Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  Doug had seemed to me the person I had been, so I felt affectionate towards him. But I felt only sadness when I saw this old man; I felt protective, and fearful too. In a matter of years that wandering coot, the ghost whom no one noticed, would be me.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO SINGAPORE

  THE LANKAWI EXPRESS

  WHEN THE TRAIN pulled into the station at Butterworth I felt ill—the laksa, I guessed. Greedy for the taste of it, I'd had seconds. I had not stopped at Penang on my previous trip. I might have passed by this time too, except that my guts were griping. I was dizzy and couldn't bear the thought of onward travel. So, bent double, I took the ferry across the harbor to Georgetown, got a taxi to the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, and curled into a ball, rising only to rehydrate with glasses of water fortified by a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar. I felt so ghastly the next day I took a pill; when that didn't work I went to a Chinese herbalist down a side lane and got a potion. I stayed in bed. After three months of travel I was seriously laid low.

  All that second night I heard loud music from the nearby streets—the bars, the clubs, the narrow lanes of massage parlors and neon signs. I had been sick only a few times on this trip, but this was by far the worst—cramps and nausea. My usual way of dealing with illness was to suspend all activity, find a good hotel, and sleep it off—eat nothing, keep drinking salted water. I did so here at the E&O.

  Eventually I felt well enough to shuffle around the town on the sea legs of convalescence. With its colonial houses and covered walkways, its monsoon drains and narrow Chinese shops stacked high with goods, Georgetown (named for King George III) was a marvel of preservation. It looked much like the Singapore where I had worked in the 1960s. I had been to Georgetown once before, in 1970, on my way to a remote fishing village up the coast, Batu Ferringhi (Foreigner's Rock). Out of curiosity I went there again, in a taxi, and found that it had become a corniche of high-rise hotels and condominiums, luxury homes, big resorts, and dreary tenements crowding the beachfront, a place of unparalleled ugliness.

  Chandra, the taxi driver, was of Tamil extraction but born in Penang. He had never been to India. I asked him why. He said, "Too many people." He was married to a Chinese woman who had been a childhood neighbor and friend. They had two children. His sense of hospitality was such that he invited me to his house for tea, and when I commented on his addressing his wife in Tamil, he said, "We always speak Tamil at home." His wife was a Hokkien-speaker, and of course the national language was Malay, and he was fluent in English and knew "a bit of German. Danke. Guten morgen"

  Many Germans had second homes here, he said. But mainly it was a resort for Arabs.

  "Saudis—they have the money," he said. "But also Jordanians and Syrians. Their country is too hot—they have to leave, but they don't want to go to Europe or America. They know people hate them there. Americans say they're terrorists. They get double-checked at airports. And they don't want to be in a country where the women have to remove veil."

  "They wear veils here?" It seemed odd in a country where Muslim women were gracefully dressed in sarongs and tight-fitting blouses.

  "The women eat like this," Chandra said, and gestured, lifting an imaginary veil and sipping an imaginary drink. "No man can look at their wife. Only them."

  "Lots of Arabs?"

  "Thousands. Many thousands. Big planes, full of families—women in black, men in suits. Children. They can be very rude. They break things at the hotels and they fight when we ask them to pay. And rude when they talk to you. Sometimes they say to me, 'We go'"—and Chandra flapped his arms—"because they can't say 'airport.'"

  "So what do you think?"

  "I think if you're a good person, you don't need religion."

  "They've got a lot of religion."

  "They pray five times a day, and still they are terrible. So rude!"

  Chandra took me to Penang's botanical garden so I could see the varieties of bamboo. I debated whether to look up the procuress Lily, but I was still convalescing. I felt too fragile to roam the streets at night. I found an old paperback of The Great Railway Bazaar in a Georgetown bookstore and read some of it and thought: I am not that man anymore, nor do these places exist anymore. I was impatient to get to Singapore, so I bought a ticket and returned to Butterworth on the ferry and got a night train to Kuala Lumpur, in a compartment that was jammed with so many cardboard boxes there was hardly room for me. My fellow traveler was a Malay salesman for a firm dealing in table fans.

