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9 Imagining a Big Singapore: Positioning the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall Situated in a corner offthe modern Pan-Island Expressway and right above the underground Mass Rapid Transit railline, the Sun Yat Sen Villa in Singapore has a history of more than one hundred ye征s in a nation-state that traces its beginnings to its 1819 founding and subsequent settlement as a British colony. That it is still standing while few buildings of lesser vintage have survived the priorities of urban renewal is not necessarily a testimony of its recognised historica1 importance. The building had in fact been left in relative benign neglect since the 1950s by its owner, the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce. However, in the 1990日， a10ng with new initiatives taken to give prominence to the politica1 history of postwar Singapore and to the Asian Values discourse, as well as the orientation towards China as the greatest potential market for Singapore investors and a favoured source of immigrant talent, the Ministry of Information and the Arts decreed that the dilapidated Sun Yat Sen Villa should henceforth be restored as ‘a cultura1 shrine for a11ethnic Chinese Singaporeans'.1 At the behest of the minister, George Yeo, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce subsequently undertook extensive restoration works which transformed the building into the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall, officially opened by Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew on 12 November 20仙， the 135th anniversary of Sun's birth. ‘Nanyang', literally ‘the South Seas', is historically a China-centric term referring to the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia with its pan-Chinese nationa1ism, and it has become anachronistic as the community settled in as citizens in postcolonial nation-states. Its incorporation in the renamed Villa holds in balance the tensions of Singapore's aspiration to be a ‘globalised nationstate '. Aihwa Ong has contended that in late capitalism Chinese culture has been ‘variously reified and deployed in two competing discursive systems: the moderni日t imaginary ofthe nation-state (emphasising essentialism, territoriality, and fixity) in tension with the modernist imaging of entrepreneuria1 capita1ism 182 Con/Scripting Singapor的 National Heroεs (celebrating hybridi旬， deterritorialisation, and fluidity)'.2 Nowhere has this been truer than in Singapore, with three-quarters of its 3.38 million resident population being Chinese, its economy one of the most open and globalised, and a public policy of attracting ‘foreign talent' for the island's restructuring towards the age of information and biotechnology. The tension in which the two imperatives are held is negotiated through the history of the definitions and positions that Chinese culture has been assigned by the nation-state as well as through influences ofregional neighbours, intemational powers such as China and the various local constituencies of Singaporeans. The latter include both those who identify themselves as practitioners of Chinese culture and their detractors, who rather distance themselves on grounds of either profes 臼凹 s 位 ing ml山肌 The vicissitudes of the Sun Ya 叫 t Sen Villa of 旺 fe 叮 r apn 昀 sm whose refracting surfaces throw light on the h 趾l1S 叫 torical cross-curr 它 ent 的 s of ethnicity, culture, politics and economics in the social imaginaries about the Singapore nation. The state sees a ‘Big Singapore' as one that looks ‘beyond the island's shores [to understand] its backdrop ofAsian and Anglo-Saxon history and connections'. It has also decided to privilege the colonial immigrant Chinese segment of Singapore history at the tum of the last century as the m吋or platform for achieving a Singapore that 'can be larger than what it is geographically and in population'.3 However, given the earlier phase in independent Singapore's nation-building process where Chinese history and culture were seen as antinational , it is not without irony that among the current Singapore cultural intellectuals associated with the use of Chinese as their medium of expression, there are those who would rather distance themselves from the newly endorsed national links with the Sun Yat Sen myth, preferring instead to inscribe their altemative renditions of a ‘Big Singapore'. Sun eclipsed: The Villa in the orbit of China's politics The Sun Yat Sen Villa was built in the 1880s by a wealthy Cantonese merchant reportedly as a love-nest for his mistress and named 'Bin Chan House' (Mingzhenlu) after its lady-in-residence. Its quantum leap to revolutionary fame began when Teo Eng Hock, a Straits-bom Teochew merchant, bought the Villa in 凹的 for his aged mother to spend her sunset years there, and accordingly renamedit ‘Serene SunsetVilla/Garden' (Wanqingyuan...

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