Singapore Swing (16 page)

Uranium breaks the silence. ‘In one respect, yes, you are right. We Chinese have the Hungry Ghost Festival and its taboos.'

Please elaborate.

‘It is believed that all the dead spirits in the netherworld are released for one month's holiday during the seventh lunar month. They come up to our world floating around. As a form of respect and for them not to bother us, we offer them food and drink. It's like Halloween, but that's only one day.'

Actually it's more than Halloween. It is a touching remembrance of those souls who have otherwise been forgotten: the ghosts of the unwed, of the childless, of those to whom no offerings were made through the year – and no offerings means they are hungry.

Sunkist joins in. ‘The Japanese have the same custom except that it lasts one week. For us, it lasts one month.'

I contemplate the havoc ‘trick or treat' might cause for 30 days.

‘There are lots of taboos that our parents passed on to us about this seventh month,' says Uranium. ‘Not to go swimming, not to get married, not to move house, not to stay out at night. Of course that is
exactly
what we do in SPI. This is our busiest month!'

‘The main taboo that still gets observed is not to get married,' says Sunkist and looks at Uranium with an unmistakeable stare.

But he's in full flood and doesn't notice. ‘The reason why the Chinese believe it is not good to get married during the seventh month is because when we are talking about a wedding, we are talking about a feast. Even if you're not superstitious, you don't want your guests to freak out at the idea that during the dinner ghosts will also be sitting around the table. And, of course, the food will not taste any good.'

‘Why won't it?'

‘It is believed that when Chinese make offerings, the food will lose its original taste and smell because the ghosts eat it. We did a scientific test
lai dat
.'

I notice that they are discreetly leaving the rest of the jellyfish for me. I oblige.

‘Like what?'

‘A blind tasting. We asked people to try the food before and after it was offered to the ghosts. Then we asked them to distinguish between the food that had been offered and that which had not.'

‘And?'

‘About fifty per cent could tell that the food had lost its taste after the offering,' Sunkist says coolly.

Could it be chance? I am trying to calculate the odds, but my probability theory is hidden in the cobwebbed attic of my cortex. Whatever – it sounded like good fun.

‘You can join in the fun,' says MJ. ‘We have an outing in two weeks' time. Will you still be around? Do you want to join us?'

I jump at the invite. ‘It's a date,' I say.

They pay for my dinner.

- 17 -

I pass through Chinatown on my way back to my hotel. It's only been a few years since I arrived in Singapore beslinged, dispirited by my debility and with a fifty–fifty prospect of a potentially crippling operation. To my own surprise and delight, the medication and the rest during long intercontinental flights healed my arm enough for me to climb glaciers in New Zealand – that is, completely. True to my promise, I have returned the same – if not a little healthier– but Singapore has changed. Even six months is a long time for this bite-size state, as they told me in Tiong Bahru.

Yes, one of the first things I did is return to the Bird Arena early on my first Sunday morning, before the nightlife devoured me, as is its wont. This time, I knew something about the suburb itself: it was the first public housing project in Singapore, the brainchild of the Singapore Improvement Trust which operated until 1960 when the Housing Development Board, the HDB, took over. Despite the lack of maintenance, there is something earthy and liveable in those three- and four-storey houses that still stand – most noticeably in Seng Poh Road and Eng Hoon Street – compared with the later Gotham City tower blocks of the HDB. The pavements may be cracking and the smell of mould spores might permeate the air, but the curves, the lines and the dimensions are more agreeable and convivial.

Huh?

I stop and look at my map. Was it here? Yes it was, but –

The old café is no more. A high fence informs us of ‘Danger/ Keep out/
Bahaya Jangan Dekat
' and in a few more alphabets I can't interpret. The block of flats next to it has been covered with green netting as if ready-wrapped for a takeaway. I know where to look: up, where a wiry old signboard is only just discernible: ‘Tiong Bahru Bird Arena
–
Mata Puteh'. I shake my head. It can't be! Tourist leaflets are still advertising the song contests! They just can't
demolish
it!

Well they can. I approach the fence and read the poster with trepidation: ‘Proposed conservation... Addition... Alteration
'
– I am too upset to read the lot – ‘Change of use... Hotel development with provision of restaurant at roof and erection of bridge link...'

Yep. Just what Singapore needs: another hotel.

Mutely, I move to a café nearby and fight the inclination to have a stiff drink, opting for a strong cup of coffee instead. I notice another backpacker couple with a map walking around, lost. And another. And another. If you didn't know where to look you'd have missed this minor catastrophe.

When the waitress brings me the coffee, I quiz her about the Bird Arena. How long has it been closed?

‘Six month,' she says with a jaded expression. Obviously I'm not the first person to have asked her that.

‘When I was last here, there were birds,' I say, ‘there was singing...'

She is busy and doesn't want a heart-to-heart. ‘Six month long for Singapore,' she says curtly and walks away.

And it is over two years since I've been here.

On the grander stage the PAP is still in power. Goh Chok Tong's interregnum had just come to an end by the time of my last visit, and Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew's son, is now in charge. But, as has become tradition in Singapore, none of his predecessors has left Cabinet. Lee Kuan Yew, now in his eighties, has been retained with the title Minister Mentor and Goh Chok Tong as Senior Minister. I've heard of guarantees regarding smooth transition of power, but this verges on the extreme.

The monsoon has not yet finished, and it is raining relentlessly. Over the Johore Straits, there are permanent floods and two people have died from leptospirosis, a disease transmitted via rat's piss. Even parts of Singapore flooded temporarily (‘an unlucky combination with high tide', taxi drivers keep telling me in order not to lose face). At least the constant downpour keeps the bloody mynahs out of sight.