  "Samples-lah!" he explained, but he was gone, with his boxes, when I woke up.

  Even in the dim early morning I could see that Kuala Lumpur's main railway station was a marvel of good design, with marble floors, efficient clerks, and lots of trains to choose from. Any city in America would have been proud to have such a station. I bought a ticket on a later train to Singapore so that I could have my noodles here.

  Pulling away from Kuala Lumpur, I could see the city like a mirage hovering at treetop level, a capriccio of spires—jungle and palms in the foreground, the otherworldly skyscrapers showing in the mist, silvery in all the green, a fantasy skyline. That sight was a reminder that Malaysia was an oil-producing nation; the beautiful railway station and this train were more proof of the country's prosperity.

  In the seven hours through the jungles of southern Malaysia, the kampongs of graceful houses, the palm-oil plantations, I wrote more of my Indian story. The verdant zone was restful and reassuring. Approaching Johore Bahru and the border, I saw that all I had written in my notebook was jungle—palms—muddy river.

  Welcome to Singapore was the greeting at Woodlands Station, the customs post, and under it a warning: The Penalty for Drugs Is Death.

  ***

  LITTLE TINKY-WINKY SINGAPORE was unrecognizable, the most transformed of any city I had ever known in my life, a place twisted into something entirely new; and the people, too, like hothouse flowers that are forced to grow in artificial light, producing strange blooms and even stranger fruit. But I was disarmed by the feline good looks of Singapore women, soft, pale, kittenish girls with skinny arms and fragile bones; vulpine women, fox-faced and canny, quick-eyed, tense with frustrated intelligence. In great contrast, the toothy men hurried clumsily after them, down futuristic streets, giggling into cell phones, pigeon-toed in their haste.

  No one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed. But many Singaporeans had (so it seemed to me) the half-devil, half-child look of having been infantilized and overprotected by their unstoppably manipulative government. The entirety of Singapore's leadership was personified by the grouchy, hard-to-please Lee Kwan Yew. This tenacious nag, it seemed, refused to go away: after forty-one years in the government, at age eighty-three, he was still micromanaging the place. The city-state showed his tweaked and tinkered-with look, and so did the people. I had lived and worked here, at the University of Singapore, for three years in the 1960s. Then I'd passed through on my Railway Bazaar in 1973. Now I was back again, and nothing was familiar.

  I was disoriented as soon as I left my hotel near the city center, a place I had once known well, at the top of Orchard Road. But it no longer looked like Orchard Road. The street names had stayed the same, which made it all the more confusing because the streets themselves had been redrawn. Singapore had been a tiny colonial city on a tiny island, with a hinterland. It was now a single modernized piece of geography—island, city, and rural areas had been combined to form a city-state, with muddy shores. It was a thoroughly urbanized island, 270 square miles of it—about the size of the Spanish island of Menorca, but much smaller than New York City.

  It was a place without solitude. Cameras everywhere, snitches too. You can be arrested and fined for being naked in your own house, if someone gets a glimpse of you through a window and reports you. This is an inconvenient law, because being a place with no privacy, Singapore is also a place of great loneliness and fear, the apprehension of people who know they are forever being watched. Singaporeans are encouraged to spy on e
ach other; rats are rewarded.

  Joseph Conrad would have been able to find his way around the Singapore of the 1960s. He described a walk through the city in his long story "The End of the Tether." But the old horizontal city of shophouses and bungalows had become a vertical city of tall buildings, and because of intensive land reclamation, the whole of Singapore was bigger by forty-three square miles. What had been the waterfront was now far from the sea—Beach Road was nowhere near the beach. Restrictions and subways limited the traffic on this island of merchandise for sale, highly organized streets, clusters of housing estates, and many mansions. Flyovers had replaced narrow lanes, parks had replaced slums and shophouses. A city of restaurants and department stores. A city of frenzied shoppers, most of them young. What struck me was that, as an effect of living in this place, Singaporeans were strange without knowing they were strange.

