Singapore Dream and Other Adventures

by Hermann Hesse

  On the bank, a light white spot appears. It is a white dog. It runs a little way along the shore and sticks its skinny neck way out to look over at us. But it does not bark. For a little while it looks at us in diffident silence, then sniffs the murky water and trots away without a sound, following the perfectly straight line of the shore.

  The Chinese fellow is talking about European languages. He praises the convenience of English, the euphony of French, and apologetically laments that he knows only a little German and has learned no Italian at all. He smiles and cheerily follows the movements of ship lights with his moist, shrewd eyes.

  Meanwhile, two big steamers move past us, slowly and with infinite care. Our ship is moored to the shore. The great canal is precious and fragile and is protected like gold.

  An English functionary from Ceylon comes over to us. We stand there for a long time looking down into the dead water. The moon is already setting. I have the feeling that it has already been years that I’ve been away from home. Nothing here speaks to me, nothing is near and dear, nothing consoles me but our good ship. Its few boards, metal fittings, and lights are all I have, and it makes me uneasy now that after so many days the familiar heartbeat of the engine is no longer to be heard and felt.

  The Chinese talks to the English functionary about rubber prices, and repeatedly I hear the English word rubber, which ten days ago I did not yet know and which now I am completely accustomed to. It is the ruling word in the East. His talk is business-like, pleasant, and polite, and he smiles continuously in the pale electric light, like a buddha.

  The moon has completed its arc. It sinks and goes down behind the gray rubbish heaps, and with it, the hundred cool, malevolent flashing lights from the bogs and lakes also disappear. The night looms thick and black, sharply cut by the beams of searchlights, which are just as eerie and soundless and endlessly straight as the dreadful canal itself.

  EVENING IN ASIA

  Evening arrival on the island of Penang. In the Eastern and Oriental Hotel (the nicest European hotel I encountered in peninsular Indochina*1) I am shown to a princely apartment of four rooms. Beyond the veranda, the brownish-green sea slaps against the wall, and in the red sand stand the evening trees, large and venerable. The russet and yellow sails of the many junks, shaped like strong-sinewed dragon wings, glow in the dying light of day, and behind them lies the white sand beach of Penang proper, the blue Siamese mountains, and all the tiny, thickly wooded coral isles of the gorgeous bay.

  After weeks of comfortless living in the frighteningly narrow cabin of the ship, first off I spent a good hour enjoying the spaciousness of my rooms. I tried the comfortable curved-back lounge chair in the airy sitting room, where immediately a small Chinese man with a philosopher’s eyes and a diplomat’s hands soundlessly served me tea and bananas. I bathed in the bathroom and completed my toilet in the dressing room. Then in the handsome dining room, to the sound of quite good chamber music, I partook for the first time, with mild disappointment, of the bad cuisine of English-Indian hotels. In the meantime, a deep black starless night had fallen, the large unknown trees rustled pleasantly in the warmish, heavy wind, and everywhere large unknown beetles, cicadas, and bee flies sang, buzzed, and shrieked loudly with the shrill, headstrong voices of young birds.

  Without a hat and in light slippers, I stepped out into the broad street, beckoned a rickshaw man over, climbed with a happy feeling of adventure into his light conveyance, and cold-bloodedly uttered my first Malay words, which the nimble, strong coolie understood as little of as I did of his. He did what every rickshaw man does in this situation—smiled at me warmly with his fine, kindly, childish, bottomless Asiatic smile, turned around, and happily trotted off.

  And soon we reached the inner city, where street for street, plaza for plaza, house for house, everything glowed with an astonishing, inexhaustible, intense, and yet fairly noiseless life. Everywhere were the Chinese, the secret masters of the East; everywhere were Chinese shops, Chinese stalls, Chinese artisans, Chinese hotels and clubs, Chinese teahouses and brothels. And here and there in between was a street full of Malays or Klings*2—white turbans on dark-bearded heads; glowing brown, manly shoulders; the still faces of women abundantly adorned with gold jewelry fleetingly caught in the torchlight, laughing or howling dark brown children with fat bellies and wonderfully beautiful eyes.

