Return to a Sexy Island

by Neil Humphreys

  I joined a couple of fishermen on the South Promenade and Viewing Deck and shouted my hellos. They replied enthusiastically while I marvelled at the view. With the serene islands of the Chinese and Japanese gardens offering seven-storey pagodas, stone bridges, waterfalls and fountains as a backdrop while the waters lapped the shoreline gently, Jurong Lake provides a thoroughly disarming day out. Not only for fishermen, amblers and picnickers, but also for the hunting herons, the chorusing frogs and a cruising monitor lizard so large that at first glance I honestly mistook the beast for a crocodile. Such fabulous fauna and vistas undoubtedly make the location an attractive proposition for waterfront developments. Whether the current tenants feel quite the same way about sharing their home with drillers and diggers for the next two decades is doubtful. They may just wave a white flag and retreat through the canals to either Selat Jurong or Kranji, which would rather contradict developers’ boasts of offering mixed-use properties in a natural setting.

  I wandered the length of Jurong Lake Park and back again, passing the adventure playground, the skate park, the Jurong Country Club and the fishing jetties filled with superbly idiosyncratic fishermen. When I offered my customary greeting to one particular fisherman, whose wonky haircut must have been the result of a lost bet, he giggled, mumbled something in Mandarin, took out a plastic toy machine gun from his fishing box and shot me.

  Yes, I thought it was peculiar, too.

  I raised my hands in mock surrender so he shot me some more. He even supplied his own machine-gun sound effects. I put my hands down and left the jetty, otherwise I suspect he’d still be standing there shooting me with his toy gun. He smiled at me. I counted six teeth.

  I have no idea whether my toothless, gun-toting fisherman will be affected by Jurong Lakeside’s radical makeover, but some things will obviously have to go (his toy gun probably being one of them). Space, the reclusive green retreat’s finest attribute, will be the first casualty. All Singaporeans in Jurong deserve a bit of legroom, not just those swinging away at the golf course across the lake. Power walkers, kayakers, picnickers, parents playing with their children at the sandpit and fishermen playing with their kids’ guns are simply free to be and that’s a priceless commodity to have when you’re beside the dense housing estates and industrial complexes of Yuan Ching and Corporation roads. Joan Rivers isn’t required in Jurong. It’s already got Jodie Foster, a quiet, unassuming, natural beauty. And that’s sexier than any facelift, no matter how accomplished the men with scalpels. The odd nip and tuck would certainly do Jurong Lake no harm (I’d start with the dilapidated adventure playground) but the waterfront’s alluring charms do not need the architectural equivalent of a push-up bra.

  I left Jurong Lake Park, studied my street directory, made a startling discovery, jumped on a bus and headed to Tuas. The trip was not planned. I blame my mother-in-law and Sentosa. Whenever my in-laws visited, I always carried out my customary tourist duties, guiding them across Palawan Beach and the suspension bridge to the slither of an unnamed islet that the cartographers of the Sentosa Development Corporation had long ago declared Asia’s southernmost point.

  My mother-in-law never bought it.

  “How can it be the southernmost point of Asia? Those islands are further south,” she always said, pointing to Singapore’s Southern Islands.

  “They are not part of continental Asia, not part of its land mass,” I reiterated, on every occasion that we visited. “They are separate islands.”

  “So is this,” she countered. “We had to get across that suspension bridge.”

  “Yeah, and Sentosa is not part of Singapore,” my father-in-law usually chimed in. “So it’s an island off an island off an island off Asia. How does that work?”

  “Look, do you want to take your photo here or not?”

  “Yeah, of course we do. Just make sure you can see the southernmost point bit on the sign.”

  If my rudimentary map reading was correct, new Singapore might have settled the matter. Land reclamation had overtaken Sentosa. The projected extension of Tuas clearly ventured beneath the islet of Sentosa’s Palawan Beach. New Singapore had a new southernmost point of continental Asia and it wasn’t far from Lakeside. So I decided, on a whim, to head for Tuas, redraw new Singapore’s boundaries and silence my mother-in-law.

