Singapore Swing (26 page)

I checked Indonesia's 2000 census later. The province with the largest number of Chinese is Bangka-Belitung with 11.5 per cent. The Chinese in the Riau Islands comprise less than 5 per cent of the population, although, of course, they are concentrated in the cities like Tanjung Pinang. Singapore's apprehension was not generated in a vacuum.

The road is becoming monotonous with little to see except the odd humble dwelling. Yet even if the people are poor, the houses we pass are well-tended and clean, and schools have spacious playgrounds where children are running around boisterously. They are all dressed in a uniform matching the national colours: white and red – red like the earth we see more of as we go south.

‘
Boxít
,' says Deva, pointing at the entrance of a mine.

‘Bauxite,' I translate. Its extraction on Bintan is another source of employment for the locals, although the deposits are now getting depleted. What is still in operation, is the granite quarry in Kijang that underpinned the building craze in Singapore – ever wondered where all the stone and gravel came from? Only recently Indonesia mysteriously banned such exports ‘for strategic reasons', throwing Singapore's perpetual construction boom into turmoil. I'm sure there are other countries – Australia? – that will happily step in.

Sometimes, it takes a look from afar to understand a country, and my short sojourn on Bintan made me understand Singapore better than weeks of roaming its streets. If nothing else proves the city-state's First World status, Bintan does. Their economies are interdependent in a manner than can only be described as imperialistic – if the export of surplus capital defines the ‘ism'. And it's not just in Bintan. The Thailand dealings of Singapore's state investment company Temasek (headed by a member of the Lee family) under the Thaksin government caused a political earthquake and resulted in the latest Thai coup. Singaporeans are starting to discover what Americans and Europeans have warily accepted long ago: prosperity brings resentment. The country has been accused by its neighbours of the most preposterous things: eavesdropping on mobile communications in Thailand (through owning part of the biggest network); cheating at football (it won the ASEAN Cup in 2007 with a disputed penalty); even causing the killer Johore floods (via a construction project across the straits). The government and the press seem at a loss as to how to respond to all these charges and they very wisely keep a low profile.

‘
Bol
,' Deva says now, pointing to our right.

I try to make out the ball – or the ballgame – and it takes me a while to realise what he means. ‘Rubber,' I explain. ‘These are rubber trees.'

But by then he is pointing at a gated entrance. ‘
Prostitut
,' he utters with giggles that require no translation.

Yes, the rich neighbour's presence is everywhere: there are the honeymoon couples bathing in the beauty of the developed north whose natural competitors are Phuket, Seychelles or the Maldives; and there are sex tourists in the poorer south who frequent the prostitute retreats that compete with the lorongs in Geylang. Frankly, if sex tourism is not an indication of affluence, I don't know what is. Deva is pointing at the infamous Batu 24. Along with Batu 16 they are the distances in miles outside the capital where the girls are gathered in cheap hotels and rooms by the hour, costing as little at $5–$6 a session. Geylang prices are reserved for the high-class hookers in Tanjong Pinang's karaoke clubs who offer to Singaporean men the extra excitement of legal, non-procreative penetration.

The irony is that it was moneyed, prosperous Singapore that bore one of the world's prime porn stars. Step forward Annabel Chong, the woman who starred in the world's most famous gang-bang, where she had sex with 251 men in ten hours back in January 1995. (‘
No different from having sex with one man for ten hours
,' she revealed.) Born Grace Quek into a well-off, middle-class family – her mother was a TV presenter – she was a convent-educated, piano-playing Singapore sweetheart. Scholarship material, she studied Law in London and then Art in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. It was then she answered an
LA Weekly
ad for nude modelling that catapulted her to porn stardom, but it was her short time in London that seems to have marked her indelibly: she was notoriously gang-raped on a council estate. It is hard to assess the impact this incident had on this innocent, cutesy girl, but it is easier to detect an unconscious desire to claim back that nightmarish experience as a willing seductress in that ultimate movie of hers, the World's Biggest Gang-Bang.

This film became one of the biggest sellers in the industry, but Annabel never received from the producer the $10,000 (US) she was owed. In one of those twists of fate, the ensuing documentary,
Sex: The Annabel Chong Story
, shot by cinema student Gough Lewis, became an art house favourite and was nominated for the Grand Jury Award in the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Watching it can be an ordeal because of its unrelenting sadness; by the time Annabel Chong returns to Singapore as Grace Quek to ‘come out' to her family who know nothing about her notorious career, all hankies in the house will have disappeared (and by that I mean to wipe tears).

The jury is out on Annabel/Grace, who has now eschewed all publicity and is working as a database developer and web designer. Was she an articulate pioneer who retaliated on behalf of every subservient woman in South East Asia by turning the tables on the male sex and taking control of her sexuality or was she simply manipulated by the porn business? One thing is certain: a society's sexual mores beget extreme sexual exemplars. Just like Kenneth Williams's campness, frigidity and hatred of his own sexuality could only have originated in the homophobic Britain of the 1950s, Annabel Chong's radical, over-the-top succubus persona can only be comprehended as a defiant rebellion against Grace Quek's strict Confucian upbringing in twentieth-century Singapore.

TOOT! TOOT!

The hooting of the
ojek
, motorbikes and scooters – an existential declaration from every motorist to another – tells me that we have finally reached Tanjong Pinang.

I am astounded. Who says time travel is impossible?

Deva drives me straight to the wharf where the tide is at an ebb exposing all kinds of unsavoury matter under the
pelantars
which are hardscrabble houses built on stilts and separated by narrow, plank walkways. Their curved wing-walls remind one of traditional ship's bows; legend has it that the original
pelantars
were docked boats secured onto foundations.

