“Can I be a politician?” I asked her.
“No. Governments are not made for you. You are against governments by inclination.” (There she hit the mark!) “And then, with the work you do, you’re already half a politician.” (My job as a journalist had never been mentioned.)
She shuffled the cards again, and laid them out in the form of a cross, then a circle. “Now listen carefully: never eat turtle meat or snake meat, and you will have a long life. When you are sixty, throw a big party and invite all your friends, and you’ll live to the age of eighty-three. If you take a bit of care, you may even reach eighty-eight.”
All the other customers, who had been listening with great curiosity to my destiny while waiting their own turn, broke into laughter as I gave up my place to my Chinese companion.
The card reader told her to move from her present house as soon as possible: her husband’s death had deprived it of a stabilizing element. If she remained there everything would go badly for her, and she would very soon fall gravely ill. My companion was convinced.
It was only as she was accompanying me back to the hotel that it occurred to me that she had the same surname as one of the men closest to Lee Kuan Yew, a pillar of the regime. “A relative?” I asked, expecting a “no” and ready to change the subject. Instead: “Of course, he’s my son,” she said. I felt secretly pleased. Lee Kuan Yew and his acolytes had even changed Singapore’s climate, but here was something ancient and irrational which they had not managed to uproot, not even in their own families.
13/A VOICE FROM TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO
Sir Stamford Raffles was absolutely right to choose Singapore as a base for the East India Company in 1819. Every ship that sailed in the region had to pass through there to avoid the monsoons. Singapore’s geographical position was its wealth. It is still so today, and Singapore is one of the great maritime centers of the world. But a very vulnerable one.
All it would take would be a canal across the narrowest part of the Malay peninsula, the isthmus of Kra, and all ships traveling between Europe and Thailand, Indochina, the Philippines, China and Japan would be spared hundreds of nautical miles. Singapore, cut off, would soon become a dead city, like those that sprang up and died in the American gold rush. Lee Kuan Yew and those around him are aware of this, and are already recycling Singapore to prepare it for another role: that of Asia’s information-technology capital, the first truly all-in “intelligent city” on earth.
Singapore has more robots per capita than anywhere else in the world, and the most computer-literate population. Computers, and courses on their use, are everywhere. Thus on this island, where already materialism is rampant and money the sole criterion of success and morality, another element of narrowness is added: the binary logic of machines that are changing not only the way people work, but the way they think.
“This is the future,” I heard again and again in Singapore, and I was terribly depressed to think it might not only be Singapore’s future, but also that of millions of other Asians. And perhaps ours as well.
Once upon a time, even in Singapore, schools taught children how to think. Now they mainly teach them how to program. But what happens to a society that grows up like this, without learning to make distinctions, with only the computer’s logic of “yes” and “no”? What happens in the heads of children who grow up with the impression that every problem has a solution, and that everything is at most a question of software?
Singapore scared me because to a great extent it already works that way. The state is the computer and society is regulated, like the temperature, by a sort of electronic thermostat. Does the evidence show that the children of intellectuals have a higher IQ than others? University teachers are encouraged to procreate. Does the evidence show that the young are not marrying in sufficient numbers? The state creates a special Social Development Unit to organize cruises and dances to help bring them together. Is this rich, modern city discovered one day to be boring and cultureless? Take an army general and make him a minister: his job will be to give orders so that the arts may flourish.
I was curious to meet this character, and asked for an appointment with him, but I was only permitted to invite one of his secret service agents and a secretary to lunch. I asked them which artists I could meet, but there was not one they could name. Instead they wanted to know what I was doing in Singapore, and reminded me that with my tourist visa I was not entitled to interview anyone.
Did they know that I had met—with all due precautions, including the tricks of taking two taxis and walking the last stretch—a recent victim of their totalitarian state? This was a young university teacher who had believed in the rhetoric of democracy and had labored under the illusion that he could offer himself as an opposition candidate in the next elections. The regime began digging into his past, and exposed his crime: he had posted a personal letter with university stamps. He was accused of theft, sacked and subjected to a severe campaign of denigration. In protest the poor wretch had gone on a hunger strike, but he got no sympathy. Everyone was against him: the university chancellor, his colleagues, the press and public opinion of this island with no feelings and no soul. He was a fine character, an idealist, and was still determined to make his dissenting voice heard. “If I don’t do it, who will?” he told me. It was precisely this that the computers found unacceptable.
“Ah, you’re interested in strange things? Go to the Chee Tong Temple this evening, then, and you’ll see some good examples.”
About twenty years previously I had known an architect called T. K. Soon. I met him again by chance, and we began talking about what we had done in the meantime. He had been teaching and building. The Chee Tong Temple was his design. “A unique experience!” he said.
