Raffles Hotel has been thoroughly revamped and officially re-opened in August 2019. It brought back its Writers Bar at the lobby, and is also hosting a Writer's Residency Program, and its inaugural Writer-in-Residence is Pico Iyer.
The contents of this newly published 'This Could Be Home- Raffles Hotel and the City of Tomorrow' (2019) are drawn from the author's impressions of Singapore and his numerous stays at the 130-year-old Raffles Hotel over 35 years. He wrote this book during the hotel's two-year closure for renovations. He visited it while it was undergoing renovations, and spoke to staff and the hotel's resident historian Leslie Danker.
The final chapters in the book made me laugh. Table at 7 doesn't exist at its Mohamad Sultan location anymore, and it will open in a new format at SIM Management House at 41 Namly Avenue this week. (Yes, the food served by Eugenia and Karl is still excellent.) The author obviously took a stroll back to the hotel, passing by Clarke Quay. Pico Iyer also introduced his friend Aaron, gave us his background, and regurgitated Aaron's words about Singapore, her politics and social policies and her various ethnic communities like it's gospel. I didn't know the author would mention Aaron in such detail. Well, Aaron isn't exactly wrong; he is quite the astute authority on these in many aspects. I don't think I need to give you his last name. He's quite known as a poet and a political analyst/researcher.
A friend asked me what I thought of it of this little thin book. Well. I said, "It's a rather thoughtful marketing spiel." It's effectively a soft sell of Singapore and the Raffles Hotel, STB-appproved. I don't see it as anything else. The Writers Bar, Raffles Hotel and the slight slant of its marketing angles are a little too colonial for my liking. I'd also opine that you need to be a fan of Pico Iyer before you could sit through his writing. Sure, the author is a really nice guy and is a great conversationalist, but I'm not a fan of his works. The insights and his thoughts from this particular book read like a loooong blog post, and within, some of those comments are really dated.
"Look!" says Wendy Wong, a creative director, at just that moment. "We're putting Peranakan chillis on French bread." None of us has even noticed how naturally we're mixing continents.
Outside, as I saunter back to my hotel close to midnight, the streets feel as stylish and loose, as festive as any I have seen, not quite Shanghai and not quite London, but more sultry and many hued than either. The tall chairs outside the pubs are full, couples are kissing on the bridge between the illuminated quays, tanned girls in very flimsy dresses are tapping impatiently on phones to make contact with tall boys whose shirts are unbuttoned.
I've heard the word "heritage" more often in Singapore than in anywhere I can remember; but these young and cutting-edge resellers are marching into a world where such words have to be redefined daily. By the time I'm back in the Long Bar, on my way to the airport next day—Changi now sees five times more travellers than when I touched down in 1994—I finally have time to recall the motto of Raffles Institution, which still carries its founder's coat of arms: AUSPICIUM MELIORIS AEVI. The hope of a better age, in effect.
The language in which it was written is dead. But the hope—more and more people are streaming into the new hotel around me, old and young, dark and blond, hip and highly retro—is very much alive. Home, quite beautifully, can be a creation of the future as much as of the past.
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