Singapore Swing (11 page)

I am not sure if Dan has heard me recount all this, because, fortified by several beers, he has been leaning on me for the past quarter of an hour.

‘Go to yo' place?' he finally proposes.

I think of the signs at reception:
Absolutely no guest in room after midnight.

‘I live in a hotel. They don't allow guests after midnight.'

Dan isn't so sure. ‘Can,
lah
,' he says, which in Singlish means ‘Of course they can and will.'

The lights come on and force a decision. I could at least try to sneak him in.

Well, the native Singaporean was right: he walked into the lift while I went straight to reception to ask for my key. But no, Mr Censor, you can pass this chapter with a PG certificate: as soon as Dan lay on my bed, clothes and all, he fell asleep. This is more than I can say about me, since he turned out to be a nightmare of a sleepmate. He tossed and turned every five minutes like a crackhead in rehab; he kneed my spleen with panache; and he spread himself upon the bed as if posing for the Crucifixion.

I jump. Now he is scratching himself all over.

I push him away and look carefully. There are no marks on him, no spots, no rashes.

Except
–

On his back I can see a soft, mother-of-pearl scar where an incision appears to have been made. Now that I pay attention, his body has many such scars, as if he's suffered the death by a thousand cuts. I do not understand, and I'm uneasy with what I don't understand.

I wake Dan up. He sits up fuzzily.

‘You were scratching – badly,' I say to him.

‘No worry,' he says timidly.

‘What's going on?'

He looks dejected.

‘Before, when I was little, I had eczema,' he says, though the pronunciation of his affliction was such that he has to write it down (‘exma') for me to understand. ‘I am fine now but when I sleep, I scratch. No worries.'

‘Only when you sleep?'

‘Only,' he repeats.

‘How odd,' I murmur.

‘Odd,' he whispers – affirmation by repetition.

‘I mean, you might bleed. Your scratching is so vigorous.'

He shows me his nails. Well trimmed.

‘I take medicine to make my skin soft. But can no' stand in sun. Danger,' he replies.

I sigh. ‘Can anyone sleep in the same bed as you?'

He nods.

‘Can. My bo'friend. Only he can.'

‘Your boyfriend? Where is he now?'

Dan rolls back into the sheets.

‘No mo' boyfriend,' he says and almost immediately falls asleep. I don't. I can't – not a wink.

As soon as the sun comes up, I ask him politely to leave.

U
nlike his nickname, Wang ‘Lucky' Xiang, was not fortunate; for a start, he lost his mother to illness at the tender age of five. His father, toiling in the fields from sunrise to sunset, could not bring up his son alone. So, six months after his dear wife had gone to meet the Jade Emperor in His Celestial Palace, he chose to marry beautiful but wicked Zhu. In the beginning all was well, and Zhu was kind to little Lucky Wang, for she was young and healthy and would have kids of her own. But a thousand days passed and then another thousand and, like a slowly uncoiling snake, the truth crept upon Zhu: she would never become pregnant. Her husband had a child, but she would have none to call her own.

Her heart poisoned with bitterness and envy, she turned against her stepson.

She punished him for the most trivial things. When he played with other children and returned home spattered with mud, she would not serve him his bowl of rice. When he had a nightmare and his screams woke her up, he got a beating. When one day he came back from the woods with hardly any mushrooms in his basket, she locked him outside in the howling wind. And every time she whispered calumnies in his father's ear: Wang gets into fights with other boys; Wang can't sleep at night because he's lazy and nods off during the day; Wang is disrespectful and doesn't do his share of household chores. Eventually, his father, too, turned against him and the poor boy was abused and beaten by both.

Yet Lucky Wang knew that the greatest virtue in this world is
xiao
, filial piety. How could he complain to his father who laboured and sweated everyday so that he, Wang, could have a roof over his head and a shirt – however worn out – over his shoulders? How could he bear a grudge against his stepmother who cooked him his meals – however meagre – and warmed his father's bed at night? So Wang kept his head down, and he patiently and uncomplainingly bore his cross.

One thousand more days passed and an unusually harsh winter set in. Deep snow covered the farm. The lakes were frozen and the small river that cut the forest in two became icily firm. It was as if life itself had gone into hibernation like the bears and the squirrels. Worse, Zhu fell ill with a fever, like Wang's mother. To lose one wife is a tragedy, to lose two is a catastrophe. Wang's father became a shadow of himself: he turned paler as Zhu turned more ashen in her bed and lost more and more weight as she became slowly emaciated. The family had slaughtered their last chicken weeks ago and had been on a diet of rice and water ever since. Nothing to hunt, nothing to rear, everything killed by the unrelenting frost.

