It is he who has transformed this equatorial port into a center of modernity. He has remodeled the city, manipulated its climate, remade its inhabitants; he has created the most efficient and least corrupt administration of all the Asian states, paying its officials like captains of industry. It is he who has established one of the most advanced educational systems in Asia, whose teachers receive some of the highest salaries in the world. There is no question that his experiment has been highly successful.
The price? A city without life, a humdrum people, and dictatorship. Despite the appearance of a democratic political system, with parties, a parliament and elections, Lee Kuan Yew has never left anyone in the slightest doubt that the power was his and would remain so. He has used all possible allies, and destroyed them one by one as soon as they threatened to become rivals. As for opposition, no one has had the ghost of a chance to challenge his power. Like every dictator he has throttled at birth every voice of dissent, taken control of all organs of information, tried to rewrite history and blot out the memory of the past.
Archives of Singapore newspapers are extremely hard to find; even Lee Kuan Yew’s speeches are a state secret. They would reveal too many contradictions, too many changes of line, too many truths that became heresies and vice versa. For dictators memory is always a terribly dangerous thing. Even mine!
I remembered a multiracial Singapore that tried to persuade Chinese, Indians and Malays to forget their origins and become “Singaporeans.” Now I saw a city that was almost exclusively Chinese, in which the most widespread language was Mandarin. An exhibition being held in the city celebrated the cultural greatness of China. By now all non-Chinese, still 25 percent of the population, feel excluded.
One evening I was dining in an open-air restaurant with an Indian who was born and had lived all his life in Singapore. The Chinese customers at the nearby tables treated him as a foreigner and me as a “fellow citizen,” just because I spoke Chinese and he did not. In spite of his assertion “I am Singaporean,” in English and Malay—theoretically still official languages on the island—the others jeered. One answered him in Chinese: “Singaporean? The Singaporeans are all dead. Here there’re only Chinese.” The rest of the group laughed and applauded.
Even a few years ago such a display of chauvinism would have been unthinkable. But times have changed. China is Communist only in name; the Chinese of the diaspora are no longer suspected of Maoism, and can reaffirm their identity without restraint. China is a great power, hence they too feel powerful. The step to racial arrogance is a short one.
One need only remember history to understand. The vast majority of the Chinese in today’s Asia left China during the past century. They left as boat people, in vessels that did not always arrive. They fled from famines, wars and poverty. The country they left was humiliated by colonialism, weakened by opium, and lacerated by conflicts of one kind or another. They were not mandarins, they were not poets. They were a labor force: coolies. Ku li in Chinese means “bitter strength”—a fine expression, written in two simple characters, which sums up the condition of people who are desperate.
Like all emigrants, these Chinese had only one dream: money. With money they could buy the protection of the rulers of the countries where they found themselves, with money they could save their lives. People without any culture, they came to the nan yang, the South Seas, and with them they brought the traditions and the gods of the village, all too soon supplanted by the culture of money and material wealth.
The great merit of Lee Kuan Yew was to have understood all this and to have realized, in his little island city-state populated by coolies, the dream of all Chinese emigrants: to have a safe refuge, a place to bring up their children, a bank to put their savings in. That is how Singapore, skillfully remaining equidistant from Communist China and the Nationalist China of Taiwan, has become the capital of the third China, of the Chinese of the diaspora. That is how Lee—intelligent, able and with great aspirations (at one point he hoped to become Secretary General of the United Nations), but condemned by circumstances to be virtually the mayor of a small Chinese city of barely three million inhabitants—imposed himself as the natural head of this tribe without a country, this population of refugees from an Israel to which none of the twenty-five million expatriate Chinese scattered all over Asia wants to return.
From the historical point of view Lee has done even more: in his little island he has demonstrated that the Chinese, like everyone else, can progress and get rich. With this he has fulfilled the dream of every Chinese intellectual since the end of the nineteenth century—modernization. With a Chinese model? No, copying the West—but nobody blames him for that. Indeed today Singapore, where everything is Western—from the architecture to the educational system, from the underground to the cranes, from the computers to the pencil sharpeners; Singapore, where even the quintessentially Chinese abacus has been replaced by calculators, where the people dream only of wearing a Pierre Cardin belt and a Rolex, writing with a Mont Blanc and driving a Mercedes—is what China itself would like to become. Singapore is China’s new model.
Lee Kuan Yew has done all this with firmness, at times with unnecessary cruelty, without respect for anything or anybody, and above all with no qualms of conscience. He has destroyed people and things that stood in his path, sweeping away the old to build the new. In Orchard Road, the central street in the city, was an Indian temple that some said was the oldest on the island. It was demolished because it got in the way of the underground. An ex-president of the republic, Lee’s old collaborator, was noticed courting some dissidents. He was ousted on the charge of being an alcoholic. Whole areas of old Singapore have been razed to the ground. Whole generations of Singaporeans have been whipped into line by a sophisticated system of creeping terror.
The ratio of policemen to population in Singapore is among the highest in the world. But the policemen are nowhere to be seen. Traffic control is automatic. A car goes through a red light? A video camera records its number plate and in a flash its owner receives a fine. To enter the city center at peak hours a tax is charged: an electronic eye automatically subtracts the amount from a magnetic card each time the car passes the control points.