Originally the temple, an old Taoist sanctuary, was in the northern part of Singapore. As it was in the way of a modernization scheme, it had been demolished. In compensation the government gave the Taoists another piece of land on which to build a new temple. There was a competition, T. K. Soon’s plan was successful, and he was invited to discuss it with the Master. The Master imposed certain changes: the roof had to be designed so as not to point at people or at any other building, and there must be no right angles in the entire temple. T. K. Soon obeyed: after all, the Master was a Taoist sage who had died more than two thousand years ago.
The taxi driver who took me there said that by now everyone called it “the temple of the Glass Lotus,” and when I saw it I realized why. It stood in the middle of a working-class housing estate—row on row of houses differing only in the numbers painted on the front. Wrapped in a bluish light, this unconventional, ultramodern structure really did look like a flower miraculously blooming from the asphalt. The petals were the overlapping roofs curled upwards to the sky, and the columns on which they rested formed the stem. The roofs were all of glass. Between the columns there was not a single wall, and the whole building, standing on an octagonal white marble platform, appeared transparent. Thus the temple looked like a vast empty space, open to the breeze. Beautiful! In the center was an altar with many oil lamps, whose flames were reflected and multiplied in the panes of the ceilings. On the altar were statues of the Monkey God and two Taoist saints. The right-hand saint, a smiling old man with a very long white beard, was the Master, Kuan Lao Xiang Xian, who had lived a hundred years before Christ in China, near Chengdu. It was his spirit which every Thursday evening, without fail, visited the temple in this anonymous suburb.
A couple of dozen people were waiting. In front of the altar, ensconced in a big red chair with arms in the form of dragons, was a corpulent woman of about fifty dressed in flame-colored silk pajamas. Her eyes were closed, and she sat straight-backed and motionless. She was the medium. Two other women also dressed in red, her assistants, hovered around her with bowls of tea, sheets of green paper and a calligraphy brush. In the background people carried on with the irreverent to-ing and fro-ing and casual chatter which one finds everywhere in Chinese temples.
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The secretary of the Temple Association came up to ask me who I was and what I wanted. From his visiting card it turned out that, among his various functions, he was president of the Singapore Restaurant Association and chairman of the Rotary Club. I told him I had come, like all the others, to speak with the Master. He had no objections, but he warned me not to go too close to the medium—the slightest touch might shake her out of her trance. The two assistants were the only ones who could touch her.
I sat down on one of the marble benches. Time passed. The secretary told me that the temple itself was the fruit of a miracle performed by Kuan Lao Xiang Xian. It was he, the Master, who had designed it, who had decided every detail and done all the engineering calculations. “Incredible, isn’t it? A man who lived two thousand years ago, and so modern!” he exclaimed. I did not tell him that T. K. Soon was an old acquaintance of mine. After all, I thought, the miracle makes a better story, and as the years pass it will be told and retold and will gradually become the only true version.
Suddenly the woman in the chair began to shake, rocking her body backward and forward. “He’s come!” cried the secretary, and the temple fell silent. A very strange, shrill old man’s voice seemed to come from the bowels of the woman. The secretary said that as I was a guest from far away I had precedence over the others who were waiting, so I found myself kneeling on the right of the chair with my hands joined over my chest, facing the woman. Her agitation subsided, and only her head continued to move convulsively. Her half-closed eyes were fixed on the statue of the Master. One of the assistants put a pipe in her mouth and lit it. She inhaled a great lungful of smoke, and then, as if she really were the old man of the statue, slowly began to caress, from lip to tip, the long white beard which she did not have.
She asked me my name and where I came from. I reexhumed my old Chinese name, Deng Tiannuo, and introduced myself. I saw her shake herself, nodding her head violently, and then I heard a brief, almost sardonic, laugh. I looked around, because I could not make out where it came from. Then it was heard again. It came from the woman’s stomach: she was a ventriloquist. From her half-closed lips issued a beautiful ancient voice, speaking in fine classical Chinese, rhythmical as the language of the Peking Opera:
“Kuan Lao Xiang Xian is glad
that you speak Chinese.
China is a great country,
a country of great culture,
an ancient country.”
I had to smile: even a shaman, if Chinese, could not escape the racial arrogance of all the children of the Yellow Emperor. “What do you have to ask of Kuan Lao Xiang Xian?” she inquired.
I would really have liked to ask her what a Taoist sage thought of modern Singapore; what a man who had spent years as a hermit felt on seeing his followers all obsessed with making money. But a little crowd of the Master’s faithful had gathered around me, and I thought they might be offended. In the end I settled for: “A fortune-teller told me …”
The woman wanted to know who the fortune-teller was and when he had made that prediction. Then she did some calculations in the Chinese manner, starting with her hand open, bending the fingers in turn, beginning with the thumb, to count to five and then extending them again, beginning with the little finger, to reach ten. She said:
“What you are afraid of
is fear, not planes.
If you want to be unafraid,
you must fly.
Sit in a plane
convinced that nothing will happen,
and nothing will happen.”
