A Fortune-Teller Told Me (29 page)

“No.”

“Do you live there?”

“No.”

“Where do you live, then?”

“Far away.”

“Are you in Singapore to do some shopping?”

“No.”

“Business? How many days are you here for?” And on and on until we reached my destination.

Nosy and intrusive as policemen, the taxi drivers struck me as reflecting all the banality of the new Singapore, where seemingly nothing was left to chance or to free individual choice. Just looking at the dashboard of a taxi, with the box of tissues, the bottle of rose-scented deodorizer, the form on which every ride had to be recorded, and a series of notices which the law required to be plainly posted, gave me the creeps. One card, with the driver’s photo, gave his name, license number and a telephone number to call if you wanted to report him for some misdemeanor. Another gave the weight of the wheels, the maximum number of passengers, and the speed he could go at. Another said “Be loyal to Singapore.”

My main worry was how to proceed with my journey. I wanted to go to Jakarta by ship, but once again this proved highly difficult, for the reason I knew all too well by now: the ships carried only cargo. It was incredible. The roadstead of Singapore, the second-largest port in the world, was full of ships—ships of all flags, all tonnages, all types—ships waiting to load and unload and then sail off, some undoubtedly for an Indonesian port where I would be glad to go. But none of those ships wanted me as a passenger. Finally I managed to speak with an official of the Singapore Port Authority who promised to help me; and then—this
is typically Singaporean—he asked what my real reasons were for wanting to travel by ship.

Singapore is a paradise for tourists, but they must be the kind of tourists that Singapore wants. As long as you’re not looking for a ship, you can find everything here, and find it cheaper than anywhere else, because Singapore is a free port and there are no taxes: a suit in twenty-four hours, a precious jade, a fashionable pair of glasses, a swimming costume, the latest record, the smallest camera, the most powerful stereo, the lightest personal computer. There are whole stores stuffed with them. Singapore is the Bethlehem of the great new religion: the religion of consumerism, of material comforts and mass tourism. There is no need for cathedrals or mosques. The new temples are the hotels. By now it is the same almost everywhere in Asia. There are no more beautiful palaces or pagodas to grace the urban panorama: only hotels. Hotels are the centers of life, the places where you meet, reflect, have fun, unwind, enjoy yourself. Hotels are what cafés, churches, squares and theaters once were—all rolled into one. In Kuala Lumpur as in Hong Kong, in Seoul as in Bangkok. In Singapore everything better than anywhere else.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Florence, and I do not think I once set foot in a hotel. In Asia you are always in one. You make appointments to meet in them, you eat, you celebrate holidays and birthdays, you get married. In hotels you go swimming, shopping, dancing. The new Asia’s affluent youth scarcely know anything else. Taking a walk, for many of them, means going from one hotel to another, often by way of huge shopping malls with their marble pavements and plastic trees. Yes, Singapore is on the Equator and on the verge of the jungle, but the best trees, which by now you see everywhere, are artificial ones. They need no rain, only a little dusting now and then.

I soon realized that I did not know the rules, the etiquette and the taboos of this new society. I had invited to tea the secretary of an important official at the Foreign Ministry—its office is on the thirty-ninth floor of a hotel—to enlist her help in finding a ship, and to discover which in her opinion were the best fortune-tellers in town. We met in the lobby of a big hotel, and I asked for some hot water to add to the pot. “Sorry, sir, but our tea is unrefillable,” replied one of the very young waitresses, dressed in “Chinese style” with the skirt slit up to her
bottom to appeal to the tourists. What an extraordinary expression! Only the Singaporeans could invent it: unrefillable tea.

One day, in the very center of town, I passed the office of a firm which, according to the large sign in the window, was a shipping line that ran a service exclusively between Singapore and Indonesia. When I entered and made my usual request for a passage to Jakarta, a vacuum formed around me: the director was at a meeting, the sales manager was out to lunch, and all the other employees, blind and deaf, had their heads buried behind their computers. My friend M.G.G. Pillai had warned me: “In Singapore you’ll be suspect. Nobody trusts anyone who doesn’t travel by air, and in business class, who doesn’t stay in a first-class hotel and who doesn’t pay by credit card.” He was right. The question in the minds of all those clerks who tried not to see or hear me was obvious: a terrorist?

In a society where countless things are forbidden, from long hair on men to the chewing of gum, where there is one correct form of behavior, a reaction prescribed for any situation, the most unacceptable thing is to deviate from the norm. The social duty of all is to help their neighbor behave properly, not to help him be different. I was only passing through, but even I had the sensation of being constantly guided, either by people (“Take my advice: go by plane!”) or by some invisible presence. Everywhere in the new Singapore you hear metallic voices issuing announcements or advice from hidden loudspeakers in hotels, lifts, escalators, in the underground, on lampposts. Everywhere you see notices remonstrating (“Don’t bring AIDS home”) or imposing prohibitions (“No fishing from the bridge,” “No spitting”). Others offer fatuous warnings: “Watch your head! Low branches ahead,” you read if you are about to walk under the few old trees remaining along the river. For those who fail to get the message there are little pictures showing how a branch can strike your head.

