Singapore Swing (13 page)

Boon Haw built the villa, a six-domed folly with a panoramic view of the sea and the islands beyond, for his beloved brother Boon Par in the 1930s. The furniture was imported from Europe, the inner domes were lined with gold and the terraced gardens covered with sculptures representing Chinese myths. The villa contained an additional extravagance for the thirsty city: a swimming pool. Despite the brand new Pulai Reservoir built in Johore in 1929, the island's perennial freshwater supply problem soon turned the pool into a pond. Swallowing his pride, Boon Haw had its sides ornamented with mermaids, crabs with human heads and giant fishes that could have swallowed Jonah and the whole of Judaea several times over. In accordance with their personal motto – ‘
that which is derived from society should be returned to society
' – the brothers opened up the gardens to the public so that their compatriots would be reminded of the traditional Chinese beliefs, for there they were, sculpted in all their gory glory. This is Singapore's oldest standing attraction, entertaining– I am careful choosing that word – visitors since 1937. The outbreak of the war made the brothers flee: Boon Haw to Hong Kong and Boon Par to Rangoon where he died in 1944. When Boon Haw returned the villa was decrepid, so he had it demolished and turned into a theme park, restoring many of the statues and building even more.

We pass through the gate under an inscription trying to explain what the villa is: ‘It is a park. It is a big moral lesson. It is for everyone.' Well, it's not for everyone and many a Western – sorry,
Caucasian
– visitor remains perplexed among the morals to be gained from the parables depicted. For a start, irony, tragedy and subtlety are absent from Chinese mythology. Flawed heroes are a product of Western tradition: Hamlet, Faust or Madame Bovary are as alien to the Chinese as elliptic their own tales appear to us – and nowhere is that more blatant than in the Tableaux of Vices and Virtues.

So let's play guess-the-moral: Qing Chen is gambling all day while his wife is running her grocery business. There he is at bottom right, absorbed in his card passion. We see Mrs Chen sending her son down a slope to fetch his father from the gambling den, because her business is booming, and she needs help. But the son pays no attention to the traffic and a car – a plain blue Volkswagen Beetle – runs him over; his dead body, bleeding from the head, is the centrepiece of the composition. And the moral of the story? Is it, ‘Look left, right and left again when crossing the road'? Is it, ‘Keep to the speed limit in built-up areas'? Nah, it's ‘Gambling can cost you everything' – silly me.

How about this scene? In the first panel, two friends have gone to camp in the woods. A bear appears while friend B is asleep. So what does friend A say? ‘A bear! I must escape at once! No time to warn my friend! My safety comes first! I will climb this tree!' In panel two we see him being devoured by the bear: ‘Friend! Friend! The bear has got me. It saw me hiding on the tree. Help me, please.' And what does friend B think, who is still seemingly asleep during this time? ‘I am so afraid. Maybe if I lie down on the ground and act dead the bear will go away.' Now guess the moral. Is it, ‘If you see a bear pretend to be dead?' Is it, ‘Bears climb trees too, stupid!' No, it is, of course, ‘Be a loyal friend'. Where is Aesop when you need him?

This one is a little easier, although its elaborate finale still eludes me. Wang Qing once saw a large sea turtle being carried to the market to be sold for soup. He bought it, and rather than cook it, he set it free back into the sea. So far so good, nice touch mate, I know people who are horrified to pick a live lobster from a restaurant aquarium, too. Years later, Wang was travelling in a boat that sank in a typhoon. As Wang was about to drown, the grateful turtle appeared and saved him. Moral of the story: ‘Be kind to animals'. Right, a bit stretched, but a point I can at least get. But there is more. The turtle presented him to the Dragon King in his undersea palace who showered Wang with presents. Fine, the turtle owed him one and now they were even, so what's the point of the extra presents? In my books he now owes back to the turtle! And there is more: the turtle then took him to his destination where a rich heiress fell in love with Wang and married him. Hold on, this is not a moral tale, it's an advertisement for the World Wildlife Fund!

While I am pondering all this, a sudden shower makes us seek refuge in Hell. Well, it is the only covered space in the villa and better in Hell than wet.

‘So you Chinese believe in hell?' I ask Chang. ‘I thought everyone east of Karachi believed in reincarnation.'

‘This is
before
reincarnation,' says Chang. ‘When you pass the nine courts of hell where you are punished, you end up in the tenth court. There, the presiding judge determines your future fate, an old lady, Meng Po, hands out the tea of forgetfulness and your past life is wiped from your memory.'

