Notes — Continued (2 of 2)

1. Their consolidation expresses the economic logic of development, in which it is far more profitable to build large projects than small ones, especially where the base cost of land is high.

2. This is reminiscent of the account given by Marshall Berman in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Simon and Schuster, 1982).

3. See Rogers, Speculation, and Banner, Speculation.

4. Marble and large-paned glass effectively increase the liquidity of the flat as an asset.

5. By this scheme, the developer avoids the “development charge” (DC) levied by the government on gross floor area. They can still add this to the per-square-foot cost that is chargeable to the family that buys the flat. While the construction is paid for, this is typically a minor premium compared the additive cost of the same area in DC.

6. The maximum allowable size of units is often determined by, for example, “running distances” to fire egress. An error in code interpretation by the architect can thus result in units that must be smaller than expected—in order to reduce this distance to escape—and a lower chargeable price as measured in per-square-foot costing. Such a minor, and common, mishap will ramify across repeated units, and the collective losses may wreak havoc upon the profitability of a development model that had assumed larger salable areas. The interpretation of such fire code measures is notoriously subjective, and the documentation of the regulations is both contradictory and open to interpretation. The dreaded Fire Safety and Shelter Department (FSSD) submission is thus always a breathless moment in the design process, as it is subject to what Max Weber called “khadi-justice” on the part of the FSSD officer reviewing the plans. Each of the nation’s regulations—over fire safety, construction quality, traffic and environmental impact, and many others—is assigned to a different statutory organ, and these operate largely as their own fiefdoms. This is often seen with some incredulity by the uninitiated, who would expect that this sector would follow the larger nation in its heavily centralized organizational model. It most certainly does not.

7. Locations next to hospitals, police stations, or places of sha qi (intensified or traumatic energy) are well-known violations of good feng shui practice, a fact that would be obvious to most raised in the contemporary Taoist tradition.

8. Charlene Chin, “Unit at 8 Napier Incurs $969,000 Loss,” EdgeProp, June 23, 2019, https://www.edgeprop.sg/property-news/unit-8-napier-incurs-969000-loss.

9. For example, 8 Nassim Hill, by the architect Chan Sau Yan, went on sale only a few months later. Nassim Hill Road, which sits directly behind Napier Road, has four similar completed projects.

10. Certainly there are cases of claims being dismissed—chiefly by Christian development executives or managers—as mumbo jumbo. This typically results in subterfuge, such as hidden shrines or rituals conducted in the wee hours of the morning. Even Christian senior managers at construction firms are typically sympathetic, as they see this as a major issue of worker morale. I do not know of a single case in which no propitiating action (overt or covert) was taken.

11. Interview conducted October 10, 2009.

12. I have witnessed this pattern repeatedly in my work as an architect in Singapore. The timing of incidents is only, in fact, truly random when accidents are involved—and even then, they are typically ascribed meaning by proximity to some near event (ground breaking, completion of a construction stage, Zhong Yuan arriving or just past, etc.). Allegations of haunting without accident are very rarely reported during the “normal” course of works.

13. In this latter period, the architectural and interior works are substantially completed, and all parties wait anxiously for a temporary occupation permit (TOP), allowing occupants to move in. During this phase, the architect, clients, and purchasers will make periodic checks to identify defects in construction, which are rectified by the contractors. Defect rectification typically lasts from six months to a year, depending on the contract and extent of works.

14. In fact, Singapore law is very precise about when certain sums are due and when the purchaser can no longer exit the sale without substantial penalty. These dates are typically tied to “stages” of completion by the contractor, such as acquisition of permits and TOP.

15. “Upgrading” is a powerful concept in Singapore’s political lexicon. It is commonly deployed to describe both physical and human capital; an HDB block or estate can be upgraded (through improvement of physical structures or amenities), but so may a worker or retiree. The term captures a key component of PAP ideology, which is the notion of the state and the self as undergoing a continual process of incremental improvement. Robbie Goh, “Ideologies of ‘Upgrading’ in Singapore Public Housing: Post-Modern Style, Globalisation, and Class Construction in the Built Environment,” Urban Studies 38, no. 9 (2001): 1589–1604; Tiffany Ho, “The HDB’s Upgrading Programme: Its Political and Social Implications,” Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore, 1997.

16. The continuing appeal of such a populism is hardly unexpected in a community still rankled by the PAP’s seizure of wealth and power from civil organizations of clan and dialect, remanding them to new elites. See chapter 4.

17. In this sense, it appears very much as a wayang (a local term meaning “shadow play” or political theater) of the PAP’s strategy for producing wealth and national fabric.

18. However, a more recent challenge is fixing a date when most of the client’s consultants’ representatives can attend.

19. Such services are now predominantly online, for example, at https://www.yourchineseastrology.com/calendar/.

20. The name is part of the branding; Nassim Road remains Singapore’s most high-end housing enclave.

21. Using exchange rates at time of writing, this sum is equivalent to US$7,852,000.

22. For example, this was reported in “Unfair Scare Tactics at Farrar Court,” New Paper on Sunday, March 18, 2007, 6. This tactic has been rather overused, and such rumors now are almost immediately met with counterrumors alleging skulduggery.

