Singapore Dream and Other Adventures

by Hermann Hesse

  Then we would go into one of the Japanese shops. Here the level of swindling is at its highest, so we would buy neither silver nor porcelain, neither pictures nor wood carvings, but rather a host of little playful things of no value. Whimsical shelves made from the thinnest wood, small fragrant wooden boxes with lovely inlaid ornamentation that can be opened only by a secret finger lever, and wooden and bone puzzles of refined and innovative design: balls that when picked up fall apart into thirty pieces and that take a week on vacation to put back together again; and small figures of people and animals and that can be had here for fifty cents and whose simplicity and expressiveness all the German artisans put together could not achieve.

  And then it would be the turn of the Javanese and Tamil shops. Old batik sarongs with patterns of birds and leaves, scrollwork and triangles; sarongs of rich, heavy gold brocade from southern Sumatra with the saturated glow of sunset; and kerchiefs and scarves of Chinese and Indian silk, lots of golden yellows, reddish browns, and curry greens; and little stiff women’s shoes, needlepointed and arched like a Japanese wooden bridge, embroidered with silver and pearls. And for myself, I want a sarong and brown sarong pants, and to go with that, a green velvet cap and a sporty, jacket-length dressing gown of thin yellow silk. Then we’d look at the needlework, of which I know nothing and therefore which I find costs the most; and then the ivory carvings: elephants and temples, buddhas and idols, coat buttons and cane handles; also entire elephant tusks and dice and toys, figurines and boxes.

  We must not forget also to ride over to the Chinese quarter and then climb, far beyond it, to the North Bridge Road, where the places of business of junk and antique dealers, shop after shop, are located. There, beside boots and sailor’s pocket watches, you find discarded men’s clothing and brass tobacco pipes, beautiful old bronze bowls and vases, sometimes also old porcelain, if you have the time and patience. But in any case, hanging and lying about there in glass cases, mysteriously glowing from the corners of the shop, are the most beautiful Chinese jewelry pieces: simple old finger rings of gold or silver with simple and beautifully set stones or pearls; thin gold chains of every sort, all made from bright, joyfully cheerful Chinese gold; and thicker chains with yellow gold fish hanging from them; a grotesque, tail-wagging fish with a thousand delicate scales and protuberant, staring opal eyes; bracelets cut in one piece from gold or milky, bright green jet; brooches made from old Chinese gold coins, everything a bit tarnished and old, and everything of the same wonderfully precise, whimsical, and playful workmanship.

  Coins of money are regarded unquestioningly here, as among all naive folk, as valuable adornments. The Germans of the Black Forest used to, and still do today, wear silver taler pieces as jacket buttons; in Siam silver tikals are used for the same purpose. I myself wear tikal buttons on my white jacket. Chinese and Siamese gold coins with their beautiful, decorative script are seen everywhere in the form of brooches or cuff links, and here in a shop I once saw a whole collection of cheap, modern brooches made from the gold coins of various countries. Among them was one with an old German twenty-pfennig piece, one of those thin, tiny silver pieces that have long since been discontinued and have disappeared. (In Swabia in the old days, people would say, for example, at the bakery when they had to pay with a couple of those twenty-pfennig pieces, “But that is really a stupid coin; you keep losing them, because they’re just too small!” To which the baker replied without fail, “Oh, if I just had enough of them, they wouldn’t be too small for me!”)