Along with the monsoon, a ban on smoking indoors has descended upon the city that seems congenitally attracted to prohibitions. Inside the Pearl Centre, a public notice is barking threats: the National Environment Agency has apprehended several people smoking within the complex and is proceeding with summary action against the mall management; the management in return threatens to forward the particulars of any smokers to the agency and hold them liable for all costs incurred. All in all, a rather neat angle on the subject: we save you from death but sue you to death, instead.

Chinatown is wearing red, the auspicious colour of celebration, for it's the time before Chinese New Year. Despite the incessant rain, awnings and marquees have been erected and the passing hordes of shoppers are asphyxiating: if a house is full during this period, it will be full throughout the year, for Happiness equals Abundance equals Wealth. Stocking up the larder is a must: cured meats, candied delicacies, glutinous rice puddings, fruit with special connotations. You can buy melon seeds and pomegranates signifying many children; pomelos whose name ‘yo' also means ‘to have'; kumquats that symbolise prosperity since the first character is also that of gold itself; pineapples whose name is homonymous with ‘good luck has arrived'. And everywhere you turn there are red papercuts, red lanterns, red candles and red calligraphic epigrams in golden font.

I sort of give up on central Chinatown for the duration except for the Samsui women's restaurant on Smith Street; during my compulsory visit there, I am unnerved to see a male chef 's head peeking from behind the kitchen door. I know that sounds stupid but I had bought the medicinal lore hook, line and sinker: the least I expected was to see a centenarian sorceress slowly steaming that ginger chicken to perfection. To top it all, a blasphemous newcomer proclaimed brashly its existence outside: ‘Erich's Wuerstelstand: the Last Sausage Kiosk Before the Equator'. I sigh; is nowhere safe from the Bratwurst?

Yes, I am back at the Chinatown Hotel. I admit it's a little frayed around the edges and I note that it now charges $40 for every guest who stays in the room after midnight but I'm used to this place. I did try staying at one of a bunch of new ‘boutique' hotels nearby, but in an Asian context you should think of them as ‘bijou'. The shower head was over the toilet, the fridge was only large enough for a single can to fit snugly inside and there was no cupboard: instead, a long horizontal pole with three hangers emerged from the wall at eyebrow level. I didn't last a full day, especially since, after I lay on my bed, my trousers hung on top of me menacingly like the legs of hungry ghosts. I escaped to the Chinatown Hotel where my double bed is almost as big as the room in that ‘boutique' hotel and the fridge is the size of a minibar – after my purchases in a day or so, it would look like one, too.

The Kreta Ayer HDB flats are being ‘upgraded'. This is the carrot the government has been offering to the voters: PAP wards get their tired-looking skyrise honeycombs to look like Docklands maisonettes. Mind you, the government doesn't need to promise anything here, since they'd even vote for a Haw-Par statue if it ran under the PAP banner: this is now the Tanjong Pagar multi-MP constituency, where Lee Kuan Yew himself gets re-elected year after year. Disturbingly, for the first time in Singapore I notice homeless people. Maybe it is the monsoon that's made them seek shelter inside the Kreta Ayer estate but there they all are: old, flimsily thin and wearing only a vest and pantaloons, they sleep on the concrete floors, their head resting on their sandals. The bunch of keys that lets you march into the First World Club seems to lock more doors behind you than it opens up in front.

I walk to the end of Keong Saik Road and I hardly recognise it. Last time I was here I counted 15 brothels. I can now spot only eight, but I'm reliably informed there are ten. Hotel Pacific has disappeared and those above-mentioned ‘boutique' hotels have opened plus a dozen or so eateries. At Number 20, I locate one of the successes of gentrification:
Whatever
, a New Age shop and vegetarian café, whose walls are lined with books on everything kooky and holistic – from Alpha-alignment to Yoga and Beyond. Its coffee is the biggest attraction, although the leaflets advertising ‘Egyptian Shenu Attunements' and ‘Past Life Workshops' make compulsive reading. The Indian corner shop is still there but, along with my Pokka aloe vera juice with pulp bits, I can also buy time at one of their four Internet machines. The seafood restaurant still serves king prawns the size of lobsters but it must have changed chef, because they serve them with enough monosodium glutamate to turn you allergic even if you are immune. On my first day there, I left looking like Madam Mim in Disney's
The Sword in the Stone
after she has caught the virus with which Merlin the Wizard finally defeats her.

Backstage is still defiantly flying the rainbow flag over the New Year's revellers in Central Chinatown. On my first night there, I met a Malaysian visitor who urged me to fly to KL on the next plane.
The Etiquette Guide to Singapore
explicitly suggests avoiding the topic of politics during small talk, but there was no stopping this guy dissing all things Singaporean and painting an idyllic paradise to be found on the other side of the Straits of Johore. When I steered the conversation to the delicate subject of leptospirosis, he got agitated as if it was my piss that spread the pathogenic serovars.

Manazine
, the only attempt at a gay magazine in Singapore, has gone out of business. Ten thousand free copies were distributed in selected outlets but, come the third instalment, ‘concerned parents' complained about the ‘easy accessibility of the magazine's homosexual content'. Immediately, the MDA cautioned
Manazine
to restrict its availability and sounded its death knell: it was the last issue that I read at Backstage last time I visited. Happy has also closed and Nation, the international gay party, after running for four successful years, was discontinued despite the Singapore Tourist Board advertising it abroad; the government decided that it was not prepared to allow any more public gay festivities. It seems that the new PAP brooms under Lee Junior are more prudish than the old mops.

This time around, it is Tantric I frequent the most, with its candle-lit tables and muted
Little Britain
videos. There's a good balance of smoking in the yard in front, drinking in the middle and dancing at the back. It is there I meet Jacky. She is sipping a Martini and, as I look anxiously over the bar, she tries to put me at ease.