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Monday, October 12, 2009
May 12, 2009 Tuesday: Indecent proposal
Around midnight on Jalan Besar, I was flagged down by a young
woman. She took the back seat and told me in Chinese to go to
Hougang.
She was in her mid or late twenties, wearing a tight, light
color, spaghetti string singlet and a pair of denim shorts that
were so small they could pass for a pair of underwear. Although
this was a pretty common outdoor getup among teenage ladies in
Singapore, it was also a standard dress code for bar girls.
I knew because I had one time driven a KTV
girl a round trip who was ordered by her boss to go home to change
for something “appropriate”. She went in jeans and tank top and
came back dressed in exactly the same way as this woman now sitting
behind me.
Sure enough, the woman told me that she worked in a pub near
where I picked her up. Today, she said, the business was very slow.
The pub was almost empty for the whole evening. As she didn’t get
any chance to sit with customers, she was asked to leave
“early”.
I was not surprised. “What do you expect on a Tuesday night?” I
said nonchalantly. “Worse still, Jalan Besar isn’t exactly a
hotspot for night owls. Maybe you should switch to somewhere with a
better location.”
She sighed but said nothing in return. I stole a glance at her
in the mirror. She looked she had fallen into a sea of unhappy
memories. I started to regret the tone I had just used.
After a few moments, she began to tell me that she came to
Singapore a couple weeks ago from Fujian, China. She did not know
anybody here except a few folks from her hometown. And she could
not speak any English. She was able to find a job in this pub only
because one of her hometown friends helped her. The job paid
peanuts, relying mainly on the handout of the customers, and was
very inconvenient to get to by public transport from her place,
which she paid $300 a month for a bed in a room she shared with two
other girls. She had no choice but to be stuck with both the
working and living situations she was blessed with at the moment.
She felt she wanted to tell me about it because I was “the first
taxi driver from China” she had met, she said.
I knew too many stories like that. I knew how they came, how
they got stuck, and how they were carried away by the murky
undercurrent beneath the dazzling glory of this place. I heard them
time and again so that I had grown immune to the tormenting
feelings generated by them. “Yes, I know. I know.” I muttered to
her as much as to myself.
As I stopped outside her residence, an old condo, the meter
showed a fare of $12. She slowly opened her purse while asked me if
I could give her some discount. “I didn’t get any tips today.” She
said. “I come home empty-handed.”
I chewed on it for a moment and said, “Okay. $10 will do.”
She took out a $10 note from her bag and said, “This is all I
have. I give you this I will go hungry tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t believe you.” I said. “It can’t be that bad.”
“You can see for yourself.” She opened her bag in front of my
face and went through the stuff inside. There were keys, some
makeup things, a small pack of tissue paper, a phone, and a wallet
which contained nothing but some plastic cards. No money. She then
patted her pockets, which were set so tightly on her hips that it
was obvious there’s nothing in there.
She leaned forward and placed her elbows on the top of the front
seats, and said in an undertone, “You are a nice man. I want to be
a friend with you.”
I turned and gazed at her. She held my look with a slight smile.
I looked away and said, “No matter what you say, you still have to
pay for the fare.”
“I will be your girlfriend.” She said softly into my ear. “All
you need to do is ju….”
“I am an old man and I don’t need a girlfriend.” I quickly cut
her off.
“Wrong. Old men especially need girlfriends!” She said with
laughter.
“No!” I turned to her again and said forcefully, “I said no!
Okay? Just give me the money!”
“You don’t like me?” She was startled by my anger and hurriedly
took out the $10 and handed it to me.
I took the money and gave her back a $5 and said, “This should
be enough for your breakfast. Now go home.”
She accepted the money and gave me a long, steadfast look before
she stepped out.
I felt I was carrying a terrible weight on my heart as I drove
away.
Posted by Mingjie Cai at 9:47 PM
April 2, 2009. Thursday: Out of innocence
Shortly after midnight, a young Chinese lady flagged down my taxi
on Balestier Road. After I stopped, she lowered her head and peered
through the window for a second before opened the door. She came
in, sat in the front seat, and told me in Chinese to take her to
“You Chi”.“You mean Yew Tee, the oil pond?” I asked.“No,” she said.
“You Chi, the KTV.”But I had no knowledge of
a KTV in that name. I asked her if she knew
where it is and she took out a phone and got somebody on line. “Let
my landlord speak to you,” she said as she passed the phone to me.A
man with a hoarse voice at the other end of the line said in
English, “take the girl to Orchard KTV in
Orchard Tower quickly as you can, and tell her I am waiting here.”
