Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

AND HERE IS THE CONTRADICTION. Everyone I met in Singapore treated me with the utmost courtesy. I was fed the Singapore delicacies—chili crabs and dumplings and steamed fish and bowls of laksa. I was invited to give a lecture at the new national library, and four hundred people showed up. I was driven around by the sweetest, most solicitous people I'd met on my whole trip. They smoothed my way. What did I need? How could they help? Did I want something to read? Was there anyone I'd like to meet? Was I hungry? Was I tired? Was I having a good time?

I swore I would not carp. I had been sick on my trip, endured nasty governments and horrible hotels, drunk filthy water on dirty trains and eaten disgusting food and put up with drunks and thieves and pests. Here I was in a place where everything worked, everything was clean, everything was on time.

While I wrote my notes at night, my hand began to shake. It seemed ungrateful to be criticizing, yet it was horribly unfair that there was so little room for people to grow and be happy. The government's interest in the arts or culture was entirely fictitious, just another bid for control. For all the bright talk there was a reflex of pessimism when it came to action. No one wanted to have children in Singapore, not many people even wanted to get married. The city-state kept evolving, but because the rule was "conform or leave," Singaporeans remained in a condition of arrested development, all the while being reminded that they were lucky to be governed by inspired leadership—in effect, the Lee family.

Lee was a social leveler, but like all levelers he had elevated himself, introduced contradictions, and created a society in which there were privileges for the few, monotony for the many. Lee and his planners were full of great ideas. The trouble was—and it seemed to me a fault of most repressive, power-hungry people—they didn't know when to stop.

***

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER SINGAPORE. It takes a while to find, and you need someone in the know to help. One of my friends, "Jason Tan," heard me denouncing Lee for sanitizing the place, and said, "Give me a couple of days. I'll show you things that most people don't see."

The first thing I saw, at midnight in the outer district of Geylang, was a skinny prostitute in a tight red dress, praying as she burned so-called gold paper (kim chwa in Hokkien) in a brazier on the sidewalk, a thick sheaf of gilt-embossed fake banknotes—quite a blaze, outside a noisy joint where other prostitutes (kittenish, vulpine) were groping men, who were standing at a bar.

"She is transferring gold," Jason said, "from this world to the souls in the underworld, who can spend it—like Western Union, into the next world."

I liked this unusual Singapore sight: decadent beauty, obvious vice, ancient superstition, defiant litter, veneration, smoke and ashes. There was something about this intense little ceremony, being performed by a dusky dragon lady in a crimson dress, white-faced with makeup, red lips, with long fingernails and stiletto heels, that made it superb.

In a Singapore that had turned its back on the past, that never talked about having been part of the British empire, or despised subjects of the Japanese for four years of occupation, or as the setting for books by Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Anthony Burgess, or even me—Singapore's history had started with Lee Kwan Yew—this prostitute praying in the open, using fake money and real flames, was a strange and wonderful thing.

Something stranger lay beyond her: twelve long streets of whorehouses, massage parlors, bars, knocking shops, and love hotels. Local lady-boys—young men in makeup—were cruising and winking, and so were transvestites; streetwalkers were perched on benches or motorcycles, looking decorous and making kissing sounds of invitation.

"How much?"

"Eighty dollah. Take me."

That was fifty U.S. dollars, and in Geylang it was the going rate for a short time.

"You want I come your hotel? Hundred dollah. Take me."

Some slender women from China with snake-like features and long legs simply held their breasts and offered them in delicate eloquence, saying, "No speak English."

It was the old recognizable Singapore, but there was much more of it than before. Because Singaporeans were encouraged to put the best face on their city-state, and because (as I learned later) none of the sex workers were Singaporean, this wild side was never written about or advertised.

"See? See?" Jason Tan said. "This is Lorong Four—all the even-numbered streets up to Lorong Twenty-four or Twenty-six are reserved for sex."

Lorong is the Malay word for lane or small street, and we were walking up East Coast Road, which bisected the numbered streets, looking east down the lorongs where each shophouse held ten or fifteen prostitutes, some lolling on couches, others sitting inside glass enclosures like aquariums, each girl wearing a number and frantically beckoning as we came near.