Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  Punishment for not toeing the government's line was always on the Singaporean's mind. It shows in the Singaporean face, typically an anxious face—pouting kittenish women, frowning nerdish men. When I'd lived in Singapore—because of my writing, and for speaking my mind in lectures—I had not been popular with the government, and the government had not changed. After three years here, I was told by the new department head—a whiny, fretful-faced local man, politically connected—that my contract would not be renewed. I was fired for being a political liability. You talk too much, my colleagues said. You tell too many jokes. I published stories in Playboy magazine. So I left under a cloud of growing xenophobia. Thereafter, I became someone a loyal Singaporean could not praise, which was why, decades later, I was still being rubbished.

  "If you play along, you advance here," an Indian labor organizer told me. I had met him in the Indian district, on Serangoon Road. He was bringing me up to date. "But if you criticize, the PM will crush you like a cockroach."

  "There is no other place like this on earth," said my old club-going Singaporean friend, whom I will call Wang. He meant this in every possible sense. He was a citizen, and he spoke with the usual Singaporean ambivalence.

  Nominally, Singapore is a democracy. In reality it is no such thing. Any critic of the government is subject to criminal proceedings, heavy fines, libel suits, threats, or jail. The leader of the opposition party once said euphemistically that the government had engaged in shady dealings. A lawsuit followed. The Singapore technique is diabolically effective. Foreign critics like Chris Lingle are deported or placed under house arrest, and if they are journalists, their newspapers or magazines are sued. This has happened numerous times to the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune, Bloomberg.com, and other news outlets. Singaporean critics or aspiring politicians are pursued through the courts with fanatical zeal, and sued with such severity they are bankrupted. Judges are appointed by the government and are indeed compliant. Destroyed financially, an opposition politician can't run for office—can hardly live.

  "But he doesn't beat people in the streets," Wang said, speaking of Lee Kwan Yew, who now held the title of "minister mentor" and whose son was prime minister. "He," in Singapore, always meant Lee.

  I reminded Wang that Lee had famously praised the Chinese in 1989 for brutally suppressing, shooting, and imprisoning the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, backing the Chinese government in the massacre of thousands. And Lee's uncompromising approval of this cruelty had frightened Singaporeans to such an extent that similar demonstrations had never occurred here, though individually critics had been persecuted.

  "He's very shrewd," Wang said. But Wang was also shrewd. He said, "Think of the Machiavelli line about 'economy of violence.'"

  "Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys, the Chinese disciplinarians say."

  Lee gave a rare press conference when I was in Singapore. I saw it on television. He had aged in a remarkable way, not just becoming white-haired but acquiring withered, almost simian features—not the thuggish scowl of a Triad chieftain he'd had when I'd last seen him, but a pinched and unforgiving look that I associated with unhappy captives, like a caged thing scowling through bars.

  "I can't retire," Lee protested at the beginning of this talk. And throughout it he kept up the tone of an old meddler who says, Look what you're making me do! He went on, "There are things in Singapore that no other minister can do." Even at the age of eighty-three, he refused to retire and play golf. "I still have ideas. I want to tweak it a bit more."

  Lee's use of the word "tweak" always meant meddle and micromanage and fiddle with people's lives.

  "Why not leave that to younger politicians and leaders?" someone inquired.

  "I'm the only one who understands what Singapore needs," he snapped. "Next question."

  A foreign journalist suggested obliquely that this was an arrogant way of governing—after all, he had been out of office for some years.

  "If I were arrogant, would I be talking to you?" Lee said, and told the man to sit down, adding, "There are very few things you can tell me about Singapore—what will work, what won't work. That's my value to the government." He was annoyed at having been defied. Before he left the podium, he said, "I know what will work here because I tweaked the system to get us here!"

  "He's respected, he's somewhat admired, but not loved," my friend Wang said. "He knows that. He's rather sad that he's not loved."