The overwhelming majority of the police are engaged as internal spies. They are everywhere, incognito: in working-class housing blocks, in offices and factories, and especially in the university. Under a state security law, anyone can be arrested and detained indefinitely. Dissenters, real or merely suspected, used to be kept in prison for years without trial—the record was twenty-three years. Now the system has changed. A person is arrested, “broken,” and returned to circulation with a government job where he can be constantly blackmailed and kept under control. The “breaking” takes place in an underground bunker beneath an old Chinese cemetery in Oreat Road, off Thompson Road. It was built in the 1960s with the help of experts from the Israeli police. The prisoners are held in special cells which are ice-cold and without daylight, fed on drugged foods and interrogated half-naked. The psychological tortures end when the prisoner decides to “confess.” Thus he is “broken.” In the past twenty years no more than a thousand people have passed through that center, but the terrorizing effect continues.
Those who know him say that Lee has had the upheavals in Eastern Europe very much in mind, and is worried that once he loses power he himself may be tried for the violations of human rights perpetrated under his regime. His appointed heir is his son Lee Hsien Iong, who before entering politics had a dazzling career in the army and became a general. This dynasticism arouses no particular resentment among Singapore’s docile citizenry. In Chinese society everything revolves around the family, and if a man can leave his shop to his son, why not a state? That is how dynasties wax … and wane!
And the Singapore dynasty does not in fact seem destined to last long. Even in the history of Lee Kuan Yew’s great success, there is something mysterious and disturbing in which Asians cannot but see the hand of fate: the
first male grandchild, the general’s son, was born an albino; his mother, a doctor, committed suicide. And Lee’s son and heir was struck by a serious form of cancer, while his other son suffers from recurrent depressions. The man who has foreseen everything has been unable to program fate.
“Black magic … Black magic,” I was told, with great conviction, by one of the few Malay taxi drivers in the city. “The hatred of him is so great that someone has managed to focus it.”
The more I looked into Singapore’s history, the more I realized that behind the glass and steel façade, behind the screen of superefficiency and rationality, even in Singapore the world of the occult was still alive and perhaps on the increase. I would return to my hotel and find messages from people to whom I had barely mentioned my new interest, wanting to introduce me to a bomoh or to take me to a woman who can diagnose cancer from afar. I had asked a Singapore journalist to collect all the stories of fortune-tellers which had appeared in the press in the past three years. He came up with a list of several hundred.
One or two people told me that Lee Kuan Yew himself had had recourse to fortune-tellers. He had also promulgated a law making the profession of fortune-teller illegal “if practiced with intent to deceive.” Despite this, the yellow pages of the Singapore telephone directory were full of seers, astrologers and magicians of one kind or another.
I had also heard talk of a noted personage in Singapore’s high society, a successful businessman, who had the powers and was an excellent palmist.
Finally I received a promising telephone call from a travel agency. There was a passenger ship bound for Jakarta. Was I interested? Most definitely. It was a cruise ship transformed into a great floating casino with roulette and baccarat tables. Splendid! It seemed made for me. The illusion lasted only a couple of days. Another telephone call announced that the cruise had been canceled.
I felt caged in Singapore, but I wanted to stay. One reason was that on April 27 there would be the first official meeting between the Chinese Communists and Chinese Nationalists since the end of the civil war in 1949. The fact that the meeting was taking place in Singapore, and with the mediation of Lee Kuan Yew, struck me as highly significant in the context of what I saw as the resurgence of Greater China. It was a historic moment that I did not want to miss. Another reason was that I had made contact with Rajamanikam, the fortune-teller mentioned by M.G.G. Pillai. Several people in Singapore had told me he was the best in town. He was heavily booked, but had promised to see me.
Singapore irritated me more and more. I could not bear this society of shopkeepers who had made it, and who could afford everything except to think. I was annoyed by their crassness and arrogance, the way they confused the GNP with the IQ, average income with progress, kitsch with beauty, quantity with quality. One university student asked me in a provocative tone how many floors Italy’s tallest skyscraper had.
As the days went by I became more and more aggressive.
“Take me to Holland Park,” I said to a taxi driver.
“Are you going to dinner?”
“No.”
“What country are you from?”
“Africa.”
“How? You’re white!”
“There are whites in Africa.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I murder taxi drivers who ask too many questions.”
He looked at me in some surprise. He said he had only been doing his duty: a campaign of courtesy to tourists had just been launched. I noticed that he had two rings: one with a blue stone and one with a brown stone. “I’ve been wearing them for twenty years. They protect me from all kinds of evils,” he said. Seeing that I was interested, he showed me a little white ball he had on a chain around his neck. “A coconut pearl,” he told me. For every ten thousand coconuts, there’s one that has a pearl inside. “It was given me by an orang asli, and it’s highly potent.” He also had to observe certain taboos if his various protections were to be effective.
Suddenly I felt disgusted with all this talk, these trinkets around the neck and on the hands, and the taboos that went with them. I was disgusted at myself for wasting time on such matters. All that had formerly seemed poetic and interesting struck me as absurd, stupid, humiliating. I felt that I had fallen into a trap, that I was going mad myself. I had a strong impulse to go to the airport, take a plane for Jakarta and make an end of it.
