): 111–26.

18. This comment was made by Arthur, March 23, 2009. This reflects more the cosmologies shared by Chu’s respondents in China, who understood spirit money as contributing to a reserve of credit in the afterlife. Arthur saw the remission of “money” not in literal terms but as a means to elevate the dead through displays of respect and remembrance. This allows them to rise on the gui-shen spectrum, which connects well-tended and -situated ancestors, poor ghosts, and gods.

19. See the next note. Such understandings of the spatial structure of the afterlife, oddly, have also been heavily influenced by dioramas of Haw Par Villa, a “theme park” in Singapore that depicts cautionary moral tales based on Chinese lore. These are, however, subject to wild imaginative license—but are seen multiple times by most Singaporeans during their childhoods. These leave an indelible imprint, and I have noticed that unconventional visions of Chinese hell often reflect what is on display here. https://theculturetrip.com/asia/singapore/articles/a-guide-to-haw-par-villa-singapores-nightmare-theme-park/.

20. Again, here, it should be noted, with Russell Kirkland, that the repertoire of ideas that compose the afterlife is highly varied among Singaporeans, and there are differing ideas of the nature of this debt. In recent discourses, this is seen in highly financialized terms (a view not commonly shared, for example, among older Singaporeans). See Kirkland, Taoism.

21. Tong, Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore.

22. Hui Ping, interview, September 30, 2009.

23. The “spectral turn,” as Martin Jay has correctly observed, coincided with a moment of particular interest in the more troubled aspects of history and memory. Jay, Cultural Semantics.

24. In this sense, they resemble the recently dead of the Ndembu, as described by Victor Turner in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Cornell University Press, 1967), 8–10. As still-social beings, they remain interested, and likely to meddle, in the ongoing matters they have left behind—such as the remarriages of their widowed spouses. The Singaporean case also very closely resembles Ndembu belief that “forgetting” of the dead results in a loss of social status.

25. Philip Lim, “Dead ‘unable to rest in peace’ in Singapore,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 15, 2009, https://www.smh.com.au/world/dead-unable-to-rest-in-peace-in-singapore-20090315-8yuc.html.

26. This is a popular conception expressed in many informants’ accounts and illustrated in public media such as Singapore’s Haw Par Villa theme park. More can be found in Ken Brashier’s explanation of the Taizong Hell Scrolls in Chris Lydgate, “To Hell and Back,” Reed Magazine, December 1, 2009, https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/2009/brashier-hell-scroll.html.

27. This term refers to seeing without being seen. Derrida, Specters of Marx.

28. Likewise, this echoes Freudian interpretations in Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (W. W. Norton, 2005), and in Freud, The Uncanny (Penguin, 2002), or in the charismatic Christian tradition of “spectral evidence,” which is physically absent but appears to the witness in the form of dreams or visions. Pragmatist Charles Peirce theorized conjectural knowledge as abductive logic or the “educated guess” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Harvard University Press, 1934), 2:17ff.

29. This is described by Tom Gunning, citing Jean-Claude Schmitt, in del Pilar Blanco and Peeren, Spectralities Reader, 217. This was an occasional theme of Singaporean accounts also—at least, of the broader issue of the ghost’s problematic visuality. Transparency or an impression of “emptiness” (much like kimzua and sacrificed objects) was mentioned by some, but by no means by all. It should be noted that, in much traditional media, Chinese ghosts have a conventional “outfit,” complete with a ribbon in front of the face. None of my respondents spoke of this in their own accounts.

30. Interview conducted September 30, 2009.

31. Interview conducted October 28, 2009. The friend was later found, confused and febrile, in a stand of trees.

32. Mr. Ang, interview, February 10, 2009; Father JP, interview, October 3, 2009.

33. David Toop describes this effect in “Chair Creaks, but No One Sits There,” in Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (Continuum, 2010), 144ff.

34. A more precise distinction between seeing and sensing was expressed by respondent Charles (see later), who noted that the former is rare and (in adults) requires a gift, illness, or unusual circumstance. He stated, “Many people can sense ghosts, but far fewer can see them.” Interview conducted January 14, 2007.

35. Tom Gunning, “Uncanny Reflections, Modern Illusions: Sighting the Modern Optical Uncanny,” in Uncanny Modernity, ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Gunning, “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision,” Grey Room 26 (2007): 94–127.

36. Much nineteenth-century haunting in fiction articulated this ineffability. Edgar Allan Poe, “MS Found in a Bottle,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics, 2011), 122. Poe reiterates this concept repeatedly, also describing an “indefinite awe” and “a sentiment ineffable” (124).

37. Brian Massumi, The Politics of Affect (Polity, 2015).

38. See Henry James, Turn of the Screw: Norton Critical Edition (W. W. Norton, 2020); Rudyard Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy (Pegasus Books, 2008); and Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics, 2020).

39. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016), 61.

40. Gothic fiction in the Victorian and Edwardian modes described both visible and nonvisible ghosts, but the visible became dominant with the rise of photography. See Gunning, “To Scan a Ghost.”

41. Interview conducted March 15, 2009.

42. Interviews conducted October 22, 2009, and April 15, 2013.

43. This is akin to the ambiguities described by Hylton White, “The Body of the Spirit: Post-Funerary Embodiment in Zululand,” workshop on “Ghosts, Ancestors, and Archives,” Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, University of Cape Town, August 26, 2014.

44. One, the late geomancer and qigong teacher Master Timothy, said that “a ghost just wants attention; it will say anything to get it.” Interview conducted December 8, 2016.

45. Some examples of this, as are discussed in chapter 6, could be explained in a secular interpretation as the violence of modern construction processes and the risks to laborers—such as being crushed by large objects, cut, or run over by heavy equipment.

46. For a discussion of weak messianism, see Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968).

47. This occurs in many ways, but we will see a signal case with property development in chapter 6—a space of giddy and often fetishistic depictions of commodified futures.

48. Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 41–55. We will hear a bit more about what the ghost “wants” in chapter 6.

49. It should be noted here that ghosts are treated with extreme caution by the secular state—as are all matters of religion. The latter are seen as a powder keg, and interethnic violence in the nation’s history has been understood, in large part, as dividing along lines of faith. In two decades of following this subject closely, I have never witnessed an allegation of haunting that has not been taken seriously by officialdom. Likewise, for reasons that will become clear in chapter 6, I have seen representatives of private firms dismiss spectral allegations only from within the framework of evangelical Christian belief (and only rarely).

50. I describe this in “Ghostly Topographies.” In this sense, Singapore stands at the recent end of Foucault’s timeline of power—and supports his depiction in History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (Vintage, 1978), 135ff., that modernity represents a transitional mix of these two modalities.

51. Made famous, in part, by the controversial caning of Michael P. Fay for vandalism offenses in 1994.

52. Chan, Ritual Is Theatre. This “theater of pain,” a gruesome spectacle, exists also in Hindu communities in Singapore. In the Taoist version, the medium is burned, bludgeoned, and pierced, as well as whipped. They rarely show any reaction. This is but one example of a common attitude of opposition often found in religious groups that see themselves to be at odds with the repressive hand of a secular state. This was a common sentiment in my research among evangelical Christian groups, who saw themselves as (in the words of one cell-group leader) “answering to a higher authority.” It occurs in other areas of Taoist practice; see, e.g., Chia Jie Lin’s “State Regulations and Divine Oppositions: An Ethnography of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival in Singapore,” Religions 11, no. 7 (2020): 330.

53. It should be noted, however, that “female intuition” was a common presumption also and that (like “Lady Luck” at casinos) it was assumed that women’s “sensitive” natures predisposed them to correct speculative guessing. The centrality of womanhood among speculative notions is discussed in Rogers, Speculation, 165.

54. See Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

55. This group was founded by Anat Rosenberg of Reichman University, Kristof Smeyers from the University of Antwerp, and Astrid Van den Bossche at King’s College London. Their website is https://economic-enchantments.net/.

56. Although Derrida reads widely across Marx’s writings, the book pays particular attention to Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Classics, 2011), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (International, 1994), and Capital, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics, 2004).

57. Tong, Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore, 139, focuses on these in particular, but there are many other types of objects also; see chapter 3 for discussion of auctions and their role among seventh month events.

58. As of 2024, an increasing proportion of these payments are made through PayNow and other digital peer-to-peer platforms.

59. These were the going rates for packages in the year of writing; 888 represents an auspicious number in Chinese, as ba (eight) is a homonym for fa (grow prosperous) in Mandarin.

