SEX IN THE LION CITY

Singapore Sleaze                                                          

As a scene of unzippered sordidness this should be a contender for the AVN (Adult Video News) awards, also known as the Porn Oscars - except it was real life.

At dusk in an open lane alongside a busy restaurant and well-lit road, the meat market was being stocked – a regular event.

Four women, who might once have been young, shuffled into line and stared through the crowd.  They wore the standard uniform  -  stilettos, tiny skirt and tinier blouse.  Before them their pimp vigorously spruiked their physical virtues to the ogling men.  In case they couldn’t understand his language he raised three fingers, then circled the thumb and forefinger. S$30 (Rp 275,000) for a session.

Some red-light spot in San Francisco or Sydney’s King’s Cross?  Maybe Amsterdam’s notorious De Wallen district where girls pose in shop windows? Or could it be Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy?

No, all those sex centers are too dignified.  This one’s base and coarse, yet it’s in prim, clean, image-conscious Singapore, the heartland of Asia’s conservative moral values where failing to flush a public WC will get you a S$500 (Rp 4.6 million) fine.

The little red dot where the media is controlled, where graffiti vandals get whipped and chewing gum is banned, is also the center of sleaze.

You won’t find the wares and whores of Geylang listed in the splendid brochures handed out by the Singapore Visitors’ Center, though by chance we found the area through a tourist promotion officer at Changi Airport.

We’d arrived late, missed flights and had no prior booking. “I could get you into Geylang,” he said hesitantly, trying to gauge the likely reaction, “but it’s the red light area.”

“But is it safe?” asked my wife.

“Of course,” he bristled.  “This is Singapore.”

That was more than a decade ago and we’ve used the suburb’s hotels on every trip since, finding them clean, convenient, well-located between two MRT (subway) stops just a few minutes ride to the upscale attractions, like museums and galleries.

It’s also surrounded by restaurants. No posh waiters to call you ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ as they shake out your serviette, only sweating girls in  shorts and bum belts pointing at pictures on greasy menus; but the food is plentiful, good value and absolutely authentic.

However Geylang is no longer quite so secure, according to Police Commissioner Ng Joo He, since last December’s riots in Little India, a suburb just five kilometers distant. The first major public disturbance in the city state since 1969, the riot followed a fatal traffic accident, and involved 300 migrant laborers trashing emergency vehicles.

A Straits Times report of the Committee of Inquiry into the mayhem revealed the situation in Geylang is now a bigger concern.

 “If Singaporeans are irked by the littering, the noise and the jaywalking in Little India they’ll certainly and quickly sense that there exists a hint of lawlessness in Geylang,” Commissioner Ng said.

Police statistics appear to uphold his claim. Last year 135 serious crimes were reported in Geylang (including ‘outrage of modesty’) compared with 85 in Little India, while the number of public order offences was double.

Yet none of this deters the tourists seeking relatively cheap rooms rather than  participating in the street services.  Some, elderly folk and those with children, have clearly not googled Geylang in depth.

Reality hits while filling in forms and having passport details copied by the smartly uniformed hotel receptionists.  As the procedures drag on couples with no luggage hand over S$20 (Rp 185,000) bills, grab a key and bolt for the lift, no questions asked.

There’s so much to see in Geylang, and it’s non-stop.  You won’t encounter Dior or Chanel here, but the stores sell most things found in Orchard Road, though the brands won’t be familiar.

Though a new regulation now prohibit alcohol sales between 2 am and 6 am the streets stay busy, and open-front coffee shops keep trading. Passersby flop into plastic chairs, dribble their way through soft-boiled eggs and rice porridge, then doze off hangovers till  the fridge is unlocked.

Along with the prostitutes, mainly Chinese who rarely speak English, there’s a resident population of pensioners who spend their time exchanging banter with the girls between jobs. 

These old men sleep in nearby rooms but spend their days in the cafes reminiscing of virilities lost while nursing S$6 (Rp 55,000) Tigers.  The local bottled beer is twice the price of its Indonesian equivalent.

