by Paul Theroux
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.
"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."
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?"
One thin-necked unsmiling girl, with pale skin and a fragile body, narrow shoulders and no breasts, tried shyly, turning sideways, to catch my eye. She was attempting to smile, but her eyes gave her away, for as she posed as a coquette, she seemed afraid that I might choose her. She was a soft pale thing with muscles like custard. Was I imagining that she was twisting a little stuffed toy in her hands?
"Maybe later."
"I'll be here," King said.
I got one last glimpse of the girl before he switched the light off. Her child's face stayed with me the rest of the night and saddened me.
We met Gerrie Lim back at the noodle shop. We left Geylang and went by taxi to Katong and the Paramount Shopping Center, where energetic Filipinas howled when they saw us. This horde of clawing, screeching girls fell upon us and tried to drag us into one of the bars that lined the long hallway. We then went back to Orchard Road, where Gerrie brought me to an escort agency run by a lisping and unamiable Indian, who opened a fat album of photographs.
"Russian ... Ukraine ... Romania," he said. They were hard-faced women, alluringly posed in expensive dresses. It could have been a clothing catalogue. "This one works during day in estate agency ... This one teacher ... This one in shop. Booking fee three hundred. You work out the negotiation for whatever else."
He was one of many, Gerrie said after we left. Twenty-four pages of the Singapore telephone directory were filled with escort services. We took a short walk up Orchard Road to a busy intersection at the corner of Scotts Road. In an earlier time I used to go to the nearby movie house. I saw Midnight Cowboy here.
"What's this?" I asked, because we were right on Orchard Road, in the middle of one of the largest shopping districts. I had passed the building twenty times without knowing what was upstairs.
"Orchard Towers," Gerrie said. "Four floors of whores."
We went to the top floor and worked our way down, from bar to bar, seeing the same ethnic variety we'd seen in Geylang—Thai, Burmese, Mongolian, Lao, and all the others. The bars had themes. One was hard rock, another tropical décor. Gerrie's favorite was country and western; most of the girls were from Vietnam.
I bought some of the girls drinks. They smiled. "Please," they said. "Take me."
I said goodnight
to Gerrie and Jason. Alone, I walked back to my hotel, which was surprisingly near. The face of the young girl who had been woken on her mattress by the overbright light at Ah King's stayed with me. Sad, fearful, frail, her small breakable body and bright eyes. What haunted me about her was that she was obviously a recent arrival, not yet debauched, with a luminous innocence, the glow you see on the face of a child.
The next day I was in a taxi, going to a book sale, hoping to stock up for the next leg of my trip. I saw the driver's name on the identity disk on the dashboard: Wally Thumboo.
"Wally, can I ask you a question?"
"Can," he said with Singaporean economy.
I mentioned where I had been prowling—Geylang, Katong, Orchard Towers, even Serangoon Road, where taxi drivers themselves paid for sex—Indian girls for a few dollars, the lowest of the Singapore stews.
"No Singapore girls!" he said to my reflection in his rear-view mirror. That was his boast, and it was perhaps the rationalization for all of it.
"Why not?" I asked.
"We no do, lah!"
And he began lecturing me on the vices of foreigners. It was his master's voice, like listening to Lee Kwan Yew denouncing the morals of Americans while at the same time justifying the red-light district. The place of piggy lorongs was regulated, it wasn't dangerous, and best of all it was sanctioned because it didn't corrupt Singapore women. These were all foreigners. Only foreign women did those things. Singaporeans were well educated and much too pure for that.
"It is shameful for our girls to do such things." And he became sententious and preachy, boasting of Singapore virtue.
THE SLOW TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR
BACK IN BANGKOK, buying a train ticket to the border, I ran into a farang who advised me to take the bus instead. I could even buy a bus ticket here at the main railway station. He smiled when I said that I had wanted to take the train to Cambodia long ago, but that it hadn't been possible.