When the Japanese came and took it all, with dismaying ease, the
British dream-time ended; the postwar years brought rapid decay,
and equally rapid aspirations for independence. In 1965, Mr. Lee
Kuan Yew, a Cambridge- educated lawyer, became the country's first
prime minister. Today's Singapore is far more precisely the result
of Lee Kuan Yew's vision than the Manchester of the East ever was
of Sir Stamford Raffles's. Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party has
remained in power ever since; has made, some would say, quite
drastically certain that it would do so. The emblem of the PAP is a
cartoony lightning bolt striking within a circle; Reddi Kilowatt as
the mascot of what is, in effect, a single-party capitalist
technocracy.
Finance Data a State Secret
SINGAPORE: A government official, two private economists, and a
newspaper editor will be tried jointly on June 21 for revealing an
official Singaporean secret - its economic growth rate.
Business Times editor Patrick Daniel, Monetary Authority of
Singapore official Shanmugaratnam Tharman, and two economists for
regional brokerage Crosby Securities, Manu Bhaskaran, and Raymond
Foo Jong Chen, pleaded not guilty to violating Singapore's Official
Secrets Act.
South China Morning Post, 4/29/93
Reddi Kilowatt's Singapore looks like an infinitely more liveable
version of convention-zone Atlanta, with every third building
supplied with a festive party-hat by the designer of Loew's Chinese
Theater. Rococo pagodas perch atop slippery-flanked megastructures
concealing enough cubic footage of atria to make up a couple of
good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies. Along Orchard Road, the Fifth
Avenue of Southeast Asia, chocka-block with multi- level shopping
centers, a burgeoning middle class shops ceaselessly. Young, for
the most part, and clad in computer-weathered cottons from the
local Gap clone, they're a handsome populace; they look good in
their shorts and Reeboks and Matsuda shades.
There is less in the way of alternative, let alone dissident style
in Singapore than in any city I have ever visited. I did once see
two young Malayan men clad in basic, global, heavy metal black -
jeans and T-shirts and waist-length hair. One's T-shirt was
embroidered with the Rastafarian colors, causing me to think its
owner must have balls the size of durian fruit, or else be flat-out
suicidal, or possibly both. But they were it, really, for overt
boho style. (I didn't see a single "bad" girl in Singapore. And I
missed her.) A thorough scan of available tapes and
CDs confirmed a pop diet of such profound middle-of-the-road
blandness that one could easily imagine the stock had been vetted
by Mormon missionaries.
"You wouldn't have any Shonen Knife, would you?"
"Sir, this is a music shop."
Although you don't need Mormons making sure your pop is
squeaky-clean when you have the Undesirable Propagation Unit (UPU),
one of several bodies of official censors. (I can't say with any
certainty that the UPU, specifically, censors Singapore's popular
music, but I love the name.) These various entities attempt to
ensure that red rags on the order of Cosmopolitan don't pollute the
body politic. Bookstores in Singapore, consequently, are sad
affairs, large busy places selling almost nothing I would ever want
to buy - as though someone had managed to surgically neuter a W.H.
Smith's. Surveying the science fiction and fantasy sections of
these stores, I was vaguely pleased to see that none of my own
works seemed to be available. I don't know for a fact that the UPU
had turned them back at the border, but if they had, I'd certainly
be in good company.
The local papers, including one curiously denatured tabloid, New
Paper, are essentially organs of the state, instruments of only the
most desirable propagation. This ceaseless boosterism, in the
service of order, health, prosperity, and the Singaporean way,
quickly induces a species of low-key Orwellian dread. (The feeling
that Big Brother is coming at you from behind a happy face does
nothing to alleviate this.) It would be possible, certainly, to
live in Singapore and remain largely in touch with what was
happening elsewhere. Only certain tonalities would be muted, or
tuned out entirely, if possible. . . .
Singaporean television is big on explaining Singaporeans to
themselves. Model families, Chinese, Malay, or Indian, act out
little playlets explicating the customs of each culture. The
familial world implied in these shows is like Leave It To Beaver
without The Beave, a sphere of idealized paternalism that can only
remind Americans my age of America's most fulsome public sense of
itself in the mid-1950s.