The old fellows’ days are numbered, not through police harassment but because Geylang is being gentrified.  The colonial era buildings, including the curious blocks with curved concrete outside staircases, are being smashed down to build more hotels and apartments.

The men who do this work, mainly Tamils and Bangladeshis, wander Geylang in large numbers, picking their way through the sidewalk trade in bootleg cigarettes, video porn and drugs that are supposed to enhance men’s performance.

The law says such medicines can only be dispensed by registered chemists handling doctors’ prescriptions.

The law prohibits pornography and tobacco sales outside registered shops.  It’s illegal to solicit for sex, but any man alone in Geylang (or even with his wife) can expect to be sleeve-plucked and invited to negotiate for the services of his choice.

The police say they now deploy five squad cars in Geylang every weekend though blue uniforms are rarely seen. Presumably they are busy elsewhere sniffing out unflushed toilets.

Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower says the total foreign workforce is now more than 1.3 million, with around a quarter working in the construction industry.  These are mainly single young men who find freedoms in Singapore they’d never encounter back on the sub-continent.

Without outlets for their passions it’s reasoned that they’d tend to violence, so minor infractions are overlooked lest heavy handedness causes friction.

Those who step out of line  lose their jobs, are blacklisted and on the next Boeing leaving Changi.  After the Little India riot 55 men were deported. That tends to ensure some respect for the law.

Despite Commissioner Ng’s anxieties we’ll continue to use Geylang till the new hotels push prices into the stratosphere.  By then the district will be dead, its sunset folk dispersed, the girls back in Shanghai and Geylang just another boring suburb in an emasculated Lion City.

DETAILS

Accommodation prices vary depending on whether there’s a convention in town.  Rack rates start around S$150 (Rp 1.4 million) not including tax or breakfast, but Internet prices can be below S$100.

The rooms are small and poor value when compared to prices in Javanese cities, but usually clean, secure and well maintained.

Most of the foods familiar to Indonesians can be found in Geylang; Westerners who fumble chopsticks will have to adapt or go hungry. S$15 will get you a spectacular feed served on a chipped laminate-top.

Metered taxis from the airport cost under S$20 and take about 30 minutes.  It’s more fun and cheaper at S$2.40 (Rp 22,000)  to take the MRT direct to Aljunied or Kallang.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 12 September 2014)

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STAMFORD RAFFLES - A NEW APPRAISAL

The man who loved Java                                         

On 2 February 1824, Sir Stamford Raffles, his sick wife Sophia and their son Charles left Bengkulu (then known as Bencoolen) on board the Fame.  They had been waiting months for a passage to Britain and had booked on another ship, the Borneo.

Then the Fame arrived and the impatient family’s goods were transferred. The former Lieutenant Governor of Java thought this was one of the happiest days of his life.  He wrote presciently: ‘We were, perhaps, too happy.’

That evening a steward ignorant of chemistry went into the hold to uncork a brandy cask.  He was carrying a candle. Also on board was a load of saltpetre, an essential ingredient in gunpowder.

The ship was about 50 miles off the coast of Sumatra.  All made the boats before the Fame was ripped apart, but the story doesn’t have a happy ending.

Also in the hold was what Raffles described as  ‘the cream and best of everything I had collected learnt and attained.’ 

According to Victoria Glendinning’s Raffles and the Golden Opportunity the collection included 300 bound volumes and many unbound, shadow puppets and craft, even a gamelan orchestra. 

All Raffles’ notes, maps, drawings, plants and stuffed animals were also lost. Fortunately his History of Java had already been published.

The value (in today’s currency) was US$4 million, but the loss to Indonesian history and appreciation of the archipelago was immense.  Raffles collected ‘for cultural propaganda to prove back in England that Java had been, and could be again, a great and civilised country’.

Lesser men would have dissolved in despair.  The family was already grieving from the earlier death of yet another child, and the Fame fire would have suggested a curse. But Raffles set about drawing the map of Sumatra that had been lost with the ship to the admiration of Sophia.

When he eventually managed to sail Raffles wrote: ‘Perhaps I was too much attached to the things of this world. The lot of man is a mixture of good and evil, and we must be content with it – and at all events we know that all worketh for good in the end.’ 

