Among the Inverted Triangles

The gyms of Singapore | 3,150 words

Translated from Chinese by Luisetta Mudie

At first I just wanted broader shoulders and a more developed chest like those clothes horse guys on Instagram, so I started by jogging along the pedestrian pathways of my campus and doing push-ups on the floor of my room. But such self-consolations can take you only so far if you’re weak and skinny. I was still far behind where I wanted to be. 

1. 

A and I are heading out to Fitness First at One George Street. I’m only just getting started with weight training. As a long-standing member, A has 10 visitor passes a year and can bring a friend along for free. 

We’d met in a bar, shared a drink together, and had known that we wouldn’t be heading to each other’s rooms. So we’re compromising. We’re going to the gym, using exercise as a healthy justification for continuing to meet. A gets to use his membership benefits and I get to be physical in his presence. It’s the next best thing. 

“Once you’ve experienced the heights, you won’t want to go back to the plains any more,” A told me in the bar, slightly tipsy. He spoke so firmly, so sure I’d be hooked by the experience.

So on Sunday morning I don a tank top, shorts and sneakers, just like any other Island City guy dressed for sporting activity, and board the 970 bus going east. I allow myself to daydream, but not fall asleep. Every time the bus stops, I check the route map on my mobile phone and the signs at each bus stop, for fear of going the wrong way. 

A is still en route when I get off, so I find my own way there. I see another guy in tank top and shorts, gym bag slung across his body. With his broad shoulders and straight back, he’s a reliable sign I’m on the right track. I follow him into the building. The elevators are packed with weekend customers and their early morning smells. The only button that lights up is for the fifth floor.

The first thing that strikes me walking into Fitness First is the floor-to-ceiling windows with their view of the city skyline. The room is filled with natural light, brightening my mood. After a while A arrives, greets me and we check in, me exchanging my expired student ID for a temporary membership card and getting a smile from the locker room guy handing out shirts and towels. 

I follow A past the pantry, shower and changing room. “What’s great about this place is you can turn up with no kit because they have everything,” he says. The neat rows of lockers remind me of public housing flats, or a row of municipal hawker stalls. This is great. It has everything. 

All the guys are walking around in bath towels, or just their underpants, or in loosely fitting tops, as if they’re in their own homes. I feel self-conscious surrounded by their sturdy bodies and well-defined shapes, and want to dive back into the locker room, but A doesn’t take long to change. He tells me that everyone here looks like that and that I can too. I tell myself that I’m nothing special, and that I shouldn’t be ashamed to change my clothes. 

Probably seeing me nervous, A changes the subject, saying that he once lost a pair of socks after taking a shower here. Just imagining that unencumbered friction while walking is as disturbing as the idea of being naked, it must be like a part of yourself has been stolen. 

“But these shoes are so cute, it’s a waste to lock them away. So I risk them being stolen.” So A leaves his shoes and socks under the bench while he showers and steams. That’s his unique brand of optimism right there. But I can’t bear the thought of losing anything, so I put everything in the locker and swipe it shut with my card.  

2.     

For two years I rent an apartment with a mountain view. The building’s gym has been closed for a long time. Instead, the concierge directs me to the sixth floor of the parking lot. I approach this dark and secret place with some hesitation, and decide to go in the afternoon or late at night, so as not to be too visible. 

Each time the lift doors open, I feel as if I’m disembarking alone into some kind of wasteland. The sixth floor’s sides are open to the outside, and it comes equipped with ping pong table, treadmill, exercise bike, and an all-in-one gym machine. The frames, weights and handles have rusted, presumably after being left out in the hot and humid air, coupled with a lack of maintenance. The bench upholstery is split, exposing grayish sponge beneath. But it all still works, just gives me thicker and thicker calluses on my hands. 

The place seems to have been abandoned in the half-light for years. Hardly anyone uses it; there’s no air-con, no set of gym rules, no upbeat music or repetitive news shows. The shouts of children playing float up from the ground floor. Trucks are constantly reversing and motorcycles roaring past honking their horns. Amid all of this noise, I do my chest presses, my pulldowns and my leg presses, working up a sweat in no time. Nothing is shut away here, everything’s open. 

If no-one is around, I wear nothing but a tank top, or even strip to the waist, using my top as padding underneath me on the bench. During my breaks I walk to the edge to catch my breath, where there’s a view of densely-inhabited apartments, people living at their own pace, in their own space. As I put the weights back at the end of my session the sound of the machines still echo, making me fully satisfied with the day’s intensity. 

My body starts to transform under the progressive weights program. I want to lose my S-size T-shirts, so I start following training tips from various fitness bloggers on high protein diets and muscle gain. I save different simple recipes for broccoli and chicken breast. 

By the time my chest and arms have bulked up enough to make my gym top bulge, I’m ready to leave the sixth floor behind, and hit the community sports center. 