60. At the time of writing, there are several established specialist sites for ancestral items, such as http://www.kimzuadiam.com.sg/, https://kimzua.com.sg/, and https://po-pi.com.sg/. More general distributors, like Lazada.sg, fulfill orders for local brick-and-mortar shops.

61. Interview conducted December 4, 2014.

62. Tong, Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore, 87.

63. http://taoist-sorcery.blogspot.com/2013/07/secret-to-strike-4d-lottery-on-hungry.html.

64. https://stomp.straitstimes.com/singapore-seen/singapore/machine-churns-out-lucky-lottery-numbers-at-maxwell-food-centre.

65. This was commonly performed by yarrow stalk divination. There appears to still be an active readership in this area, with books like Cook and Zhao’s publishing translations for contemporary study. In this sense, divination practices resemble, to a lesser degree, the contemporary interest in feng shui. Constance Cook and Zhao Lu, Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching (Oxford University Press, 2017).

66. Tong discusses this in his chapter “Unnatural Deaths,” in Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore. The proportionate relation between the power of the ghost and the violence of its demise appears to be assumed by many respondents in Singapore. I did not find corroboration of this among Malaysians or mainland Chinese—leading me to wonder if this is the result of some other influence or merely a unique development of Singapore’s ghost-culture.

67. Hence the common tactic of spreading rumors of haunting to injure rival developers or by potential buyers in the hope of falling unit prices. See “Unfair Scare Tactics at Farrar Court,” New Paper on Sunday, March 18, 2007.

68. Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (University of Virginia Press, 1997); Peter Geschiere and Francis Nyamnjoh, “Witchcraft as an Issue in the ‘Politics of Belonging’: Democratization and Urban Migrants’ Involvement with the Home Village,” African Studies Review 41 (1998): 71; Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26, no. 3 (1998): 279–303.

69. Weber, Protestant Ethic, xxxii.

70. This term was, in fact, the title and central topic of King and Kay’s 2020 book Radical Uncertainty. See also Hacking, Taming of Chance; Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Daston, and John Beatty, The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007).

71. Interview conducted March 20, 2012.

72. https://www.statista.com/statistics/966747/population-living-in-public-housing-singapore/.

1. This aspect, of faith, is a staple observation of most histories of money and currency. We see this argument reappear, for example, in King, End of Alchemy; Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Books, 2008); Tom Nicholas, VC: An American History (Harvard University Press, 2019); and Larry Neal, A Concise History of International Finance: From Babylon to Bernanke (Cambridge University Press, 2015). It is the subtitle of Jacob Goldstein’s Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing (Atlantic Books, 2020).

2. This is particularly well articulated by Jack Weatherford, The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace (Methuen, 1997).

3. In this sense, paper money is merely a more terrifying instance of money, a categorically frightening and devilish thing. This is a global phenomenon, hence (for example) its association with the demon El Tío among Bolivian miners or with the devil’s labor in Colombia. See Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (University of North Carolina Press, 1980). Even when not perceived as overtly satanic, money may have magical associations; see Hans Binswanger, Money and Magic (University of Chicago Press, 1994), and Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 1997).

4. Weatherford, History of Money.

5. As opposed to money on the gold standard, for example, where an amount is held in reserve for each bill.

6. Rogers, Speculation, 54.

7. This was the apt description of accountant Roger, interview, August 7, 2019.

8. Resemblance to American money, and the significance of this in China, has been investigated by Julie Chu with great insight. Chu, Cosmologies of Credit. Likewise has been the role of this type of spirit money versus others. From her research, there is a clear distinction made between type of currency and recipient—whether ghost, ancestor, or god. Likewise, according to Chu, many see hell money as having a “low-class” association as compared to traditional forms. Again, here, Singaporean understandings seem rather different, in two major respects. First, there is a general maximalism that comes from a loose adherence to mainland traditions. Although some were aware of a difference between what is sacrificed to whom on the gui-shen spectrum, others were not aware or did not see this as important. In fact, when asked which spirit money they chose to burn, the logic of the response was to make use of as many varieties as possible. This is true of forms as well as denominations. Here the U.S. greenback has status but is placed in a kind of cosmopolitanism of forms, images, and associations. Second, the Singaporean case was far more financialized; the dominance of hell notes was understood, in part, via a literalization of ghost-sacrifices qua investment, and the “debts” of di yu were seen to be explicitly financial. The notion of hell having a central bank, in the sense of a national treasury, was in no way understood as a metaphor. See Hill Gates, “Money for the Gods,” Modern China 13, no. 2 (1987): 239–77; Anna Siedel, “Review: Buying One’s Way into Heaven: the Celestial Treasury in Chinese Religions,” History of Religions 17, no. 3–4 (1978): 419–32; Stevan C. Harrell, “When a Ghost Becomes a God,” in Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, ed. Arthur Wolf (Stanford University Press, 1974); John L. McCreery, “Why Don’t We See Some Real Money Here? Offerings in Chinese Religion,” Journal of Chinese Religions 18 (1990): 1–24; Gary Seaman, “Spirit Money: An Interpretation,” Journal of Chinese Religions 10 (1982): 82–87; Gray Kochar-Lindgren, “Trans-Rational Cash: Ghost-Money, Hong Kong, and Nonmodern Networks,” Culture, Theory, and Critique 58, no. 1 (2016): 94–106.

9. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Schocken Books, 1978), 87.

10. It is impossible to ascertain the actual market share of Chinese products, but it is certainly true that these are ubiquitous. Discussion with a local kimzua seller revealed that “around half” hails from the PRC. Lim, interview, August 6, 2022.

11. This statement was by Chee Wai, mid-twenties, who works in sales; interview conducted June 28, 2016.

12. The graphic language of spirit money is discussed extensively by Chu, Cosmologies of Credit.

13. Although he admitted with a laugh that “a very poor ghost, very poor thing one, might still take it.” Interview conducted October 9, 2019.

14. In one sense, this is very illuminating—it is an interesting fact of discourses about ghost-exchanges that people speak of this value in qualitative as well as quantitative terms. That is, certain streams or inputs of value were of higher quality because they were offered with the best of intentions, by individuals of piety.

15. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1 (Zone Books, 1991).

16. This reflects Derrida’s analysis in Specters of Marx, where he notes that “the metamorphoses of commodities . . . was already a process of transfiguring idealization that one may legitimately call spectropoetic” (45). While Derrida’s analysis touches on this only glancingly, I feel that the Singaporean case presents a rich circumstance of this symbolic process, what Paul Ricoeur would call “predication.” Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (Routledge, 2003), 154.

17. This is likewise not unlike monetary remission, a “service” in which one pays to move value over geographical space. The latter, however, is associated in Singapore with relative poverty and foreign labor and is a transaction that certainly does not result in surplus for the sender.

18. Alongside other kinds of offered objects. Bending space is, to a degree, thought to be inherent in the rite of offering (for example, with food and liquor as well as money). In this sense, the note works as a kind of subcategory of a given mode of ritual power.

19. Germaine, associate in a public relations firm, interview, February 23, 2018.

20. See essays by W. J. T. Mitchell and Elizabeth Helsinger in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 2002). This same principle is dominant in Chinese notions of environmental and human health. Needham, Biology and Biological Technology. Stagnation of flows is a principal source of pathology and may be addressed through acupuncture—or, in Singapore, via the enormously popular foot reflexology.

21. See Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (Zone Books, 1998).

22. In fact, prosperous is often used as a euphemism for fat. When one “looks prosperous,” it is a polite way of saying that one has put on some weight. Prosperity can mean a wedding in the family, having many children (an expanding household), or rude health in old age. Here the local usage of this term more closely resembles the traditional sense of “to prosper” than the more modern, financial sense.

23. Under the 1994 Maintenance of Parents Act, https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1614_2009-11-30.html.

24. Mrs. Tan’s Singlish is rather heavy, and this statement requires some translation. I would translate this statement as follows: “That’s why we go! We thought this kind of thing only existed in the movies. So, when I was there, there were the priest and priestess who were routinely at the temple, and I asked, ‘Can you give me luck?’ And they replied, ‘Do you mean money? 4D? No, now we are curing you. But when you are cured, you will have luck.’ Really! When I was cured and returned I won twenty-five thousand dollars at 4D. Really, but it’s true. They have these things [in Thailand]. [We see these sorts of things] every time we go.”

25. Interview conducted June 20, 2010.

26. Interestingly, I have frequently heard the reverse also.

27. During research at City Harvest Church and New Creation Church in Singapore during 2006–8, I regularly heard similar explanations followed by the time-honored “the Spirit moves in mysterious ways.”