‘You know the story well.'

‘My parents used to bring me here,' Chang admits with a blush.

Well mine didn't, and I can't get enough of these slasher dioramas that depict punishments on human statues with extraordinary ferocity. In the first court of the cavern that is Hell, the newly-arrived souls look at themselves in the Mirror of Retribution where all their past sins are revealed to them so that their torture could begin. And so it goes that in the second court prostitutes drown in a pool of their own blood and gossipers have their tongue pierced. In the third court we observe in lurid detail how ‘social agitators' are tied to a red-hot copper pillar and grilled alive. On the other hand, officials who were convicted of graft have their hearts removed, their knees crushed, and their faces scraped like an onion. At that point it hits me: it is impossible to penetrate the Confucian mind unless one appreciates that crimes against the order of society are as important as those against an individual; no wonder the PAP insists on exemplary punishment for any officials found guilty of corruption. In the fourth court not only those who stole or refused to pay rent to their landlords, but also those who evaded taxes are ground by a stone mallet.

In the fifth court of hell, moneylenders who extracted exorbitant interest rates are rolled down a hill strewn with sharp blades. As for the sixth court – woe betide those who were caught with pornographic material or those who committed blasphemy: some kneel on iron nails, some are sawn in two and others are gnawed at by rats. Drug dealers and rapists are boiled alive in the seventh court whereas in the eighth, those who violated the code of filial piety have their intestines torn out alive. In the ninth court, smugglers and arsonists are being bitten by snakes and stung by bees. As for the tenth court, the Hall of Oblivion, Chang was dead right about Meng Po and her potion. But even in reincarnation our free will is being exercised: it's up to us to cross one of six bridges and 18,000 ways leading to a particular form of future life.

I check. The torrential rain has subsided. We can safely leave Hell now.

‘Do you believe in all this?' I ask Chang as we move out.

‘I believe in the ethics,' he replies.

‘And in filial piety, too?' I tease him, as the statue of Wang ‘Lucky' Xiang awaits us just by the exit from Hell. There he is with two carp fish next to him, flung from a hole carved on the ice by his boiling hot tears.

Chang looks away. ‘I am a good son,' he protests. ‘Anyway, I have a brother. He will pass the family name on.'

Right next to Wang is a tableau David Walliams would appreciate.
Bitty
I think, as a certain
Little Britain
sketch comes to mind. Madam Zhang Sun, emaciated and hungry, is being breast-fed by her stepdaughter in order to survive a famine – at least grandma has no teeth. I find such affection both touching and nauseating. It has kept a whole culture subservient and conservative, but at the same time, it provided a safety net for older people – provided they had offspring. What can such a society make out of Western concepts of individual ‘inalienable rights' and ‘the pursuit of happiness'?

We walk towards the battle between the rabbits and the rats. This is a huge and violent composition with larger-than-life rats and hideous, sharp-toothed rabbits attacking and devouring each other with gusto. A sign explains the background of the story. A couple of white rabbits were happily married, but a black rat moved into their hole, seduced the wife and ran away with her. The other rabbits became angry, attacked the rats and a fierce battle ensued. In a touch of that wonderful oriental logic we are told that the orange guinea pigs were unsure which side to cheer for and as a result they were attacked by both sides. I know it doesn't read as odd as it looks but it's in the details that the weirdness manifests itself: two rats with red armbands use a stretcher to carry away a casualty whose four paws have been bitten off and reduced to bloody stumps; a guinea pig spears a giant rat with a lance; a rabbit steadies himself up to fight with a guinea pig in a boxing ring.

I despair: ‘What is it all about?'

Chang points at the sign that provides the moral: ‘When outsiders interfere, trouble can result'.

‘And you understand that?'

Chang, like the educated Singaporean he is, knows how to argue his corner. ‘Of course. Look at what happened in Iraq.'

I take a long breath. ‘No, no, but this is... a private matter. Single male rat seduces married female rabbit. It's their problem. Why do all individual sins have to be acted out and punished collectively?'

‘Private matters start a train of events that lead to a war,' he replies. ‘Like Helen of Troy.'

Smartarse
, I think. Chang stands next to me arms folded, a huge smile in his face, his intelligent eyes sparkling mischievously. I want to leave the Haw-Par Villa immediately and take him straight to my hotel before that midnight curfew.

‘The
Iliad
was an epic poem,' I start but I know I am on a losing downward spiral, ‘and it didn't have a black and white moral like this, and anyway, if you want an alternative interpretation, this rats and rabbits business can be interpreted as a parable against interracial sex!'