Or did I? Did I really want to get back into line, return to normality? To logic? To the logic that had created Singapore? I held back. Taking a plane would have been like cutting a vacation short.
That evening I was invited to dinner by a famous architect. He had just returned from a trip to Bombay, where he had spent two days at a conference with Indian architects and intellectuals. He was impressed: he had not heard a word about money the whole time, or about contracts assigned or to be assigned. Perhaps I was right to want to move to India.
Over dinner I mentioned my problem with transport, and the fact that at times I had really had enough of following the dictates of a fortune-teller. An elderly lady sitting across the table from me said: “Tomorrow I’m going to mine. If you would like to come and ask her opinion …”
And so the next day I found myself in a car on the way to Rangoon Road, off the great Serangoon Road, the street of the Indians. Beside me was the vivacious, shrewd, elderly Chinese lady. She had just passed her eighty-first birthday, and was born in Shanghai when it was the Asian metropolis. “Great fortune-tellers were to be found there, oh yes,” she said. When she was still very young one of them had warned her: “If you stay in Shanghai you won’t live beyond the age of twenty-five,” and she had given him heed. She was a stage actress, and when her troupe came to Singapore on tour, she stayed there. She met a well-to-do local youth, married him and had three children. She had never returned to Shanghai.
The problem that was worrying her was her house. She had lived there happily for fifty-five years with her husband, but since becoming a widow she felt that it no longer brought her good fortune. The investments she had made turned out to be mistakes, her business deals were fruitless, and she wanted to move. So it was that we were on our way to a famous card reader, a woman in whom she had great faith. She had advised her not to go back to Shanghai even for a short stay: “If you do, the old prophecy will lose no time in getting its claws back in you.”
We stopped in front of an old Chinese temple dedicated to happiness and longevity. The card reader was in the room next to that of the gods. She was a fat woman with a beautiful serene face, a pleasant smile, and extremely thick hair combed back and cut straight at the neck. She was wearing brown pajamas with yellow and blue flowers. She must have been about seventy. Sitting at a round table, she had in front of her a well-worn pack of cards in which it was hard to recognize the various figures. My companion wanted me to go first.
The woman told me to choose one card from the pack, and asked me the year and month of my birth.
“Nineteen thirty-eight. Year of the tiger,” she said, beginning to lay out the cards on the table. “Last year was consequently difficult for you. It was the year of the monkey, and the monkey likes to tease the tiger. Last year you were even in danger of your life. Did you know it? But as from next month the dangers will all pass and you’ll begin a second life. The best part of your life. Your life has always been good, but after your fifty-fifth birthday it will be outstanding. Really outstanding. The reason is that you, born a tiger, are only now becoming a real one. Up to now you’ve been a sort of oversized cat. You did everything for others and little for yourself. If there were rats around, people would come to you and you would go and catch them. If there were no rats to catch, nobody called you.”
The woman spoke beautiful Chinese, and her short, dry phrases were like aphorisms.
“Everywhere you go you have friends; people take a liking to you, but you’re not much interested in people. At most you are interested in your family. You have two children, a boy and a gir
l.” (Well done!) “You’re on your first marriage and it’ll last all your life. What’s your wife’s sign?”
“Rabbit.”
“Good. The older the rabbit gets, the more beautiful it becomes. Your wife is like that: ye lao ye piaolian, the older the prettier,” she said, chuckling. “The marriage will last because the tiger is very accommodating with the rabbit. You’re a tiger born of darkness. You, therefore, take great care of your children and go hunting for food for them. You are more of a mother than the rabbit.” I was amused at how the animals of the zodiac were used to describe a person, to reconstruct character.
The woman kept looking at me and at the cards in front of her. “Soon you will go to live in a new country, and the people there will help you greatly.” (Did she mean India?) “You are alert and intelligent. You have your own opinion on everything and you don’t need to wait for the opinions of others to have your own. Your paternal grandfather was a good man and a great help to you as a child.” (Well … he was the only grandfather I really knew, and the memories of particular walks with him are precious to me. Helped? Only in that sense.)
“Have you any questions?”
“I’d like to change my job. To do something completely different from what I’m doing now,” I said.
“If you really want to change, go ahead, but only after the Rice Festival in August. It’s not wise to change, however. You know the work you do now. It gives you a salary. You will lose that if you change. Better not to change. Take my advice.” It struck me that, more than the cards, this was her Chinese practicality talking.
She shuffled the deck and arranged the cards in rows of eight. “This month you must be careful. Try not to swim in the sea, because the dragon will not protect you. You can swim in a pool, but not in the sea. After the end of May, swim where you like. Also, don’t go into the mountains. Avoid mountains for the next two months. And mark my words! Last month a Japanese came to see me. I advised him not to swim in the sea, but he said he had to because he was a pearl fisher. I’ve just learned that he has drowned!” (Who knows if it is true, but these stories always have a persuasive effect.) “Take care. April is still a month of dangers for you.”
A Fortune-Teller Told Me Page 20