23. This is the Hokkien translation. The term is hong bao in Mandarin, also meaning “red packet.” A notable fact of mediumship is how much of its terminology remains in the nation’s major dialects (Hokkien, Teo Chew, Cantonese) despite the general drift toward Mandarin as pushed by the PAP.

24. Resident engineer.

25. Interview conducted January 11, 2009.

26. Interview conducted February 20, 2009.

27. Or in the case of a government building, the “blessings team” of an IRO will be called in to maintain a kind of secular equivalence (see the previous chapter).

28. Master Goh claims to be very strict about certain Buddhist prohibitions. He believes, for example, that a monk should follow very strict codes of nonaggression, and when we met, he spoke disparagingly about “rioting monks” in Tibet prior to the Beijing Olympics. In other ways, however, he is very liberal—he smokes a great deal and also enjoys black coffee.

29. This is not straightforward, as most urban sites are not oriented to cardinal directions. This means that a north “corner” (for example) may not be a corner at all. Also, the vast majority of sites are geometrically irregular to some degree, so locating the center involves interpretation on the part of the medium.

30. Conceptions of qi hold that it moves both within and above the ground, and the connection from soil to air is extremely important to the health of a site. The center of the site, in the older “Form School” of feng shui, is identified as an aperture where the various energies, in various phases, converge.

31. When asked why this should be the case, Goh pointed out that “money wants to move.” See the discussion of “stagnant” elements and landscape aesthetics, later.

32. These five phases (wuxing) are not literal substances but periods of instantiation through which qi passes. These are linked with a great array of phenomena, which they determine through complex interrelationships of influence, such as bolstering, tempering, and hindering.

33. In fact, traditional feng shui practitioners are quick to point out that their art is not “about” ghosts. Many concede, however, that the energies that they do work on affect ghosts as well as living beings and natural forces. There is, by contrast, a very large swath of contemporary geomantic practices that deal very specifically with gui and their potentials for wealth.

34. “Bungalow” or “good class bungalow” refers to a single-family, freestanding residential building with a land area of a given, minimum size. It does not refer specifically to a single-level dwelling, as in other contexts. The “GCB” connotes a large house. These are rare in Singapore and are extremely expensive.

35. Whether or not special ceremonies are held on a particular job, nearly all will conduct some sort of propitiation during Zhong Yuan. These have somewhat different formats, and Choo’s contained elements of both.

36. Ngoh hiang is a Southeast Asian Hokkien and Teo Chew spring roll of fried bean curd filled with pork and water chestnut and (depending on provenance) onions and yam. Its appearance and consistency are perhaps more like sausage than like the fried spring rolls familiar in the West.

37. Poison arrow qi is a mode of intensified sha qi (negatively agitating energy) radiating from sharp points and acute angles oriented toward a person or place.

38. The architect was standing nearby.

39. For more on the division of labor among the gods, see Fabian Graham, Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell Deity Worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (Manchester University Press, 2020).

40. Meaning “shrine.”

41. This translates to a 38.7 percent chance that the work will conclude. However, if the toss fails, the representative will simply redo it. This means that there is, in fact, an absolute certainty that the deity will deem the works concluded.

42. Anxieties at this stage are further fueled by the government’s 2011 Qualifying Certificate scheme, which added key additional stipulations to the Residential Property Act. In this case, developers may be subject to heavy financial penalties for any units that remain unsold two years after TOP is granted (meaning that buyers can move in). This hit developers with foreign ownership in particular, and thus by nature any publicly listed company. At the time of writing, developers are given a typical period of five years to design and build a project to TOP and a further two to clear the units, to prevent land banking by private concerns.

43. It is worth briefly noting that there exist parallel Christian practices of site blessings. These are employed by developers with a more evangelical bent, such as the Lippo Group, which substitutes prayer meetings for offering ceremonies, and their message focuses on glorifying Christ. Despite the shift in faith, these are also very much concerned with “locating” sites, their longer histories, into a narrative about renewal; predictably, the metaphor here shifts to rebirth and conversion. As the faithful have been born again, so might the site and its finances.

44. This evocative phrase is borrowed from Nancy Munn’s analysis of urban demolition and the construction of Central Park in nineteenth-century Manhattan. Munn, “The Becoming-Past of Places: Spacetime and Memory in Mid-19th Century New York,” manuscript chapter, provided by the author.

45. Hilda, Chinese and in her late fifties, works for a leading multinational hotel chain. Interview conducted December 10, 2009.

46. Max Gluckman, “Ethnographic Data in British Anthropology,” in The Manchester School: Praxis and Ethnographic Practice in Social Anthropology, ed. T. M. S. Evens and Don Handelman (Berghahn Books, 2006).