28. Many of Singapore’s banks’ “private” departments offer arrangements of large deposits for dramatically increased annuities, including Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation and Standard Chartered Bank. These are a common topic of discussion among wealthy Singaporeans.

29. For example, Weatherford notes in History of Money, as does Jacob Goldstein, Money, that there were once more than eight thousand currencies circulating in the United States, requiring an industry simply to provide valuations. Almost none of these traded were worth their printed denominations. The same occurred, even, for coins—the practice of “sweating” money, of rubbing coins in a pouch to shed the metal as powder, meant that these gradually lost value over the course of their exchange.

30. See Lim, Singapore’s Economic Development.

31. In fact, four recessions between 1998 and 2009. See Tan and Bhaskaran, “The Role of the State in Singapore: Pragmatism in Search of Development,” in Lim, Singapore’s Economic Development, 72.

32. Tan and Bhaskaran, 74.

1. Cherian George, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation—Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990–2000 (Landmark Books, 2000), 15.

2. C. J. W.-L. Wee, “Staging the Asian Modern: Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch, and the Asian Lear,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 777.

3. As Cherian George puts it, “the end is a high level of material security for Singaporeans.” George, Singapore, 15.

4. See Chua Beng Huat, Life Is Not Complete Without Shopping: Consumption Culture in Singapore (Singapore University Press, 2003), 3. More recently, Singaporeans’ online shopping has become something of a cause célèbre. See https://www.visa.com.sg/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases/singaporeans-are-southeast-asias-top-online-shoppers-visa-survey.html.

5. Chua argues, helpfully, that retail in Singapore acts merely as a programmatic basis of public life and that much happens in shopping centers that is not shopping. This argument stands as a healthy corrective to the dismissive accounts of other critics, who have suggested that commercial activity had replaced other, more authentic aspects of civic life on a European model. This is discussed further in chapter 4.

6. The vaccine, in a paper syringe, created a stir in Malaysia and was soon after spotted in joss paper shops in Tiong Bahru market. https://www.asiaone.com/malaysia/ghosting-covid-19-spirits-get-vaccinated-offerings-jb-store. One might well wonder what use a ghost has for this item. The maker specified that the purpose of paper commodities is simply to give the dead what they most desire—which often involves unsettled business or feelings of unjust death. His assumption (probably correct) is that many people died during the pandemic wanting a medication that would have saved their lives.

7. This complex relation has been worked through in great detail, and a full discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter. The duality of the commodity, and thus the labor that produces it, is a crucial factor. See Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A key observation is how the fetish appears to animate it into life. It is this autonomy that is relevant, in particular, to arguments about the commodity’s spectrality. See Derrida, Specters of Marx, and Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (Verso, 1997). Also see Katja Diefenbach, “The Spectral Form of Value,” Transversal Texts (blog), January 2006, https://transversal.at/transversal/1106/diefenbach/en.

8. Marx understood market-oriented exchange-value, the spectral fellow traveler, as something in need of exorcism. When the illusion of the fetish is dispelled via the revolutionary process, so, too, will the ghost be.

9. See also Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination.

10. Such objects have an interesting sociolegal history. The lost term deodand referred to beasts and inanimate objects that caused human mortality. Teresa Sutton has examined this concept in terms of the responsibility for death, which goes back at least to Plato’s Dialogues. Sutton, “The Deodand and Responsibility for Death,” Journal of Legal History 18, no. 3 (1997): 44–55. William Pietz also discusses this with respect to monetary valuation of life in “Death of the Deodand: Accursed Objects and the Money Value of Human Life,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 31 (1997): 97–108.

11. Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses Against Occultism,” in The Stars Down to Earth (Routledge, 1994), 174.

12. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Neal Kirk, “New Media Hauntings: Digital Aesthetics of Haunting, Context Collapse, and Networked Spectrality” (PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 2017); Gammeltoft, Haunting Images.

13. Gramophone and microphone inventor Emile Berliner claimed that the microphone would eventually pick up the dead, as they simply vibrate at a lower frequency than the living. See Sterne, Audible Past, and Friedrich A. Kittler, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and Michael Wutz, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999). See also Kirk, “New Media Hauntings.”

14. Indeed, there is a rather busy emerging field of practice in digital engagements with spirits in Singapore. See Alvin Lim Eng Hui’s fascinating Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance (Routledge, 2019) and Lim, “Live Streaming and Digital Stages for the Hungry Ghosts and Deities,” Religions 11, no. 7 (2020): 367.

15. Here they resemble conditions documented by Elizabeth K. Teather in “High-Rise Homes for the Ancestors: Cremation in Hong Kong,” Geographical Review 89, no. 3 (1999): 409–30.

16. Playing one’s IC number is a common way of gambling on 4D. The government IC is issued to all citizens and permanent residents of Singapore and is one method of tracking the populace.

17. It should be noted that the character of 4D lends itself to this kind of speculation. Unlike Lotto, where occasional winners face immense odds to win enormous payouts, 4D is structured such that many winners (who present partial number combinations) win far smaller amounts. Many people thus have stories of winning a few hundred or a few thousand; relatively few win more than this. 4D is thus a system that lends itself to pragmatic, small-scale speculation.

18. Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (Routledge, 2001).

19. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1979).

20. This term, which is highly pejorative, is usually used by primarily English-speaking, middle-class Singaporeans to describe “Chinese” tastes among a variously imagined working-class population. It is used, for example, to describe the tastes of ah beng and ah lian, the male and female urban lumpen-proletarians—depicted as Chinese-educated (or undereducated), superstitious gangsters who speak a ludicrously dense Singlish patois. Cheena is also used as a signal of contempt and differentiation from mainland Chinese, who are subject to overt discrimination and a stereotyping that borders on racism.

21. Helper here refers to a migrant domestic worker; the term has come to replace maid. Interview conducted October 3, 2018.

22. These observations were made in 1947. They are reprinted in Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society—a Translation of Fei Xiaotong’s “Xiangtu Zhongguo” (University of California Press, 1992). The ideally “open” nature of reciprocal exchange is likewise described in Yan Yunxiang, The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (Stanford University Press, 1996).

23. Tong, Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore.

24. The popularity of items for students, discussed by Tong, was confirmed by Gan, who mans a kimzua shop in the Tiong Bahru neighborhood. Interview conducted June 3, 2020.

25. For example, in 2013, a businessman paid a record S$488,888 for a “lucky” urn. The record-setting bid was reported in the Singaporean daily The New Paper on August 22 of that year (2–3).

26. This has been repeatedly described to me as the signal moment of Ghost Month, a sort of climax.

27. Mr. Lim, volunteer auction leader, interview, December 8, 2017.

28. In the contrast of these understandings, we see a repeated bifurcation of approaches to the ghost-economy. One tends toward narratives of occult power and mystification, while the other is loosely rationalist.

29. And this, of course, speaks to the powerfully arbitrary nature of exchange-value itself.

30. For this reason, the provenance of the objects (by means of a particular temple or organizer) and the identities of the buyers are prominently displayed, and winners and prices are sometimes reported in the newspaper and online.

31. Because, as we know, the exchange-value originates in socially necessary labor time.

32. Max Pensky, “Method and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 187.

1. See Albert Lau, Moment of Anguish: Singapore in Malaysia and the Politics of Disengagement (Times Academic Press, 1998).

2. This telling phrase was used in “The Returned Student,” a powerful speech to the Malayan Forum at Malaya Hall, London, January 28, 1950.

3. As do hantu (Malay) and pey (Tamil).

4. This phrase was used by “LHL” on April 5, 2018, at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) Ministerial Forum. The transcript is publicly available and makes clear the degree of state intentionality: https://www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom/pm-lee-hsien-loong-sutd-ministerial-forum.

5. For an account of housing as a broader economic lever, see Lee E. Goh, “Planning That Works: Housing Policy and Economic Development in Singapore,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 7, no. 3 (1988): 147–62; Augustine H. H. Tan and Phang Sock-Yong, The Singapore Experience in Public Housing, Occasional Paper 9, Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Singapore, 1991; and Stephen H. K. Yeh and Pang Eng Fong, “Housing, Employment and National Development: The Singapore Experience,” Asia 31 (1973): 8–31.

6. George, Air-Conditioned Nation, 14.

7. Clarissa Oon, “Singapore’s Green Trump Card,” Straits Times, May 7, 2009.

8. Savage, “Human Environment Relations,” 200.

9. I discuss this with respect to Cuba in “Terror and Territory: Guantánamo and the Space of Contradiction,” Public Culture 19, no. 2 (2007): 381–425.