  Lee is of course a cold and single-minded control freak, a puritanical, domineering know-it-all, oddly resentful in the things he says; and Singapore society reflects everything in Lee's personality. Not surprisingly, Lee's domineering father was a severe disciplinarian, who insisted his son speak English at home. Lee is a highly emotional man who has publicly sobbed, to his own shame and to the horror of his stoical electorate. People said, I thought that was the whole point of him, that he didn't cry, and yet there he was, on national television, blubbing his heart out.

  Beware the blubbing autocrat, for he will make you cry. As a leader, Lee allowed his personal agonies to eat into people's lives, making Singapore a reflection of one man's anxieties. He famously hates gum-chewing, smoking, littering, and nudity. Chewing gum is banned in Singapore, hardly anyone smokes, no one litters—the fines for them are severe, and Playboy has been banned for decades. Lee suspects he is being plotted against, so it is a society without any privacy and virtually without an opposition. Lee is xenophobic; Singaporeans likewise tend to be dismissive or sarcastic about foreigners, regarding them as decadent and disorderly. Lee is puritanical. So are they. Movies are routinely censored, TV shows too. The Sopranos was sharply edited and bleeped. Deadwood was so bleeped it became incomprehensible, and broadcasts were stopped. Six Feet Under was chopped to pieces for its sexual innuendo. Lee refuses to be challenged or questioned, much less criticized. Apart from anything else, this condescension and censorship is odd in a highly educated country, with one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

  Virtually the only Singaporean who has dared to speak openly to the government is a fiction writer and former linguistics professor, Catherine Lim, a courageous woman in her mid-sixties. Unlike her imaginative and witty novels, her op-ed pieces read like stern memos. She asks for more transparency, more idealism, more heart, more sentiment. In a 2007 essay published in the Straits Times, she wrote: "Even in a society often described as aggressively materialistic and coldly efficient, there are, fortunately, Singaporeans who believe idealism has a place, and that the fire, passion and commitment of the Old Guard, who saw Singapore through the difficult early years with little hope of financial reward, are still alive in some young Singaporeans."

  No sooner does one of Lim's pieces appear than it is jeered at by a government functionary, and Lim is put in her place. In any other country, she would be regarded as a caring, auntie figure. She is not so much a critic of the government as someone who is trying to define a national mood and suggesting modest proposals, but even so, such temerity in Singapore makes her sound like Thomas Paine.

  Despising and belittling the electorate, intolerant of the political opposition, which he regards as riffraff, Lee is as prominent now as he was forty years ago when I first arrived to teach at the University of Singapore—and was told by the vice chancellor to get a haircut. That was in 1968, not a notable year for barbershop visits by twenty-somethings.

  On my return trip, I tried to talk to my interviewers and friends about Lee and his party and Singapore's political direction, but no one except my old friend Wang would discuss politics—and he did so in a whisper. For fear of being misunderstood or overheard, no one mentioned Lee Kwan Yew by name. He was like the Mafia capo who is never named. In the Genovese crime family, a soldier would refer to the boss, Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, only by touching his chin, never speaking the name. It was rare to hear anyone say "Lee." They said "He" or "LKY," sometimes "the Old Man" or "Uncle Harry," or they winked.

  Because Lee sha
ped Singapore, the place bears all his characteristics and is stamped with his personality, his quirks, his crotchets. He has caused Singaporeans to take up golf. He has no sense of humor—laughs are rare in the city-state. Singaporeans' personalities reflect that of the only leader most of them have ever known, and as a result are notably abrasive, abrupt, thin-skinned, unsmiling, rude, puritanical, bossy, selfish, and unspiritual. Because they can't criticize the government, they criticize each other or pick on foreigners. And in this hanging and flogging society they openly spank their children.

  An expatriate woman from Europe who had lived in Singapore for many years said to me, "Singaporeans have no grace. They are the rudest people I've ever met. I was pregnant with my second child. I had a tiny child by the hand. On a bus, no one would ever stand up to give me a seat." A moment later, she added, "But I love living here. I have a comfortable house. My children have good schools. It's well organized. It's safe."

  Lee, a Cambridge graduate, is a great admirer of the British. He has a prickly history with the United States—his socialist utterances in the 1960s provoked the CIA to subvert some people in his party with payoffs and intrusions. He has never forgiven America for this.