Like a good Singaporean, Chang avoids any more confrontation and walks on. We follow the story of the Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea; we stop by the Three Gods of Prosperity: Fu – the deity of Luck, Lu the deity of Wealth and Shu the deity of Longevity and pause to ask for all three; we check out the panels of the Journey to the West depicting the adventures of Xuán Zàng, Monkey, Friar Sand and Pigsie; and we marvel – if marvel be the word – at Boon Haw's cars. If you thought that there must be limits to pretentious exhibitionism, think again: his first car was a 1927 German NSU with a metal tiger's head and a horn that reproduced the animal's roar. The second was a 1932 Humber with gold stripes on the body and a much bigger tiger's head – complete with fangs – welded to the radiator.

We come to a stop in front of one of Singapore's most photographed statues: the Maitreya or Laughing Buddha. You all know the one: he's bald, ludicrously pig-eared and dressed in an orange robe that exposes a long necklace gracing a round belly, one that you rub for luck while having your photo taken. As the inscriptions inform us, the Maitreya was not a full Buddha, but a bodhisattva, an enlightened being who kept postponing his entry into nirvana in order to help the human race. His last documented incarnation was as the monk Chi Tze who lived an itinerant life in the ninth century AD teaching the principles of Buddha.

‘I quite like Buddhism,' I say to Chang. ‘I like the way it isn't prescriptive. Buddha's teaching points to the moon; it isn't the moon itself. There are many ways to the top of the mountain, and each one of us can follow a different one, our own private
tao
. It doesn't matter if you follow Christianity, if you follow Islam or whatever, as long as you reach the top.'

‘Yes,' Chang says. ‘That's what my parents taught me. There are many ways to the top of the mountain.' He suddenly grins. ‘And mine is through gay sex!'

If this is how you will ‘know thyself '…

‘Dutiful son,' I tease him.

‘Dutiful son,' he repeats, and his eyes shine.

K
ing Hui of Liang was sitting smugly on his throne on the great wooden dais made out of Chen-hai hardwood timber whose underside was ornately carved with birds, dragons, flowers and human figurines. He was looking over the winding, sloping road to the shrine of Guan Yin the Goddess of Mercy, who saves us from the Three Calamities and the Eight Disasters.

King Hui closed his eyes for he felt ethereal, drifting, up on his balcony. The autumnal day was bright, but not too warm, and the few clouds in the sky appeared more as a decoration for the distant mountains than as a threat of rain and thunder. And there was he, a ruler – a just ruler everyone claimed – of a vast and prosperous land, in peace with itself and its neighbours. The world was a benign place and nowhere more so than today, here, and now.

In order to put a brake on his daydreams, he cast his eyes on the street below where a man had appeared, leading a black hulk of a bull from a rope attached on a nose ring.

The King was perplexed by the spectacle and asked: ‘Where are you taking this beast? This is the way to the shrine of Guan Yin.'

The man immediately fell on his knees and replied, ‘My Lord, I was going to consecrate a bell with its blood.'

The King looked at the bull and amazingly the bull looked back with a piercing, mournful glance as if it could comprehend what had been decided and what was to follow. More remarkably, the bull's gaze was not furious or frenzied, but calm, stoic, unruffled.

The King was moved.‘I cannot bear its demeanour,' he said. ‘It appears to me as if it is an innocent person going to a place of execution. Let it be.'

The man, still kneeling, asked deferentially. ‘Shall I then dispense with the consecration of the bell, my Lord?'

The King deliberated for an instant and replied: ‘An unconsecrated bell will not be heard by Guan Yin in the realm of
sagga
. Perform your sacrifice, but swap the bull for a sheep.'

As the man obediently made his way back, King Hui rose from his throne and left the balcony. He wanted to make sure that he wouldn't be there to witness the scene when the man, this time pulling a sheep behind him, made his way to the shrine – for what we don't see, we don't know and what we don't know, doesn't hurt.

- 13 -

With over 9,200 birds and 610 species in 20 hectares of lush and misty jungle greenery, even the raging avian flu could not keep an inveterate twitcher like me from Jurong Bird Park. I admit, there is some Cringe Factor Seven involved: a birdsof-prey show, a ‘Breakfast with the Birds', a ‘Be a Falconer' experience, a children's ‘Parrot Panto' and worst of all, an hourly chit-chat with pelicans, hornbills and starlings. (Did I get this right? What do you do there? Exchange gossip about the flamingos?) Yet despite such family-style tweeness, this is also a site of serious research. Amongst other firsts, the zoo harbours the world's largest breeding colony of Humboldt penguins outside Patagonia and has pioneered a successful conservation programme of the highly endangered golden conure whose sweet amiability turned it into one of the most sought-after aviary birds. You are excused if you've never seen any, because they normally live in Brazil and they are on the verge of extinction; but if you
do
know what they look like, then you must own one, so shame on you.