The pervading smell is overwhelmingly of fish whether fresh, barbecued, charcoaled, grilled or dried. In the
Pasar Ikan
, the Marine Market, anchovies, scallops, prawns and seaweed are sold in open sacks. One can easily get lost in the labyrinth of alleys and cul-de-sacs. I turn right and discover a fruit market with the malodorous smell of over-ripe durians and a consignment of ginger; I turn left and catch a glimpse of a Chinese temple celebrating the God of Fortune. I watch fascinated, as a Chinese boy follows his father in kneeling barefoot in front of the weathered scrolls and statues and bends his back to touch his head on the floor –
like a Muslim
.

Deva pulls my sleeve and takes me to a large cage. Through the wooden bars I can see a huge python and three panic-stricken chickens. The snake is asleep – or digesting – but that does not make the chickens any calmer; their terrified cackling has attracted the attentions of the street-kids in the harbour who peek in curiously through the slits. I feel nauseous.

‘Let's order a
sampan
for Penyengat,' I tell Deva. After reading about Singapore's sole mode of sea transport for centuries, I have to come to Bintan to experience it.

The wind is strong and the boat's owner is holding on to the wharf steps with a thick rope as the pointed stem is bobbing up and down. Despite his Indonesian blood and slightness of figure, Deva is much less at ease climbing aboard the flat-bottomed skiff than me. I am more comfortable stepping on its narrow wobbling front; I must have a lower centre of gravity. Once inside, we move on under cover and sit on planks that are almost level with the water. The even, horizontal bottom means that we can run aground or be mired in a tidal shore and not heel over – it looks designed especially for this eventuality. As we start on our way, the wind brings sea-foam from the starboard and our captain brings down a tarpaulin to keep us dry. During the crossing to the pancake of an island that is Penyengat, I look back at Tanjung Pinang to solve one of my questions: yes, Singapore's river port had the edge. Raffles did well there.

‘Penyengat not like Bintan,' Deva informs me. ‘In Peneyengat many Malays.'

The long Penyengat pier has a traditional entrance – a gentle, straight sweep of a roof which changes half way to a 30-degree angle. This is a fairy-tale island perfectly preserved, with no means of motor transport other than a scooter-rickshaw with a wooden, covered passenger-car which is supposed to hold two people – but only if they are slim, archipelago,
orang laut
. That rules me out, so Deva does the honourable thing and rides pillion with the driver. The first place we visit is the mausoleum of the Queen Rajah Hamidah; her grave, full of votive ribbons, is considered a miracle-working
keramat
. The tomb is painted in royal yellow and religious green, combining the traditional Riau pyramidal roof with round domes, a possible Arab influence, or maybe Portuguese.

This is where it all began.

The more you delve into history the more fractal it becomes and the more human the protagonists appear, so let's revisit Singapore's birth. When that last sultan, Mahmud III, of the combined Johore-Riau passed away in 1812, his wife, Queen Raja Hamidah, had borne him only one daughter who died soon after her birth. The Sultan himself had left the question of succession open: his two sons, Hussein and Abdul Rahman were illegitimate; the first had a Malay mother and the second was born from a Bugis concubine. At the time of Mahmud's death the elder son, Hussein, was away getting married; the Bugis faction usurped the throne and installed Abdul Rahman. The feud between the Bugis and the Malays had been boiling for over a century, ever since the Malay Sultan Mahmud Shah was assassinated by his Bugis
Laksamana
at Kota Tinggi. When he died, he cursed his admiral's descendants who, even today, will not set foot in eastern Johore.

After the Dutch arrived in Bintan closing the Riau door to Raffles, he covertly came to Penyengat to negotiate with Hussein, after he had clinched the more meaningful deal with the Temenggong on Singapore itself. The reason Raffles could still grope for some semblance of constitutional legality is precisely because of the woman buried in front of me. Queen Raja Hamidah, the stepmother of both pretenders, was holding jealously on to the
nobat
, the percussive and wind instruments that make up the royal orchestra used during a coronation, so not even Abdul Rahman could claim he had been legally enthroned. Hussein left Bintan in February 1819 and was declared sultan in Singapore. One year later, his son Ali attempted to bring over Raja Hamidah and the tools of kingship, but failed. The conundrum was ended by the Dutch who seized the regalia by force in 1822 and legitimised Abdul Rahman's occupation of the throne. The whole affair only mattered for two years: the Treaty of London that divided the colonial possessions between Britain and Holland also split the hyphenated sultanate of Johore-Riau into its two constituents. That was the nightmare the Queen was trying to prevent.

Abdul Rahman himself is buried behind the mosque he commissioned, the Masjid Raya in front of me, or the ‘egg mosque' as it has been dubbed, painted as it is with a mixture of egg white and lime to strengthen the cement. After the withering of the power of the Riau part of the sultanate, it became a centre of Islamic learning. The remarkable, later figure of the learned Sultan Raja Ali Haji left a history of the Malay people– for once, from the local point of view – a collection of moral-guiding verses, that first grammar of the Malay language, and an encyclopaedia of Malay customs.

This is where it all began, and this is where it all ended.

Or maybe not. Geographical coherence is stronger than artificial borders and so a shadow of the Johore-Riau sultanate has been economically recreated by the governments of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. It is termed the ‘growth triangle' and it encompasses, Singapore, Johore and Riau with the shorthand acronym of SiJoRi. The island of Bantam, next to Bintam, and Johore itself became Singapore's industrial hinterland, whereas Bintan is being developed as Singapore's international beach resort, an upmarket alternative to Bali. After two centuries of living apart, the peoples of the archipelago – Malay, Bugis and Chinese – are re-learning how to live together.