Funan Centre

 I remember that I used to go to Funan Centre very often after ECA days. It would be my time to go and tuang in a shopping mall, and I did it quite often. I never told my parents about it, and it was one of those things that may have emotionally estranged myself from my parents – the fact that I constantly had to keep this a secret from my parents.

Back then it had just opened. I never bothered to eat at hawker centres because most of my pocket money would be spent on recorded music. So there's not much that I can report about Hill Street hawker centre. But I always loved the rows and rows of shops which sold computer games. I would spend hours just gazing at the computer games – and it was pretty crappy the way I treated the shops. I would look at the computer game boxes, and try to decide what to play. Then I would look at the computer game magazines in Times the Bookshop at Centrepoint or whatever, and read the review of the games. And then I might go to Megalink to go “buy” a pirated copy of the game. This was back in the day before intellectual property was rigorously enforced in Singapore, and it was some kind of a haven for that.

And that also cemented my relationship with computer games. I don't know if computer gaming led to my downfall... there was a time when I was one of the top students in class, and after that my grades plummetted. I sometimes wonder if it was due to computer games being a distraction, but somehow I don't think so. And anyway, it was around the time when I stopped playing computer games (other than the solitaire games that Microsoft used to provide)

There'll always be things you remember about Funan – it was the IT mall back then and you always felt that it signified the future. It sold futuristic things back then, and it's pretty hard to explain to you know how wonderful those things were at that time. PCs with word processors. Spreadsheets. Text based computer games. Arcade games. And this was at a time when arcade machines were banned in Singapore, so the only option was for you to buy these computer games and play them at home.

I think that back then, computers seemed like big expensive toys, and in many ways, that's how I still preferred to see them. They were there for your entertainment. They helped you to run stock portfolio. I remember gazing longingly at those big boxes with expensive price tags on them, that you could not possibly afford on a schoolboy's salary. (Of course, if my parents were smart enough, they would have taught me an even more important lesson – that you had to make more money, and you could afford it one day. Or maybe you could even be one of those businesses which sold those things. And if I'm honest, I'd also say that the admonishments to make more money largely fell on deaf ears)

And as much as I liked the computer shops, I always liked the layout. There were 5 or 6 floors of computer shops, and they seemed orderly and laid out. People in class started talking about the new Leisure Suit Larry game when it came out. There were always a few rich kids who bought the originals with the boxes, but largely it was pirated.

Funan centre was also home to Dada records, which for a few years was one of the most famous record shops in Singapore. Quite possibly it benefitted from its proximity to both the Substation, where there was a small and nascent punk scene in Singapore, as well as to Excelsior shopping centre, which had a lot of cool guitar shops. I used to go in in my school uniform, and I ignored all the CDs and went for the cassettes, and used to spend an hour or two browsing the place, which is why the shop owner kinda loathed me.

And at the same time, CDs eventually stopped being profitable, and the guy switched over to being a DVD / VCD seller. I thought that was a little sad, because they weren't as cool and hip as music on CDs. And say whatever you like about CDs, they presided over a time when music was at the peak of its creative expression.

So in the 80s, Funan Centre was about software and boxes of software packaging. In the 90s it was about CDs. I think I occasionally dropped by Funan because it had a cafe or 2 I liked hanging out at. There may have been a Coffee Bean at Funan. Or at least I sometimes liked to get the cheese fries at KFC and just spend an hour or two with my nose in a book. There were a few times when I just liked walking around that bookstore which sold computer books and manuals. (Now I don't think anybody would be dumb enough to run a business on that model, so hopefully the owner knew that the jig is up and wrapped it up).

I still remember when Challenger took up the whole top floor, and you could just walk around and grab something. IT was our version of Fry's. And it was fun while it lasted.

So in a way Funan was important in my life. You could say the whole place was my toy shop. It was an era when shopping centres were more like carnivals and cathedrals of pleasure, rather than carefully engineered systems to suck a little more money out of you and spy on your lifestyle habits.

What do i think about it today? The problem with computer stores and book stores and CD stores were that they operated on the border between the physical and the virtual media. Bits and bytes are basically information. CDs and computer boxes were basically the only way of obtaining these bits, back in the day before there was the internet, and before the internet was fully developed as a dream machine. Back then, you had to go into a physical store to get these things. These stores would be some kind of magical portal between the physical world and some kind of dream reality. They would be wonderlands for schoolkids to get lost in for hours.

I still remember LCD Soundsystem explaining what music appreciation was like in the 90s. You had to get the CD, and you had to go hunt it down. You only heard about it through print publications, and they assumed some kind of magical aura. They were some kind of magic amulet that you had to hunt for in dungeons and dragons.

Inevitably, with all the piles of books or piles of CDs, these were dust traps. The stores would be musty, but it would be so full of goodies that you wouldn't care less. And quite a few of those stores were made to look more hospitable so that you would spend more time in there.

So what has changed in Funan Centre recently? The problem with Funan Centre was that it's out of the way. It's not in a long belt like Orchard Road. It is in the vicinity of the seat of government during the colonial times, near a lot of nice touristy places, and the part of Singapore which looks like London. But it's always been a block unto itself. You could stretch things a little, and say that Suntec city, Marina Centre, MBS, Citylink, Raffles City and Capitol Theatre form some kind of a retail zone, and Funan / Peninsular / Excelsior is on the far end of it. But traditionally, it's always occupied a certain niche, and people went to Funan for its own sake. And when it's become just another lifestyle mall, it ceases to be special.

Maybe that's why they had to spruce up Funan Centre like this. They knew the old business model of Funan was dead, and it had to be just another New Town mall. Maybe that's why they went a little overboard in decorating the place. Now it looks a little bit like some kind of Blade Runner dystopia cyberpunk place. It's become hipster, it's become Silicon Valley Aesthetic.

Malls stopped being a place where you necessarily bought stuff. The 20^th century mall was a place that served at least 2 purposes: there was the display of goods, and it was a place where you could actually buy those goods. And in the 21^st century, there was a schism between buying those things. Why did you go to a mall? You certainly weren't going to get them on a cheap, compared to what you could get online. Then you were there for an experience, maybe to instagram yourself.

Lifestyle changes since the 90s: we have gone from consumption as purchasing of physical goods, to consumption as going through experiences, to consumption as taking photos of ourselves going through experiences. Personally I find it pretty alarming. Or at least I can't wrap my head around it.

The experience of a shopping mall has changed so much. The internet has replaced the public square in so many ways. It has changed the meaning of public space. Now, you needed interesting and new toys in order make the mall hip and funky. You had plenty of interesting things: an indoor cycling track. A rock climbing wall. You had interesting architecture – lots of unexpected corners, large staircases in the middle of the building, and an amphitheatre sitting area for people to hang out at. It was almost designed to resemble some hip and funky collegial co-working space. And quite a few interesting things that were going on on the rooftop as well.

But what made me a little worried for Funan was that I recall a few times when people designed cool and funky things for their buildings, and as time went on, they became less cool and funky. Such as the overhead bridge connected to Far East Plaza, which was once so cool that even David Bowie had to be pictured next to it. Then there was the time when Isetan and Metro were so aggressively expanding their footprint in Orchard Road, until it suddenly became prohibitively expensive to do so. Or the time when people thought that malls within the MRT vicinity were going to be the future. I think very few people remember when Isetan was the anchor tenant of Dhoby Ghaut MRT station. I wonder how the playgrounds on the rooftop of Vivo City are holding up. Or the car elevators at Peninsular Plaza.