Lion City

by Ng Yi-Sheng

  There was no boom at the stroke of midnight. Horses at the adjacent racetrack stables did not rear up in alarm. Residents of landed properties in the nearby suburbs did not report monkeys scurrying en masse through their windows, urgently fleeing the jungle.

  There was no gaping hole exposed, ten metres wide, beneath the burial mound of the tomb of the 19th century rubber magnate .

  There was no smoke rising from the rubble.

  There was no stench of sulphur.

  There were no workers harmed.

  , former Director of the National Museum, was not contacted by Minister in the dead of night. She did not arrive at the site, still in her pyjamas, escorted by military policemen past hillock and headstone, to inspect the strange hole blasted into the Earth’s crust.

  She did not peer inside the hole and say, “This could be a problem or it could be an opportunity.”

  She did not immediately requisition a set of mountain-climbing gear for the expedition.

  There was no expedition. A subterranean archaeological mission of such a scale would require months of safety checks and background research in accordance with international standards set by UNESCO; the idea that one could be arranged within 24 hours is unthinkable.

  Furthermore, given the Director’s considerable age and size, she could not realistically have been the chief of such an expedition. The notion is particularly preposterous given the claims that shea) refused to deploy an unmanned probe as a scout,

  b) was lowered into the darkness on a kernmantle rope, with only a flashlight to guide her way,

  c) negotiated the flooded interiors of cavern chambers followed by a team of naval divers.

  Given her specialisation in the history of Southeast Asian independence movements of the 1940s and 50s, the Director would not, in any case, have been deemed professionally qualified for such a task.

  The “leaked report” posted onto the online forum is riddled with incongruities and falsehoods.a) The phenomenon of the “city” is presented as fact rather than hypothesis, a supposition entirely at odds with academic rigour.

  b) The depths to which the team supposedly descended would be of a temperature far beyond what the human body can withstand.

  c) The dimensions of the walls are of such “grandiose and bone-chillingly inhuman” proportions as would make their construction physically impossible.

  d) The dating of the rocks would suggest that said civilisation emerged sometime in the Paleozoic Era, well before the evolution of mammals, dinosaurs and flowering plants.

  e) The sophistication of the “city”—a metropolis boasting a harbour, a fortress, a palace of justice, various houses of worship, homes of differing social strata and market squares—would be patently unsustainable in an isolated society. In order to exist, such a settlement must have been connected to a vast network of other cities and vassal states, maintaining a constant exchange of consumer goods and labour.

  f ) The details of the architecture—French windows, transoms and pilasters of classical orders—are laughably similar to those of 1920s Peranakan shophouses.

  g) Obviously, all photographic evidence was Photoshopped.

  Given our national policy of transparency and public consultation over all matters relating to national development, it would have been impossible for the Minister to reach a decision within ten minutes of receiving the Director’s report.

  He did not recommend, based on the expedition’s findings, a complete demolition of the city, given:a) its questionable aesthetic value,

  b) its inaccessibility, limiting its potential as a mainstream tourist site,

  c) its lack of connection with any of the vibrant cultures that make up the fabric of our own multi-ethnic Asian society,

  d) hence its lack of relevance in any notion of “national heritage”,

  e) not to mention the ever-pressing need for land serving residential, commercial and infrastructure purposes, outlined so clearly in the White Paper of 20 .

  There was no resulting altercation in the Minister’s office.

  The Director did not resign in protest.

  She did not issue dire warnings of “forces [that] may be unleashed that foolish mortals such as we are not meant to understand.”

  Personal firearms are illegal in this country. Therefore, what was heard could not have been gunshots.

  There was no trail of blood.

  There was no late night car chase involving the Minister’s bodyguards and a stolen Mazda.

  There was no ominous crack of thunder.

  The Museum Director’s whereabouts are not currently unknown. Documentation can be produced to show her indefinite secondment to the Institute of in Yaren District, Nauru.

  The naval divers have likewise been deployed to NagornoKarabakh.

  There was no body deposited at 3am by the Minister’s bodyguards in the open tomb of .This would have been, among other things, in violation of the site’s status as an officially decommissioned cemetery.

  There are no arms manufacturers in this country that could have produced an incendiary device matching the magnitude of the explosion observed at 6am on ber 20 .

  The Ministry has no dealings with overseas arms manufacturers.

  Likewise, the Minister did not order additional building insurance in advance.

  Our geologists would like to assure the population that minor subterranean volcanic activity is indeed a known phenomenon on our island. It poses no danger to society or commerce.

  Onlookers are being refused entry to the cemetery purely for the sake of their own safety. The supposed “alien rubble” discovered lately in the vicinity is simply the debris of old Chinese tombs.

  Once again, there have been no casualties.

  Our deepest sympathies go out to those families whose ancestors’ remains were not yet exhumed from the cemetery. As an act of compassion, the Ministry has resolved that no further development of the site will take place for the next ten months.

  Trespassers and treasure hunters will be shot.

  For now, resources will be redirected to the construction of the Line, a new extension to the Mass Rapid Transit system which will involve tunnelling below the grounds of the Central Catchment Reserve. The environmental impact assessment carried out on this site shows the project to be fully in keeping with our commitment to ecological sustainability and green living.

