All images by RICE Media unless stated otherwise.
Around 40 people file into Spectrum by Phil Studio one evening in late August. It’s not an uncommon sight in and of itself—except this crowd isn’t here to watch a group of young (or millennial) indie darlings.
The headliner this evening, Feel Young, is certainly indie (don’t bother, you probably haven’t heard of them), and they’re certainly darlings.
But young?
Taking the stage tonight is the ‘disruptive and problematic’ retiree band you might have seen playing outside Chinatown MRT Station Exit A—and they’re especially disruptive and problematic tonight. They’ve commandeered the space and are now performing to a crowd of clapping twenty- and thirty-somethings.
Feel Young is a group of retirees who gather on Monday and Saturday evenings to jam. Some of them play instruments. Some sing. Many do both. All are old. And they want you to know: They’re ageing gracefully in the way they do best.
Me? I’m here partly out of curiosity, partly because I’ve grown tired of being surrounded only by people my age. Most of my friends are almost exactly my age, and 23 feels like a stupid age to be.
Weird Little Concert
The band comprises all types and classes of senior Singaporeans. A fanny-packed man who thanks Phil Studio and RICE for organising the event. An ostentatiously dressed woman wearing a furry green scarf. A lute player who doesn’t look at the audience the entire evening, too engrossed in his own tunes to spare us a glance.
Together, they form Feel Young. They sing mostly Mandarin and Chinese dialect songs, and not just dreamy ballads you might associate with popular Chinese music. Some of the vocals later in the evening get positively operatic.
But this story isn’t about them, not really. It’s about one of the vocalists who settles into the seat beside me, a sixty-something-year-old woman holding on to a hefty lyrics book.
I strike up a conversation and ask if she printed the book herself.
No, she “bought it” from “someone”.
Who? “A man.” Oh, okay.
The band plays on. The singers sing on. My seatmate and I strike up an easy conversation. She hands her lyric book to me when I ask if I can take a look, but not before prefacing that I probably won’t know any of the songs in it.
She’s too indie for me, it seems.
I Get Invited to Sing
Another song passes before the elderly woman beside me taps my shoulder.
“Do you want to sing with me?” she asks.
I’m equal parts flustered and flattered—I didn’t expect our friendship to be progressing so quickly.
I say yes. She opens the lyrics to ‘Lead Around (Qian Yin)’ by Maggie Teng on her phone and asks me how I feel about it.
“I have to tell you that I don’t know this song,” I tell her. “But let’s do it.”
“Can one,” she says.
She sings one line to prove to me that it’s “so easy”. I think she’s just showing off. Then she asks me to take a photo of her screen so I can refer to the lyrics.
I head over to Eudea, the producer from RICE, and tell her we’d like to sing a song.
“Nadine and—” I pause. “What can I call you?”
“Mew Fong,” says Mew Fong.
I Attended This Esoteric Concert, and All I Got Was Introspection
If the angry shop owners around Pagoda Street are to be believed, Feel Young disrupts the peace and quiet of the street (Chinatown is famously known for its peacefulness, right?) and drives away foot traffic.
In that respect, Feel Young are just like rabble-rousing youth. Aren’t they?
Other similarly navel-gazing thoughts cross my mind as Mew Fong and I wait for our turn to sing.
Thoughts like: A club in the slightly dilapidated outskirts of the CBD (Selegie Road) isn’t where I thought I’d make my next friend. But that’s not a bad thing, all things considered.
Remember being 14 and volunteering at an old folks home for school? We were terrible.
This concert is the reverse of all those cringeworthy volunteering ‘experiences’—only the old folks sound a dozen times better than we ever did. May the members of Feel Young never be subject to secondary schoolers singing at—not for, but at—them.
And I think to myself: I wish I were friends with more old people. As things stand, the only old people I’m really friends with are my grandparents, and I have a sinking feeling that they feel obligated to be my friend.
“I wish we had more community spaces,” I blurt out, grief rising in the back of my throat.
“I wish we had stronger support for places like these. If only we could always be this way.”
“Huh?” says Mew Fong. “Our turn yet anot?”
Allegory of the Third Space
I won’t lie—had we met in different circumstances, we would probably not have spoken at all. Mew Fong looks like any other senior citizen you might pass by on the street. If she got on the MRT train with me, I wouldn’t give her a second look.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that—anyone who approaches people in public is either trying to proselytise or sell insurance, sometimes a strange mix of both—but it does also mean that it takes extraordinary situations for us to warm up to strangers.
It is, therefore, a good thing that we’re meeting here. I used to think that ‘third spaces’ was just another term for ‘air-conditioned place I can meet hotties my age without having to pay $3 for a drink’, but maybe there’s something to it.
“If you’re scared of singing,” says Mew Fong, sounding a little like she thinks I’m going to break out in cold sweat, “You can share the microphone with me.”
We take our places. This is when I realise there are a lot more people in the audience than I first thought.
I project as much confidence as I can and spend the next two minutes learning the lyrics as I’m singing them. The end result is a full-spirited quasi-adlib on my part (at one point, I give up and go “ooh ooh”), and full-throated singing on Mew Fong’s.
I’m not going to lie: I think we end up sounding kind of bad, and it’s all my fault. She sounds great because she knows the lyrics and the melody. Me, not so much. But she told me not to worry so much, and so I don’t.
After our Phil Studio debut, she complains that our mics were too soft and she couldn’t hear us properly. I’d say it’s for the best.
Stop Telling Me About Your BTO
Talk to a Gen Z person long enough, and they start bringing up how they’re worried about their careers or their Build-To-Order (BTO) flat prospects. Talk to a millennial long enough, and they invariably start having premature mid-life crises (that are sometimes centred around their BTO and how they chose the wrong contractor). Talk to a Gen Xer long enough, and eventually they start giving the other two unsolicited advice on how to pick the right BTO renovation company.
The only way to get away from BTO talk, therefore, is to talk to older people.
Because if you talk to an old person long enough, they start bringing up dementia.
“If you don’t keep your mind active, you might get dementia,” Mew Fong tells me. “That’s why I go out and sing every week. To avoid it.”
I prefer this to the BTO talk.
I’m enjoying this. It crosses my mind, briefly, that our friendship is almost heartwarming.
Ew. The nausea-inducing word isn’t the word people use to describe things they take seriously. It’s PR-speak, nationbuilding-speak, dismissive agenda-speak for “Aww, that’s nice.”
It’s my personal axe to grind: I just don’t like how commentary about old people in Singapore is written. A lot of the language surrounding old people is well-meaning but patronising.
They’re labelled ‘inspiring’ and ‘boundary-breaking’ for doing everyday things like running a business or picking up a hobby. Or worse, they’re infantilised, and have to put up with people cooing “So cute!”
The things old people do are often contrasted against their age, as if their accomplishments are in spite of it. I’m intent on making it clear, right here and right now: They’re just like us!
Just Like Us
There are, of course, valid reasons to categorise elderly people separately—it can spotlight issues that hit them harder, and ensure that assistance can be sent their way.
But it can’t be at the cost of treating them as a different class of person altogether, so foreign and distinct that interactions with them need to be coached a certain way.
Or something like that. I don’t know. Mew Fong’s my friend, not a lesson to take away from. Sometimes it really isn’t that deep.
At the end of the night, Mew Fong grasps my arm and bids me goodbye before getting up to look for her friends in the band. I don’t get her number, or a promise to keep in touch, or any other information.
We don’t need to. We’re just ships in the night sharing the same waters for a single surreal night before drifting back into our own tides.