10. This strain of socialist reformism (popular with Lee and early PAP elites) followed many of its predecessors and contemporaries in emphasizing the power of environment. In this case, determinism was an aspect that survived its schism with the Fellowship of the New Life. See Kevin Manton, “The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered,” History of Political Thought 24, no. 2 (2003): 282–304.

11. This can be seen with absolute clarity in Rodolphe De Koninck, Marc Girard, and Thanh Hai Pham, Singapore’s Permanent Territorial Revolution: 50 Years in 50 Maps (NUS Press, 2017). “Permanent territorial revolution” is perhaps the best descriptor for this postcolonial condition. See also Peter Ho, Liu Thai Ker, and Tan Wee Kiat, A Chance of a Lifetime: Lee Kuan Yew and the Physical Transformation of Singapore (Singapore Centre for Livable Cities/Editions Didier Millet, 2016).

12. See Chua Beng Huat, Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore (Routledge, 1997), and George, Singapore, 189.

13. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994). Thongchai uses this term to refer to the image of the national perimeter, which was an emotive aspect of Thailand’s anticolonial media. I have discussed this with respect to Singapore’s coastal land reclamation and bodily dysmorphia among its menfolk. Joshua Comaroff, “Coastlines of the Self: Body and Geobody in Singapore,” lecture presented at RMIT, Melbourne, Superterrestrial lecture series, September 1, 2020. Where Thai examples communicate a sense of threat to a natural and eternal boundary, the Singaporean case would appear to emphasize uncertainty and malleability. This reflects a more general epistemological instability with respect to the coastline, as discussed by Paul Carter, “Dark with Excess of Bright: Mapping the Coastlines of Knowledge,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (Reaktion Books, 1999).

14. See Comaroff, “Ghostly Topographies,” and Chris Hudson, “Romancing Singapore: Economies of Love in a Shrinking Population,” paper presented at the fifteenth biennial conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Canberra, June 29, 2004.

15. Lee, speech at SUTD.

16. Arjun Agrawal, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Duke University Press, 2005).

17. In this sense, Singapore’s pragmatism resembles Deng Xiaoping’s famous political dictum of “crossing the river by groping for stones” (mo zhe shi tou guo he), or constructing policy through discovery of a path in the midst of administrative circumstances. The PAP early leadership were skillful improvisers, and the concept of pragmatism as against fixed ideologies, either communism or Western liberalism, was invoked to justify changes of course. A good account of this approach is given by Boon Siong and Geraldine Chen in Dynamic Governance: Embedding Culture, Capabilities and Change in Singapore (World Scientific, 2007).

18. See Cedric Pugh, “Housing and Development in Singapore,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 6, no. 4 (1985): 275, and Pugh, “Housing in Singapore: The Effective Ways of the Unorthodox,” Environment and Behavior 19, no. 3 (1987): 311–30. Pugh raises the ticklish question of ethnic quotas in HDB neighborhoods in particular. An account of the sensitivity of the PAP to housing is given by Tai Ching-Ling, Housing Policy and High-Rise Living: A Study of Singapore’s Public Housing (Chopmen, 1988), 107. Tai points out that the relief of the housing shortage left by SIT was a major platform in its first electoral campaign, in 1959. The party swept to victory on this platform, and “delivering the goods” (to use Goh Chok Tong’s oft-repeated phrase) has been an essential element of claims to legitimacy ever since.

19. Goh Keng Swee’s role in the housing story is an important one, as he occupied the post of assistant director of social welfare (social research) in 1953, when the first social survey of the Department of Social Welfare was conducted. The latter was the first PAP analysis of urban housing and living conditions and, according to Tai, “the first comprehensive analysis [of this subject] ever made in Singapore.” Tai, Housing Policy and High-Rise Living, 45. For an account of administrative roles among the “pioneer” generation of state, see Lam Ping Er and Kevin Y. L. Tan, Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard (Allen and Unwin, 1999).

20. Chua, Political Legitimacy and Housing, 130.

21. A concern that is still regularly voiced, in valedictory mode, by the PAP today—as in Lee’s speech at SUTD.

22. Teh Cheang Wan, “Public Housing,” in In Modern Singapore, ed. J. B. Ooi and H. D. Chiang (University of Singapore Press, 1969).

23. For more on the SIT’s history, see Tan and Phang, Singapore Experience in Public Housing.

24. Stephen H. K. Yeh and Research and Statistics Department, HDB, Homes for the People: A Study of Tenants’ Views on Public Housing in Singapore (Singapore Government Printing Office, 1972).

25. Loh Kah Seng notes that migration was the central force behind the expansion of Singapore’s population and economy from the very outset. The opening of Suez, with the tin boom in the Malay states, drew a steady source of predominantly single, male Chinese and Indian workers. Colonial authorities attempted to control the influx with the Immigration Restriction Ordinance of 1928 and again with the Aliens Ordinance of 1933, which limited male Chinese immigrants to one thousand between spring 1932 and 1933. See Loh Kah Seng, “Dangerous Migrants: The Representations and Relocation of Urban Kampung Dwellers in Postwar Singapore,” Working Paper 140, Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, 2007, and Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (NUS Press, 2013).

26. Tan and Phang, Singapore Experience in Public Housing, 2.

27. Michael Hill and Lian Kwen Fee, The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore (Taylor and Francis, 1995), 117.

28. The presence of pigs and chickens, among other animals, was something mentioned as a signal degradation by both the SIT and, later, the HDB. This is mentioned by both Chua, Political Legitimacy and Housing, and Loh, “Dangerous Migrants.” Interestingly, however, kampung meat (especially chicken) is still considered a desirable food in contemporary Singapore—in contrast to the “processed” foods of commercial farms. Contemporary kampung chicken comes predominantly from nearby Malaysian towns such as Johor Bahru. A terrific study remains to be written concerning the symbolic valences of the kampung chicken, perhaps as a fundament of Singaporean nostalgia. For the general sense of ungovernability, see Loh, “Dangerous Migrants,” 2–3.

29. The name “Tiong Bahru” in fact translates to “New Cemetery” (tiong being Chinese for “cemetery,” bahru being Malay for “new”). The name contrasts this burial ground from the older graveyards around Chinatown. See Lily Kong and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, “Place-Making: Collective Representations of Social Life and Built Environment in Tiong Bahru,” in Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singapore, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong (Times Academic Press, 1995), 89.

30. Kong and Yeoh.

31. The document is the Report of the Committee Regarding Burial and Burial Grounds, Colony of Singapore (Singapore Government Printing Office, 1952). The full listing of burial grounds, their religions, and their sizes is given in the appendix.

32. Janet W. Saldaff, State and Family in Singapore: Restructuring a Developing Society (Cornell University Press, 1992). Saldaff notes that these were, in fact, very powerful and wealthy organizations. The Hokkien hui guan was “a major private landowner with assets of S$100 million” (21) and founded Nanyang University in 1956. The issue of burial was one of great acrimony, as the new state wrested the responsibility of funerary practices from the hui guan. The PAP also closed Nanyang University in 1980; it was later subsumed into the National University of Singapore. The Hokkien hui guan continues to be a very rich organization and occupies a modern mid-rise building overlooking Telok Ayer and Stanley Streets in Chinatown.

33. Informal food selling, or “hawking,” was a major concern. Government experts worried that this flexible, lucrative trade kept young men out of the workforce and attempted to limit the total number of hawkers through a registration program. See Government of Singapore, 1974 Budget, col. 498, per Mr. Chok Yeok Eng.

34. This was stated explicitly by Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock in a speech of 1958, as quoted in Loh, “Dangerous Migrants.”

35. This was a phrase in common use and is quoted in Hill and Lian, Politics of Nation Building, 119. The conflagrations were described as “some help from providence” by the Straits Times (September 16, 1964). The possibility of fire as an inherent risk of wood shacks was continually used as a veiled threat by the PAP. Lim Yew Hock’s 1958 speech, quoted earlier, includes the crepuscular statement that “fire, though accidentally begun, spreads quickly and destructively.”

36. Teh, “Public Housing,” 173.

37. The bracing efficiency of this machine is evident in the numbers: between 1960 and 1965, the HDB provided 55,430 new units; by 1980, the number had grown to more than 305,000 (which, in fact, represented a significant surplus over declared goals). The PAP’s culture of excess and overperformance was gathering pace. The crisis mentality is a cornerstone of PAP government, as is the tendency toward excessive and emphatic gestures and expressions, on the part of Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Chok Tong, and others. One of the first moves by the PAP was to carry over wartime emergency legislation into the independence period to suppress leftist radicalism. But overshooting goals has also become a hallmark of the state’s political style.

