A New Yishun Urban Legend: The Mysterious Woman in a Weird Mask

Yishun is to Singapore what Area 51 is to America.

That is to say where ALL strange things in Singapore occur.

I mean, the place is so horrifying mysterious that Netflix chose to run a Stranger Things promo in Singapore featuring Yishun.

Talk about international fame.

The next news comes straight out of Yishun and is likely to be filed under “Is this even news” or  “What has my life come to”.

The Yishun Mask Lady

As the name suggests, there seems to be a masked lady lurking in Yishun.

Given that the lazy, crazy, hazy days of our perpetual 35 degree Celsius summer is back, you may be forgiven if you’ve thought it was an N95 mask.

If anything, this mask is child’s play despite its government-endorsed efficiency in combating harmful airborne particles.

For the Yishun Mask Lady is highly-conspicuous, shockingly affective and downright terrifying in my opinion.

Lights off, nary a sound and Boo!

Not enough of the strangeness?

Bham! Here comes another.

Searching for a logical answer to these sightings, The Straits Times informs that the Yishun Masked Lady is not a myth, and is in fact “none other than local actress Wendy Toh.”

What Does It All Mean?

Speaking with AsiaOne, Wendy shares “that the masks were initially for a theatre performance about consumerism. But as she continued, she was amused by the masks and decided to wear them out for fun.”

She added that each mask is handcrafted spontaneously from materials found lying around in her house from cardboard boxes to Ikea bag, and features different expressions.

The actress recounted a time when she wore a mask to a neighbourhood fruit store: “An elderly couple could not stop laughing at me. They were asking me so many questions. It’s like you can expect anything in Yishun.”

In the end, I suppose what I can surmise from this is:

1. It’s fun to wear masks in random places.
2. Why always Yishun?
3. Wendy is bringing up a conversation about consumerism and recycling.

For which I will obligingly mention that #recycle always appears alongside images of the Yishun Mask Lady on Wendy’s Instagram.

Waste, Recycling and Plastic

According to the Business Times article, “Singaporeans generated some 7.70 million tonnes of solid waste for the whole of 2017″ with overall recycling rate standing at 61 per cent and a domestic recycling rate of 21 per cent.

While there was a 50 % recycling rate for paper and cupboard and a near 100% rate for ferrous metals such as iron, the recycling rate for plastics stood at a paltry 6%.

This was, in fact, more than a two-fold decrease from a high of 13% in 2005.

That’s not all.

According to research ” Singaporeans take a staggering 820 million plastic bags from supermarkets each year, amounting to two to four bags per person for every shopping trip.”

And that’s just plastic bag alone, not forgetting all the loose items in the bags held together with and by plastic wrappers.

At the end of the day, I suppose Wendy has a point to drive across.

If you don’t recycle, the Yishun Mask Lady will haunt you.

That or your wallet hurting if the “Pay-as-you-throw” system comes into play if our waste disposal continues on an upward trajectory.

Good Luck

#Themediumisthemessage