The tone was bossy and loaded with impatience. I could also hear
some noisy music in the background.“Okay,” I replied.I gave the
phone back to the girl, and started heading towards Orchard
Tower.The girl appeared to be in her early twenties. She was
dressed in jeans and a T shirt, and looked nice and endearing in an
innocent kind of way. The fact that she pronounced “Orchard” as
“You Chi” indicated to me that she was new to the town and could
not speak English, which also explained why she checked upon the
driver before she got into the taxi. She had to make sure he or she
speaks Chinese.On the way, the girl confirmed that she just arrived
here three days ago from Fujian, China. She came to Singapore
because she believed what she was told by middle agents that she
could make money here. “They told me that I can work here in
Singapore earning equivalent to at least eight thousands of
RMB a month,” she said.But it first cost her
and her family 60,000 RMB to come. And after
she came, she was very much disappointed to know there was no job
of 8000 RMB waiting for her. No job at all,
in fact.I asked, “why don’t you just go back?”“I am stuck,” she
said moodily. “My family, my parents, are in deep debt now. I have
to stay here to find a job to repay the money they borrowed for
me.”I had heard similar stories before. I sighed privately.But
then, her eyes lit up. “Luckily, my landlord is a kind man and he’s
helping me find a job,” she smiled at me. “He has arranged an
interview for me tonight. That’s where I am going to now. If they
like me, I will be working in a KTV as a
waitress, as soon as today.”“I am sure they will like you,” I
murmured. I started to have a bad feeling about this.”It is not
something I had in mind, but it will buy me some time.” She added,
her smile still visible.After a short period of silence, I asked,
“how did you know your landlord? I mean, how did you find him?”“Oh,
he was introduced to me by the middle agent,” she replied
glibly.That surely made sense. I nodded to myself.I was again quiet
for a while, not sure what to say to her. Towards the end of the
trip, I decided to say something which I was certain if I kept to
myself I would feel bad for the rest of the night.I told her that
during the month of my taxi driving, I drove young and good-looking
girls like her from China on several occasions. Some of them, also
like her, paid hefty prices, some 50 or 60 thousand RMB, to the middle agents to come to Singapore with the
belief that they could work here and make more money than they
could in China, only to wake up to the reality that there was no
such thing in Singapore, especially the Singapore in its worst
economic crisis, after they stepped on this island. The girls I met
all ended up selling themselves to Chinese-speaking men, because
they, like her, cannot speak any English. “You shouldn’t trust your
landlord,” I cautioned, “as you shouldn’t have trusted your agents,
because I think they are in this together. Melons of the same
vine.”“I don’t want to sound overly negative,” I added in the end.
“But just think about it. What’s the odd of getting a normal job in
Singapore without being able to speak a single word of English?”She
had kept her lips compressed into a thin line while she listened.
After I was finished, she took a deep breath and said, “thanks for
telling me all this. I appreciate it. I know how to protect
myself.”“You’ll need to. It is a jungle out there.” I said in
earnest.Orchard Tower was aside us now. The huge neon sign board
hung on the wall of the building shone on the street below which
was still crowded with partygoers at this hour. As the girl handed
me with the taxi fare, I noticed that her hand trembled slightly. I
knew she was still excited or nervous about the coming “interview”.
I wished her luck as she stepped out of the car.Perhaps she had
also stepped out of her innocence. I hoped. – Posted by Cai
MingJie
Here’s another, that tells of respect for a gentle elderly lady
:
March 31, 2009. Tuesday: An old working lady
Late at night, picked up an old lady in Chinatown to go to west
coast. I asked her what she was doing at this hour and she said
she’s working. I was surprised, as she looked well over 70. I asked
why she had to work late into the night. She told me her story.
She came to Singapore with her family in 1942 from Sichuan,
China, when she was nine. Her husband had passed away some years
ago. For some reason, she didn’t live with her children. Instead,
she bought a small HDB flat for herself in
west coast after her husband died. Because of her age, the flat
must be paid up in 10 years. She has to pay over $1000 a month for
the mortgage. She didn’t want support from her children because
“they have their own flat to pay for”. She earns $50 a day by
working in a restaurant as a cook.
She spoke like a woman who is old but not weak, alone but not
forlorn, poor but not without dignity.
I have a soft spot for people like her. I have more respect for
them than those who sit high on the social pyramid and have
everything, wealth, power, fame, privilege, or whatever they mean
by the term “success”, revolve around them. Behind the glorious
skyscrapers and ravishing neon lights, thousands and thousands of
people in this city live their lives like this old woman. They have
nothing outside, but they are strong inside. They live at the
bottom of the society, but they are the very foundation of it
precisely because of that. Without their strength and endurance,
this nation, doesn’t matter if it is a first or second world
country, and doesn’t matter how many gold or silver medals it wins
in the Olympics, and doesn’t matter how many hundreds of billions
in its reserves, will inevitably collapse.
At the end of the trip, I wanted to discount her fare by half
but she insisted in paying the full amount.
Posted by Cai MingJie
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