38. Saldaff, State and Family in Singapore, 20.

39. Aline K. Wong and Stephen H. K. Yeh, Housing a Nation: 25 Years of Public Housing in Singapore (Mauzen Asia and Housing Development Board, 1985), 93.

40. Teh, “Public Housing,” 175.

41. Early fears of the HDB as a “shadow state” led to the reallocation of many of its functions to separate organs. For example, its planning operations were placed in the charge of the new Urban Renewal Department (later the Urban Redevelopment Authority). For the history of this, see https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=7a64797c-e86c-44ac-ab2f-6c82a5e213b5.

42. Sharon Siddique, “The Phenomenology of Ethnicity: A Singapore Case Study,” in Understanding Singapore Society, ed. Ong Jin Hui, Tong Chee Kiong, and Tan Ern Ser (Times Academic Press, 2000); Hill and Lian, Politics of Nation Building; Lily Kong and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of “Nation” (Syracuse University Press, 2003). A quota of 20 percent Malays per building, for example, was made public by the prime minister in 1987 and formalized in 1989. This racial distribution policy was justified in the guise of building community through integration. Minorities are housed amid a Chinese majority, both at home and in school—in fact, it is part of the determinist position of the PAP that “underperforming” Malay children should experience a “keener” standard of competition. Savage, “Human Environment Relations,” 196. Quotas are maintained under the national Ethnic Integration Policy, and new blocks are designed to reflect “demand”—that is, the economic profile of the market. A proportional quota of rental flats for low-income families is mandated, as is (since March 2010) a 5 percent cap on permanent residents in any given block.

43. Racial conflict was also a recurrent threat of the colonial period and a preoccupation of the British. In the early 1950s, “riots” occurred around the mosque in the mostly Malay Hertogh district. More importantly, perhaps, the Malay–Chinese violence of 1964 centered on a decision by the HDB not to grant a special community concession area to a Malay housing area that was to be resettled. Fighting broke out during a procession to commemorate the prophet Muhammad’s birthday and resulted in the deaths of thirty-six people. See Hill and Lian, Politics of Nation Building, 115. The specter of these riots is still raised from time to time by the PAP as an example of the inherent volatility of the multiethnic society.

44. Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell, eds., The Shopping Experience (SAGE, 1997), 9. Anderson is quoted in Carl A. Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power, and the Culture of Control (Routledge, 2006), 7. His lack of interest is interesting, given the high incidence of invented tradition at work on the island generally.

45. These flats themselves became spaces of modern bourgeois aspiration. This was communicated very clearly in Our Home, a publication by HDB that was delivered to all homeowners, combining imagery of an ideal, contemporary lifestyle with lessons on good behavior and hygiene. HDB Singapore, Our Home (HDB, 1972–89). See also Lilian Chee, “The Public Private Interior: Constructing the Modern Domestic Interior in Singapore’s Public Housing,” in The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, ed. Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal (Bloomsbury, 2013), and Jane M. Jacobs and Stephen Cairns, “The Modern Touch: Interior Design and Modernisation in Post-Independence Singapore,” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 572–95.

46. For an account of the last days in an urban kampung, see K. K. Seet, “Last Days at Wak Selat: The Demise of a Kampung,” in Yeoh and Kong, Portraits of Places.

47. https://urbis.com.au/insights-news/singapores-secrets-to-density-done-well/#:~:text=Singapore’s%20density%20is%20among%20the,inner%20suburbs%20has%20reached%2014%2C500.

48. https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=7a64797c-e86c-44ac-ab2f-6c82a5e213b5.

49. Chua, Political Legitimacy and Housing, 52.

50. Otto Koenigsberger, Susumu Kobe, and Charles Abrams, Growth and Urban Renewal in Singapore (United Nations Program of Technical Assistance, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1963). Both Kobe and Abrams died relatively young, but not before making major contributions to global housing and development initiatives for the international organizations of the time. Their obituaries in the New York Times are illuminating in this regard: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/01/09/archives/susumu-kobe-67-expert-special-to-the-new-york-times.html; https://www.nytimes.com/1970/02/23/archives/charles-abrams-worldwide-housing-expert-dies-lawyer-author-68.html.

51. https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=fbca0654-cd2b-4638-b1ef-c18ba06344ad.

52. As noted in chapter 1, land sales have averaged S$17 billion per year from 2013 to 2019, with another S$10 billion or so from previous investments.

53. Temasek was founded in 1974 and is primarily an equity investor. https://www.temasek.com.sg/.

54. The fairness of these is debated. See Tommy T. B. Koh, “The Law of Compulsory Land Acquisition in Singapore,” Malayan Law Journal 35 (1967): 9–22; Bryan Chew, Vincent Hoong, Tay Lee Koon, and Manimegalai d/o Vellasamy, “Compulsory Acquisition of Land in Singapore: A Fair Regime?,” Singapore Academy of Law Journal 22, special issue (2010): 166–88.

55. https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/LAA1966.

56. Eunice Seng, “People’s Park Complex: The State, the Developer, the Architect, and the Conditioned Public, c.1967 to the Present,” in Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology, and Power, ed. Jiat-Hwee Chang and Imran bin Tajudeen (NUS Press, 2020), 245. Seng has shown how this transpired for the creation of People’s Park Complex, the first mixed-use retail and housing complex, completed in 1967 under the influence of Japanese Metabolist urban theory. Here developer Ho Kok Cheong—a local window glazing magnate—saw the role of the private firm as “gifting” a center of Chinese commerce to a modernizing public. This was built on a long-standing informal open space and market associated with migrant labor (and, in particular, a kind of Chinese urban life unpopular with the colonial administration and later the PAP). Increasingly against the vision of the architects, People’s Park transformed from a naturally ventilated, regionally influenced urban market to a Western-style, air-conditioned mall. A similar partnership occurred in 1981 with Marina Square—a world-standard shopping and hotel complex on a newly reclaimed piece of land to the south of the CBD. This was to become the anchor of Marina Bay, later a showpiece of iconic architecture and home to the Sands casino and convention center. S. P. Tao, then chairman of Singapore Land Group Ltd., was tasked by Lee Kuan Yew with the construction of this new design by hospitality superstar John Portman, a household name in America and perhaps architecture’s first truly global brand. By now, there was to be no talk of plein air; this space was explicitly built as a cool and luxurious atmosphere for the equally cool and brand-aware Singaporean consumer. See Joshua Comaroff, “On the Materialities of Air,” CITY 21, no. 5 (2017): 607–13.

57. In a manner characteristic of this cyclical business, the leading developers of the day were called upon to deliver the offices from which their shares, as publicly listed companies, would be traded. Many of the daring, ultramodern works of this time are now under threat, and such “everyday modernism” is being recorded in architectural volumes like Jiat-Hwee Chang, Justin Zhuang, and Darren Soh, Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore (NUS Press, 2023), and Ho Weng Hin, Dinesh Naidu, and Tan Kar Lin, eds., Our Modern Past: A Visual Survey of Singapore Architecture, 1920s–1970s (Singapore Heritage Society/Singapore Institute of Architects Press, 2015). Not least, these provide some serious consideration regarding histories of “alternate” modernism(s) in Asia. For discussion of this, see William S. W. Lim and Jiat-Hwee Chang, Non West Modernist Past: Rethinking Modernisms and Modernities Beyond the West (World Scientific, 2011).

58. These are central to Singapore’s strategy of moving up the value chain. See Chua Hui-Ching Emily, “Survival by Technopreneurialism: Innovation, Imaginaries and the New Narrative of Nationhood in Singapore,” Science, Technology, and Society 24, no. 3 (2019): 527–44, and Wong Kai Wen and Tim Bunnell, “‘New Economy’ Discourse and Spaces in Singapore: A Case Study of One-North,” Environment and Planning A 38, no. 1 (2006): 69–83.

59. In the image market of social media and the internet, several of these have come to stand, metonymically, for the nation itself: Jewel at Changi Airport, the Flower Dome and Cloud Forest buildings at Gardens by the Bay, the Parkroyal Collection Pickering, the Oasia hotel tower, and even Singapore’s national pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai.

60. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story—1965–2000 (Harper, 2000), 188.