Are these the words of a devious wrongdoer?  Raffles was admired, but also mauled by critics during his brief lifetime – he died aged 45 of a brain seizure.  Many were driven by jealousy of a former clerk with limited education and contacts who became a star administrator and founder of Singapore.

It didn’t help that he was English, small, had no military experience, was a faithful lover, keenly interested in other cultures and the environment, and ‘physically fragile’ – hardly the sort of man who’d appeal to the Scottish and Irish warriors subservient to his civilian rule. 

The British invaded Java in 1811 during the Napoleonic Wars and held the Dutch colonies till 1816. 

Raffles and his boss Lord Minto understood their interregnum would be brief should peace break out in Europe.  Reforms had to be swift. ‘While we are here let us do as much good as we can,’ he said.

The new Lieutenant Governor agreed. His motives were not religious – he had little time for missionaries and was ‘vituperative’ about the Dutch administration. Raffles set up a committee with the instructions to ‘consider the inhabitants without reference to bare mercantile profits.’ 

Comments Glendinning: ‘But the relationship between the common good and the profit-making purpose of the (East India) Company answerable to shareholders, was uncomfortable.’

Raffles’ committee recommended the abolition of ‘all kinds of servitude’ and a major shake-up of the taxation system. He ‘sought to promote the value and beauty of the indigenous culture and its pre-Islamic Hindu heritage’. 

Once the bloody work had been done and the Dutch suppressed, Raffles set about his benign dictatorship. 

In this biography he comes across as a free trader, a visionary reformer ahead of his time who loved Java and its people, particularly villagers, supporting them against claims of indolence. Inevitably he attracted haters.

But they were up against Raffles’ determined widow Sophia, his second wife.  His first, Olivia, famous for reversing the Dutch policy of excluding Eurasian wives from functions, died in 1814. Sophia bore Raffles five children but only one survived to adulthood and then died unmarried.

Sophia wrote a biography of her husband celebrating his public service.  Yet Raffles died in debt to the East India Company, undermining his detractors’ allegations of corruption.

This is Glendinning’s eighth biography, written in her early 70s. She writes with clarity, impartiality and controlled enthusiasm.

There have been many biographies of Raffles, some hagiographic. This isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s hostile.  ‘Raffles’ story, in a work of fiction, would strain credulity,’ she writes.  ‘His good fortune and his ill fortune were both of an extreme kind.  He became the entrepreneur of his own ideals and an utopian imperialist.’ 

She described writing the biography as ‘an act of concentration in both senses. There are a great many strange characters churning around in this book, and a great many clamouring outside it.’ 

So she’s set up a website www.rafflesbook.co.uk including titbits, links and an events diary celebrating the life of an extraordinary Englishman, famous for founding Singapore, but fascinated by Java, an island he served briefly – but well.

Raffles and the Golden Opportunity

Victoria Glendinning

Profile Books 2012

350 pages

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RUBBISHING RAFFLES

Still standing tall: Raffles' statue in Singapore

Knocking a reputation

Felling tall timbers takes more skill than whacking away with a blunt blade. 

Tim Hannigan, Cornish chef turned travel writer and one-time Surabaya chalkie has used an old trick to seek fame:  If you can’t find an unknown needing elevation and your own tale’s not worth telling, try iconoclasm.

Sir Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant Governor of Java between 1811 and 1816 is the target.  How could one ill-educated young man (he arrived in Java aged 30) from a lowly background and with no military experience have achieved so much?

There have to be explanations beyond ability, leadership, foresight and intellect.  So said the curmudgeons trampled or ignored by this high achiever – and Hannigan has helped give these belittlers the chance to hack away at the image in the provocatively titled Raffles and the British Invasion of Java. 

However the man, like his imposing statue in Singapore, is not easily toppled.  Not because some evidence against Raffles lacks substance, but because the author strains to hate when he should have let the facts damn.

Raffles made mistakes deserving exposure and analysis. He quit Java in near disgrace having failed to make the colony pay; perhaps because he wasn’t ruthless enough. He died in debt; a careless accountant – or a man driven by concerns other than profit?