  I visited a Chinese theater. There the men sat quietly smoking, the women quietly sipping tea. On her high gallery, on perilously shaky boards, the tea lady moved athletically back and forth with her huge copper kettle. On the spacious stage sat a group of musicians who accompanied the drama, artfully marking its cadences. With every emphatic stride of the hero sounded an emphatic beat of the soft-toned wooden drum. In olden costumes, an old play was being presented, of which I understood but little and saw no more than a tenth of, since the play is long and continues on for days and nights. In it, everything was measured, studied, ordered in accordance with ancient, sacred laws, and carried out with rhythmic, stylized ceremony. Every gesture was exact and performed with calm devotion, each studied movement was prescribed and full of meaning and accompanied by expressive music. In Europe there is not one opera house in which the music and the movements of the figures on stage go together so faultlessly, so precisely, and with such marvelous harmony as here on this wooden stage. A beautiful, simple melody returned frequently, a short, monotonous tune in a minor key, which in spite of all my efforts I was unable to imprint on my mind, though later I heard it a thousand times again. It was not, as I thought, always the same sequence of notes, but rather it was the Chinese fundamental melody, whose innumerable variations we are to some extent incapable of perceiving, since the Chinese scale has much more finely differentiated tones than ours does. What disturbs us in this music is the all too abundant use of bass drum and gong. However, aside from that, the music is so fine and—in the evening, heard from the veranda of a house where a celebration is going on—sounds so full of joie de vivre, and is often so passionate, so voluptuous, as only the best of our music at home can be. There was nothing European and foreign in the whole theater, apart from the primitive electric lighting. An ancient, thoroughly stylized art was continuing here along its ancient sacred way.

  Unfortunately, after that I let myself be persuaded to visit a Malay theater. On show here were lurid, mad, grotesquely ugly sets, painted by the Chinese Shek Mai, who had successfully tuned into the ape instincts of the Malays. It was a parody of all the worst of European art. It lent the whole theater such an air of ludicrous drollery and hopelessness that after a short period of forcing oneself to laugh, it became intolerable. In shoddy costumes, Malay mimes acted, sang, and danced the story of Ali Baba in a kind of variety-show style. Here as later on, everywhere I saw the poor Malays—lovable, feeble children—hopelessly hung up on the basest European influences. They acted and sang with superficial skill, with Neapolitan-style heavy-handedness, sometimes improvising; and with it all a modern mechanical harmonium was playing.

  As I left the inner city, the buzz and glow of activity continued in the streets behind me as they would for much of the night. And in the hotel, for his solitary nocturnal pleasure, an Englishman was playing a quartet of Bavarian yodelers on his gramophone.

  *1 Malaysia.—Trans.

  *2 A Dravidian, probably of Tamil origin, of the seaports of Southeast Asia and Malaysia.—Trans.

  GOING FOR A RIDE

  There’s nothing more lovely than going for a ride in Singapore when the weather is good. You call for a rickshaw, you take your seat inside, and from that point on, besides the usual view, you have the calming sight of the coolie who’s pulling you, his back bouncing up and down to the cadence of his swaying trot. It is a very nice, naked, golden brown Chinese back, and below it is a pair of naked, strong, athletically developed legs of the same color, with between them, wash-faded bathing shorts of blue linen, the color of which goes exquisitely well with the
yellow body and the brown street and with the whole city and with the air and with the world. For the street sights being aesthetically pleasing and harmonious to look upon, we must be thankful to the Chinese, who understand how to dress and how to carry themselves, and whose thousand-headed throng—in blue, white, and black—fills the streets. Among them, walking proudly and with heroic bearing, are tall Tamils and other Indians, with scrawny, dark brown limbs, every one of whom, at first glance, looks like a dethroned raja. But on the whole they are no better than the Malays, who with the kind of gullibility characteristic of black Africans, fall for every imported article on offer and dress like housemaids on a Sunday. You also see dark, noble-looking people walking along in exactly the same screamingly lurid, mercilessly colorful outfits, a bit like what fanciful shop assistants might wear to one of our costume balls at home—veritable caricatures of traditional costumes! The clever merchants from our Western countries have rendered silk and linen expendable; they have dyed wool and printed cotton in much louder colors than ever seen before in Asia, in a way that is more Indian, more joyous, wilder, and more toxic; the good Indians, along with the Malays, have become grateful customers and wrap their bronze hips in this cheap, garish cloth from Europe. The figures of ten such Indians are enough to create a chromatic disturbance in a busy street and give it an inauthentic “Oriental” look. But they do not dominate here, no matter how regally they may strut or how much parrot-like color they may emit, for they are surrounded and smothered and quietly covered up by the discreet yellow folk from China, who teem densely and industriously in a hundred streets; by the uniform, ant-like Chinese, none of whom is inclined to indulge in loud colors or dress himself up in the guise of a king or clown; rather an endless swarm of them in blue, black, and white fills and dominates the entire city of Singapore.

