Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Does the government know about this?"

"Are you kidding? These are government-licensed whorehouses. The girls have medical cards. They have to get regular checkups."

It was more than a few licentious streets; it was a whole district of crowded roads, each one like Gin Lane—noodle shops, open-air bars, brothels, cheap hotels, women sitting on curbstones, teenagers gaping, groups of young men swigging beer; very busy on this hot night, very noisy, very lively. The pedestrians and gawkers were mainly locals—Chinese, Malays, Indians, with a smattering of bewildered ang mohs, the Singapore term for red-haired devils. Because Singapore was well policed, the district was safe; because Singapore is tidy-minded, there was no litter; and because of restrictions, there was hardly any traffic. Just strollers, cruisers, touts, pimps, and the usual selection of Artful Dodgers. The whole district was well organized while allowing freedom of movement. I didn't see any police, yet it was orderly, and I presumed self-regulated, probably by gangs, the Triads, the secret societies that have been enforcers in Singapore since the nineteenth century.

The love hotels—Hotel 81, Fragrance Hotel, and others—were brand-new, several on each street, with prices posted: $25 for two hours. They were staffed by young male clerks in uniforms, in contrast with the pimps and the brothel managers, who were tattooed and looked tough and gang-connected.

"If you just gonna look, lah, get out. You waste my time," a thuggish man said to me, ordering me away from a fish tank full of numbered beauties.

"These guys are mostly ex-cons," Jason said. "Don't piss them off. They'll thump you."

Inside the entrance of every brothel was a Chinese shrine, a Taoist niche, with a furious god, one of the Immortals, and a pot of smoldering joss sticks and some fresh fruit and a dish of money.

"You come here to talk-talk-talk, lah?"

"I was just wondering..."

He was a short but muscular man with a brutal haircut, a scarred face, and badly inked prison tattoos. He darted at me and barked, "Get out!"

The sex industry is fastidiously time-conscious, much more so than most other industries; the minute, not the hour, is the important unit. There is no clock watcher like a pimp or a whore, though given the large amount of time they spent idly awaiting a trick, this seems an unreasonable statement.

"Are these local girls?"

Jason said no. He had the subtle Singaporean eye for ethnicity and racial distinctions. The girls, he said, were Thai, Burmese, Malay, Indian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, mainland Chinese, Indonesian, Mongolian, Filipino. They were the nationalities that served as domestics in Singapore: the scrubbers, the amahs, the child minders, the housecleaners, the car washers. The word here was that no Singaporean girls worked as domestics. The same foreign nationalities were sex workers as well.

Like the stews and baths of Elizabethan London, teeming with fearless whores and promenading clients, drunks and lurkers, spitting and spewing, guzzling beer, slurping oysters, this part of Geylang, with its great sweaty vitality, was vicious too, the women like zoo animals, gesturing and pleading from cages, promising a good time, something special, a bath, a Jacuzzi, a massage, making unambiguous gestures and mouthing obscenities.

"Choose one," the pimps cried. "Hurry up."

What made it unusual was that these women were not in bars, not dancing, not drunk. No strip clubs here, no shakedown. The brothels were arranged like Chinese shops, where instead of merchandise—but of course they were a form of merchandise—the women sat waiting for customers, hissing at them: Choose me!

Towards the end of one lorong, young prostitutes clutching handbags, wearing high heels, stood under the eaves of houses, smiling, or under trees, or near cars. When I approached them, fierce boys appeared, shielding them.

"Don't talk to the girls. Talk to us!"

"You hungry?" Jason asked me. "You want noodles?"

We sat, each of us with a bowl of noodles and a beer, on a street corner at the edge of this floating world.

"There's Gerrie Lim," Jason said. He had told me earlier that Gerrie might show up.

I had heard of Lim. A Singaporean, he was the author of Invisible Trade, about the sex industry in Singapore, not just the business of whorehouses and high-priced escorts, but also the trade in rent boys, lady-boys, male prostitutes. Earlier in his journalistic career Gerrie had had a monthly column in Penthouse magazine, writing about adult films. In the noodle shop he told me he was something of an authority on a famous Singapore porn star named Grace Quek, who in 1995, under the name Annabel Chong, had had sex with 251 men in about ten hours, setting a record (later broken). Annabel's feat had been filmed.

"Her mother saw the movie. Poor old woman cried."