Rafael suggested meeting for our interview somewhere between Tanjong Pagar station and Chinatown. It is the first week of my first field trip to Singapore for this project. It is February 2015, with a temperature of slightly over 30 degrees and humidity below 77 per cent, quite pleasant for tropical Singaporean climate. From my first encounter with the city in 2008, I remember the ‘Old Singapore’, especially Chinatown’s colourful streets and the huge old hawker centre (food court) in its middle. Contrary to my expectations, we end up on the wooden bar stools of a British pub, squeezed on the sidewalk in front of the neatly painted shop house with the pub on its ground floor and a design startup on the second. My eyes catch the red lanterns at the entrance to Chinatown just a stone’s throw away from this British pub, which reminds me of some of the complexities of the city-state and its diverse population. As Frost and Balasingamchow (2009, p 149) depict in their biography of Singapore, a Chinese traveller to the island suggested as early as in 1887 that the European and the Chinese parts of the city rub shoulders, spatially but also symbolically as the flourishing centre of the city’s commercial activities. Tanjong Pagar and Chinatown are located in the heart of ‘Old Singapore’ and as the venue for one of my first interviews, they are one example raising questions about my young European interviewees’ positioning in the convoluted yet separate lifeworld in this city 150 years after the previously mentioned Chinese traveller’s depictions.

Rafael orders a cocktail; I choose iced coffee. Done with my questions we chat about lifestyle in Singapore. Rafael’s way to splurge, I learn, is a nice flat in the CBD rather than fashion brands or parties. I raise my eyebrows – the CBD’s concrete and glass skyline are mainly home to Fortune 500 companies – so I cannot imagine the slimly built, pale Frenchman’s living arrangements. He reads my surprise and invites me over. We make our way to One Shenton Way, a real-estate redevelopment project with 341 apartments, shining in gold amidst other less flashy skyscrapers.