  We must also be grateful to the Chinese for the long, calm, prosperous, regular streets, where one house after another stands blue and humble in its quiet blue row, and each one supports and yet yields to its neighbors, at least in as refined and discreet a manner as in Paris. But the English must be thanked for the broad, beautiful, clean, and commodious roads, the gracious garden suburbs, and the magnificent trees they planted, which are perhaps the most beautiful in all Singapore.

  Right along the sea, in the midst of showy, pretentious buildings, broad and beautiful athletic fields, very empty and pale and improbably large in the merciless midday sun, lies the mighty Esplanade, a princely broad avenue whose old magnificent trees make of it an always cool, always shady, giant’s hall of foliage and branches. It is lovely to ride through here in the early morning, when the fierce sun burns down at an angle over the shining sea and the numberless ships and sails and rocking boats, and beyond the sea and the ships and the islands, along the whole horizon, white morning clouds soar in fantastic forms of towers and giant trees. And it is lovely at noon, when all around everything seethes and broods in the heat. At that time leaving behind that blinding blaze and entering the dark coolness of the trees is no different from stepping from a midday summer marketplace into a holy, cool cathedral with its dark vaults. But in the evening, the angular light is full of gold and warmth, a fragrant wind blows off the sea, relieved and recovering human beings move about with pleasure in white clothes, play ball on green, flat fields, whose lawns glow in the evening light with a jewel-like green. And at night, you ride along the Esplanade as though in a magic cavern; in the small gaps in the foliage, the stars twinkle with a greenish light, and swarms of fireflies glow with the same cool fire; and on the sea floats the ships’ mysterious city of lights with its thousand red eyes.

  The garden streets of the outer city are endless. There you continuously ride along smooth, fine, highly maintained roads, and everywhere other silent roads branch off and lead through green realms of trees and gardens to quiet, airy country houses, every one of which arouses homesickness and seems to harbor happiness, and over you and around you the wonderful forest landscape breathes calmness and life. It goes on for hours, a park without end with trees that remind you of oaks, beeches, birch, and ash, but which all look a little alien and fairy tale–like, and are bigger, taller, and more luxuriant than our trees.

  Suddenly you are again among houses, you pass by workshops, shops, through the earnest hive-like life of the Chinese. Gilded porcelain and bright yellow brassware glow in the shop windows, fat Indian merchants sit on low shop tables between heaps of silk cloth or stand leaning near display cases full of diamonds and green jet. The frenetic street life pleasantly recalls that of Italian towns, but completely lacks the mad screaming and yelling with which, there, every lad selling matches hawks his trifling wares.

  You come back again to low houses among trees, semicountry suburban air, and suddenly you are moving beneath coconut palms. Low huts, roofed with palm leaves, goats, naked children—a Malayan village stretches as far as the eye can see, with thousands upon thousands of palm trees, severe and bare, with pale green daylight flickering through them from above.

