Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (50 page)

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."

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."

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 shaped 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."