Zhu was drifting in and out of a coma, while Wang and his father stood praying by her side. One morning, she opened her eyes: ‘Only eating fresh fish will cure me,' she whispered with difficulty. ‘I saw it in my dreams.'

Her husband started weeping, for he knew then she was doomed. How could anyone go fishing in these inimical conditions? He cried so hard that he didn't notice Wang who got up, stuffed his clothes with paper and straw to keep the cold away, and walked out silently.

Wang marched to the Emerald Lake, where, only a few months ago, he'd caught the plump carp that swam in its waters. At first he tried to dig a hole in the ice with his hands, but didn't get far before his nails broke and his blood turned the snow red. He tried to beat through a hole with an oak branch, but the glacial hiss of the air numbed his fingers and his grip. Defeated, he lay prostate weeping and tried to melt the ice with his body heat.

As his tears fell down his cheeks, he thought he heard a distant voice: ‘Your stepmother beat you and turned your father against you and yet you are endangering your life on her behalf. Why?'

Through the mist of his tears, Wang tried to see who had been talking but in vain. ‘Who's there?' he shouted.

Nothing. No one.

Ever obedient, he replied: ‘Because she is a companion to my father. It is my duty to try and save her.'

He raised his chin and his eyes darted around trying to detect the slightest stir.

‘Who's there?' he shouted again.

This time, the remote voice replied.

‘Look down,' it said.

Wang lowered his eyes and they were immediately engulfed in vapour, for his tears had driven through the ice like molten lead. They created an inch-long opening that was steaming larger by the minute, as if a coal brazier had been suspended in the middle.

And lo and behold, two large golden carp flung themselves through the hole and landed next to him flapping their gills and gasping for air. An astonished Wang stunned them with the oak branch and carried them home running at full speed to take them to his stepmother.

We don't know what became of Zhu. The story doesn't tell us whether she survived the winter after eating the fresh carp or whether she appreciated her stepson's selflessness, felt ashamed and changed her ways.

That's not the point of the story, anyway.

- 11 -

The Orient might start east of Vienna and Asia east of Istanbul, but the real Far East starts in Singapore. Once upon a time, the Orient stood for sensual mystique and untamed wilderness: impenetrable mountains, subservient females and fearless warriors surfaced during your uncharted voyage. The Orient was for the adventurous, the defiant, the slightly insane. Its appeal was its cruel unpredictability: British emissaries could be thrown down a scorpion-infested cellar at the whim of a ruler; pirates could surface and ‘rommage' your calicoes, your camphor or even your crew; sailors and ships might disappear in the eye of a typhoon and never be heard of ever after. Then again, guests would also be defended by a clan to the last teenage boy's breath; women respected and treated like precious jewels; and friendships forged would last a lifetime. Nowadays the Orient is mapped, its languages have been studied and its religious writings translated. It has become predictable as globalisation transports values to and fro and national values are forced to gauge their stock in the global mindplace of ideas. We now know what the Orient is about – and we should have noticed earlier, when we crossed the first bazaar.

It stands for retail culture.

Nowhere is this more true than in Singapore where consumerism is a marker of identity. Hong Kong may be the cultural hub of the Far East; Thailand its pleasure beach; Japan its locomotive; mother China the giant political spring – but Singapore is its marketplace. This lozenge-shaped island has been described as ‘a shopping mall with UN representation' and sometimes the sarcasm almost rings true. As Prime Minister Goh admitted during his National Day rally speech in 1996, ‘Life for Singaporeans is not complete without shopping'. What truly seems to unite the kaleidoscope of its communities is their love of the iPod and there's no better place to buy one than Orchard Road.

This stretch used to be an area with gambier and pepper plantations, Singapore's soil not being conducive for the cultivation of much else. When Raffles arrived, there were already such holdings on the island belonging to a Chinese family. It was their estate that Captain James Pearl bought in May 1822 – on today's Pearl's Hill – and started cultivating pepper; gambier vines lead a symbiotic existence with pepper trees entwining themselves around them and providing natural fertiliser. Gambier is not a shrub that gets a name-check in
Gardeners' World
but as a component of a well-known regional upper it is quite valuable; chewing a combination of betel seeds, gambier paste and tobacco wrapped in leaves soaked in lime brings a euphoric rush. There is a rather awkward side-effect: the betel nut turns the tongue and gums crimson red so an addict looks at best Ebola-diseased and at worst an extra out of a John Carpenter zombie spectacular as many a hapless rickshaw driver, who's driven his tourist clients away just by smiling, has found.