  Humming The Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way” (it’s Boon Lay Way’s fault), I reached Boon Lay’s topsy-turvy public transport hub, where the interchange was air-conditioned but the bus itself wasn’t. The bone-shaking time machine, also known as the 182M, was the blue-collar express to Tuas, its exclusively male occupants clearly undeserving of the air-conditioned comfort taken for granted by the white-collar crowd sauntering towards Shenton Way. No such luxury for the poor sods expected to toil in Tuas under the Saturday afternoon sun.

  Not that the construction workers concerned themselves with the top deck’s temperature. They focused on eating and drinking. Two Chinese guys stretched across the front seat were swigging cans of Coke while an older Chinese uncle, possibly in his early sixties, tucked into nasi lemak on the back seat behind me. The boisterous old bruiser of a bus belonged in my Dagenham childhood, taking me home after watching Jaws 3-D at the cinema in Romford. All that was missing were empty Stella Artois cans and the odd chorus of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”.

  The driver bought into my childhood nostalgia, too. He thought he was Stan from the seventies sitcom On the Buses, gear-crunching, accelerating and swerving his way along Jalan Ahmad Ibrahim. Thanks to the boneshaker’s open windows, my fine Caucasian hair billowed around in the breeze with a gaiety that suggested I had one foot planted in a bowl of water and the other in a plug socket. As we swayed from side to side and the coastal gusts rattled the windows, I struck up a mostly inaudible conversation with Nasi Lemak Uncle about Tuas’s land reclamation while continuously holding my dancing hair down lest he confuse me for Doc Brown in Back to the Future. He fought a losing battle to keep the rice on his plastic spoon and conducted most of the conversation with a couple of anchovies poking from the corner of his mouth. I never wanted the bus journey to end.

  But the loop service reached its southernmost point at Tuas South Avenue 3, where I stepped off, eager to make geopolitical history, both for Singapore and Sentosa. According to my street directory, ongoing land reclamation works being carried out by Penta-Ocean Construction (the Japanese constructor for the MCE gig) would easily make Tuas South the island’s southernmost point and I intended to walk on water to get there.

  I got nowhere.

  Just in case you haven’t been to Tuas, the industrial zone does a disservice to dustbowls. Had tumbleweed rolled past me on the pavement, I would not have noticed unless it had bounced up the kerb and smacked me in the face. I was battered about by the searing, sandy, stale air instead. Whatever those trucking guys are paid to transport sand and soil up and down Tuas South Avenue 5 all day, and they rumbled along endlessly before disappearing into a cloud of crap long before they reached the horizon, it is not enough. I squinted and peered down the long, wide white avenue but the sun’s reflection, the absence of shade and the omnipresent dust cloud revealed nothing but the fact that the road was beyond me on foot. I continued to trudge along Avenue 5 but I had kilometres ahead of me. Ordinarily, I’d go to just about any length to settle an argument with my mother-in-law but this one was beyond me. I had no distance left to run.

  On the roadside, a lone guy sat on a plastic chair under an umbrella, handing out tickets to truck drivers. I hurried over. I wasn’t really interested in him, just his umbrella. I joined him beneath the canopy. On hindsight, I probably should have sought his permission first. We were the only two people in a desolate corner of the country and I often forget that I am a tall Caucasian in a predominately Asian country. He did not expect his personal umbrella space to be invaded by Ichabod Crane that afternoon.

  “Er, yes, can I help you?” the Indian chap asked cautiously.

  “Yes, you see that land recl
amation going on down there,” I replied, indicating to the distant silhouettes of cranes through the gloomy air. “Can I get to it?”

  “Why, lah? There’s nothing there. It’s just a building site. Trucks, cranes, workers. Cannot go inside.”

  “No, I guessed that. But I just wanted to say I stood on Singapore’s southernmost point. When that work is finished, it will have to be Singapore’s most southerly point.”

  “Yah? So?”

  “No, you see, the thing is, my mother-in-law, no, it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to go and see it.”

  “Yah, well, you seen it. It’s down there,” he said, pointing at the faint crane shapes. “Still cannot go inside. What’s the point? You are an ang moh. You will be so red.”

  His logic was incontestable. I thanked him for his time, retraced my steps and got lost. I failed to find a 182M bus stop. I was closer to Malaysia’s Johor Bahru than Boon Lay. Alone, tired and hungry, I was disconsolate and disturbed by a couple of stray, salivating dogs on the other side of the road. But then the saint of Singapore’s southernmost point appeared. A blue pick-up truck pulled up alongside and the Indian gentleman of a driver, recognising that I had lost my way, offered to drop me at a 182M bus stop. I almost kissed him. But considering my location, circumstances and dishevelled appearance, I settled for a grateful handshake as I clambered aboard.

