Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The pixie-faced twenty-three-year-old's sexual athleticism, which was both rebellious and weirdly competitive, had a local angle. In a film of her life, she said she was rebelling against the typical Singaporean restraint, the stricture "close yourself to the world." And in an interview she gave in 2000, she had elaborated on this: "I looked back on my entire life in Singapore and realized that all my life I had been processed." Perhaps Singapore repression did inspire her joyless exhibitionism, but it seemed to me that Grace Quek's most Singaporean trait was her reflex to blame the little island for her willful nymphomania. Blaming was a national vice. Singaporeans did not see themselves as individuals but rather as indistinguishable cogs in Lee Kwan Yew's experimental machine.

Gerrie Lim was noncommittal when I laid this out. His equivocation was also a Singapore trait and a survival skill. He was a slightly built but intense man in his late forties, with a polite manner. His overlarge glasses made him seem scholarly from one angle, lecherous from another.

"What do you think of this?" Gerrie asked, and gestured to the activity around us.

"I wasn't expecting it. Maybe old Singapore didn't change. Maybe it just moved to Geylang."

"This is the other Singapore," Gerrie said. "People don't believe it!" He said to Jason, "You take him to Paramount Shopping Center?"

"We go Paramount later."

"You take him to Orchard Towers?"

"Later."

"What's Orchard Towers?" I asked.

"Four floors of whores," Gerrie said. "You want to see an escort service? Russian girls, English ones. Big money."

"Maybe later," I said. I had finished my noodles. "I think I'll just walk around here."

I chose a lorong at random and walked down it, looking left and right at the glowing, freshly painted shophouses, each with the front door open, getting glimpses of girls seated just inside; some had fish tanks of girls. Farther down the lorong, the road narrowed; it was darker, the houses looked gloomier, but still their windows were lit, the distinct movement of women upstairs.

"That's all," Jason said.

We reached the end of the lorong, where a dark lane intersected. No streetlamps here, not even any shophouses, only shadows.

"Might as well go back," Jason said.

But I saw the lighted tip of a cigarette moving towards us, and the person who held it, a man in a white smock-like shirt.

"Good evening, gentlemen. Can I help you?"

"What have you got?"

"Come this way," he said. He almost disappeared in the darkness, but because his shirt was white we were able to follow him. No lights burned anywhere here. From time to time I saw the red tip of his cigarette when he puffed it. When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw that he was leading us between two low tin-roofed buildings through a wooden gate. I followed the scrape and scuff of his loose sandals. Because it was too dark to take notes, I said to myself, Chicken coop. Behind me, Jason was sighing, sounding anxious. The man was beckoning.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"My name is King. Come through here."

He led us into a deeper darkness. No helpful sky or stars or moon here, just walls all around and a tin roof.

"In here," King said.

I could not see anything at all. He shot a bolt on a door and felt for a light cord. In a sudden brightening, King jerked a light on and I saw four young girls come awake, to a sitting position, on a bare mattress. They wore T-shirts and shorts, but because of the dazzle of the bare bulb they squinted and made faces. They were high school age and the room was like a crude bedroom, the girls blinking and covering their faces.

"Which one you want?"

I had been as startled as the girls. But they looked worried and unwelcoming, and who could blame them?

"Maybe we'll come back later."

Sighing, King turned off the light and locked the door. When we were in darkness again, he said, "Maybe you want something a little younger?"

He was leading. He scuffed on his sandals to another low tin-roofed hut and fumbled with a bolt, pulled the door open, switched on a bright light.

More blinking girls, like an apparition in the brightness, five or six of them squirming on a mattress that lay flat on the floor. Their blinking in the light made them look terrified—and they may well have been terrified, for none was older than fourteen or fifteen. They were Thais, with simple dignified faces, very skinny, almost frail, also in T-shirts and shorts, jostling.

King said something to them in their language. No sooner had he finished than they stood up in a little twitching group, their shoulders touching. They were at once fearful and eager, shy, looking pressured, like eighth-graders in a gym class being hectored by a fierce coach.

"Which one you want?"