Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"No," I said. But it did. I saw my earlier self in my office, working my way through a stack of students' essays about The Changeling. I was twenty-seven years old. I was on the lowest lecturer's salary, earning the equivalent of $50 a week. I had a wife and two children to support. I was trying to write Saint Jack. I wasn't arrogant, I was desperate.

My novel was about a man of fifty, hard up in Singapore, with dreams of happiness. I was hard up; I felt fifty. I had dreams too.

"And another one..."

"Oh," I said, because being belittled made me remember, "I lived in a tiny house with no air conditioning."

"This one said you were unapproachable."

"I was in my office from nine to five—Enright insisted we keep office hours. 'Where's Paul?' he'd say, even when I didn't have to deliver a lecture. Students dropped in all the time. I thought they liked me."

She was still studying her notebook page. "One described you as a 'less than perfect teacher.'"

"Less than perfect! Ha! Probably true."

"Do you remember a student called Kirpal Singh?"

"Very well. A nice kid. What I remember was that he was poor and studious, odd man out—a Sikh among the Chinese. And the government took his scholarship away. The government's line was that studying English didn't build the nation. They wanted engineers and economists. Kirpal got screwed and so did lots of other scholarship students. More of Lee Kwan Yew's meddling."

She was reading: "'Singh recalls that Theroux would be late for class, not return assignments on time, and fail to give individual feedback, making him feel shortchanged as a student.'"

"Are you going to print that?"

"I'm going to write a balanced piece."

"Shortchanged?" I said, my voice becoming shrill. "I stuck my neck out and complained to the vice chancellor when his scholarship was taken away!"

Several interviews were published, with the anonymous abuse and innuendo, and the one with Kirpal Singh's criticism. In that piece Kirpal, who was fifty-seven, was described as "a poet and associate professor of creative thinking at Singapore Management University."

I called his office. I said, "Kirpal, this is Paul Theroux. Why are you saying these terrible things about me?"

"They misquoted me," he said, and gabbled a little about his innocence. "Want to meet for a beer?"

"Time for a Tiger," I said.

Over fish-head curry at an open-air restaurant, Kirpal was shamefaced and apologetic. I smiled as he explained that he had said to the reporter I was sometimes late and occasionally didn't return assignments and now and then ... He was bearded and grizzled, still wearing a turban, hot-faced, jolly, and plump. His new wife was Chinese. They had a small boy. It was wonderful to see Kirpal, talking about his poetry, still alive, animatedly trying to convince me that he had not maligned me, while I laughed and drank Tiger beer.

"There should be a retraction," he said, tugging his beard.

The other interviews rubbished me in the same way, not for being a bad writer but for having been a poor teacher, for my dubious character. In Singapore, a place that demanded absolute loyalty of its citizens, accusing someone of being unreliable or disloyal was much worse than saying his writing was bad.

An old colleague who got in touch after the interviews invited me to his club. He said, "They were so unfair. You must be annoyed."

"Not annoyed. Fascinated."

One of the characteristics of autocratic rule, even a benign, well-intentioned autocracy like Lee's Singapore, was that whispers and betrayal, survival skills, had become modes of being. Wayward citizens were punished unmercifully: anyone caught with drugs was hanged, and even petty criminals were flogged with a rotan, a narrow rattan rod, sometimes thirty or forty strokes on the back or buttocks. What I have written so far here would be enough to get my ass whipped in Singapore.

Strange blooms, eh? Cruel and unforgiving government, eh? Drop your pants and bend over, Mister Thorax! You're getting fifty cuts of the rotan!

An exaggeration? Not really. My friend Christopher Lingle, the scholar and journalist, wrote an op-ed piece for the International Herald Tribune in 1994 that mentioned "certain south-east Asian countries ... bankrupting the opposition by means of a compliant judiciary." He did not mention Singapore by name, yet the Singapore government took umbrage. Lingle lost his job at Singapore's National University and was charged with contempt of court and violating a law against "scandalizing the judicial system." He was placed under house arrest, from which he cleverly escaped, doing a midnight flit out of the country.

I happened to see Lingle in Bangkok, on my way here. He is a serious and widely published political economist and university professor.

"Lee takes too much credit for Singapore's success," Lingle had said. "What has he actually produced? Seventy percent of Singapore's businesses are foreign-owned."