Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

An expatriate woman from Europe who had lived in Singapore for many years said to me, "Singaporeans have no grace. They are the rudest people I've ever met. I was pregnant with my second child. I had a tiny child by the hand. On a bus, no one would ever stand up to give me a seat." A moment later, she added, "But I love living here. I have a comfortable house. My children have good schools. It's well organized. It's safe."

Lee, a Cambridge graduate, is a great admirer of the British. He has a prickly history with the United States—his socialist utterances in the 1960s provoked the CIA to subvert some people in his party with payoffs and intrusions. He has never forgiven America for this.

"He's a frank admirer of President Bush," one of my Singaporean friends said. "But he disliked Clinton for his irregular private life. Do you remember when that American boy damaged the car and was caned for it?"

This was Michael Fay, an eighteen-year-old who was stripped naked, bent over a trestle and tied, then ass-whipped with six strokes. He also got a heavy fine and four months in prison—this for spray-painting graffiti on cars in a Singapore parking lot. Fay was a punk who deserved to be disciplined. But whipped? Yet his punishment was mild, practically ridiculous, in comparison with the torture meted out to many others in Singapore's jails, whose cases never got into the newspapers: many more strokes, long prison sentences on political grounds or for thought crimes, or death by hanging for drug offenses.

Wang said, "Fay would not have been caned had Reagan been in power. Lee was trying to teach Clinton a lesson, showing Clinton that Singapore disapproved of him by whipping the American boy."

Some U.S. senators lodged a protest. President Clinton called the punishment "excessive," though his outrage at the caning must be weighed against his unseemly haste just two years earlier, in 1992, to stop campaigning for president in New Hampshire and fly back to Arkansas to authorize the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded black man.

The American reaction to Fay's punishment provoked Lee to reveal in an outburst what he really thought of American society and how he viewed Singapore. "The U.S. government, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. media took the opportunity to ridicule us, saying the sentence was too severe," he said in a television interview. The United States "does not restrain or punish individuals, forgiving them for whatever they have done. That's why the whole country is in chaos: drugs, violence, unemployment, and homelessness."

Like the head of an isolated cult who preaches to his people that only they are pure in a wicked world, Lee actually believes that America is "in chaos," and he enjoins Singaporeans to believe this nonsense and to count their blessings. We Americans are undisciplined and bestial, out of control and criminal. Singapore is the opposite, orderly and safe, nonviolent and hard-working, and will continue to be so under Lee's leadership.

Some time ago, on a rare trip to Paris, so a well-placed friend told me, Lee was granted a meeting with François Mitterrand. Lee began lecturing the premier of France on governance. After Lee had left the room, Mitterrand said, "Who is this ridiculous man who wastes my time? Running Singapore is like running Marseilles. I am running a whole country!"

Lee's Anglophilia is shared by Singaporeans, but it is based on a dated notion of English ways, a set of social snobberies—tea-drinking, cricket-watching, and harmless affectations—and an overformal way of dressing in the Singapore heat, turning up the air conditioning so they can wear tweeds and Burberry sweaters. Like Lee, Singaporeans are assiduous, honest, tidy to the point of obsessiveness, and efficient. They also tend to be inflexible and stern. They are fluent in English, though with a small vocabulary, and in pronunciation and idiomatic bewilderments they have made the language their own. Their jaw-twisting yips and glottal stops are so sudden and glugging that some words can sound less like language than a gag reflex.

Lee is a vain and domineering patriarch, and with the passing years he sounds more and more like the head of a cult than a political leader. His son Lee Hsien Loong is prime minister, and a chip off the old block. Hsien Loong's wife, Ho Ching, is the executive director of the government-linked Temasek Holdings. The Lee family is the nearest thing to a political dynasty. Yet Lee never smiles. He is never satisfied.

"No one ever gets a compliment here," a Singaporean woman told me. "There is no flattery. People are suspicious of compliments or any expression of appreciation. Toughness is the style. Good manners are suspect."

In a Singapore joke, a man goes into an antique shop and sees a lovely image next to an ugly one. "I know that's Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy," the man says, "but who is that ugly one?" The shop owner says, "It's Kwan Yew, the god of no mercy."