61. Timothy Barnard, Nature Contained: Environmental Histories of Singapore (NUS Press, 2014), 297.

62. Trocki, Singapore, 213.

63. For a more detailed account on this history, see Hill and Lian, Politics of Nation Building, 119; Edmund Waller, Landscape Planning in Singapore (Singapore University Press, 1991), 48ff.; and Timothy Auger, Living in a Garden: The Greening of Singapore (Singapore National Parks Board/Editions Didier Millet, 2013).

64. Trocki, Singapore, 137.

65. https://www.nparks.gov.sg/who-we-are/mission-history.

66. The government also directly sought to involve the public, and still does. This began in 1971, when Tree Planting Day was initiated in the attempt to create an affective bond (“green consciousness” or “biophilia”) between Singaporeans and trees.

67. R. Corlett, “The Ecological Transformation of Singapore, 1819–1990,” Journal of Biogeography 19 (1992): 413.

68. Waller, in Landscape Planning in Singapore, places the development of government policy in three phases. The first takes place between 1959 and 1971, during which a “neatening” ethic, as well as the ambition toward a Garden City concept, emerged (47). A second phase is defined by the years 1971 to 1991, during which larger-scale projects and an increase of available resources led to the marriage of landscape planning, “social engineering,” and the creation of themed natural environments, such as “vest pocket” parks, the Jurong Bird Park, and Singapore Zoo (53).

69. Corlett, “Ecological Transformation of Singapore,” 418.

70. Clarissa Oon, “Singapore’s Green Trump Card,” Straits Times, May 7, 2009.

71. See C. J. W.-L. Wee, “Staging the Asian Modern: Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch, and the Asian Lear,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 771–99. Also see E. Tan, “Re-engaging Chineseness: Political, Economic, and Cultural Imperatives of Nation-Building in Singapore,” China Quarterly 175 (2003): 751–74. By an analogous process, around the same time, the Tourist Promotion Board created a new icon for the nation, the Merlion, by attaching the head of a lion onto the body of a fish; see Choon et al., Imagining Singapore.

72. A number of horticultural specialists are now working toward the renativization of the Singapore landscape, despite a lack of support from the National Parks Board. One is Professor Hugh Tan from National University of Singapore/Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research.

73. Singapore’s landscapes do have a characteristic appearance, however—driven as they are by a common compositional design logic. Plants are corralled into monospecial clumps of irregular shape, tightly abutted. These clusters express a certain informal or organicist intention, via amorphousness and curvilinearity of perimeter. The monocultural aspect is itself significant. It is a way of planting totally alien to the tropical landscape, which typically intermingles not by “stands” of species but on a specimen-by-specimen basis. Equatorial flora tend, rather, to differentiate themselves, ladder-like, into ascending “trophic” levels or tiers. Nowhere in the designed national landscape do plants mingle at the level of the individual. But nor do they appear en masse; rather, they are replicated in small, tightly bounded, homogeneous groupings.

74. Quoted in Oon, “Singapore’s Green Trump Card.”

75. Cited in Robert Boyers, “This Way, Not That: Nadine Gordimer Does As She Pleases,” Harper’s, February 2008, 89.

76. This recalls the famous argument of Charles Tilly that warfare has a galvanizing effect on state capacity. See Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Blackwell, 1990). Singapore figures the existential crisis of landscape as a state of war. Here are echoes of the United States, in the so-called wars on terror, on poverty, or on drugs—or the other politically useful conflicts ongoing in Mexico or Israel or Brazil, where “civil” unrest has emerged as the new technology of state making. The reality of this combat can be set against the beguiling fiction of Rem Koolhaas’s tabula rasa, the famous concept of Singapore as a “laboratory” in which all things are possible, because history—enshrined elsewhere in Western notions of genius loci, heritage, or context—is not an obstacle. See Koolhaas, “Singapore Songlines,” in SMLXL (Monacelli, 1996).

77. This limits the burden of maintenance but also prevents squatting or unsanctioned activity, as happened in marginal spaces, such as the former Johor–Singapore railway corridor that runs from the north coast to the Keppel district, near Marina Bay. Singapore’s accumulation of invasive species has made such a biocondensing strategy easy—in fact, largely passive. In contrast to a clear gesture of occlusion, the collapse into jungle looks simply like nature taking its course. Through simple neglect, cataracts appear in the national fabric, with spaces effectively inaccessible to the public. Overgrowth simply takes sectors off the map.

78. John S. T. Quah, “Crime Prevention Singapore Style,” Asian Journal of Public Administration 14, no. 2 (1992): 149–85; Stella R. Quah and Jon S. T. Quah, Friends in Blue: The Police and the Public in Singapore (Oxford University Press, 1987).

79. I acknowledge, for what follows, that qi has no satisfying English equivalent. While its flows are described often in a manner like energy (I use the term energetic in these chapters), it nonetheless is also seen as a structuring condition of matter. In this sense, there is a very clear analogue to the nature of subatomic elements in quantum theory, which behave both as waves and as particles—and which constitute the matter through standing waves and other mysterious conjunctions of this bimodal behavior. See Frijtof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Shambhala, 2010). While qi in Singapore is subject to the same polyvocality as most cosmological and spectral discourse, I am relying on the contributions of Needham, Biology and Biological Technology, and Kirkland, Taoism, as well as on the varied depictions of my respondents.

80. The increasingly bureaucratized experience of funerals—from the timing of remembrance services to the process of collecting ashes—was of great concern to respondents. Hours were spent discussing the minutiae of these and the microtraumas attributed to them. This was a concern that crosscut religious communities and was not principally or disproportionately a complaint of those who identify as following Chinese religion or Taoism or Buddhism exclusively.

81. Kong and Yeoh, Politics of Landscapes. This history also engages the larger question of the changing role of clan and religious organizations vis-à-vis the state. Death was one of those realms of social existence where these bodies maintained a great deal of authority—Marjorie Topley provides some suggestive detail. See Topley, “The Emergence and Social Function of Chinese Religious Associations in Singapore,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3, no. 3 (1961): 289–314.

82. Even today, large groups among the public are aligned in the fight against the ongoing exhumation of Bukit Brown and other surviving graveyards and remnants. Huang Jianli, “Resurgent Spirits of Civil Society Activism: Rediscovering the Bukit Brown Cemetery in Singapore,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 87, no. 2 (2014): 21–45; Natalie Pang and Liew Kai Khiun, “Mediating Community in Bukit Brown,” in The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore (Cambridge University Press, 2020). See also Straits Times, “Race to Save Oldest Chinese Tombs Here,” August 19, 2006.

83. This idea was expressed to me, in particular, by younger respondents like Hui Ping and Renee.

84. See Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2008).

85. Mr. Kok, interview, April 2, 2009.

86. One in the Bukit Timah area proved particularly troublesome. This grave, of an early Chinese settler known as Qiu Zheng Zhi and his wife, Madam Li Ci Shu, has been the subject of petitioning by a group of private-sector heritage enthusiasts. The tomb lay in the way of plans by NParks to create new horticultural displays for the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The issue was reported in the Straits Times, August 19, 2006, H1.

87. Dominique Mosbergen, “Cemetery Now a Park: Next, It Will Be HDB Estate,” New Paper, December 18, 2006, 6.

88. Mosbergen. It was reported that Bidadari contained the graves of a number of famous Singaporeans, including philanthropist Lim Boon Keng, former health minister Ahmad Ibrahim, and A. P. Williams, a sailor upon whom Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim was based.

89. Peggy Teo, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Ooi Giok Ling, and Karen P. Y. Lai, Changing Landscapes of Singapore (McGraw-Hill, 2003), 200.

90. Tong, Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore, 27.

91. This was described in an article, “Gravedigging: A Dying Trade,” in the Straits Times, Home B1, November 10, 2008. A former gravedigger (now a nurseryman) subsequently explained to me that many have reluctantly moved into the landscaping industry, where income is more stable. Interview conducted December 8, 2016.

92. Teo et al., Changing Landscapes of Singapore, 200.

93. Tong, Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore, 62.

94. For more on the question of migrant labor, see Comaroff, “Ghostly Topographies,” and further discussion in chapter 6.

95. Terrence, interview, January 4, 2009. I have heard this given as the cause, also, of isolation among elderly Singaporeans and the phenomenon of dying alone in HDB flats. Desmond Ng, “When Someone Dies Alone in Singapore, This Is What Happens,” CNA, March 4, 2020, https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cnainsider/when-someone-dies-alone-singapore-this-is-what-happens-seniors-769486.

