Little Guilin

by CAL GALICIA

Singapore, 2022

by WILLIAM MOON

Green replaced with gray. Towering tembusu hardwood replaced with sky-scraping metal trees. Grass replaced with concrete. And so it goes, as cities creep — inching their way towards every nook and cranny they can get their steel tendrils into. If you’ve lived in a city, you’ll be familiar with this phenomenon. Where once were rolling hills and clear blue skies are now vandalized sidewalks and a skyline choked with steel.

Over the winter break, on the last day of my time back in Singapore, I decided I wanted to spend it somewhere I’d never been before. Even after 13 years of living in the tiny island nation, there were still places I had yet to explore.

I thought back to a book I had flipped through during one of my many excursions to my favorite bookstore in the Lion City, Kinokuniya. It was titled Secret Singapore and I remembered that that had intrigued me.

I had known Singapore, but did I know its secrets?

Apparently not. There, buried in the middle of the book, was a sight I had never seen before — it was nature. And not nature in the sense of trees and grass and greenery, but nature in the sense that it looked untouched, undirtied, pristine.

by CAL GALICIA

Little Guilin, the page said, A rare survivor of Singapore’s former natural hillocks.

I’d have to take the East-West and then the North-South lines to Bukit Gombak MRT — a little far from where I’d normally go, but it was my last day before I’d have to do the packing I’d been putting off and fly back to Manhattan, so why not?

The one-hour MRT ride gave me time to think. Staring out the window as the MRT rose out of the tunnels and onto an elevated track, I thought about Singapore. Only by wrenching the power out of nature’s hands could it have industrialized so quickly. And while it still held its rightful nickname as “The Garden City” — you’d be hard-pressed to find a road not lined with trees — it was still just a fraction of its original ecological glory. Was that a bad thing? The only way a country smaller than the five boroughs could sustain a population of over 5 million people would be to industrialize, to create groves of public housing rather than gardens, to replace the green with gray. Singapore had to do what it had to do.

Still, it was a sobering thought.

One hour on the train followed by a five-minute walk. At this point, however, my thoughts had turned into doubts. Could such a place really exist in this country? Named after the original Guilin in Southern China, Little Guilin seemed so out of place. China has the room for looming karst cliffs — does Singapore? Yet, there it was, just as the book had said.

It was breathtaking. From my vantage point, the buildings were pushed to the side by nature and not the other way around. How often will you see that in Singapore? Unless you’re deep in the middle of Lim Chu Kang or the Central Water Catchment, the answer is not often.

While Little Guilin is a remnant of Singapore’s original granite cliffs, that’s not wholly true — it’s an abandoned quarry. Over time, rainwater filled the crater left behind and eventually formed what would become Bukit Batok Nature Park.

There’s a certain irony to the whole situation — a beautiful natural landmark, testimony to the green spirit of Singapore, was partially man-made. In fact, Bukit Batok translated to English means “coughing hills,” and a popular explanation for that nomenclature is the fact that the blasting of the granite quarries sounded like…coughs. Coughing, an early warning that something is wrong with the body, and in this case, a sign that the hills were dying as quarrymen gouged out parts of its body in a quest to industrialize a city barely 280 square miles. Yet, it seemed like here, deep in Central Singapore, the hills were very much alive, pushing the concrete urbanity away.

Sure, the lake was artificially and accidentally made, but the terrapins that call it home didn’t seem to care. Sure, the cliff was a remnant of ecological amputation, but the hawks that took flight from the trees atop it didn’t seem to care. Maybe the question wasn’t—or isn’t—green vs gray. Because in this pocket of nature in the heart of metropolitan Singapore, it seemed to me that it was green and gray, both working together to create a scene neither could hope to conjure up on their own.

And that scene truly was beautiful. The fragments of green, bold against the gray…

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