Gum Control

Singapore rarely basks in the tender rays of world media attention, but one issue that consistently brings the news to fawn over us is that of the ban on chewing gum, or presently, the lack thereof. In what may be seen as an extension to our draconian laws, the legality of flavoured rubber (chewing gum, not the other sort) has polarised global opinion in all of its 12 years of absence. Now that we are able to obtain, with a certain amount of effort and expense, a few sorts of chewing gum, it is perhaps time to gaze back upon the ruinous effect that such a deficiency has wreaked.

The good times of chewing gum were still rolling as I entered primary school, where the main lure was the gaily coloured packs of poorly manufactured bubble gum from Malaysia, pellets of various shapes and sizes that felt oily to the touch and whose print would often rub off on one's fingers. But we devoured these because they were chock full of dyes of a mysterious and inorganic origin and because they were so sweet. It never was the fun of chewing them, because, frankly, mastication is repetitive and exhausting. Still, children had their share of fun chewing these candies.

An ominous cloud then appeared above the pastel skies of the meadows of gum, as, in response to the flagrant and gratuitous defacement of our pristine public transport system and streets, the government decided to ban the import and sale of chewing gum, with the peripheral benefit of being able to partake the pleasure of a Wrigley's Juicyfruit painstakingly smuggled over hell and high water into one's home. With the usual dispatch, chewing gum evaporated off the shelves of corner stores, school bookshops and supermarkets, no doubt being sent to this immense landfill of stringy, tangy goodness.

The reactions to this were mixed; I had never found chewing gum to be a problem, my encounters with it only being a sticky wad of gnawed gum lurking under desks or the occasional annoyance of glancing at a piece of gum plastered to a wall like some sort of malignant wall tumour. Frequent gum users were outraged; their right to enjoy a minty fresh flavour explosion in their mouths had been flouted and they would have to seek fulfilment in other things. For others, everything went on as normal; after all, more important things than chewing gum had been snatched from them and there was not even a peep.

It was to be the dark ages of chewing gum, when some uncle or the other would return from Malaysia and there under the clothes in his suitcase, lovingly wrapped in editions of the New Straits Times, would be two boxes of Wrigley's, shimmering in their shrink-wrap like ingots of green gold. As it always is with forbidden fruit, every stick seemed sweeter and more refreshing, as though egging us on in our determination to wait out the stranglehold that was being exerted on our tasty treats.

Those were the early days, and like an occupied peoples, with each passing day the hope of liberation become bleaker. Soon we were to forget that such a ban even existed, and live our lives as though the inventor of chewing gum had been run over by a horse carriage in front of the patent office. An entire generation of children grew up without knowing chewing gun and were none the worse for the wear for it. Chewing gum existed only on the fringes of the general public's psyche, and no more as an object than as a symbol.

The ban on chewing gum has been doggedly utilised by political commentators to denote the almost totalitarian control of our government and to demonise Singapore as some sort of human-rights black hole where, since people cannot chew chewing gum they must also be languishing in derelict gulags, being beaten by burly wardens everyday. Such a simple and incidental law also fires up the boundless imagination of many foreigners, responsible for such statements such as littering and various small offences being punishable by the death penalty, and where flogging is the de facto standard of punishment, like some Arabic nation only without the oil and chewing gum. Like a sort of cancer, the ban on chewing gum exacerbated the spread of our political and social misrepresentation, until it permeated most of our legal system, which soon falsely appeared to foreigners to being like the alpha and omega of a brutal absolute despotism, resonating with the screams of the damned and dripping with the crimson blood of thousands of orphans.

This of course is mildly disconcerting, bumping into people who say that Singapore is like Soviet Russia without the funny accents (yeah, well, their country bombs weddings), only for them to be cut off by others who yell approval at our laws that keep everything so nice and clean, like some sort of mental institution. The past years have seen a continual tussle between the two viewpoints, coming to a head during the Michael Fay incident (during which, I was pleased to learn, H.E. S R Nathan was the ambassador to the US) that placed our flogging practices under the world's microscope, generating long and excruciatingly detailed accounts of exactly how canings are carried out, and how to factor in things like the period of the moon and the mean square velocity of the air molecules.

But it seems that this is to be no more, now that chewing gum is allowed back into Singapore, it returns timidly, like some Japanese veteran who had been hiding in the steamy jungles of Malaya waiting to strike the British interlocutors, but nevertheless it is like the harbinger of civil freedom bringing his shining, blinding, gleaming torch to every pharmacy (for now) and lighting up the lives of the hundreds and thousands whose souls had been besmirched by the impure shadow of the 12 year ban.

You might say that it's a small concession to make so that Singapore can stop being classified as this gulag because people are now allowed to chew gum, and we all know gum is a very important food group and is essential for life, like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide, so with it's immense wealth and highest per capita rate of executions it ranks right up there in the nations top of the pops with our friends and now trading partners the USA.

Now we have more in common than you think. While you need to register to buy gum over here (undoubtedly so that when a wad of gum is found adhering to a lamppost, a crack team of forensic specialists can swoop down on it, seal off the scene, extract your precious oral DNA, fingerprint it, then break down your door and pistol whip you as they question you about what flavour it was – a libertarian fantasy if true) you need to register to buy guns over there. Only that a head full of hot gum never killed anyone. While they rage on about gun control, debate is beginning to be polarised about gum control and its undoubted far-reaching and social-order-obliterating consequences.

When I first came over to the UK before the ban was lifted (one would think that this development will in the future be taken to be some sort of demarcation between epochs) , one of the things that I had always intended to do was to totally legally, uninhibitedly, stroll into the newsagents, unafraid, freely picking up an entirely legal pack of chewing gum, saunter to the cashier, and unreservedly pay for my wholly lawful purchase with my wholly lawful money. As I achieved dental communion with two sticks of Wrigley's Doublemint, the flavours were sensuous and intense, but within minutes they had evaporated, leaving behind only the ingredients for a good tyre and a sour taste in my mouth. Good times never last.