  "You are here at an auspicious time," a Singapore friend said.

  "I hear that a lot."

  "No, really. They just unbanned Saint Jack"

  My Singapore novel, published in 1972, was at last available in Singapore. And the movie made from it in 1978, by Peter Bogdanovich, was being shown in theaters. It was the only Hollywood film ever made entirely on location in Singapore—but done by trickery, as the Singapore-based writer Ben Slater had revealed in his recent book, Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in Singapore. Bogdanovich had not revealed to the authorities that he was filming my banned book, and because of this deception, and the film's portrayal of the sex trade, the Chinese gangs, and the more colorful neighborhoods—such as Bugis Street, thoroughfare of transvestites—the film had been banned. Because the ban had been lifted, and I had just arrived, my friends alerted the press. I was interviewed. It was the first and last time on my trip that my face appeared in the local papers.

  Four interviews, each posing the question (among others) "What do you think of Singapore?"

  Singaporeans, keenly aware that they live in a safe, very tidy, highly organized, and generally unfree city-state, need to be reassured that it is Shangri-la. It didn't matter that I'd been in Singapore for only two days.

  "It all looks absolutely marvelous," I said.

  Interviewers can encourage harmless self-glorification in their subject, or they can be obstinate and unimpressed, or devious. But they have their uses. A great way to find old friends in a foreign city is to be interviewed for the press. In Singapore I met many people I would otherwise have been unable to find: great friends growing old here, and even old enemies—enemies, after all these years! But a cruel and unforgiving government can make its citizens cruel and unforgiving. Several people who were informants for the interviewers said, in so many words, what a horse's ass I had been and how they hadn't liked me.

  "I talked to two or three of your former students," one interviewer said, clicking her pen over her stenographer's notebook. The open page was covered with neat handwriting.

  "Let me say one thing," I said, interrupting her. "The university students I had in Singapore were the brightest, the best, the most hard-working of any students I'd ever taught. And they spoiled me. I never found students that good anywhere else, so I gave up teaching."

  "That's quite a compliment. What did you teach?"

  "Shakespeare's contemporaries, like Middleton and Tourneur. The revenge plays of the Jacobean period. What else? I gave a series of lectures on The Winter's Tale, and tutorials in Conrad, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence—all the stuff on the Cambridge syllabus. Great Expectations" She was writing this down. "So what did they say?"

  "They weren't very complimentary."

  "Really?" I was surprised. The head of the English Department, D. J. Enright, a highly regarded English poet and literary critic, much loved by the students, affected an air of bonhomie with them, while being something of a taskmaster with his staff. He was a hard worker himself, and he suspected me of being an upstart. His need to assert himself had turned him into an inveterate gossip, and his puritanical streak made him a retailer of steamy rumors. He held court in the Staff Club, where we all drank beer, moaned about the government and the weather, and speculated on campus adulteries. As the first American who'd ever taught in Enright's department, I had to prove I was a scholar. And I needed the job; I tried hard to impress him. I liked the diligent students, so I felt my effort was in a good cause.

  "One of your students said, 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything. So I'm not saying anything.'"

  I swallowed and said, "Go on."

  "Another one said you were arrogant. Does this bother you?"

  "No," I said. But it did. I saw my earlier self in my office, working my way through a stack of students' essays about The Changeling. I was twenty-seven years old. I was on the lowest lecturer's salary, earning the equivalent of $50 a week. I had a wife and two children to support. I was trying to write Saint Jack. I wasn't arrogant, I was desperate.

  My novel was about a man of fifty, hard up in Singapore, with dreams of happiness. I was hard up; I felt fifty. I had dreams too.

  "And another one..."

  "Oh," I said, because being belittled made me remember, "I lived in a tiny house with no air conditioning."

  "This one said you were unapproachable."

  "I was in my office from nine to five—Enright insisted we keep office hours. 'Where's Paul?' he'd say, even when I didn't have to deliver a lecture. Students dropped in all the time. I thought they liked me."