Still, don't underestimate the ability of the bird park to switch suddenly from the scholarly to the seriously syrupy: immediately past the entrance I am confronted with the spectacle of half-a-dozen grinning kids posing for photos with parrots perched on their shoulders. Kids also love miniature railways which is why the elevated ‘panorail' – an automatic motorised train that allows you to observe the park from above– is so popular I have to queue to board it. Once on the move I look down, and sometimes sideways, at golden-backed and fulvous-breasted woodpeckers, roseate spoonbills, snowy egrets and scarlet ibises until we reach the first stop at the Lory Loft, a large lory aviary. There, forty feet above ground level, I wander on an elevated boardwalk where tittering lories feed literally from my fingertips. They are of unimaginable variegated brilliance: rainbow, dusky, blue-streaked or yellow-bibbed, they come and perch fearlessly on my shoulders as I place the odd mango peel by the central feeding tower. Now let me put on my professor's hat for a second and make the distinction:
lories
– to be found in Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea – should not be confused with
lour ies
that live in Africa (nor, of course, with
lorries
which are a different proposition altogether). As if to emphasise the lories' native habitat, there is an Australian Bushman's hut by the aviary exit. I order a cappuccino and thankfully I pay and get served without those complicated Coffeemania quadrilles.

The waiter proudly proclaims his provenance with the thickest Aussie accent this side of Porpoise Spit.

‘Do you like the coffee, mate?' he asks me.

It's not often you get that sort of question, but maybe he wants a chat with a fellow Caucasian. I had to admit the aroma was exquisite.

‘Now you mention it, yes, it's excellent. The best coffee I've tasted in Singapore.'

‘I grow it myself.'

‘Sorry, you mean
grow
it or
grind
it?'

The waiter grins in the mocking way Australians do when they know something you don't.

‘I have a business here in Singapore. I grow beans – in a large garden or a small plantation, I don't know myself.'

‘Good life?' I ask.

‘Great life, mate,' he replies. ‘Singapore is a place where you can make a lot of money very quickly. They micromanage your life, but they don't regulate your business'.

Rather abruptly, he points at my sling.

‘What happened to your arm?'

Time to go.

‘Swimmer's arm,' I reply. ‘You know, like tennis elbow.'

I get up as the panorail arrives.

The next stop is Waterfall Station and I disembark to marvel at its special attraction. At one hundred feet, Jurong Falls is the world's highest man-made waterfall – this being Singapore, the water is recirculated – and provides the setting for a humid tropical aviary. Hoopoes, crested louries (note the ‘u'), bee-eaters, weavers and starlings nonchalantly cross my path as I walk there and back. But the real special attraction awaits me as I return: two white parakeets are perched right above the station seats copulating with loud gurgles. All children look up – many giggling, most befuddled, some expressionless – whereas every parent pretends not to hear the orgiastic noises and checks the clock in the hope that the next panorail would show up
now
! Not even its eventual arrival makes the parrots flinch, for they are well into their mating with ardour that puts any semi-respectable rodent to shame.

I've heard that Jurong had a fantastic ‘World of Darkness' but I'm still surprised at its prodigious size. The extensive owl section feels almost complete – what with barn owls, spotted-wood owls, those huge eagle owls, arctic snowy owls, Malay fish owls and the great Ural owls (what, no ear-tufts?) Despite all this and more, everyone queues up to see the ‘mad woman bird' (bush-stone curlew to the rest of you) which is a short, gangly, grey-streaked Australian bird with large plaintive eyes and an eerie call that's been compared to the howl of a mad woman – sound engineers who are working on
Jane Eyre
adaptations, take note. Poor bird, it has probably lost its voice with all these kids tapping on the glass to make it shriek. I catch the eye of their unresponsive parents and tut-tut. To my horror they mistake my disapproval for impatience and start tapping on the window themselves.