47. See, e.g., Laura Antona, “Geographies of Bodily (Dis)possession: Domestic Work, Unfreedom, and Spirit Possessions in Singapore,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 114, no. 5 (2023): 943–57. It is beyond the scope of the present work to explore the relationships between ghosts and migrants or “guest” laborers. Antona has undertaken an insightful ethnography of this in the case of spirit possession among Singapore’s foreign domestic workers in their dormitories, and this has likewise been a matter of some pop-cultural exploration in horror films like Kelvin Tong’s The Maid (2005). As mentioned earlier, the word gui is used as an epithet for non-Chinese and for foreigners, as gwai lo is in Hong Kong, and the migrant (especially in their nonlinear peregrinations) is often associated with ghostlike behaviors and terrors. For a discussion of Tong’s film, see Sophia Siddique Harvey, “Mapping Spectral Tropicality in The Maid and Return to Pontianak,” Tropical Geography 29, no. 1 (2008): 24–33.

48. At one project site where I conducted extensive observation throughout the course of 2010, a well-intended foreman tried to convince a reluctant Muslim worker to join a ceremony by comparing ghosts to jinn. The worker, of course, understood the ghost perfectly well—and, in fact, was a big fan of videos in the horror genre. There is a constant work of intercultural and interreligious accommodation in this area that is not without its ironies.

49. Of course, nonspeculative buildings (especially government ones, as in the CID and early HDB examples) are also haunted during construction. Overwhelmingly, these are said to experience incidents during the demolition of existing structures. Here the narrative seems to be rather unequivocally about the destruction of existing environments and about transformative violence.

50. Certainly Singapore grows and fells trees, but it no longer has the large-scale productive capacity to turn these into wood. At the same time, the lack of a forestry industry means that such timber is in inadequate supply to satisfy the building trades’ (admittedly limited) appetite for solid wood.

51. Here they have much in common with urban homeowners worldwide.

1. The comments in the chapter’s epigraph were delivered at a tea party on Gurgadhi Day, in the People’s Association at Kallang, October 31, 1965. https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19651031.pdf. I am indebted to Singaporean artist Ila Ila, who brought this quote to my attention in the context of her own writing on nature in the Portside Review: https://www.portsidereview.com/5y2b-ila-ila#_ftn1.

2. I use the term utopian loosely here—and not in any formal, ideological, or political sense. While Chinese religion does not articulate any sense of civic collective, it is nonetheless holistic and social in nature. Persons are subject to complex relations of reciprocity and risk, both with each other and with the broader spatial-ecological environment.

3. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge University Press, 1996), introduction.

4. Of course, it can be objected that Singaporean discourses of the ghost still posit a being dependent on living humans and thus on “society” in some sense. Although this is true to a degree, it is an essential aspect of gui that they have already slipped beyond that order through neglect or tragic event. They are thus anonymous figures, dependent on collective charity and not on specific care by their descendants. This anonymity is the source of their power and what distinguishes them from ancestors, deities, and other spiritual beings.

5. See, e.g., Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), or David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (Allen Lane, 2019).

6. See Mbembe, Necropolitics; also see John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008).

7. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 111.

8. This is the central theme of the essays in Fisher, Ghosts of My Life.

9. This view is neither ahistorical nor reactionary, though it tends to stress repetition and other universal principles. There is certainly enough of the Buddhist influence to value the present, and we can see that much of the expectation for radically improved life—for prosperity, health, and luck—is immanent.

10. This is not exclusive to Chinese religion and is evident in the liturgical transformations of Singapore’s megachurches, for example, which have progressively deemphasized discourses of heaven in favor of discourses of this-worldly happiness and prosperity that, as local priest Father JP points out, are nothing more than those of Taoism cloaked in Christian raiment. In interviews with megachurch youth groups, excited expectation was directed less toward the afterlife and more at the imminent context of contemporary Asia. Singapore was repeatedly described as the “new Antioch”—that is, as a stage from which China (and, eventually, Islamic neighbors) might be evangelized. While the Messianic endgame was not in any way disavowed, it was largely deemphasized in favor of discourses of a victorious Christian contemporary (a kind of heaven on earth).

11. In this sense, it resembles a spiritually turbocharged form of bourgeois-populist ideology, as embodied by Dale Carnegie and other advocates. In a similar manner, and in direct contrast to left-wing critique, capitalist economy is not imagined as “zero sum.”

12. This principle is outlined in the following post on the Feng Shui Nexus website: https://fengshuinexus.com/feng-shui-rules/feng-shui-rules-related-to-supernatural/.

13. Differences of method and emphasis among these approaches are well summarized in Anna Tsing, “A Multispecies Ontological Turn?,” in The World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds, ed. Keiichi Omura et al. (Routledge, 2018).

14. Marcuse argues that the forms of gratification repressed by social and economic reality operate as ghosts. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Routledge, 2024), 14.