  And after I had bought all that stuff and was broke and my lover had left me, then I would still from time to time go to those shopping streets. I would stand before the displays and peek through the shop windows, smell the fine woods, feel the fine weaves, and practice my skills on the hundreds of puzzles and curious gadgetry, and with all that I would enjoy the visual pleasure that the East has to offer and that only the East has the ability to provide. Everything that can be bought for money here in Asia is a dubious deal, from lodging to food, from servants to currency exchange, but nevertheless all around the richness and art of Asia shines inexhaustible: though it may be beset from all sides, stolen, undercut, violated, maybe already seriously weakened, and maybe already fighting for its life, even so it is still richer and more multifaceted than anything we in the West could even dream of. Everywhere treasures are on display, and all of that belongs to anyone who knows how to take visual pleasure in it, because whether I spend a hundred dollars or ten thousand, what I get for all my money is still only a single handsome item, which I soon enough might find disappointing. And so of that great tableau of heaped treasures, of all the great, colorful gleam and glitter of the Asian bazaar, all I can bring home with me to the West is a glowing reflected image in my memory. So if later at home I were to unpack a chest full of Chinese and Indian things, or ten chests, it would be like I had brought home a bottle or twenty bottles of water from the ocean. Even if I were to bring home a hundred tons of it, it would still not be the ocean.

  * Cities in India and Germany known for jewelry.—Trans.

  THE CLOWN

  In Singapore, once again I went to a Malay theater. I certainly did not do so with the hope of learning something of the art and folkways of the Malays or of being able to pursue any other kind of valuable study, but just the way, in an easygoing close-of-day mood, of an idle evening in a foreign seaport after dinner and coffee, one gets the urge to go see a show.

  The very accomplished actors, one of which had to play a European, put on a modern play, the story of a marriage in Batavia* that the playwright had dramatized on the basis of newspaper and court reports. The sung parts were accompanied by an old piano, three violins, a bass, a horn, and a clarinet, and were movingly funny. Among the players was a marvelous beautiful Malay woman, almost certainly a Javanese, who carried herself with captivating noblesse.

  The most noteworthy player, however, was a slender young actress in the bizarre role of a female clown. This very sensitive, superintelligent woman, infinitely superior to all the others, was clothed in a black sack, wore a pale-blond wig of coarse hemp over her black hair, and had her face smeared with chalk with a big black splotch on her right cheek. In this fantastically ugly beggar’s getup, this high-strung, supple person moved about playing a minor part that had only a very cursory relationship to the play but kept her always onstage, for her role was that of a vulgar clown. She grinned and ate bananas in an ape-like manner, she got in the way of the other players and the orchestra, interrupted the action with pranks, or accompanied it with mute parodying mimes. Then she sat on the floor for ten minutes in apathetic indifference, with her arms crossed and gazing with an indifferent, morbid, cold, superior stare into space, or peering at us onlookers in the front row with an air of cool criticism. In her aloof apartness, she no longer looked grotesque but tragic instead, with her narrow, glowing red mouth indifferently unmoving, tired of all the laughing, the cool eyes gazing sadly out of the weirdly painted face, alone and hopeless. One might have chosen to speak to her either as to a Shakespearean fool or as to Hamlet. Until the gesture of one of the actors aroused her—then she stood up, full of life, and parodied this gesture exerting the least possible effort but with such devastatingly hopeless, abject exaggeration that the actor had to have been driven to despair.

  But this genius of a woman was only a clown. She could not sing Italian arias like her fellow actresses, she wore the black cloth of humiliation, and her name appeared neither on the English nor the Malay playbill.

  * Present-day Jakarta.—Trans.

  ARCHITECTURE

  Large and magnificent buildings are really nowhere to be seen in the Malayan world. Its few princes are rather modest, and the Malays have never felt the need to vent their energy in orgies of building temples or other cultural edifices. The style of Buddhist and Hindu temples has been taken over from mainland India with little variation. The mosques are without originality, ranging from mos
tly completely styleless, modern principal mosques to small Mohammedan village churches with towers made from four rough-hewn tree trunks. The climate here destroys all work of human hands very quickly. The houses are not made for stability and durability but rather out of a present need for shade, cool, and shelter from rain.