3. 

I had thought we’d start weight training as soon as we came out of the dressing room, but instead we hang around outside a studio that looks like a glass box. A tells me he’s signed up for a barbell aerobics class and I want to go along with it, even though it’s not what I’d originally set out to do. 

We watch the proceedings before we enter. The music in the glass box is very loud, with everyone facing the dais, doing rapid squats up and down, panting and covered in sweat, the step boards quivering under their feet as they grab their barbells like branches, lively as a box of frogs. Outside, people are hanging around in small groups, waiting expectantly in line, towels and water bottles dangling, focused on the present moment. 

I feel like I’m about to turn into a frog. It reminds me of the time a friend dragged me along to a seminar where successful direct salespeople shared the secrets of their success in a way evoking lectures on psychology, and I sat through the whole thing suppressing my anger at being simultaneously unable to get with the program and unable to leave. I don’t tell A that I don’t like the sudden change of plan, that I don’t fancy the group setting, or that I don’t want to take the class. We chat away about nothing until the music stops and the frogs jump out of their box and become human again. The glass box is empty, then it’s our turn to go inside. 

Before I get a chance to say to A that we should stay at the back, the back row fills up. We grab our barbells and steps and move towards the front of the class. Everyone sets up their barbells and steps expertly. I’ve brought along some extra steps and the only five-kilogram weights that were left. I have no idea of the right weight for me. 

Inside the glass box the lights outside appear dimmer, but the air is circulating well. Aside from the rhythmic pulsing of the music there’s no noise, and no applause. The coach demonstrates the moves, shouting instructions through a headset, then previews the next set of actions, trying to drive us to work up a sweat. Most of the men and women follow him closely, pushing, stretching, rowing, squatting and glute bridging, moving from one action to the next in unison, well-coordinated, heart rates high. Before long, they’re also starting to look like frogs. 

I feel like I’m the only one who can’t breathe, but I keep going anyway, fighting my limbs’ urges to slow down. I only flag a bit in the last repetitions of each set. My sweat turns from hot to cold, as if the water I drink is pouring straight out of my pores. My heart and stomach hurt, as if I’m about to heave black vomit. I’m sideways to the instructor, with many eyes on me. Anyone suddenly stopping will stand out like a sore thumb. 

Each set of movements builds on the next. During the break, I long for my old sixth-floor view of packed apartments. I long for the equipment outside the box. I really want the class to be over. I don’t want to mutate into a frog. 

Eventually the branches and lily pads are put back into place, the frogs morph back into human adults, and the glass box is empty once more. Exhausted, I realize that I’m too old to have stayed up as late as I did last night, and that I’m still allergic to alcohol. I had been going through the motions in the box, desperately trying to fit in with the energetic and muscular frogs, kicking up water frantically. It was like being the lowest-status person at a vibrant boat party, desperately trying to stay sunny about the experience. I’ve lost all interest in weights and equipment now. I just want to go home and fall into bed. 

4.  

It seems to me that if pedestrian pathways are Singapore’s capillaries, the community-based ActiveSG Sports Centres and commercial gyms are its viscera, while fitness culture keeps its circulation healthy. Everyone in this city has a different reason to want to reshape themselves. 

Me, I get to like using the ActiveSG Sports Centre gym either before 3pm or after 8pm, the non–busy times. I put on my favorite slow songs, and work out at my own pace, rather than following any instructor-led group class which consumes so much energy. 

I spend a bit of time learning how to use the equipment and check out all the comings and goings. Conversations with people occur naturally and intermittently while waiting to use equipment, or helping someone out. After a while, they become workout buddies in a way that is unforced and natural. I watch them in silence, getting tips from the way they move and incorporating them into my own technique. As the pin moves gradually down the stack of counterweights every muscle in my body builds up its own memory, transforming my body type. 

I want to be liked even more than I want to be physically strong. But I can’t attain my ideal form, no matter how much pressure I put my body under. And I keep asking more and more of myself. The running tracks seem interminable. 

It’s the survival of the fittest in this city. If I wasn’t a Singaporean, I would perhaps still be learning to live with my thin, undernourished body, eating less modestly and carefully, and training a lot less. Would I be happier in my ignorance than I am now? When I think about it, I’m a long, long way from where I was before. 

5.   

After the aerobics class the weather gets cloudier, so the sunlight doesn’t hurt my eyes so much. I sit by the pool outside the gym, soaking my feet to get used to the cold water. I look out at the skyline beyond the pool, the Marina Bay Sands resort, skyscrapers, coastal entertainment centers, and various financial buildings that the tourists love so much. The Island City never seems to pall. 

