Singapore Swing (19 page)

It was to prove a bigger catastrophe than anyone could have suspected.

It's past ten o'clock at night when I step into Outram Park station. This time I'm not going to be snookered in front of vending machines with single tickets that have to be returned at once at the end of every trip: I have bought myself an ez-link card that can be topped up electronically and offers discounted travel, not unlike Ken Livingston's Oystercard. Who copied whom, I wonder.

The MRT has not changed – well, a new line is being built – but a slight climate of alarm permeates Singapore's underground system, most conspicuously at Clarke Quay where a sign proudly proclaims: ‘
For your safety 40 CCTV cameras are monitoring this station
'. The Madrid, London and Bombay bombings have been gravely noted, and a film keeps looping in the flat screens in every carriage. A vigilant lady challenges a youth with a baseball cap who leaves his luggage behind: ‘You left your bag!' she says; he claims it isn't his and runs away; she pulls the emergency cord and stops an impatient guy who is about to touch it. The fears are not misplaced. In Malaysia, an Islamist party is contesting the elections. In Singapore itself, three dozen local members of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group that carried out the Bali bombings have been arrested, after video material was found in Afghanistan.

I stop. Everyone is looking at me. I just had a gulp from a water bottle. Shit! I forgot
.
‘
No Eating and Drinking: Fine $500
'. Thank my lucky stars that we're arriving at Farrer Park, my stop.

Ah, it's different. The unsightly high rises have been demolished and cranes – mechanical ones – occupy the spaces where swallows used to nest. A government official must have visited the place, glimpsed the dirt and disapproved.

The Mustafa Centre still dominates the Serangoon Plaza, and they still let me walk in with my backpack. Inside, the place is as chaotic as I remember it. Imagine a shop where wares of every colour and size are right in front of you, rather than in the storeroom, out of sight. I slip quickly through the watch stalls where the whole stock is mangled like snakes in a pit. Special offers abound:
Buy Two Citizen For $90
– hey, what are they, melons? It's at the luggage section that I begin to warm up to this leviathan of department stores. Wow, I can replace my ageing bags for a tenner! As for the digital camera section – it's enormous, and I spend a good half hour browsing the brands. They are cheap, oh so cheap, and suddenly I realise that I've become a dedicated Mustafa shopper – especially since it's just before midnight; the place is open 24-hours.

Guidebooks revel in remarking that Singapore ain't no Bangkok. It's an unfair comparison, like saying, ‘Goa is not quite Gomorrah'. But where else can I go shopping for camera equipment or change pounds at the foreign exchange centre – maybe deal in gold – after midnight? If I'm peckish, I can have a curry, a Hainanese chicken rice or sit out and enjoy a coffee at any hour of the day. And when I do, and I sit at one of these plastic chairs, I am not alone for long. Soon a young Indian ensconces himself next to me although there are empty seats as far as the eye can see. I check him out with the corner of my eye. He's well-groomed, unmistakably excited and steals glances at me.

Whatever I said about Gomorrah, I take it back.

- 21 -

Attack is the best form of defence and if you want to bully someone, follow them home and make sure they notice you. After the poor showing by the PAP in the peninsular elections, the Malay right-wing press took advantage of the party's post-election blues and started a hysterical denunciation of the Singapore government with imagined wrongs where none were intended or, indeed, had transpired. Editorials wondered why there were more unemployed Malays than Chinese in the city, although the Chinese formed the majority of the population. Columnists raged that the PAP had forcibly moved the Malays out of their
kampongs
to house them into flats. Accusations of gerrymandering by splitting the Malay vote through displacement were being bandied around. A phrase started appearing menacingly in the commentaries: ‘
Do not treat the sons of the soil as stepchildren!
'

Lee Kuan Yew was disturbed at the course these attacks were taking, so he called a conference with Malay groups on 19 July to discuss any grievances including any perceived slights from the government's slum clearance and tower block building operations – to be fair, this was a policy common in the sixties worldwide. A fiery demagogue and UMNO member, Syed Jaafar called his own conference a week earlier than Lee's. On 12 July he delivered an acerbic speech at the New Star cinema in Pasir Panjang in front of huge crowds that included representatives and observers from Malay bodies, and fifteen Alliance members from Kuala Lumpur. Syed Jaafar started by claming that Malays had been oppressed subtly or blatantly in Singapore and, like Mark Antony at Caesar's funeral, he spread doubt by refutation: ‘
I do not want to accuse Lee Kuan Yew of being a communist, but I feel suspicious.
' By the time he'd finished, cries to kill Lee were being heard.

It is hard to think of Lee Kuan Yew as a model of restraint given his latter-day defamation writs against dissenting voices, but during that period he was as patient and composed as a Vestal Virgin. This, in spite of headlines in the Malay press that ranged from overt threats ‘
If some undesirable incidents should happen… Lee Kuan Yew should not blame the Malays, but he himself should take full responsibility
,' to Mohammed-cartoonsstyle agitation: ‘
Teacher forced student to smell pork!
' Despite all this the government-sponsored conference went well with most of the invited organisations attending. Lee himself was subjected to a grilling which he handled skilfully and everything appeared to be on track again.

