Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Singapore is a success, though."

"Cities are always places of high productivity. He wouldn't have been able to run Malaysia."

"Tell me why."

"Because he is articulate but incoherent."

"How would you rate him?"

"I don't rate him at all. Singapore is an example of banal economic theory," Lingle said. "A monkey could do it."

Punishment for not toeing the government's line was always on the Singaporean's mind. It shows in the Singaporean face, typically an anxious face—pouting kittenish women, frowning nerdish men. When I'd lived in Singapore—because of my writing, and for speaking my mind in lectures—I had not been popular with the government, and the government had not changed. After three years here, I was told by the new department head—a whiny, fretful-faced local man, politically connected—that my contract would not be renewed. I was fired for being a political liability. You talk too much, my colleagues said. You tell too many jokes. I published stories in Playboy

magazine. So I left under a cloud of growing xenophobia. Thereafter, I became someone a loyal Singaporean could not praise, which was why, decades later, I was still being rubbished.

"If you play along, you advance here," an Indian labor organizer told me. I had met him in the Indian district, on Serangoon Road. He was bringing me up to date. "But if you criticize, the PM will crush you like a cockroach."

"There is no other place like this on earth," said my old club-going Singaporean friend, whom I will call Wang. He meant this in every possible sense. He was a citizen, and he spoke with the usual Singaporean ambivalence.

Nominally, Singapore is a democracy. In reality it is no such thing. Any critic of the government is subject to criminal proceedings, heavy fines, libel suits, threats, or jail. The leader of the opposition party once said euphemistically that the government had engaged in shady dealings. A lawsuit followed. The Singapore technique is diabolically effective. Foreign critics like Chris Lingle are deported or placed under house arrest, and if they are journalists, their newspapers or magazines are sued. This has happened numerous times to the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune, Bloomberg.com, and other news outlets. Singaporean critics or aspiring politicians are pursued through the courts with fanatical zeal, and sued with such severity they are bankrupted. Judges are appointed by the government and are indeed compliant. Destroyed financially, an opposition politician can't run for office—can hardly live.

"But he doesn't beat people in the streets," Wang said, speaking of Lee Kwan Yew, who now held the title of "minister mentor" and whose son was prime minister. "He," in Singapore, always meant Lee.

I reminded Wang that Lee had famously praised the Chinese in 1989 for brutally suppressing, shooting, and imprisoning the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, backing the Chinese government in the massacre of thousands. And Lee's uncompromising approval of this cruelty had frightened Singaporeans to such an extent that similar demonstrations had never occurred here, though individually critics had been persecuted.

"He's very shrewd," Wang said. But Wang was also shrewd. He said, "Think of the Machiavelli line about 'economy of violence.'"

"Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys, the Chinese disciplinarians say."

Lee gave a rare press conference when I was in Singapore. I saw it on television. He had aged in a remarkable way, not just becoming white-haired but acquiring withered, almost simian features—not the thuggish scowl of a Triad chieftain he'd had when I'd last seen him, but a pinched and unforgiving look that I associated with unhappy captives, like a caged thing scowling through bars.

"I can't retire," Lee protested at the beginning of this talk. And throughout it he kept up the tone of an old meddler who says, Look what you're making me do! He went on, "There are things in Singapore that no other minister can do." Even at the age of eighty-three, he refused to retire and play golf. "I still have ideas. I want to tweak it a bit more."

Lee's use of the word "tweak" always meant meddle and micromanage and fiddle with people's lives.

"Why not leave that to younger politicians and leaders?" someone inquired.

"I'm the only one who understands what Singapore needs," he snapped. "Next question."

A foreign journalist suggested obliquely that this was an arrogant way of governing—after all, he had been out of office for some years.

"If I were arrogant, would I be talking to you?" Lee said, and told the man to sit down, adding, "There are very few things you can tell me about Singapore—what will work, what won't work. That's my value to the government." He was annoyed at having been defied. Before he left the podium, he said, "I know what will work here because I tweaked the system to get us here!"