  “I’m a site foreman,” he told me, perhaps in an effort to reassure me. He could have told me he was a site fornicator and my opinion of the Good Samaritan would have altered not a jot.

  “I’m a writer,” I replied.

  He wasn’t impressed. I noticed some Indian cricket keepsakes on the dashboard.

  “Ah, you’re a cricket fan,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I’m Indian, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m English so it’s football for me,” I said as I removed my West Ham baseball cap. “That’s my team there, West Ham, do you know them?”

  “I don’t really follow football but I have heard of West Ham.”

  And then he laughed. He stopped chuckling long enough to drop me off at the bus stop and we wished each other well. As I joined the waiting industrial workers, I contemplated the profound impact of globalisation upon new Singapore. Most of the men at the bus stop were not Singaporean. They were mostly mainland Chinese, Indian, Bangladeshi and me, of course. Globalisation’s tentacles had reached the farthest flung corner of the growing island. So much so that even a cricket-loving Indian migrant working in Tuas South knew that West Ham were shit.

  Seventeen

  I HEADED towards the island’s northern shoreline to follow in the footsteps of Mas Selamat bin Kastari. For the benefit of overseas readers or any Singaporeans who have been living under a flotation device for the last five years, Mas Selamat is the suspected terrorist formerly known as Singapore’s Most Wanted Fugitive. He triggered the biggest—and most unsuccessful—manhunt the country has ever known, generated fear throughout the nation and temporarily exposed the government to international ridicule and domestic vitriol.

  Mas Selamat was a 48-year-old man with a limp.

  Still, his 2008 escape from the Whitley Road Detention Centre, not far from where I once lived in Toa Payoh, was the most farcical, unintentionally hilarious, getaway since I left home at 13, vowing that my mother would never track me down, only for her to discover me by the back gate two hours later. When Mas Selamat fled on Wednesday 27 February 2008, he left an old, complacent Singapore. When he was recaptured in Johor in April 2009 by Malaysian authorities, he was later returned to a new Singapore. Political apathy was being replaced by jaded cynicism publically and a strident rebellion alliance of sorts in cyberspace. The government could no longer take the ballot box for granted: votes had to be earned, trust was a serious bone of contention and cabinet hubris needed to be swiftly replaced by a degree of humility. Mistakes had been made and, unlike Mas Selamat, there was nowhere for ministers to hide. By the time the terror suspect was eventually thrown back across the Causeway, the landscape had changed. The man with the limp had unwittingly been one of new Singapore’s chief architects. That’s a remarkable legacy for a great escape that should have failed at every conceivable level.

  Drawing up an outlandish escape route that had more in common with Mr Bean than Steve McQueen, Mas Selamat squeezed through a toilet. Not literally. He wasn’t Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting. While getting ready for a family visit at the Whitley Road Detention Centre, the Indonesian-born Singaporean asked to be taken to the toilet. Once inside a cubicle, he left a tap running for 11 minutes to fool the guards outside. By the time the guards realised that if Mas Selamat wasted any more water a new agreement with Malaysia might be required, the fugitive had pulled his frame through an unsecured window, lowered and then jumped onto some toilet rolls to break his fall (my mum has always said, “If you’ve got to go, make sure you’ve got enough toilet roll before you go.”), scaled a fence, hobbled across the PIE and then was spotted in a back road near MacRitchie Reservoir that led to Lorong 1 Toa Payoh. I lived in Lorong 1 Toa Payoh for years. I took that back road to get to MacRitchie many times. In most instances, the road was quiet. Had I met an escaped prisoner with a limp carrying a packet of toilet rolls, I’m sure I might have raised the alarm. Or presumed he was in desperate search for a toilet and guided him towards one with the nearest, easiest access—the one at Whitley Road Detention Centre.