  She was still studying her notebook page. "One described you as a 'less than perfect teacher.'"

  "Less than perfect! Ha! Probably true."

  "Do you remember a student called Kirpal Singh?"

  "Very well. A nice kid. What I remember was that he was poor and studious, odd man out—a Sikh among the Chinese. And the government took his scholarship away. The government's line was that studying English didn't build the nation. They wanted engineers and economists. Kirpal got screwed and so did lots of other scholarship students. More of Lee Kwan Yew's meddling."

  She was reading: "'Singh recalls that Theroux would be late for class, not return assignments on time, and fail to give individual feedback, making him feel shortchanged as a student.'"

  "Are you going to print that?"

  "I'm going to write a balanced piece."

  "Shortchanged?" I said, my voice becoming shrill. "I stuck my neck out and complained to the vice chancellor when his scholarship was taken away!"

  Several interviews were published, with the anonymous abuse and innuendo, and the one with Kirpal Singh's criticism. In that piece Kirpal, who was fifty-seven, was described as "a poet and associate professor of creative thinking at Singapore Management University."

  I called his office. I said, "Kirpal, this is Paul Theroux. Why are you saying these terrible things about me?"

  "They misquoted me," he said, and gabbled a little about his innocence. "Want to meet for a beer?"

  "Time for a Tiger," I said.

  Over fish-head curry at an open-air restaurant, Kirpal was shamefaced and apologetic. I smiled as he explained that he had said to the reporter I was sometimes late and occasionally didn't return assignments and now and then ... He was bearded and grizzled, still wearing a turban, hot-faced, jolly, and plump. His new wife was Chinese. They had a small boy. It was wonderful to see Kirpal, talking about his poetry, still alive, animatedly trying to convince me that he had not maligned me, while I laughed and drank Tiger beer.

  "There should be a retraction," he said, tugging his beard.

  The other interviews rubbished me in the same way, not for being a bad writer but for having been a poor teacher, for my dubious character. In Singapore, a place that demanded absolute loyalty of its citizens, accusing someone of being unreliable or disloyal was much worse than saying his writing was bad.

  An old colleague who got in touch after the interviews invited me to his club. He said, "They were so unfair. You must be annoyed."

  "Not annoyed. Fascinated."

&nbs
p; One of the characteristics of autocratic rule, even a benign, well-intentioned autocracy like Lee's Singapore, was that whispers and betrayal, survival skills, had become modes of being. Wayward citizens were punished unmercifully: anyone caught with drugs was hanged, and even petty criminals were flogged with a rotan, a narrow rattan rod, sometimes thirty or forty strokes on the back or buttocks. What I have written so far here would be enough to get my ass whipped in Singapore.

  Strange blooms, eh? Cruel and unforgiving government, eh? Drop your pants and bend over, Mister Thorax! You're getting fifty cuts of the rotan!

  An exaggeration? Not really. My friend Christopher Lingle, the scholar and journalist, wrote an op-ed piece for the International Herald Tribune in 1994 that mentioned "certain south-east Asian countries ... bankrupting the opposition by means of a compliant judiciary." He did not mention Singapore by name, yet the Singapore government took umbrage. Lingle lost his job at Singapore's National University and was charged with contempt of court and violating a law against "scandalizing the judicial system." He was placed under house arrest, from which he cleverly escaped, doing a midnight flit out of the country.

  I happened to see Lingle in Bangkok, on my way here. He is a serious and widely published political economist and university professor.

  "Lee takes too much credit for Singapore's success," Lingle had said. "What has he actually produced? Seventy percent of Singapore's businesses are foreign-owned."

  "Singapore is a success, though."

  "Cities are always places of high productivity. He wouldn't have been able to run Malaysia."

  "Tell me why."

  "Because he is articulate but incoherent."

  "How would you rate him?"

  "I don't rate him at all. Singapore is an example of banal economic theory," Lingle said. "A monkey could do it."