illiteratus.com

by Justin Loke

Fred Tan was a Singaporean born in 1970. Some of the people remembered him for his love of music and books, enduring loyalty to obsolete forms, his belief in unseen influences, and his quiet resistance to the logic of substitution. His life, though modest in outward appearance, was shaped by a series of private disruptions, each reinforcing his preference for routine, and permanence over adaptation and change.

Tan grew up in a conventional household and, during his formative years, developed a mild interest in reading and writing. His formal exposure to literature came through secondary school and A-Level studies, where he developed a fondness for poetry, drawn to its rhythms and resonances, which he found echoed in song lyrics. However, he did not proceed to university, having achieved only modest examination results for A Levels. Much of his literary sensibility was formed outside academic institutions, and an informal study of music and literature from places such as Tower Records and Borders. 

Since early adulthood, Tan held a series of night-time jobs. As a student, he began as a printing assistant and later worked in a factory on an assembly line, then still common in Singapore. During national service, he was posted to the police force, where he frequently took night shifts. Later, he worked as a pub waiter. In his fifties, he found work as a night shift security guard in condominiums, and warehouses across industrial estates. These occupations suited his temperament, allowing him to remain slightly apart from the rhythms of the day. The solitude of the night shifts gave him time to reflect, to read, and to listen to music, but it also deepened his quiet sense of dislocation from the society that passed by while he watched.

Tan’s approach to music mirrored his wider resistance to technological and cultural change. He began listening to vinyl records during his youth, later adapting, somewhat reluctantly, to cassette tapes. When CDs replaced cassettes, he made the transition out of necessity rather than enthusiasm. He refused, however, to embrace digital formats such as iPods or mobile phones, complaining that music played from these devices lacked the tangible weight and texture of earlier media. For Tan, sound was a physical phenomenon, intimately tied to memory, and memory to the body. He kept a vast CD collection, even though he no longer owned a player. Like his music, his domestic life followed a logic of attachment over replacement: a quiet refusal to discard what had once held meaning. Likewise, he would never buy a book online without first holding the physical copy in his hands.

For a period, Tan lived with his aging parents, eldest brother, and sister-in-law in a shared HDB flat. His second brother works abroad, and he had the room he used to share for himself. However, tensions gradually accumulated, especially with his sister-in-law. During her pregnancy, Tan occasionally overheard arguments between his brother and sister-in-law, often centering on the strain that their living arrangement was placing on their privacy and future plans.

Although he wished to move out, Singapore’s public housing policy, which prevented unmarried individuals under the age of 35 from purchasing their own flats, left him with few options. Contrary to later assumptions that he had always been solitary, Tan was not someone destined for bachelorhood from the outset. While he was introverted and rarely attracted the opposite sex, he had formed a sincere and meaningful relationship in his early thirties with a woman he met through work. It was, for a time, a sign of emotional potential, perhaps even the possibility of a settled domestic life. But that possibility never materialised. His only girlfriend, Susanne, died during the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s. Her death left an irreparable wound, shaping his later refusal to seek new attachments or accept substitutes for what had been lost.

Tan rented a room from a retired carpenter in a peculiar towering HDB block, an uncommon design of vertically stacked units, now demolished. The carpenter’s flat, which smelled of varnish and sawdust and was offered at a low rate, carried a quiet but troubled history. The previous occupant, a Malaysian man, had died in a motorcycle accident; neighbors whispered that the carpenter has a son had later disappeared under mysterious circumstances, with some suggesting suicide. Though unconfirmed, these rumors contributed to the heavy atmosphere surrounding the unit. The block itself, with its labyrinthine layout, low parapet walls, and disjointed corridors, caused Tan vertigo whenever he looked down, and produced a subtle but persistent disorientation. Over time, Tan grew increasingly withdrawn, sensing in the building’s strange geometry a reflection of his own internal dislocation.

Tan once said, “Astrology is not superfluous to a person’s life story. Don’t be averse to noticing the stars at night.” People once, he said, looked to the heavens to consider their futures.  The word consider comes from the Latin considerare, meaning to observe with the stars. Because of his occupation and his casual references to astrology, many assumed Tan was just another frivolous unintellectual reader of the horoscope column printed weekly in newspapers, indulging in low and vulgar superstition. They were half right. He did read it religiously, not as a guide, but as a dictation. In another era, Fred Tan’s reliance on astrology might have seemed natural, not eccentric: a way to impose structure on uncertainty. For him, it was not superstition, but a necessary framework, an architecture for interpreting the world’s instability.

In mid 2010s, another quiet but significant loss occurred: the newspaper from which he had drawn his daily horoscope ceased publishing its astrology column. Though alternatives existed online, Tan refused to substitute. Its disappearance mirrored, in miniature, the earlier loss of Susanne, another trusted orientation point quietly erased without substitution. 

Seeking coherence amid personal loss, Tan immersed himself in the study of astrology. In the quiet reference section of the National Library, he came across a linguistic thread that felt like revelation. The word influenza, he learned, originated in 14th-century Italian, derived from the Latin influentia, meaning the influence of celestial bodies on earthly events. During a major epidemic in the 18th century, Italian physicians used the phrase “influenza di catarro” – influence of catarrh – to describe a respiratory illness marked by excessive mucus. Over time, the phrase was shortened simply to influenza, and when the epidemic spread across Europe, the English borrowed the term wholesale, stripping away the celestial context but keeping the name. Flu emerged later as a casual abbreviation. For most, this was a linguistic curiosity. For Tan, it confirmed a worldview he had long intuited: that diseases, SARS included, the one that took Susanne, were not merely biological mutations, but visible symptoms of cosmic imbalance. To him, the virus was not chance. It was a star’s long, delayed echo.

During this period, Tan had depression and it gradually developed symptoms of pseudo-aphasia, a language disturbance arising not from brain injury but from profound depression. His speech became halting, fragmented, and hesitant. His spatial perception also deteriorated. He began having difficulty distinguishing between private and public spaces, sometimes confusing corridors, void decks, and rooms. On occasion, he performed private acts, intended for the seclusion of a room, in semi-public areas, apparently unaware of the boundaries he had once observed.

However, a fortune teller at Waterloo Street, an expert in Fengshui, the traditional practice of arranging space, furniture orientation, and architecture to optimize the flow of energy, told him that it wasn’t just the alignment of stars that had influenced him. Initially, Fred was skeptical. But when he followed her advice, and bought some expensive items from her, there was a slight improvement, though perhaps it came too late.

The rearranged furniture and the auspicious objects he hung did seem to help. The altered layout, guided by Fengshui, briefly improved Fred Tan’s mental state, containing the edges of his madness. But what lingered most were the stars, celestial, faintly visible from the window of the tower block, no longer sharp, just dulled glimmers drowned by the city’s terrestrial glow: streetlamps, lit windows, and passing headlights. In May 2021, during Singapore’s second wave of COVID-19, part of the resurgence that had killed nearly 481,000 in India, Fred contracted the virus and died. Until the end, he insisted it wasn’t the virus that had harmed him, but the stars. He thought of this while on respiratory support, with no one to tell, or perhaps simply unable to. He believed the cause lay in the influences, the silent, indifferent stars we no longer interpret. Others still argued: it wasn’t the stars, it was the room. Some said it was both. And only one person, passing through the void deck, paused at the sight of his CD collection left by the rubbish chute, and thought: perhaps this was the true influence, the quiet music of his youth, that had determined his destination all along.