The Good Morning Towel Project - A Walk Through Our Heritage, Past and Living

Our minds were ablaze with childhood nostalgia at Night Festival 2012. It was a surreal experience, walking into the Great Singapore Souvenirs (GSS) collection. It was like walking down memory lane. Personal memories of playtime at primary school, my grandparents’ shophouse on Pasir Panjang Road… flooded my mind.   

At this National Day showcase, Bak Chang, 5 Stones, Nonya Kuehs and shophouses etc. were memoralised into contemporary design. What reality left behind was served into the spotlight, and back into our everyday lives.

For us, what really triggered the nostalgia was the Good Morning Towel dished up in gold threads; upgraded to symbolise the improved quality of life in Singapore, not unlike Kampong Punggol being remade into a waterfront town.

I remember the Good Morning Towel from my childhood – on the bamboo clothes poles in my neighbours’ backyards, draped over Ah Pa’s shoulders at the barbershop, atop the bamboo steamers at my favourite dim sum stall... Nenek too had a particular fondness for these white cotton towels. It was a mainstay in our kitchen. And it never missed a family dinner.

Perhaps in the beginning, the only towels available were Good Morning Towels so they have now become a habit born of our heritage. Or perhaps the stark white colour is a useful indicator of hygiene. I like to think its the bold red greeting that instantly warms its bearer to anyone – the rickshaw rider and his passenger or the barber and my father. A secret code between strangers.

In any case, I started to notice that the Good Morning Towel is still being used everywhere. It is in the office pantry, on the coffee grinders in the Toastbox outlet downstairs of my office and over the counters of my beloved Sago Lane egg tart store. In fact, Matt and I spotted it at the Nepalese café in Toa Payoh he frequents. The Good Morning Towel has really transcended cultures and generations in our society.

It was only natural then, when I found out about the Heritage Blog Competition, and reflected on what “Singapore heritage” means to me, I almost immediately thought of the Good Morning Towel and ting ting ting!  The idea for our little project came about almost instinctively.

What project? You may ask. Well, we set out to brand our heritage with the Good Morning Towel! We started with where we remembered the Good Morning Towel to be, and stamped those places with the Good Morning Towel – the stamp of our own brand of heritage.

The Good Morning Towel cleaned marbled table tops in kopitiams, wiped the sweat off the brows of trishaw riders, dusted the shelves of our good ol’ minimarts and kept the ice-box of the ice-cream uncle’s mobile cart dry.

The Good Morning Towel had always been just there, along with our friends and family. It was at our dim sum breakfasts and the roadside barber where I watched and waited for my father. It laid watching over my favourite kuehs prepared by the nonyas in Joo Chiat. It was also at the temple my family visited during Qing Ming to pay our respects to our ancestors.

Even on Channel 8 dramas, on the shoulders of samsui women in the 1980s drama “红头巾”, (Samsui Women), the unassuming towel was the preferred prop, used alongside tin cups, in reenacting scenes from our heritage. Across the causeway, the Good Morning Towel is paid tribute to in its own solo number in Broadway Parodies Lagi Lah!; a clear sign that it is a ubiquitous symbol of the Straits Chinese.

We also sought to brand other images outside of our Straits Chinese heritage. We laid the Good Morning Towel at our favourite prata store and the neighbourhood mosque. It was our small way of acknowledging what makes Singapore, well, Singapore. It really struck me, when I was in Sydney, hungry, cold, craving for prata only to find that it costs AUD9 for three small squares. I felt then, more than ever, how much I have taken for granted our multi-racial heritage. In Singapore, prata is part of our staple diet. Elsewhere, it is an exotic culinary experience.

And it is in a localized German street stall that we sought to reconnect using the Good Morning Towel; at Erich’s Wuerstelstand on Smith Street where we munched on currywurst. Like how Erich is trying to connect his culture with ours, we are adamant the Good Morning Towel features when we try out his, and our changing street food scene.

While on our branding campaign, we came across living scenes unchanged from before. Like a place stuck in time, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple still hosts retired men and their games of Chinese chess.

Time moves forwards, memory in the other direction. In the backalleys of Kembangan, state of the art condominium developments tower over old shophouses and five foot ways. At Clarke Quay, bumboats no longer deliver sacks of rice to godowns, but ferry tourists to admire the spectacular waterfront with its skyscrapers.

At the end of our day, and much to our delight, we also found old toys like tikam tikam and pick-up-stix at the Singapore Heritage Center. These served as sources of innocent joy common to both our parents and us. Like these old toys repackaged as mementoes, the Good Morning Towel has also been repackaged by Goods of Desire. we found it transformed into boxer briefs, floor mats, eye masks etc. – clearly, this towel of humble beginnings is keeping up with the changing times, and finding new ways to stay in the modern household; and not unlike the beloved place we call home – Singapore.