A swims up and down the pool in front of me, sometimes changing stroke, timing his breaths expertly. I am like a land mammal that only dabbles in water, kicking it up so it splashes over me up to the waist. I’ve never been able to get used to the feeling of weightlessness in water, to losing touch with the ground or propelling my body from one shore to another. My roommate tried teaching me to swim a few times, but I only learned to kick along for a short distance using a float, and could never last more than 10 seconds above water without it. Losing contact with the ground often makes me panic, so from time to time I grasped the float in a panic just to keep breathing and stave off the possibility of drowning. Here I practice holding my breath and opening my eyes under water in a bid to make the day seem less useless. 

Maybe A is my ideal self. A job in finance, a live-in boyfriend of eight years and regular cross-border trips to get massages and face-fillers, an open relationship in recent years. I am still honing my English grammar, trying to breathe freely despite the frantic pace of life, still trying to wrench a new look out of my old physique, getting used to the semi-nudity of tank top-wearing, and convincing myself that I’m nothing special. 

I envy A his masterly muscle coordination and breathing technique, the way he flings himself into the water, how he makes use of all the facilities, and how he climbs out of the pool looking deeply satisfied. We are fundamentally different. My lower body is submerged in the water, but my upper body feels a sudden chill due to a gust of wind. A is amphibiously happy, his body an inverted triangle that is my imagined but still-distant future. 

6.  

After graduating from college I would scroll through Instagram Stories, looking at my former classmates’ lives. Some were reaching for freedom as if performing aerial yoga. Others seemed to have lives of independence, balance, and control, as if performing a perpetual juggling act. Me, I joined Fitness First when I was 27. 

So it has finally come to this. With monthly fees giving access to all branches, membership means total, wholehearted devotion, and no going back. 

Now I have everything I need to exercise every part of my body. In these bright open-plan gyms, people mostly focus on their own workout and their own experience. If the equipment you want is in use, there are other machines that perform similar functions. Boundaries between individuals are clearly delineated, and people are almost totally self-sufficient here. No need to talk to anyone. The idea of making friends or chatting seems a bit ridiculous and inappropriate. Much better to observe people from afar. 

The slower, older people draw my attention more than the young exquisite men with beautiful bodies. They tend to stay for longer periods of time, and their lockers are full of stuff, like they spend every day here. They do their stretches in the open spaces in the corner, then read and drink coffee in the pantry area. In the afternoon, when the shades come down to block out the bright sunshine, they pace slowly and calmly on the treadmills. Then they’re in and out of the steam room and showers, wiping themselves dry before leaving clean and invigorated just as the after-work rush-hour hits. Task accomplished, they’ll come back and do it all again tomorrow. 

Fitness First has a longstanding reputation for sensory pleasures, built on the generational fault lines between young and old. Open a dating app during peak times and you will see rows and rows of users listed within 0 meters of your location. Everyone comes here to better themselves, climbing step by step up the hierarchy of aesthetic standards. Peoples’ body language is reminiscent of pilgrims in a place of worship. 

The Island Man is caught in a cycle of relentless competition, where the figure you cut is king and detail is everything. I often think of A saying that he doesn’t like any kind of boundary-crossing behavior, whether physical or verbal. He likes to start as friends, work out together, attend classes, eat, and form a gradual relationship. In this densely populated, frenetically-paced island city, just slowing everything down is romantic. 

One day, showering after my workout, I see that someone has torn away a strip of the rubber seal in the side of the door, leaving a gap big enough to offer a glimpse of the body inside. There’s a single eye framed in the gap. I stare straight at it and keep soaping myself without batting an eye and making no attempt to cover my nakedness or chase the voyeur away with a roar. I don’t stuff my towel into the gap. And I certainly don’t turn away. Yet after this, I will make sure to shower facing the door, always afraid that a disembodied eye will suddenly reappear one day and see me with all my flaws, the still-undefined belly, the rounded shoulders that still look like a child’s, an angelic physique being yet to materialize. 

After showering, I wrap myself in the towel, blow-dry my hair and apply lotion in front of the bathroom mirror. The inverted triangle of my new body is taking shape, but I still feel disappointed. I have always believed that one’s physique is an even more intimate thing than nakedness. I still can’t pick up my phone and proudly take a selfie of my worked-out body and post it to Instagram or Snapchat for people to appreciate or rate. So I get dressed and keep on working out the next day, and the next, so there’s always progress, and every workout is an end in itself. 

Sometimes, a particular gaze makes my heart beat a little faster, or a body causes a temporary distraction. We nod, and leave it at that. Even a slight smile is the result of considerable restraint. At this point, I’m starting to miss the deserted parking lot. Where there were no murky regions of steam room or sauna. Where relationships were straightforward and pure; where I came in clean and left with no thought of lust. 

© Tan Kai Yik

English translation © Luisetta Mudie

Commissioning editor: Wong Kai Hui