  The flat terrain of the Malayan countries is for the most part swampy and rife with the air of fever. One must beware of snakes and predators; that is why today, as for many thousands of years, the most prevalent type of building is constructed on stilts. The floors of the buildings rest on tree trunks driven into the ground or simply on sawed-off living trees. They are as high as two and a half meters off the ground, to which they are connected by one or two light wooden sets of stairs, which in order to give protection from snakes and other animals are made as steep as possible and are sometimes very hard to climb. The floors are not rarely made of boards but, most of the time, simply from a layer of loose poles. In all houses the floors are covered with clean, beautiful bast mats. They are covered by a simple pitched roof, whose front beams often, as in farmhouses of Lower Saxony, protrude crosswise. The frame of the roof is made of bamboo poles and is thickly covered with palm leaves, and thus the roofs are light, cooling, and very watertight. Several times I have lain through the night under such leaf roofs in the virgin forest in raging rainstorms and not gotten wet. Of late, however, a lot of wood-shingle roofs are also to be seen, even in the country.

  That is the typical residential house of Indochina. In many places, though, there are houses with the roofs elegantly curved in the Chinese manner and ornamented with horn. A striking unique property of Malay houses is the way they are structured to give individual character to every room by setting each of them at a different level; starting at the entrance and moving back, each room is set two or three handbreadths higher than the one before it.

  In the cities, wherever dry and solid ground has been found, the stilted structures fall away. Here the Chinese type of street architecture is dominant, and Malay fisherman’s houses and farmhouses are relegated to the suburbs. The Chinese streets, the old as well as the new, are invariably composed of connected rows of small houses of two, or rarely three, stories. The ground floor is the workshop or shop; the upper story, when the shutters are not closed, have open rooms with lightly latticed windows giving on the street, which gives them an excellent airy quality. The buildings are colorfully plastered, mostly in light blue, which in the strong light of the tropics looks cool and dignified. The front rooms on the upper floor rest on pillars, and this results in a colonnade on both sides of every street, which is delightful to look at and filled with sights of everyday domestic life. The rich Chinese, of course, have country houses in fancy residential districts, luxurious and for the most part exhibiting European influence. Around these villas are quiet, formal, sunny gardens where every plant is elevated and isolated in its own vase.

  The Europeans have now entirely redesigned all the cities, and that has brought lots of hygiene and convenience but little beauty. Of all the European buildings out here, only the bungalows that have been built in the well-to-do residential suburbs are beautiful. They are fresh, livable, and look charming in their luxuriant park landscape. These bungalows are beautiful because they have perforce been adapted to the needs of the climate and therefore have had to retain the general qualities of the archetypal Malay house. Everything else that the whites have built, and are building here, would have been quite nicely suited to a German railroad station avenue of the eighties.

  The English do a great deal for their colonies. The layout of many business streets, harbors, residential areas, and park suburbs is exemplary and often stunningly generous, and this goes as well for the way they have built streets, conveyed water, and provided lighting. But they too were incapable of building beautiful houses, with the exception of the aforementioned bungalow type. And now phony marble, corrugated metal sheeting, and the influences of the recent design-school renaissance are taking over and have even contaminated the designs of the modern and wealthy among the indigenous builders. Japanese dentists and Chinese usurers build houses for themselves that would fit in perfectly on the most tasteless streets of German midsize towns. Bridges, fountains, and monuments are similar. The worst, however, are the churches. Coming upon a church from an exquisite, still palm forest; from a broad, handsome street in the Malay quarter; or from a deep-blue, discreetly uniform Chinese street, and seeing it in its otherwise vacant square, seeing its out-of-place and wayward English Gothic style proclaiming the inadequacy of the West, certainly figures among the great displeasures of an Asian journey, worse than filth and fever. For in this case one feels deep down that one is co-responsible. And these things are all, like a German post-office building, as solidly built as they are ugly. A Malay house that was finished just yesterday will in three months be as pleasingly weathered and as thoroughly and harmoniously matched with its surroundings as it will be in fifty years. But a Dutch residential palace, an English church, or a French Catholic schoolhouse will not be able to please our eyes until its guilt-laden existence comes to an end and it has returned its constituent parts back to nature.