Blind hero worship serves no one well. Objective scholarship that re-examines a famous life is a valid exercise.

To do it well requires an open mind.  Hannigan says the idea for the book came when Indonesian students claimed all would have been well with their nation had the British, not the Dutch, been the colonizers. 

Hollanders have a different view, particularly over the Palembang massacre when 86 settlers and their servants were murdered after Raffles provoked the local sultan to ‘dismiss (the Dutch) from his territories.’

Less well known, and Hannigan has done a service with this revelation, is that in 1811 the British didn’t want Java. Instructions from the East India Company were to evict the Dutch, destroy their forts and ‘hand the island over to the Javanese.’  They reasoned administrative costs would drown profits.  They were right.

Holland had been occupied by the French during the Napoleonic Wars. The wash-up included the British taking over the Dutch colony of Java.

The colonials resisted but were no match for British resolve and the courage of the extraordinary Colonel Rollo Gillespie. 

Raffles, the administrator, and his boss Lord Minto had other ideas about the future of Java.  They rationalized that the Europeans and Chinese would be slaughtered if the British quit – a justified fear as events proved.

Instead, according to Hannigan, Raffles and his friends ‘fantasised over … an empire of the mind as much as a political entity … a playground for their intellects and imaginations, a historical trove of which they – orientalists to their very socks – could take possession.’

So instructions were ignored and a great moment to change the destiny of the future Indonesia passed.  The British Interregnum ran for five years until another shift in European politics allowed the Dutch to return and vilify the caretakers.

The locals learned to keep left on the roads and were treated to some other benefits of British rule.  Torture a favorite tool of the Dutch – was stopped, but slavery was apparently continued despite being outlawed elsewhere in the Empire. (Raffles kept eight slaves, says Hannigan.) Land reforms were introduced, but never finalised.

History is always written by the victors and Raffles made sure his version was recorded in triplicate.  Here he was helped by his hagiographer in chief and aide-de-camp, the ‘snivelling sycophant’ Thomas Travers.

Along with the writings of Raffles’ second wife Sophia, Travers has been the source of past favorable histories of Raffles’ rule.  Hannigan labels them ‘mythomaniacs’ and claims to have by-passed their accounts for original materials such as the India Office Archives in London.

But then he doesn’t give the reader references.  There are no endnotes to back his assertions, no index to assist navigation and only 24 footnotes. 

Who, for example, were the clichéd ‘old Asia hands who still sneered at the very mention of Raffles’ name’ - jealous underlings, the bitter Dutch or impartial scholars? 

Instead we get slabs of embroidered prose better suited to travel puffs by a writer in love with the perpendicular pronoun and deaf to Mark Twain’s advice on employing adjectives: When in doubt, strike out.

There are too many gratuitous comments like Raffles’ signature style being ‘bombastic’, his first wife Olivia’s fondness for brandy (‘a little rosy of cheek, perhaps’) and his ‘insecure egoism’.

Are these observations grounded on facts or the progeny of an over-worked imagination? What’s the purpose? Snide asides from the pens of Raffle’s contemporaries dipped in bile can be judged as relevant or otherwise only if we know the writers’ pedigrees.

Raffles may not have personally torn down the jungle strangling Borobudur but he did approve the work that led to its conservation.  Perhaps he plagiarised to produce The History of Java – but it was published. Others might have spent the money on armaments and fortresses.

Hannigan writes well in his accounts of battles where the reader gets a feel for the terrain, but fails elsewhere by inserting his loathing of a ‘jumped-up clerk with a ghastly wife’ into the narrative. Others might have found them a loving and fun couple.

What drove Raffles, later to become the ‘Father of Singapore’? Did he want to do good but got defeated by scheming rivals and his own failings?  Curiously this book came out just days ahead of another revision of Raffles – this time by the established biographer Victoria Glendinning.  Reports suggest it’s more sympathetic.

In the epilogue Hannigan admits enjoying a ‘sense of iconoclastic outrage’. It’s never wise to gloat.  A smarter writer would have honed his axe before tackling a giant.

(First published in The Sunday Post 9 December 2012)

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