Painting the Tiger

Ah Leong had taken his son to the zoo. The boy had devoured an orange Frutti ice cream, a grubby handful of chocolates, and a packet of biscuits. He munched while the macaques chattered, swallowed as the sun bears yawned, and dragged his feet as the orangutans slumbered. He was no more interested in his surroundings than when one or other of his grandmothers placed him in front of the television with a packet of cream crackers. Power Rangers, Pokémon, Digimon, Sakura—marathon sessions of animated combat that left him in a belly-up, eyes-glazed stupor by the time Ah Leong got home from his insurance calls. Ah Leong was beginning to wonder if he shouldn’t have just stayed home and flipped channels after all.

Then they met the polar bear. No snow. No ice. But still, a real polar bear. It caught a fish. It swam on its back. It ambled across the rocks and dived into the blue water. In front of the glass panel, the boy’s eyes widened. He pressed his nose against the pane. The bear swam up and, almost vertical, belly to the boy, touched his own nose to the glass. David (for that was the little boy’s name, chosen by mother and father after watching a very informative programme about Michelangelo on Arts Central) squealed, alarm turning quickly to delight.

Now the boy was hooked. He ran ahead of Ah Leong from one exhibit to the next. At last they reached Ah Leong’s favourite animal, the creature he admired more than any other, and ran into the viewing gallery built out over the mock river at the front of the enclosure.

The biggest of the three tigers stretched and yawned, and meandered down to the water’s edge. He tested the water with each of his front paws and then slid in. Ah Leong whispered in his son’s ear. “That’s the King of the Jungle. Look at his muscles rippling beneath his stripes.” The boy repeated his father’s catchphrase, shorn of genitive and article: “King Jungle, King Jungle.” From behind them shrill voices intruded: “See how he checked temperature first.” “Ai yo. Missed it. This one can send to America’s Funniest Videos.” For a moment Ah Leong tried to block his son’s ears, to save him from this urban mockery of the magnificent beast a mere fifteen metres away, whose race, the Sumatran, is doomed to extinction in the wild within thirty years. Then he realised that to his son’s two-and-a-half-year-old eyes, the tiger’s majesty was irrefutable, and no intervention was necessary.

Ah Leong’s own fascination with tigers had begun as an eight-year-old. At first it was just the impression of power and freedom that he got from the tiger’s size, its arrogant gait and muscled torso. Then as he learned more about the animal, its habits and character, he came to most admire the tiger’s patience in the hunt, its slow stalk and final pounce.

He hoped that David too would learn something from tigers. And when the boy was older, he planned to take him to the spot in Choa Chu Kang, where the last wild tiger in Singapore was shot in the 1920s. Do they know what they’re doing, he suddenly thought, those Indonesians and Malaysians, happily following our lead in the taming of swamp and jungle, eliminating untidiness in the name of progress? Do they understand the loss of spirit that follows the destruction of wildness? Once there is no big predator out there, we puff up with pride, believing ourselves invulnerable. But worse than that, our minds narrow. A country with neither wolf nor lion nor tiger is a country that will always think tame thoughts, that will sink softly into comfy sofas at the end of the day, hooked on soaps from Hong Kong or action from Hollywood. The nearest it comes to the wild is through nature documentaries of another time and place, safely boxed within the television’s confines.

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