  And hardly has your eye become accustomed to that and hardly has your consciousness pleasurably registered the contrast between the linearly stylized world of the palms and the leafier, softer, less orderly park landscape, when everything totters and falls apart: your frightened regard pitches into an uncanny vastness, and you have come to the sea. An entirely new, stiller, and vaster sea lies before you, with flat palmy beaches and few boats, and within its arc the blue hilly silhouettes of many islands. Above this, dwarfing it all, towers the huge form of a Chinese sail, which with its hundred finely set ribs, pokes into the sky like the wing of a dragon.

  VISUAL PLEASURES

  If from the fumes of the bottle my boy is just opening were to arise a towering genie and offer to fulfill three wishes of mine, without having to think it over, I would say: Let me be healthy, enjoy the company of a beautiful young lover, and have ten thousand dollars at my disposal.

  Immediately I would order a rickshaw with an extra rickshaw coolie to carry my packages, and drive into the city with the first few thousand dollars loose in my pocket. I would pay no attention to the begging children, who would crowd around me and, to the horror of my beautiful companion, cry out, “O father, my father!” On the other hand, I would give a dollar to the little eleven-year-old Chinese girl who carries out her on-the-fly peddling in front of the hotel every day. She is, as I said, eleven years old, and by her size and looks you would think she was even younger and more of a child. Even so, she has already been doing her street peddling for six years. She told me that herself, but I would not state this as a fact if an old Singaporean fellow had not confirmed it. The little slip of a girl has the sweet childish face that pretty Chinese women often hold on to into their later years, but she has clever, cool eyes and is perhaps the most optimistic and smartest Chinese child in all of Singapore. She must be that, because for years five people have been living from her work, and her mother goes as often as she can on Sundays to Johor for her amusement. The little one wears a marvelous queue, black, wide pants, and a faded blue blouse, and the most seasoned world traveler could never succeed, through any amount of dickering and joking, in puncturing her composure for even an instant. Unfortunately she still has very little capital and still no market overview, but that will come, and perhaps too it is purely on account of her cleverness that it is precisely in children’s toys that she deals and will deal for as long as her look of a frail little child and her smooth child’s face suggestively support this trade. Later she will deal in articles that well-to-do young gentlemen need and then she will marry and begin trading in porcelain, bronzes, and antiquities. And finally she will end up only speculating and lending money, and she will spend half her fortune building an insanely luxurious villa, where in many too many rooms many too many lamps burn, and where the immense house altar will glitter with gold.

  So she will have her dollar, and after she has pocketed it without surprise and without much thanks, we will
be off in the direction of the high street. First I would call a halt in a side street at the shop of the best rattan weaver and order one lounge chair each for me and my lover, the best work made from the most flawless and most flexible material, each chair comfortably fitted to our respective body sizes, complete with a little tea set, a small bookcase, a cigarette holder, and for fun, a beautiful, finely woven birdcage.

  In the high street we would first stop by an Indian jeweler’s. These people have too strong a connection with Europe and rarely are still capable of fashioning their articles as naively and finely as formerly. They work following English and French designs and order their materials from Idar and Pforzheim,* but their stones are mostly beauties, and with painstaking patience I would be sure to find at least a fine gold armband set with rubies and a thin, delicate necklace made with pale bluish moonstones. We have plenty of time for sure, and whatever else might be said about the merchants of Asia, their time and patience and courtesy are measureless, and you can comfortably browse around in a shop for two hours, asking about all the wares and their prices, without having to buy a thing.

  Laughing, we would then go into a Chinese store, which in front has tin chests and toothbrushes; in the next room, playthings and paper wares; in the next, bronzes and ivory carvings; and in the back room, old deities and vases. Here the style of the European operetta penetrates as far as the middle of the shop; farther back there are imitations and fakes, but the forms are authentic, and they express everything a Chinese is capable of feeling, from steely dignity to the mad pleasures of the wildest grotesqueries. Here we would buy an iron elephant with its trunk raised, two or three porcelain plates with green and blue dragons or peacocks, and an old tea service, sepia and gold, with family or warrior scenes from olden times.