  "He's a frank admirer of President Bush," one of my Singaporean friends said. "But he disliked Clinton for his irregular private life. Do you remember when that American boy damaged the car and was caned for it?"

  This was Michael Fay, an eighteen-year-old who was stripped naked, bent over a trestle and tied, then ass-whipped with six strokes. He also got a heavy fine and four months in prison—this for spray-painting graffiti on cars in a Singapore parking lot. Fay was a punk who deserved to be disciplined. But whipped? Yet his punishment was mild, practically ridiculous, in comparison with the torture meted out to many others in Singapore's jails, whose cases never got into the newspapers: many more strokes, long prison sentences on political grounds or for thought crimes, or death by hanging for drug offenses.

  Wang said, "Fay would not have been caned had Reagan been in power. Lee was trying to teach Clinton a lesson, showing Clinton that Singapore disapproved of him by whipping the American boy."

  Some U.S. senators lodged a protest. President Clinton called the punishment "excessive," though his outrage at the caning must be weighed against his unseemly haste just two years earlier, in 1992, to stop campaigning for president in New Hampshire and fly back to Arkansas to authorize the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded black man.

  The American reaction to Fay's punishment provoked Lee to reveal in an outburst what he really thought of American society and how he viewed Singapore. "The U.S. government, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. media took the opportunity to ridicule us, saying the sentence was too severe," he said in a television interview. The United States "does not restrain or punish individuals, forgiving them for whatever they have done. That's why the whole country is in chaos: drugs, violence, unemployment, and homelessness."

  Like the head of an isolated cult who preaches to his people that only they are pure in a wicked world, Lee actually believes that America is "in chaos," and he enjoins Singaporeans to believe this nonsense and to count their blessings. We Americans are undisciplined and bestial, out of control and criminal. Singapore is the opposite, orderly and safe, nonviolent and hard-working, and will continue to be so under Lee's leadership.

  Some time ago, on a rare trip to Paris, so a well-placed friend told me, Lee was granted a meeting with François Mitterrand. Lee began lecturing the premier of France on governance. After Lee had left the room, Mitterrand said, "Who is this ridiculous man who wastes my time? Running Singapore is like running Marseilles. I am running a whole country!"

  Lee's Anglophilia is shared by Singaporeans, but it is based on a dated notion of English ways, a set of social snobberies—tea-drinking, cricket-watching, and harmless affectations—and an overformal way of dressing in the Singapore heat, turning up the air conditioning so they can wear tweeds and Burberry sweaters. Like Lee, Singaporeans are assiduous, honest, tidy to the point of obsessiveness, and efficient. They also tend to be inflexible and stern. They are fluent in English, though with a small vocabulary, and in pronunciation and idiomatic bewilderments they have made the language their own. Their jaw-twisting yips and glottal stops are so sudden and glugging that some words can sound less like language than a gag reflex.

  Lee is a vain and domineering patriarch, and with the passing years he sounds more and more like the head of a cult than a political leader. His son Lee Hsien Loong is prime minister, and a chip off the old block. Hsien Loong's wife, Ho Ching, is the executive director of the government-linked Temasek Holdings. The Lee family is the nearest thing to a political dynasty. Yet Lee never smiles. He is never satisfied.

  "No one ever gets a compliment here," a Singaporean woman told me. "There is no flattery. People are suspicious of compliments or any expression of appreciation. Toughness is the style. Good manners are suspect."

  In a Singapore joke, a man goes into an antique shop and sees a lovely image next to an ugly one. "I know that's Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy," the man says, "but who is that ugly one?" The shop owner says, "It's Kwan Yew, the god of no mercy."

  Singaporeans are intensely aware of their living like lab rats in this huge social experiment. It seems to make them melancholic and self-conscious and defensive.