To mold the citizens into what the system wants, there is a succession of “campaigns”—to keep gutters clean, to plant trees, to water flowers. When I arrived there was a campaign for “wellness,” and the 1,800 employees of a local firm had pledged to keep fit by not using the lift for a month. As I left they were initiating a campaign to starve the city’s last free creatures to death: “Let’s not feed the pigeons. They bring diseases and nuisance,” said the street signs.

Even so, it was splendid! Seen from the height of Fort Canning, where I went running every morning, Singapore was a dream city, with its transparent skyscrapers like geometric clouds against the sky, its immaculate gardens, and no traffic jams. The university was a delight: perfect avenues, ultramodern libraries flooded with sunlight, lawns in various shades of green interspersed with playing fields and thick shady trees—a splendid creation. Nothing was left to chance, from the combination of different-colored grasses on the slopes to the curve of a branch bent back to avoid obstructing cars. But I only had to talk to someone and I was again in despair.

“Our students are of tip-top quality. They’re trained up to an international level, and they’re politically trustworthy. They know when to speak, and above all when to keep quiet,” the director of a university research institute told me. He saw this as a sign of maturity. All of a sudden I hated the flower beds, the trees, the beautiful lawns and the sunshine in the libraries.

I spent my days in a continual seesaw between admiration and disgust, between wonder and horror. “This is the future, and it works,” I said to myself in moments of depression.

The future is the invention of one individual: Lee Kuan Yew, a man of great intelligence, great arrogance, great ambition and no scruples. Lee assumed the reins of government in 1959, and was holding them when the republic left the Malay Federation in 1965. In 1990 he retired as prime minister, but he remains an “emeritus member” of the government, and is still the ultimate tribunal for all decisions.

It is he who has transformed this equatorial port into a center of modernity. He has remodeled the city, manipulated its climate, remade its inhabitants; he has created the most efficient and least corrupt administration of all the Asian states, paying its officials like captains of industry. It is he who has established one of the most advanced educational systems in Asia, whose teachers receive some of the highest salaries in the world. There is no question that his experiment has been highly successful.

The price? A city without life, a humdrum people, and dictatorship. Despite the appearance of a democratic political system, with parties, a
parliament and elections, Lee Kuan Yew has never left anyone in the slightest doubt that the power was his and would remain so. He has used all possible allies, and destroyed them one by one as soon as they threatened to become rivals. As for opposition, no one has had the ghost of a chance to challenge his power. Like every dictator he has throttled at birth every voice of dissent, taken control of all organs of information, tried to rewrite history and blot out the memory of the past.

Archives of Singapore newspapers are extremely hard to find; even Lee Kuan Yew’s speeches are a state secret. They would reveal too many contradictions, too many changes of line, too many truths that became heresies and vice versa. For dictators memory is always a terribly dangerous thing. Even mine!

I remembered a multiracial Singapore that tried to persuade Chinese, Indians and Malays to forget their origins and become “Singaporeans.” Now I saw a city that was almost exclusively Chinese, in which the most widespread language was Mandarin. An exhibition being held in the city celebrated the cultural greatness of China. By now all non-Chinese, still 25 percent of the population, feel excluded.

One evening I was dining in an open-air restaurant with an Indian who was born and had lived all his life in Singapore. The Chinese customers at the nearby tables treated him as a foreigner and me as a “fellow citizen,” just because I spoke Chinese and he did not. In spite of his assertion “I am Singaporean,” in English and Malay—theoretically still official languages on the island—the others jeered. One answered him in Chinese: “Singaporean? The Singaporeans are all dead. Here there’re only Chinese.” The rest of the group laughed and applauded.

Even a few years ago such a display of chauvinism would have been unthinkable. But times have changed. China is Communist only in name; the Chinese of the diaspora are no longer suspected of Maoism, and can reaffirm their identity without restraint. China is a great power, hence they too feel powerful. The step to racial arrogance is a short one.

One need only remember history to understand. The vast majority of the Chinese in today’s Asia left China during the past century. They left as boat people, in vessels that did not always arrive. They fled from famines, wars and poverty. The country they left was humiliated by colonialism, weakened by opium, and lacerated by conflicts of one kind
or another. They were not mandarins, they were not poets. They were a labor force: coolies.
Ku li
in Chinese means “bitter strength”—a fine expression, written in two simple characters, which sums up the condition of people who are desperate.

Like all emigrants, these Chinese had only one dream: money. With money they could buy the protection of the rulers of the countries where they found themselves, with money they could save their lives. People without any culture, they came to the
nan yang
, the South Seas, and with them they brought the traditions and the gods of the village, all too soon supplanted by the culture of money and material wealth.

The great merit of Lee Kuan Yew was to have understood all this and to have realized, in his little island city-state populated by coolies, the dream of all Chinese emigrants: to have a safe refuge, a place to bring up their children, a bank to put their savings in. That is how Singapore, skillfully remaining equidistant from Communist China and the Nationalist China of Taiwan, has become the capital of the third China, of the Chinese of the diaspora. That is how Lee—intelligent, able and with great aspirations (at one point he hoped to become Secretary General of the United Nations), but condemned by circumstances to be virtually the mayor of a small Chinese city of barely three million inhabitants—imposed himself as the natural head of this tribe without a country, this population of refugees from an Israel to which none of the twenty-five million expatriate Chinese scattered all over Asia wants to return.