96. Chua has noted, more generally, that the shift to public housing has forced modes of spatial and material accommodation with long-standing religious practices. See Chua Beng Huat, “Adjusting Religious Practices to House Forms,” chapter 9 of Political Legitimacy and Housing.

97. Mrs. Tan herself claims to be a spiritual person, from a family all gifted with the “second sight.” Interview conducted April 2, 2009.

98. This is a very interesting statement that deserves some analysis. I would point out that this statement is not a sort of “secularization theory.” That is, it precisely does not mean “it is interesting that in modern Singapore we still believe all these things.” It means “it is interesting that in modern Singapore we still have so many ghosts.” Mrs. Tan’s comment, like those of some other informants, expressed a frank wonderment at the stories that were being told.

99. Comaroff, “Coastlines of the Self.” Koro was a form of cyclical, mass hypochondriacal panic, occurring in a series of waves in the years after 1965, when Singaporean men became convinced that their genitalia were retracting and that the completion of this process would result in their deaths. The term is taken from the Malay kura-kura (meaning “tortoise” and referring to the retreat of the animal’s head). It overwhelmingly affected Chinese males, who showed up to emergency rooms and clinics with thread tied around their penises. Koro manifested also in a female version, where victims worried that, in the words of one journalist, “their breasts [would] retreat into their chests like the magical islands of Brigadoon.” Scott Mendelson, The Great Singapore Penis Panic and the Future of American Mass Hysteria (pub. by author, 2010). The retraction of the penis is understood to be an indicator of low yang jing, and below a certain threshold, the belief is that death will result.

100. Mendelson.

101. Mr. Kok, interview, February 4, 2009.

102. Interview conducted September 10, 2007.

103. Interview conducted March 30, 2009. Jean is a Catholic who nonetheless shares many assumptions about ghosts that appear to match those of Chinese religion. The view expressed in this interview was shared by numerous Christian respondents, who see Singapore’s ghosts as “unclean spirits” that are attracted to those whose faith and personal strength are at an ebb. This is one of many beliefs through which Chinese religious traditions and those of Christianity and Catholicism are reconciled. These discourses are not nearly as opposed as one might expect. Father JP, a Singaporean parish priest, laughed when he said that many local evangelical practices are simply “Chinese religion in Christian language.” And it appears true that there are many accommodations between charismatic interpretations of scripture and more traditional beliefs. This recalls other Asian examples, such as the connections between modernity, Christianity, and shamanism in contemporary Korea; see Kim, “Christianity, Shamanism.” In both cases, there is a perhaps unexpected link between an upwardly mobile church going bourgeoisie and popular, traditional practices associated with “backward” populations. Although many Christian Singaporeans dismissed ghosts as “superstitious,” they were perfectly comfortable with accounts of “unclean” and “evil” spirits.

104. The name of the latter was officially changed from the less cheerful Pulau Blakang Mati, or “Island of the Dead Left Behind.” By contrast, sentosa means “peace and tranquility” in Malay.

105. While ghosts are not described to be seeking dissipation via cathexis, or resolution into nothingness, they nonetheless are understood as subject to powerful energetic drives toward disturbed memory and place. In this sense, their behavior is not so different from humans’ attitude toward trouble sites; see, e.g., Kenneth Foote’s analysis of negative placemaking in Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (University of Texas Press, 2003). As I have argued elsewhere, ghosts in this regard play their received role as a kind of collective memory. See Comaroff, “Ghostly Topographies,” and Carole Faucher’s “As the Wind Blows and Dew Came Down: Ghost Stories and Collective Memory in Singapore,” in Beyond Description: Singapore, Space, Historicity, ed. Ryan Bishop, John Philips, and Wei-Wei Yeo (Routledge, 2004).

1. Winnie is in her sixties and lived in Hong Kong, which also practices the seventh month. However, she felt that the rites were largely constrained to that period, as opposed to in Singapore. Interview conducted March 29, 2009.

2. Interview conducted March 15, 2009. Charles means by this statement that they do not observe Ghost Month in China. This is clarified in further discussion of his comment, later.

3. I refer here to Russell Lee’s The Almost Complete Collection of True Singapore Ghost Stories series, published by Angsana Books in Singapore from 1989 onward. Volume 1 is on its twenty-third edition at the time of writing; it has sold more than 115,000 copies. The Straits Times and Singapore Press Holdings have also joined this bonanza, publishing their own Singapore Urban Legends: Myths and Mysteries in 2005. Lee compiles stories by “a team of ‘ghost writers,’” who are contributing members of the general public.

4. Although, in a manner similar to Shan’s comments, some informants expressed skepticism of their peers’ “encounters” with ghosts while still holding out the possibility of their existence.

5. Interview conducted February 3, 2009.

6. Interview conducted at a recently completed project, April 5, 2009.

7. The production of paper commodities follows loose conventions of representation and exchange, and continual innovation builds on Chinese ancestral traditions. A clear sense of this was communicated in an interview with Ho Yu Yin, a paper artist working in Hong Kong; see Ho Yu Yin, “Paper: The Magic Material,” IdN (Hong Kong) 13, no. 3 (2006). There is a complex terminology that describes the relationship between the paper figures that are made and their object of representation, comprising four major categories. Ji zhao (direct reflection) describes the paper objects that a recently deceased person “is thought to need with him/her in heaven—everything from money and small trinkets to a house and a car” (29). Other terms, such as shou kou and hua pao, are used to describe the representation of animals, flowers, lamps, and other objects (artists who work in the paper medium also produce artworks for Lion Dances and other festivals). Ho notes change in the medium: “In the past, ‘ji zhao’ had less variety. Nowadays, whatever a person owned in real life can be replicated in paper for the funeral.” He adds, “The key to making Chinese paper artwork is to catch the spirit of the objects you want to copy” (30, emphasis added).

8. I have found it interesting to note Singaporeans’ continuing cognizance of the geographical specificity of former burial sites. These are remembered with a great deal of unease—one respondent was in the habit of avoiding the otherwise convenient Pan-Island Expressway because a site of disinterment of his paternal line of the Ong clan exists along its length.

9. Chan Hong Yin, “The Hungry Ghost Festival in Singapore: Getai (Songs on Stage) in the Lunar Seventh Month,” Religions 11, no. 7 (2020): 365.

10. In part because the ghosts are logically seen to be drawn to these events. I heard from many that joss burning scents, loud noises, and bright lights attract wandering spirits. Where ancestors are said to move in orderly and intentional ways, the ghosts meander confusedly and are drawn to sources of intensity. In this respect, the discourses mimic what Chu has described of the mobility of the dead in Fujian in Cosmologies of Credit.

11. One should read this, also, against the stories of paranormal activities that seem to plague military installations; see later.

12. See the preface.

13. Proverbs 3:5–6.

14. Desire line is the term, in landscape design, for a dirt path that appears where pedestrians take shortcuts across lawns or fields. It is usually taken as a sign that a path should be placed there.

15. In Cosmologies of Credit, Chu offers the insight that joss paper, as money, has a particular materiality when burned (see later) that closely mirrors the assumed materiality of specter itself. And as Vivien Zhiying Su has observed, this immediately “smokes out,” so to speak, the problematic nature of air as commons. Su, “Smoking in an Air-Conditioned Nation: The Politics of Air in Singapore” (capstone undergraduate thesis, Division of Social Sciences, Yale-NUS College, 2021). In Singapore, this is undoubtedly part of the disgust that people feel when they accidentally walk into someone else’s bonfire—one quite literally inhales the ghost, alongside the value that is released to them. For more on the issue of value in this medium, see the next chapter.

16. Tan Tock Seng Hospital is Singapore’s premier integrated public medical facility.

17. Lim, Between Gods and Ghosts, 53.

18. Harry, interview, March 26, 2009. There are some issues with what happens to the detritus. One common opinion is that it is no longer dangerous after the joss sticks have burned down, as these are what attracts the spirit and creates the ritual opening (hence the belief that sacrificed food can be eaten afterward). Many still confess to feeling uncomfortable with and avoiding such waste, which is fairly ubiquitous on certain days of the year. In truth, it is the army of maintenance workers on HDB estates and elsewhere—often foreign workers—that clears these items. There was a frankly racist sentiment, expressed to me on a few occasions, that this is the appropriate state of things—as the term gui is also used as an epithet for foreigners (and South Asian non-Chinese, Singaporean or not), there was assumed to be a certain understanding at work there. One respondent told me, “We say ‘gui da gui’—‘let the Indians [gui] fight the ghosts [gui].’”