  The rumours regarding the tunnels are untrue.

  The rock formations are natural.

  We did not discover a subsequent city, nor cities, as has been erroneously claimed.

  They are by no means as “grandiose and bone-chillingly inhuman” as the first.

  No hieroglyphics have been deciphered.

  No signs of habitation have been observed.

  The riot by migrant workers in Little India on ber 20 was an unrelated incident.

  The Minister is in perfect health. His remarks during his Channel NewsAsia interview on ary 20 were merely a manifestation of his jocular, playful nature. His habit of addressing his shadow by the name of the Museum Director is testimony to their close friendship, which may be conquered by neither space nor time.

  A new motto has been chosen for our Ministry: “The cities below will rise to reclaim the world above”. Based on a verbatim quote by our Minister, this statement encapsulates the spirit of dynamism, development and growth that is the essence of our nation.

  The public should be informed that the police are monitoring and recording all further discussions of this topic and will not hesitate to sequester rabble-rousers for the public good.

  All further questions on this subject will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  Little Emperor

  Late one night, after making love on a faux leather mattress in a bathhouse on Ann Siang Hill, Julius told me the secret his family had guarded with their lives for the past five generations.

  “Ravi,” he whispered. “I am the Emperor of China.”

  “That’s
nice.”

  “Stop it. I am being serious.”

  “Me too. It’s so nice to think I’ve fucked an Emperor of China.”

  He wriggled in my arms, annoyed, but I clutched him tighter, buried my face in his hair, and started tickling his scrawny ribs. We both ended up giggling, rolling around on the mattress, our laughter piercing the thin walls of our cabin into the unlit corridors beyond.

  This was back in the early 2000s, a good time to be a young gay man in Singapore. I’d spent the last twenty years scared stiff of my body: what it hungered for, what God and my parents and the government might do to me if they found out. Now the police raids on clubs had stopped and the PM had said we were humans too, so to celebrate we were holding all-night dance parties, signing up with mailing lists and gyms and saunas, venturing out into the world in search of love, in search of sex, in search of ourselves.

  Later, after mopping up, showering and soaping off, Julius and I sat together in the downstairs bar sipping our jasmine green tea. “You should not have laughed just now,” he told me soberly, as he stirred his drink.

  “Hey. You laughed too.”

  “You made me laugh.” On further reflection, he added, “Maybe that is why I like you.”

  This was pretty romantic of him, I thought. After all, it was only the second time we’d met, and the second time we’d slept together. I’d met him just a month before, prowling the dark rooms of another bathhouse at River Valley. We hadn’t really been each other’s types: he was one of those typical Coke bottle-glassed windbreaker-wearing mainland Chinese students we made fun of in the university, skinny bodies and bad hair and bad breath, and he’d never been with an Indian guy before. Still, our bodies somehow understood each other, and we’d ended up spending hours in each other’s arms, fucking, falling asleep, talking, and finding our way back to fucking once more.

  Then around 5am, we’d exchanged each other’s mobile numbers, promised to meet, and never got round to calling. It was only by coincidence that we’d spied each other this time, locked eyes and decided, yeah, in this case familiarity trumped the thrill of the unknown. Now, in the half-light of the bar, he was holding my hand, telling me all his secrets in halting, painfully correct English.

  “My real name is Aishin Gioro Juren,” he began. “I am not Chinese—I mean, I am not Han Chinese. I am Manchu, the same race that overthrew the Ming Dynasty and founded the Qing in 1644.”

  As the night wore on, the rain beating its steady tattoo on the roof, he told me the history of his people: how they had been horse-riding nomads, battling a timeless empire that called them barbarians, ultimately winning the throne for themselves. For two and a half centuries they’d ruled their former overlords with wisdom and prudence, bringing their culture to unprecedented heights, only to be toppled by the forces of opium, gunboats and a short-lived spell of democracy.

  “1911 was a dark year for us,” he told me. “My great-grandfather Puyi was only five years old: a puppet king, the tool of the eunuchs and the Empress Dowager. He didn’t understand what was happening, why his people suddenly wanted to cut off their pigtails and dress like white men. He spent the rest of his life as a prisoner, first of the Republicans, then the Japanese, then the Communists.”

  For the sake of survival, the true heirs to the Forbidden City had gone into hiding, changed their names and disguised their origins. But the forces of the revolution had been cruel. His grandfather had been rounded up by uniformed teenagers in a show trial and denounced as a feudalist, then ritually beheaded to the applause of a roaring schoolyard. His father had been sentenced to hard labour, and by the time economic reforms came in the 80s, he was already dead of a lung infection, choked by the dust he’d inhaled every day in the gulag’s coalmines.

  As for Julius, he’d been raised by his grandmother, who’d kept him safe from prying eyes in a freezing hut in Liaoning province, teaching him his history, speaking to him only in the forgotten Manchu language, whose script resembled falling knives. He’d excelled in school and eventually won a scholarship to a steaming tropical country where he would no longer have to fear the wrath of Maoist maniacs; where he might learn the skills of kingship, preparing for the inevitable day when China longed for the return of its rightful ruler.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would the Chinese even want an emperor again?”