Back outside, I stroll past the African hornbills and South American toucans but make a stop by the Window on Paradise. Much that I consider myself well-travelled, I have not seen any paradise birds before. Observing the intricate plumage displays of the twelve-wired bird of paradise – so named for the dozen fragile feathers that delicately sprout from its tail – I can understand why those first Portuguese sailors chose to conclude that such beauty belonged to angels and named the birds accordingly.
All this adornment and for whom?
I wonder, as I spot the drab, reclusive female, that keeps her beak open like a dog and looks more like a moorhen than the mate of those dazzling males. What do they see in her?

I've left for last the jewel in the crown of Jurong: its Penguin House. Here, the temperature is a constant 16ºC and penguins, unseen outside Antarctica, waddle around a pool set in a landscape of cliffs, nesting alcoves and burrows. There are emperor penguins, fairy penguins, macaroni penguins (so called because their stringy crests look as if they've been attacked with a plate of spaghetti) and that colony of Humboldt penguins. The success of their breeding program is due to a unique lighting system that recreates the passing of the seasons and allows the birds to maintain their annual biorhythm. But forget the science and watch them dive, for Jurong Park treats the visitor to a specially constructed viewing gallery with a ninety-foot wide window that allows us to witness the antics of these fascinating birds underwater; they swim swiftly like torpedoes and playfully like dolphins, their movements as graceful as they are dynamic.

I hear the thunder and decide to leave. It is not easy to get to Jurong Bird Park by public transport – you have to take the MRT to Jurong East and then you hop on a bus – and it is not easy to leave either. Just take care that it doesn't start to rain while you're waiting because the bus stop has no shelter. There is no downpour like a South Seas downpour and after one minute's non-stop drenching, I might as well have taken a dive with the penguins in their pen.

- 14 -

What caused this jumble of people to storm into the train compartment? Is there a special event, a football match or whatever? There is one British whimsicality that has not rubbed off on the ex-colony: the scrum to get in is as vigorous as the struggle to get out. As usual, my sling acts as a pot of honey to a grizzly with everyone pinning it on me with as much strength as they can muster. But hey, I make it to Farrer Park above ground, and my immediate impression is that I've landed on planet Bangladesh.

The recent rainstorm has just flooded the empty area in front of the exit and through the clean, crisp air I can glimpse something novel: rotting rubbish, unmaintained high rises and moulding fruit being pecked off by mynah birds and magpies. For the first time in Singapore I see swallows flying. They probably shoot them in the CBD – if the streetcleaners can't stand gum, they must go ape with birdshit – but here any droppings would make absolutely no difference, lost as they would be among the, well,
dirt
. Yes, real dirt – I nearly cry for joy. What's more, the food shops do not offer
char kway teow
or prawn
mee
but good, fine English fare like chicken Madras or sheek kebab. They don't call this district Little India for nothing; what, with the lack of hygiene and all, I feel like I'm in London.

Yet this India is more like that of old: both Muslim and Hindu. At Farrer Park, the temples are mosques like the tired Masjid Angullia in the corner – looking more like a villa in Marbella than the Taj – and as for the names, well, there is only one plastered all over Serangoon Plaza. Here is Mustafa Jewellery, there is Mustafa Foreign Exchange, an Al Mustafa restaurant and a Mohammed & Mustafa general store. That's discounting the Mustafa Centre, a sixties glass-and-frame box where bhangra muzak hums shrilly in the background. Like the other shoppers, I am prepared to surrender my bags in the entrance, but they wave me on. Why this racial profiling? Don't they think I can shoplift like the best of them? Mind you, there is nothing to tempt me. The Mustafa Centre may only be a few metro stops up from Orchard Road, but the product choice, budget manufacture and stacking (one shelf full of detergent, the opposite full of light bulbs and Mickey Mouse pencils) is unequivocally subcontinental.

What is this on Jalan Besar? Is it a bazaar or the most tired and limp car-boot sale, I have witnessed? The sellers are all gloomy, tetchy and uninterested; maybe the sheer god-awfulness of the second-hand crud has got to them: old typewriters from the age of Noel Coward, black-and-white dusty television sets, mountains of mobile chargers (as if the average user doesn't already own a dozen), well-worn trousers, boxing gloves (not exactly superwaxed), useless currency notes hardly in mint condition, pens that do not write, clocks that do not tick, penknives that do not cut, muddy boots, mouldy video tapes, soiled tennis balls. I stop, stunned. Who will buy this guy's faded family pictures? That fax machine, will it turn on? As for that Coca-Cola can, easily the most functional commodity on sale: it is past its sell-by date. I look around for the holy cows but thankfully they're missing. Lee Kuan Yew's autobiography is titled
From the Third World to the First
. Looking around, this designation is sorely tested.