I got up early to be on the balcony for the crossing of the causeway from Johore Bahru. But I was met in the corridor by two men, who blocked my way and demanded to see my passport. One said, 'Singapore immigration.'
'Your hair is radda rong,' said the other.
'And yours is rather short,' I said, feeling that one impertinence deserved another. But according to Singapore law the immigration officers were within their rights to refuse me entry if they thought my hair was untidy. Singapore police, who have virtually no effect on the extortionists and murderers in the Chinese secret societies, are in the habit of frog-marching long-haired youths into the Orchard Road police station to shave their heads.
'How much money you have?'
'Enough,' I said. Now the train was on the causeway, and I was eager to have a look at the Strait of Johore.
'Exact amount.'
'Six hundred dollars.'
'Singapore currency?'
'American.'
'Show.'
When every dollar had been counted they gave me an entry visa. By then I had missed the causeway. The North Star was rolling past the wooded marshland on the northern part of the island to the Jurong Road. I associated this road with debt: five years before, I drove down it in the mornings to take my wife to work. It was always cool when we left the house, but so quickly did the rising sun heat the island that it was nearly 80 by the time my small boy (carsick in his wicker seat) and I got back – he to his amah, I to my unfinished African novel. It was curious, travelling across the island, having one's memory jogged by the keen smells of the market near Bukit Timah Circus and the sight of the tropical plants I loved – the palms by the tracks called pinang rajah, which have feathery fronds gathered at the top and look like ceremonial umbrellas, and the plants that spray green plumes from the fissures and boles of every old tree in Singapore, the lush ornament called 'ghost leaf that gives the deadest tree life. I felt kindly towards Singapore – how could I feel otherwise in a place where one of my children was born, where I wrote three books and freed myself from the monotonous routine of teaching? My life had begun there. Now we were passing Queenstown, where Anne had taught night-school classes in Macbeth; Outram Road General Hospital, where I'd been treated for dengue; and the island in the harbour – there, through the trees – where, on various Sunday outings, we had been caught in a terrifying storm, and seen a thick poisonous sea snake, and been passed ('Don't let the children see!') by a human corpse so old and buoyant it spun in the breeze like a beach toy.
Singapore Station is scheduled for demolition because its granite frieze of Anglo-Saxon muscle men posed as 'Agriculture', 'Commerce', 'Industry', and 'Transport' is thought to be as outmoded as the stone sign on the walclass="underline" federated malay states railway. Singapore thinks of itself as an island of modernity in a backward part of Asia, and many people who visit confirm this by snapping pictures of new hotels and apartment houses, which look like juke boxes and filing cabinets respectively. Politically, Singapore is as primitive as Burundi, with repressive laws, paid informers, a dictatorial government, and jails full of political prisoners. Socially, it is like rural India, with households dependent on washerwomen, amahs, gardeners, cooks, and lackeys. At the factory, workers – who, like everyone else in Singapore, are forbidden to strike – are paid low wages. The media are dull beyond belief because of the heavy censorship. Singapore is a small island, 227 square miles at low tide, and though the government refers to it grandly as 'the Republic', in Asian terms it is little more than a sand bank – but a sand bank that has been enriched by foreign investment (Singaporeans are great assemblers of appliances) and the Vietnam War. Its small size makes it easy to manage: immigration is strictly controlled, family planning is pervasive, no one is allowed to attend the university until he has a security clearance to show he is demonstrably meek, Chinese (from America, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) are encouraged to settle there, and everyone else is encouraged to leave. The police in Singapore are assigned to the oddest tasks; the courts are filled with the unlikeliest criminals. In what other country on earth would one see such items in the paper?
Eleven contractors, three householders and a petrol-kiosk proprietor, were fined a total of $6,035 yesterday for breeding mosquitoes.
Tan Teck Sen, 20, unemployed, was fined $20 for shouting in the lobby of the Cockpit Hotel yesterday.
Four people were fined $750 yesterday under the Destruction of Disease-Bearing Insects Act for allowing insects to breed.
Sulaimen Mohammed was fined $30 yesterday for throwing a piece of paper into a drain at the 15 ½ mile, Woodlands Road.
Seven or eight years is not an uncommon sentence for a political offence, and criminal offences usually include a whipping. An alien can be deported for having long hair, and anyone can be fined up to $500 for spitting or throwing paper on the ground. Essentially, these laws are passed so that foreign tourists will come to Singapore and, if the news gets out that Singapore is clean and well disciplined, then Americans will want to set up factories and employ the nonstriking Singaporeans. The government emphasizes control, but in such a small place control is not hard to achieve.
Here is a society where newspapers are censored and no criticism of the government is tolerated; where television is a bland confection of quiz shows, American and British situation comedies, and patriotic programmes; where mail is tampered with and banks are forced to disclose the private accounts of their clients. It is a society where there is literally no privacy and where the government is in complete control. This is the Singaporeans' idea of technological advance:
How would you like to live in a futuristic Singapore where mail and newspapers arrive at your home electronically by facsimile 'print-out'?
Sounds like science fiction, but to the Acting General Manager of the Singapore Telephone Board, Mr Frank Loh, they could 'become reality before long'.
He said, 'Developments in telecommunications have already done much to change the pattern of our lives. Concepts such as the "wired city" in which a single cable to each home or office would handle all communication needs could soon be put into practice.'
Mr Loh, who was speaking on 'Telephone Communication' at the convention of the Singapore-Malaysia Institutes of Engineers, gave more details of such exciting developments which the future holds.
'Imagine,' he said, 'at your home communication centre, both mail and newspapers might arrive electronically delivered by facsimile "print-out".'
(Straits Times, 20 November 1973)
It struck me as a kind of technology that reduced freedom, and in a society that was basically an assembly plant for Western business interests, depending on the goodwill of washerwomen and the cowardice of students, this technology was useful for all sorts of programmes and campaigns. In a 'wired city' you wouldn't need wall space for SINGAPORE WANTS SMALL FAMILIES and PUT YOUR HEART INTO SPORTS and REPORT ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS: you would simply stuff it into the wire and send it into every home.
But that is not the whole of Singapore. There is a fringe, latterly somewhat narrower than it was, where life continues aimlessly, unimpeded by the police or the Ministry of Technology. On this fringe, which is thick with bars, people celebrate Saturday with a curry lunch and drink beer all afternoon, saying, 'Singapore's a shambles – I'm going to Australia,' or 'You were lucky to get out when you did.' It is a place where nearly everyone talks of leaving, but no one goes, as if in leaving he would have to account for all those empty, wasted years playing the slot machines at the Swimming Club, signing chits at the Staff House, toying with a coffee, and waiting for the mail to arrive. On the fringe there are still a few brothels, massage parlours, coffee shops, and discounts for old friends; there are fans instead of air conditioners, and some of the bars have verandahs where in the evening a group of drinkers might find a half-hour's diversion in watching a fat gecko loudly gobble a sausage fly.