  He furrowed his brow and crushed the ice in his glass with his straw.

  “How old is Singapore?”

  “You mean since independence? Two oh-oh three minus sixty-five… We’re thirty-eight, thirty-seven, I guess.”

  “China is five thousand years old. We are the oldest civilisation in the world. Not Egypt, not the Middle East. Those cultures, they went up and down, they rose and they collapsed; invaders came in, natives went out. We are unique because we have been the same people, the same culture, for five thousand years. So it does not matter if the People’s Republic lasts for one hundred, two hundred years. We have always been an empire. The emperors will return.”

  There were a few things I could’ve said at this point. For instance, I could have pointed out that once monarchy fizzles out, it’s generally gone for good. Singapore used to have Sultans, but then colonisation happened, and then immigration and the whole damn 20th century, and now the descendants of the royal line were taxi drivers and manual labourers, and no one was begging for them to hop back on the throne. The same was true of the Maharajahs of India, the Shahs of Iran, the Khans of Mongolia, the Tsars of Russia and Serbia and Bulgaria. As far as we knew, the progress of history was a one-way street.

  Anyway, if—and this was a big if—the people of China all decided en masse that they wanted a new emperor, they’d hardly go back to the Manchus; they’d seek out Han Chinese, like themselves. In fact, the new ruler could be any old peasant rebel who took over the government and claimed he had the Mandate of Heaven. The issue wasn’t the royal blood; it was who had the balls to take power.

  But, I didn’t say any of that at the time. Truth was, I didn’t feel any particular compulsion to behave like a dick to Julius there and then. He was looking cuter than ever, actually, in the glow of the muted lamps, his glasses in his lap, his towel round his shoulders, his brow furrowed with an absurdly righteous pride. So I changed the subject.

  “How’s Singapore been for you, then?”

  He stopped frowning, and a warm smile crept over his face. “This is not a bad place,” he said. “You Singaporeans, you like to complain, but you have good lives, you know? You do not have villages full of the poor. You do not have prisons full of people, waiting to be executed for believing the wrong thing. You have good food, not just your Chaozhou porridge, your Fujian noodles, but also your curries, your laksas, your chendols, your, what do you call it, your murtabak. You have apartments where everyone lives together, different races, different faiths. You have shopping malls that sell everything, from America, Europe, Japan.

  “And you have your parties. I remember the first time I walked into a club, you know? All those handsome men dancing with men, hundreds of them, and that funny show with the tall woman in the wig and the feathers and the sari. I felt I had walked into what we call the Peach Blossom Garden, a paradise on Earth.”

  He leant back in his seat, thrusting his feet forward so his toes began to brush against mine beneath the table.

  “This is a place where a man can forget, you know? That he is an emperor, that the entire Chinese Communist Party wants to see him dead and buried in an unmarked tomb, so that not even future generations will be able to kneel at his shrine and mourn the death of a living god.”

  “This is a country,” he said, moving his lips to mine, “where a man can be free.”

  I didn’t keep in touch with Julius. It wasn’t because I was prejudiced, not really. I mean, there was a lot of xenophobia back then, but I could’ve joked about a PRC boyfriend: fresh off the boat, but good in the sack. I even had a few activist friends who would’ve squealed at t
he sight of us: an Indian guy and a mainland Chinese guy, ebony and ivory, a racial harmony poster come to life. But of course, he’d had to tell me this crazy story about his relatives all being dead royals, and that meant drama of epic proportions, probably involving visits to IMH and a regimen of antipsychotics. No, I thought to myself, even on nights when my balls ached and the thought of texting him surfaced in my brain. Not worth the heartache. Not worth the headache. Not worth the time.

  As it turned out, I wouldn’t see him again for another whole decade. It was in a dance club in West Hollywood, one of those endless caverns full of huge sweaty men and flashing lights and choking clouds of dry ice: an imitation of the metropolis of smog and neon that lay outside. Every stripe of queer was there: skinny Pinoy twinks, Cuban leather daddies, Midwestern drag queens, hipster boys, lipstick lesbians, butch Goth girls, baby bears, tank-topped volunteer students offering on-the-spot HIV tests.

  It was past 2am and I was bored, residually jetlagged, sick of being sexually ignored by the rainbow society that paraded before me, 98 per cent convinced that I might as well taxi back to my fag-hag friend’s apartment for some beauty rest on her couch. Then my eye wandered over to a circle of shirtless gym bunnies, more out of curiosity than any real desire. And out of that mass of flesh, someone waved.

  “Ravi! Oh my god! It’s been like forever!”

  It took me a while to figure out it was him. He still had the same cheekbones, the same small almond eyes and short lashes, but everything else had changed. He’d bulked up, pecs and glutes, et cetera; grown taller even, cultivated a trendy buzzcut and decked himself out in designer underwear that peeked out from his Armani jeans. As he grinned, I noticed he’d even fixed his crooked teeth.

  He pulled me over to the VIP lounge for cocktails. Since we could finally hear ourselves think, he gave me a run-down of what he was up to. His accent was now classic Californian, effortless.