Her manner of speaking was extraordinary. Every sentence was like a verse of a classical poem, four characters recited in the rhythm of alternating rhymes.
“But are there no dangers ahead of me?” I asked.
“The danger is in life itself:
even you are born only to die.”
“When?” I asked, inwardly ashamed at such a banal question. The woman gave one of her nervous laughs, caressed her long, imaginary beard and said:
“Everything has its time.
Love has its time,
marriage and children.
And death too.
Yours too will come,
but late in life.”
She swept her right hand outward as if to suggest a very long road.
“Kuan Lao Xiang Xian will give you
something,
a precious paper
that will help you.”
She was sweating, and one of her assistants constantly wiped her brow. The other put a cup of dark tea to her lips, making her sip it slowly as one does with a sick person. The medium never looked at me. Her eyes were fixed on the statue of the Master, who looked down on all of us from above.
One of the assistants gave her the pipe to smoke again, and the other leaned on the base of the altar to lay three strips of green paper in front of her. The shaman shook herself, made some long hissing sounds, and waved her hands as if to drive something away. Then they put a brush in her right hand, and with firm, precise movements, constantly shaking her head backward and forward, she began drawing signs on the paper. They looked like characters, but I could not make out which. The three strips were taken away by the secretary, who set them on one side in front of a small altar. One of them, said the shaman, must be burned on that altar, one I had to swallow, and one I had always to keep with me.
Then came the taboo.
“You must take care.
All protection
will depend
on your will,”
said the woman, continuing to speak in an old man’s voice, between a mouthful of smoke and a sip of tea.
“You must not taste
dog meat,
you must not eat
cow’s meat;
do not drug yourself with heroin.”
“Is that all right?” she asked, as if one could somehow bargain over these prohibitions.
“All right about the dog meat and the heroin, but I would have a problem not eating beef.”
She shook herself violently. Again from deep inside her came that strange, sardonic laugh, and then the ancient voice: “Think of the ox. A strong, handsome animal. He helps man in the fields and on the road. To eat him you must kill him. That meat enters into you and turns you, too, into a murderer. No. You must never again eat beef. Every time you feel tempted, think how the ox is killed. You will lose the desire. You must respect nature, respect animals. One must live in a natural way. If you eat beef Kuan Lao Xiang Xian will no longer protect you.”
The secretary signaled to me that my time was up. With my hands still joined I thanked the woman, using the Chinese expression xie xie ni, “thanks to you.” She corrected me: “Not to me. Thanks to Kuan Lao Xiang Xian.”
The worst was to come. The secretary made me kneel on the Yin and Yang symbol at the center of a large Taoist octagon in black and white marble. Before my eyes he burned one of the three paper strips, put the ashes into a glass of water and ordered me to drink it. Thus the protection would enter me. I knew it would be of little use, because I fully intended to eat a steak from time to time, but how could I tell him that? I swallowed it. The second strip, while burning, was passed over my body and head, only an inch or so away from me so that it might create a cloud of protection. He put the third into a little green envelope and handed it to me as if it were extremely precious.
A few days later I called T. K. Soon to tell him how much I liked his temple, and he came up with another story about the shaman. Shortly after the temple was completed and the spirit of Kuan Lao Xiang Xian had got into the habit of coming there on Thursdays, the Taoist Association organized a trip to China, under the guidance of the shaman-woman, to see the places where the Master had lived and to look for the original temple erected in his honor. In Chengdu, nobody could help them. No one had ever heard of a Chee Tong temple. The woman ordered everyone onto their buses and told the drivers to go in a certain direction. They traveled for more than two hours, and fo
und themselves in a peasant village. Nobody knew of the temple there either. In a trance the woman began walking across the fields until she came to a plain. She pointed to the ground, and there lay the remains of some old foundations—the site of the temple. Not far away they found the grotto where the Master used to meditate.
I could not bring myself to ask him what I did not want others to ask me: “Do you believe it, then?” If he had said yes, I would have taken him for a fool. If he had said no, I would have been sorry, because it is, all said and done, more pleasing to live with the thought that such a story might be true.
The wait had been worthwhile. I would not have wanted to miss seeing the Chinese Communists and Nationalists signing their first agreement and clinking champagne glasses in a Singapore skyscraper. This was the beginning of the process of the reunification of China. For me it was further proof that I was not mistaken in thinking that China had renounced its diversity, had stopped looking for Chinese solutions to its problems and was becoming a country like all the others, dominated by the scramble for Western-style modernization, with no ideology except for money and race.
This was obvious after a glance at the Communist and Nationalist Chinese: there was no difference between them anymore. Even a few years ago a Peking official would have spoken, dressed, moved and behaved in a very different way from a Taiwanese. No more. Now they were identical: all dressed like Western businessmen, all ready to talk of common economic interests. One Communist official had gone even further: he actually added that the meeting was important “to safeguard the interests of the whole Chinese race.”
A Fortune-Teller Told Me Page 21