  Singapore is a real tinkered-with experiment—not the political con game of Turkmenistan, or the free-for-all of India, or the tyranny of Myanmar, or the muddle and make-do of Sri Lanka, or the neglect of Laos. Thailand seemed to me exceptional—a success because people were proud, loved their king, had a sense of unity, and had never been colonized. Singapore came into existence because the British colonized the jungly place. Having made it a class- and race-conscious island of clubs and bars, the British kept it as an imperial artifact until the Japanese invaded, during World War II, little skinny soldiers riding in on bikes, capturing the island, and humiliating the British for four years in diabolical prisons.

  The Japanese demonstrated that British rule was hollow, self-interested, and weak. After the war, the British looked impotent and lost their will to govern. Singapore was dominated by Islamic, Chinese-hating Malaya, which became the Republic of Malaysia in 1963. At last, in 1965, in a lachrymose display, weeping on TV (but he cries easily), Lee declared the island's independence. He was humbled, because he had believed his destiny was to be Malaysia's prime minister, not CEO of this tiny island, more a corporation or a cult than a country. But he reminded Singaporeans that they were surrounded by enemies, and he invited the world to do business in his city-state. Foreign companies relocated here, invested their capital, and helped Singapore to become an economic success. It has flourished because it made itself useful to the great powers and to global business.

  Because initiative is dangerous in an autocracy, Singaporeans are employees, not innovators. And because space is at a premium and the cost of living is high, Singaporeans marry late and, either through pessimism or procrastination, tend not to produce children. The birth rate fell so sharply in the early eighties that a government dating agency was started in 1984, to host matchmaking parties, to promote marriages and births. This agency, called the Social Development Unit, or SDU (known to Singapore wags as Single, Desperate, and Ugly), was a failure. While I was in Singapore in 2006, it was disbanded.

  Over the course of my week here, I reacquainted myself with old Singapore friends and heard their stories.

  One said: "My wife went to Australia. She was studying for a degree. But when she finished, she wouldn't come back. I went there and tried to persuade her. She said that she could never live here again, although she was born here. It wasn't a man. She just couldn't bear Singapore any-more.So we got a divorce."

  One said: "Your student [and he named him] killed himself. Your student [and he named her] also killed herself. Suicide is a Singapore solution."

  One said: "We never go to Malaysia or Indonesia, although the
y're right next door. The Muslims are crazy. They want to overwhelm us. They deliberately isolated us."

  One said: "Life here is shopping and eating. Also 'What kind of car do you have?' and 'Where are you going on vacation?' When women get together they talk about clubs, investments, money, stock tips, and servants."

  One said: "Do you remember [and he named two former students]? They got married, but when they split up she became a fanatical Catholic. She never goes out. She only stays in her flat and prays."

  One said: "I bought a new car a few years ago. It cost me forty-five thousand dollars U.S. I first had to apply for a permit to buy it. In ten years I'll have to renew this permit, and that will cost money. Everything is regulated—buying the car, driving, access, parking. It's a fortune, and this is just a little Nissan sedan. But no one really needs a car here."

  One said: "We never talk about politics, race, or religion. We never talk about the prime minister. We never tell ethnic jokes. We hardly tell jokes. Joking can be dangerous."

  One said: "Yes, we're pushy. There's a reason for it—the Hokkien expression kia su, 'afraid to lose.' No one wants to be seen holding the short straw."

  One said: "Remember [and he named a Singaporean]? He still hates you!"

  One said: "Yes, it is a life without texture."

  One said: "The big man [Lee] has erased the old Singapore. Singapore begins with him. He has obliterated the past. Though you can see the city had a colonial history, he has tried to erase it. That's your problem here, Paul—you're a ghost from the past."

  ***

  AND HERE IS THE CONTRADICTION. Everyone I met in Singapore treated me with the utmost courtesy. I was fed the Singapore delicacies—chili crabs and dumplings and steamed fish and bowls of laksa. I was invited to give a lecture at the new national library, and four hundred people showed up. I was driven around by the sweetest, most solicitous people I'd met on my whole trip. They smoothed my way. What did I need? How could they help? Did I want something to read? Was there anyone I'd like to meet? Was I hungry? Was I tired? Was I having a good time?