Two days later, on 21 July, a celebration of the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed was due to be held at the Padang. It was to prove the match that was thrown into the tinderbox.

The Nadezhda Russian Restaurant is the only incongruity on Arab Street where the live-above-the shop terraced houses are distinguished only by the dividers between their sloping roofs and their deep mauve, pink and peach colours: there is Makkah Trading, Aladdin's World of Silk, Haj Textiles and Batik Exchange (Authorised Money Changer). This is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Singapore, demarcated to a community of Bugis that had already established themselves by the Kallang river and later settled by Arab merchants. The Bugis were seafaring folk from Sulawesi who regularly traded in the Indonesian archipelago. The cry ‘The Bugis are coming!' created a frenzy of anticipatory mayhem in the Singapore docks among peddlers, provisioners and prostitutes. But in other places of the archipelago the reputation of the Bugis was one of bloodthirsty cut-throat pirates: the sight of their slender, pointed praus on the horizon was enough to lead a whole
kampong
into flight. I like the plausible but unproven theory that their name has been forever immortalised in the expression ‘
the boogie man is coming
'.

Today's eponymous MRT station at Victoria Road is where the fearsome-looking Bugis used to make merry until the early hours of the morning. It has replaced what some have called ‘
the best-known tourist attraction in Singapore until the late 1970s
': a grid of narrow streets full of food and drink stalls through which transvestites and transsexuals openly paraded their wares. It is not widely known that in the 1970s and 1980s Singapore was a centre of excellence for gender reassignment surgery. Professor Shan Ratnam, Head of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the National University Hospital of Singapore, pioneered the first Asian sex change back in July 1971 and, until his retirement 25 years later, he performed something like 500 such operations. In 1973 – astonishingly for such a homophobic society – the Singapore government allowed transgendered individuals to marry with their new identities and the change of sex to be denoted in their ID cards, a normalisation that would wait for another thirty years to be effected in the UK.

With such, let's say,
infrastructure
behind it, Bugis Street and its
mak nyah
became the porn centre of the town for decades. It is
Saint Jack
territory, a novel where the ‘Sin' in Singapore is vividly described by Paul Theroux. A viewer of the 1978 Peter Bogdanovich film, based on the book and shot on location for six months, can catch a glimpse of a seedy underside – less Padang and more Pat Pong – that has ceased to exist. The film was made under false pretences and when it came out
The Straits Times
reported that the authorities
‘were aghast at its portrayal of Singapore as a fleshpot of a country, rife with gangsters, pimps and prostitutes'
. Needless to say, the resulting movie has been banned since.

I don't know whether it was the book or the film or the feeling that they'd been had that led the government to sanitise the area, but they have succeeded. The bulldozers and cranes arrived in October 1985 and produced a pedestrianised, covered bazaar with narrow lanes and an endless two-way flow of people where it is difficult to walk with a daypack, let alone sashay in high heels, hair extensions and a 36D bra. Two-dollar cheap watches killed the transgender trade.

Or rather, pushed it elsewhere.

The origin of the July riots of 1964 was much debated at the time, but now that the non-partisan diaries of the western high commissioners in Singapore have been published, a general consensus has emerged. On 21 July 1964, 20,000 Muslims gathered at the Padang for the Mohammed Day celebrations. Inflammatory leaflets were distributed (‘
Before the blood of Malays flows on Singapore soil, it would be better to see the blood of the Chinese flooding the country
.') and provocative speeches were made by UMNO officials conflating ethnicity and religion: ‘
It is clear that Allah does not stop Muslims to be friendly with non-Muslims as long as they do not drive them out of their homes and disturb their religion
.'

At 4 p.m. a parade started with the Malaysian head of state and other personages leading the way to Lorong 12 in Geylang. As the marchers moved on, they became rowdier and rowdier. Shops started closing their shutters in advance of the procession. Just before 5 p.m., a Chinese federal constable saw two Malay youths throw an ice cream at a Chinese cyclist but did not interfere; he kept an eye on them, instead. Soon after, half a dozen of their friends broke off from the march. He told them to join up. One of them refused and pushed him away. Twenty-odd Malays ran over and surrounded the constable shouting ‘Allahu Akbar'. A second, Chinese, policeman rushed to his colleague's aid.

The group of protesters swelled to fifty. A third constable, a Malay, tried to calm down the demonstrators but failed. At 5.15 he ran into a coffee-shop to call for reinforcements.

It was then that the two Chinese policemen were set upon. The first one was jostled and kicked until he disappeared under the legs of the crowd. The second one, bleeding from a gash in his head, ran into a bicycle shop on Kallang Road. Before the – Chinese – proprietor could close the door, the mob had smashed their way in and started beating him up, too. He eventually broke free and escaped through a door at the back.