The desirability of gambier was high in the tanning industries – and no, I don't mean a beauty product to make you bronze under the sunbed: it was used to dye fabric what we now call the colour khaki. Singapore was the major world producer of gambier until its poor soil was depleted and the growers moved to Johore where by the 1890s there were reportedly 4,000 such plantations. Gambier continued to be one of Singapore's main exports until the explosion of the tin and rubber trade in the Malay peninsula took over and eclipsed everything else. The name of the street today originates after the move of the plantations out of Singapore and the emergence of fruit tree cultivation in the area.

As Orchard Road was close enough but out of town, it was an ideal place to bury the dead. Stephen King cognoscenti might relish the factoid that an old Chinese graveyard stood where the Mandarin Hotel is situated; that Indonesians from Bencoolen were buried in the premises of the Grand Central Hotel; or that a Jewish burial ground was demolished in the mid-1980s to make way for Dhoby Ghaut MRT station. The only reminder of the Orchard Road of old is the Thai Embassy at number 370, still housed in the premises acquired in the 1890s by His Majesty Rama V, King of Siam, immortalised in the musical
The King and
I
. Hats off to their defiance, given that Thailand's balance of payments would skyrocket should they ever decide to let the developers get their hands on the 18,000-plus square metre estate. Because, as anyone who has been dwarfed among the back-to-back hotels and shopping centres can attest, there is nothing left on Orchard Road of fruit or gambier any more.

I walk around aimlessly, mentally groping the shadowy image of Singapore as I remember it, but it is not the opaqueness of my imperfect memories that frustrates me. It was not far from here, on Bencoolen Street, that I stayed in a cheap hostel seventeen years ago. Nothing remains of it or the Chinese family hotels around it. I splashed out for dinner at the Omar Khayyam on Hill Street, dubbed as ‘the best Indian restaurant in the world' by more than one travel guide. I feel righteous indignation when I can't find any trace of it among the hotels and malls that have jumped up in its place.

The face of modern Singapore bears the stamp of a single man more than any other country in Asia outside Mao's China. It has been moulded in the image of Lee Kuan Yew –‘Harry' to his friends – one of
Time
magazine's 20 most important Asian leaders of the twentieth century. (Twenty? He easily slips into the top five). Singapore may owe its genesis to Raffles but its present character, appearance and constitution is the work of Lee Kuan Yew who led the city through decolonisation, union with Malaysia and, ultimately, independence to its current status as a global financial centre.

The verdict of the future historian will be tough, for Lee has been a ruthless, highly intelligent autocrat but one with the right ideas. Incorruptible, sharp-witted and abrasive, he is, like his city, a mass of contradictions. British-educated, his brand of
dirigiste
policies would not be out of place in centralised France. Hakka Chinese by descent, he abhorred the tribal politics of his neighbours. Democratic-minded, he didn't desist from making a deal with the communists in the early life of the PAP party he founded. He offered statutory seats to the opposition when there was a danger that his party would monopolise parliament using the first-past-the-post system, but he also sued persistent critics to bankruptcy and political oblivion. He created a powerful executive apparatus and imposed draconian laws – such as detention without trial– but he then used these powers judiciously and sparingly. He has created a state where capitalism reigns supreme, tempered with a programme of income redistribution unique in Asia. And in the true spirit of someone who does his job well, he has not made himself indispensable: in 1990 he stepped down to oversee his legacy as ‘senior minister' under the primeministership of Goh Chok Tong.

If there's been a constant in Singapore's PAP governments, it is that nothing stands still and everything is mutable. A slip road is required for a new highway? The bulldozers come to flatten any houses standing in the way (Woodsville Road for the Pan Island Expressway). A new metro line is extended? Demolish hospitals and schools if need be (Youngberg Hospital and St Andrew's school for the North-East MRT Line). To us it may appear heavy-handed; to Asians, used to paternalistic rule, it comes as naturally as haggling. At least Singapore is keeping some nature reserves and colonial structures; if you want to witness some good old wholesale destruction of the past, let alone the environment, go to Hong Kong.

And so it is with Orchard Road: it has become a triumphal avenue to Mammon with monuments to the deity erected along its path; from the Forum to Plaza Singapura, I have never attempted to walk all the way in between in one go. Expats flock to the Tanglin Mall for the clothing and large sizes on offer, the bookworms to Borders in the seven-storey glass cone of Wheelock Place, the lower-income workers to the Lucky Plaza where they can bargain to their heart's desire, the music-lovers to the Heeren that boasts the largest HMV shop in Asia and the trendy to the designer boutiques of the Paragon: everybody has their own favourite mall on Orchard Road.