  I am not wishing to make light of a serious issue, obviously. Who knows what havoc an unarmed, middle-aged peg leg could wreak upon an unsuspecting community? Still, when Singapore’s authorities finally realised something was afoot, the most spectacular MMS alert in multimedia history was sent to every phone in the country. The text read: “Please call 999 immediately if you see Mas Selamat bin Kastari. He is short (1.58 m tall) and limps on his left leg. Thank you.” For anyone working in Singapore’s security services, in any capacity, that text must have been a real dignity stripper. Had the alert described a muscular, armed brute, a tower of testosterone terror, a suspect in the shape of Schwarzenegger, then there’s comfort to be had from being outfoxed by a freakish beast of such superhuman proportions. But the only people usually searching for a man who’s “short ... and limps on his left leg” are theatrical agents keen to book the back end of a pantomime cow.

  I pity any diminutive individual who visited casualty with a leg injury from late February 2008 onwards. He must have been pounced on the moment he limped out of hospital and battered with his crutches. It is no joke. On 7 August 2008, according to reports, a man was spotted “limping like” Mas Selamat and arrested in Tanjung Pandan, Belitung, by Indonesian police. He was not Singapore’s most wanted fugitive, he was a book salesman. But his arrest begged the obvious question. How exactly was he “limping like” Mas Selamat? Was he doing an impression?

  If so, it was no worse than Mas Selamat’s drag act. Reports claimed the escapee was aided by a family member who dressed him in a woman’s tudung, or headscarf, and disguised him with heavy make-up. So the man suspected of plotting to bomb Changi Airport fled the country as Mrs. Doubtfire. Oh, and he swam across the Johor Straits in a “flotation device”. After a nationwide lockdown at all borders and immigration checkpoints, Mrs. Doubtfire evaded the security forces of an entire country by paddling away in a rubber ring.

  Naturally, I wanted to visit the northern coastline to examine this interpretation of events. The No. 975 bus dropped me at the rickety fishermen’s jetty in Lim Chu Kang, leaving me with a distinctly foul, fishy odour I hadn’t wafted since I had to sit next to Ashley Johnston at school. She also had a distinctly foul, fishy odour, so much so that Mr White kept the class behind one day after Ashley had gone home to explain that the poor girl suffered from a rare syndrome that made her vital organs secrete unfortunate smells. We already knew that. It was called BO. But Ashley Johnston and Lim Chu Kang shared a stench so eerily similar, I expected to find her under a straw hat on the edge of the jetty. Instead I encountered a well-wea
thered angler who had the appearance of man dipped in caramel.

  “Er, hello, I’m looking for an old white bungalow called The Pier,” I began. “I’ve heard it’s around here.”

  It’s true. I was. It was my secondary reason for being in Lim Chu Kang, which I will get to shortly, but I could hardly say I planned to mess about in the mangroves for a couple of hours by pretending to be an escaped prisoner fashioning a flotation device from the flotsam and jetsam.

  “Yah, it’s there,” he said, pointing across the Johor Straits.

  Not 200 metres away, the incongruous, but splendid, colonial retreat jutted out into the sea beyond the mangroves. Its unexpected presence was remarkable. The villa welcomed comparisons to Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye home in Jamaica, if Goldeneye had been surrounded by rusty oil drums and stray dogs.

  “Can I reach the house through the mangroves?” I asked.

  “What for? It’s all muddy and smelly, very hard to walk and the house is closed. Can see it from here.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I wanted to get a closer look. Can I cut through the mangroves?”

  He eyed my white trainers and socks and smiled.

  “Can, why not? Maybe you can swim back and clean your clothes.”

  Maybe the old prune could purchase a hat. I thanked the terrifyingly tanned fisherman, jumped off the end of the jetty and made off into Singapore’s precious mangroves.

  Now, mangroves are tenacious little buggers. Their trees grow where no other tree has been foolish enough to grow before. Their soil (a generous description of the salty, muddy sludge around them) is usually unstable, soft and lacking in decent oxygen. They tolerate tidal salty soakings twice a day. Then there are coastal storms, currents and rivers ferrying in silt during the monsoon season. Most trees would suffocate. Not the mangrove tree. It equips itself with a snorkel and gets on with it. Those snorkels are the roots, tens of thousands of roots, that grow upwards through the swampy ground, allowing the trees to breathe through tiny pores. Those unsightly snorkels are the collective miracle of the mangrove. And I must have tripped over every one of the fuckers.