19. Stanley, an independent businessman in his thirties, recounted perhaps the most famous army ghost story, one told to me in various iterations by others as well. This concerned the Charlie Company 2, located in the second camp at Tekong until the end of the 1990s. A rectangular, hand-painted outline on the wall of the barrack was “a doorway to hell. They painted it to pacify some of the ghosts who were messing around with the soldiers. Like an exit, to invite the ghosts to leave if they were stuck inside the building.” The spirit said to terrorize those in Charlie 2 was that of a soldier taken by forest ghosts. Army stories, and their discourses of the jungle, are described later.

20. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (Mariner Books, 1968), 215.

21. Interview conducted October 22, 2009.

22. A similar method safeguards workplaces, as in Chinatown. Here small shrines extend from office portals and stairways to the covered “five-foot ways” at the roadside. Large burners are temporarily erected at green patches in front of the buildings, and group offerings are made here at the beginning, middle, and end of the seventh month. In other areas, such as the CBD, business parks, and construction sites, it is common to see fires in nearby liminal areas—side lanes, residual green spaces, driveways, and the like.

23. Interview conducted October 10, 2009.

24. Renee noted to me that “in peak season, people will actually just use the pavement. Sometimes they will draw a shape in chalk and burn inside. The grass nearby goes brown, and people won’t step on it until it regrows.” Interview conducted October 11, 2009. This practice is frowned upon, but I have personally seen it many times and have heard complaints from others. Annually, there appear editorials in the national papers and online posts decrying “lazy” residents who simply burn “on the ground.” Town councils in multiple districts have warned against “mess” and “pollution,” largely in response to residents’ concerns that half-burned fragments blow onto nearby pavements and are easy to step on by mistake. Nadine Chua, “Bedok South Residents Advised to Use Incense Burners After ‘Mess’ Seen ‘Flying Around’: Town Council,” STOMP, September 23, 2020, https://stomp.straitstimes.com/singapore-seen/bedok-south-residents-advised-to-use-incense-burners-after-mess-seen-flying-around; https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1ejjz4e/incense_bins_problem/?rdt=50467.

25. See Comaroff, “On the Materialities of Air.” Su has also demonstrated, in the case of cigarette smoke, how the fluid volumes of our aerial commons simply cannot be partitioned or delimited in an unambiguous manner. Su, “Smoking in an Air-Conditioned Nation.”

26. This reversal of capital’s typical relations and equations is discussed more extensively in the conclusion.

27. Water bodies have a doubly uncanny aspect, as these have often been sites of drowning. Ghosts during seventh month are thought to try to lure individuals near lakes and the coastline to a watery death.

28. A more extensive analysis of army ghost stories, with particular attention to the “resistant” behaviors of ghosts vis-à-vis state power, is given in Joshua Comaroff, “Vulgarity and Enchantment: Religious Movements and the Space of the State” (PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2009).

29. Interview conducted April 6, 2009.

30. Or “Thursday night” in Malay. This term is discussed later.

31. And here, again, there is an interesting moment of either projection or syncretism. The sensitivity to ground forms—which was a topic of concern among Chinese respondents only—seems much more likely to be drawn from geomantic notions like feng shui, and from the characteristic earthworks of Chinese cemeteries, than from Malay discourses of ghosts or forest spirits.

32. Interview conducted April 6, 2009.

33. Of course, some of this has to do with the army’s attitude toward gay men, or “302s” (“2” being the Ministry of Defense’s code for male and “3” for female). There is certainly a notion here that the national body, as an agglomeration of individuals given over to the state, should remain pure. Many “302s” are given specific jobs considered fitting, such as roles in SAF’s entertainment corps. The fact about HIV infection was told to me by informant Ming in an interview on February 30, 2009, and verified by an informant at the Ministry of Defense, March 10, 2019.

34. Interview conducted April 6, 2009.

35. Dawn, NParks employee, interview, June 8, 2018.

36. Master Goh’s Singlish here translates to “people think the government has no problems [can do what it likes], but the government can’t [chop the tree].”

37. Interview conducted October 2, 2009.

38. A similar account can be found in Tan Mae Lynn, “Nights of the Living 4D Pests,” New Paper on Sunday, November 19, 2006.

39. This suggests, of course, that some Chinese court reciprocal transactions with non-Chinese ghosts. I have not been able to speak with anyone who pursues such practices, so I am unable to understand how the ghosts’ needs and powers would fit within more paradisaical Islamic notions of the afterlife. When I asked Mrs. Tan about this, she merely shrugged and said that some punters “will try their luck with anything.”

40. Though 4D is the most popular lottery overseen by Tote Board (the state lottery commission), there are others with a popular following. These include Toto and Singapore Sweep, as well as structured bets on football, horse racing, and the Formula 1 Grand Prix.

41. Tong, Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore, 83.

42. See Cook and Zhao, Stalk Divination. This is a type of cleromancy in which the stalks are used to compose hexagrams from the I Ching. It is much more complex than contemporary forms of stick-thrown divination used currently in Singapore. It should be noted, also, that other Southeast Asian cultures associate ghosts and numbers; Alan Klima has explored this association extensively in Thailand in The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand (Princeton University Press, 2002).

43. This was sensationally, if evocatively, reported in the New Paper, November 19, 2006, 12–13. The article appeared to mix moralistic concern about such practices with a sense that they represent “local color” of a sort.

44. Susan Tsang and Edward Hendricks, Discover Singapore (Marshall Cavendish, 2007), 20.

45. Those who win using ghost-selected numbers are expected to make lavish sacrifices afterward, to avoid vengeful retaliation. https://www.hungzai.com/4-d-punters-in-choa-chu-kang-cemetery/.

46. Terrence and Edward, both architects, interview, October 23, 2008.

47. Many accounts have been circulated to explain the hauntedness of this building, which is now used as an arts and technology “incubator.” There were rumors of prisoners having committed suicide in the holding cells. Another urban myth involved the suicide of a policeman. However, buildings with any association with violent crime or punishment are commonly thought to be haunted. https://remembersingapore.org/former-cid-hq/.

48. The traditional Chinese coffin is a rectangular enclosure with a vaulted lid, assembled from solid wood sections. Owing to material constraints and changes in fashion, these plain versions have been replaced with ornate plywood, veneers, and metal (often with an aperture so that they may be air conditioned during the lengthy wakes that are common in Singapore). The aged character of the coffin is one of the uncanny or ominous signifiers in Terrence’s story, especially as its provenance is never explained.

49. This will have added significance for those familiar with construction procedures. The engineer’s structural drawings, once completed, are “staked out” (physically delineated) by site surveyors to ensure that they are accurate. There are usually minor discrepancies between the design drawings and the physical world, but Terrence is describing an almost unheard-of variation between the documentation and the site—suggesting that something highly abnormal was occurring.

50. https://www.nirvanasingapore.sg/en/niche-relocation-grave-exhumation/ or https://www.facebook.com/exhumationsingapore/.

51. This might sound like the setup to a joke, but in Singapore such an interfaith team is considered “best practice,” as the dead are presumed to be more responsive to appeals from their coreligionists. Ghost-busting is a common term in Singapore for this activity, including by those who perform this service. In official language, it is a “blessings team” dispatched from an interreligious organization (IRO) that does a range of interfaith work.

52. Interview conducted December 11, 2017. I spoke, also, to the priest, who remembered the story differently. He said that there was no single site but an “uneasy sensation” throughout the building. According to this account, blessings were performed throughout.

53. Interview conducted May 13, 2008.

54. Interview conducted September 30, 2009.

55. Mrs. Tan is a Chinese homemaker in her eighties. Interview conducted July 4, 2009.

56. Benson Ang, “Places in Singapore with a dark past,” Straits Times, January 10, 2016, https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/entertainment/places-in-singapore-with-a-dark-past.

57. Meizi, interview, May 5, 2009; Ann, interview, August 6, 2008.

58. Harry, email communication, April 4, 2010.

59. For example, carrying or rolling a pineapple across the threshold. Pineapple in Hokkien is ong lai, which is an almost-homonym for “luck coming your way.” The bag of rice is more straightforward and symbolizes ongoing prosperity in a particular location.

60. Emily, member of New Creation Church (aka the “Rock”), interview, September 26, 2009.

61. In particular, the damming of the mouth of the Singapore River with the Marina Barrage project created a reservoir in Marina Bay. This was seen as dangerously interrupting the in- and outflows of the river from the Singapore Straits. As is often the case, concerns based in feng shui were echoed by others in the ecologically aware community: there was a prevalent rumor that the Barrage had exacerbated the flooding in parts of the city in years after completion.