  SINGAPORE DREAM

  In the morning I had chased butterflies on the byways, overgrown with grass and overhung with foliage, that run among the European gardens. In the white heat of noon I returned to the city on foot, and I passed the afternoon walking about, visiting shops, and doing my shopping in the beautiful, lively, teeming streets of Singapore. Now I was sitting in the high, pillared salon of the hotel eating supper with my traveling companion. The large wings of the fan were whirring industriously in the heights, the white-linen clad Chinese boys were gliding through the hall with silent composure purveying the bad English-Indian food, and the electric light was glittering on the small ice cubes floating in the whisky glasses. I sat facing my friend, tired and not hungry, sipped my cold drink, peeled golden yellow bananas, and called rather too soon for coffee and cigars.

  The others had decided to go see a film, something for which my eyes, strained already from laboring in full sun, were not eager. However, in the end I went along, just to have the evening taken care of. We walked out of the hotel bareheaded and in light evening shoes and strolled through the teeming streets in the cooled-down, blue evening air. In quiet side streets, in the light of storm lanterns, hundreds of Chinese coolies sat at long, rough wooden tables and cheerily and politely ate their mysterious and complex dishes, which cost practically nothing and are full of unknown spices. The intense scent of dried fish and warm coconut oil floated through the night lit by a thousand flickering candles; calls and shouts in dark Eastern languages echoed out of blue arch-covered alleys; pretty made-up Chinese girls sat in front of lightly barred doors, behind which rich, golden house altars dimly glittered.

  From the dark wooden gallery in the movie house, we looked over the heads of innumerable Chinese with long queues at the glaring rectangle of light where a Parisian gambler’s tale, the theft of the Mona Lisa, and scenes from Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe* flitted by like ghosts, all with the same harsh vividness, the ghost-like quality being doubled by the atmosphere of unreality or awkward implausibility that all these Western things take on in a Chinese and Malay environment.

  My attention soon went slack, my gaze hung distractedly in the twilight of the high room, and my thoughts fell to pieces and lay lifeless like the limbs of a marionette that was not in use at the moment and had been laid aside. I let my head sink onto my propped-up hands and was immediately at the mercy of all the moods of my thought-weary and image-sated brain.

  At first I was surrounded by a soft murmuring twilight that I felt good in and that I felt no need to think about. Then gradually I began to notice that I was lying on the deck of a ship, it was night, and only a few oil lanterns were burning. Aside from me, many other sleepers were lying there, body to body, each stretched out on the deck on his travel blanket or on a bast mat.


  A man who was lying next to me seemed not to be asleep. His face was familiar to me, though I didn’t know his name. He moved, propping himself on his elbows, took rimless golden spectacles from his eyes, and began to clean them meticulously with a soft little flannel cloth. Then I recognized him—it was my father.

  “Where are we going?” I asked sleepily.

  He kept cleaning his delicate spectacles without looking up and quietly said, “We’re going to Asia.”

  We spoke Malay mixed with English, and this English reminded me that my childhood was long past, because back then my parents told each other all their secrets in English, and I could understand nothing of them.

  “We’re going to Asia,” my father repeated, and then all of a sudden I again knew everything. Yes, we were going to Asia, and Asia was not an area of the world but rather a very specific but mysterious place somewhere between India and China. That is where the various peoples and their teachings and their religions had come from, there lay the roots of all humanity and the source of all life, there stood the images of the gods and the tables of the law. Oh, how had I been able to forget that, even for a moment! I had been on my way to that Asia for such a long time already, I and many men and women, friends and strangers.

  Softly I sang our traveling song to myself: “We’re going to Asia!” And I thought of the golden dragons, the venerable Bodhi Tree, and the sacred snake.

  My father looked at me in a kindly way and said, “I am not teaching you, I am just reminding you.” And in saying that, he was no longer my father, his face smiled for just a second with exactly the same expression with which our leader, the guru, smiles in dreams; and in the same moment the smile dissolved, and the face was round and still like a lotus blossom and exactly resembled a golden likeness of the Buddha, the Perfect One; and it smiled again and it was the mellow, sad smile of the Savior.