PERSONAL COLUMN
Singapore revisited
ANTHONY BURGESS
When I wrote my first published novel, fifteen years ago, 1 called it Time for a Tiger, which is the slogan of Tiger Beer, one of the several gaseous creatures of Messrs Frazer and Neave, brewers of Singa- pore. As soon as the book was accepted for publication, I wrote to Messrs Frazer and Neave, suggesting that, as it was obviously beneficial to their product to have its slogan attached to a work of literature, they might possibly wish to show their gratitude in some small way. All I wanted, in fact, was one of the wooden Tiger-advertising clocks that ticked cosily in practically every kedai of Malaysia, as we must now call it. What I got was nothing. Messrs Frazer and Neave said it was not necessarily a good thing to have a book called Time for a Tiger: it might be obscene or seditious and prove damaging to their brew. I was very hurt, and showed this in an emendation I at once made in the text. My hero wins the Federation Lottery first prize of $350,000, and it is suggested that a celebratory case of Tiger be sent out for. 'No,' he says, 'make it Carlsberg. It costs a bit more but it's a better beer.'
The response of the Carlsberg agents proved very swift. As soon as the novel appeared in Malaya, two dozen quart bottles of their lager appeared on my verandah. Messrs Frazer and Neave did not respond at all, not till just over a month ago. I was revisiting Singapore to lecture, and in my hotel I found a letter waiting. It was from-Messrs Frazer and Neave: it regretted the mistanderstanding of so many years ago, and it invited my lady wife and good self to drink all the Tiger Beer we required while in Singapore, at the expense of Messrs Frazer and Neave. Alas, my beer days are over, and my wife's never really began, but many a tukang kebrin. sais, newspaper-seller and trishaw-driver rolled home, Tiger growl- ing within, during our Singapore stay.
This is meant, first, to illustrate that memories in the East are long, and, second, to introduce a recording of my qualified satisfaction that the Malayan trilogy I com- pleted ten years ago is still being read out there. My pleasure is tainted because no supersessive literature in English has come out of the territory since then, and because what I wrote as pure fancy has turned out prophetic—I mean, Malays and Chinese killing each other in fictional fun has changed into a permanent feature of Malay- sian life. There used to be a pretence that, with the white man out of the way, the two races would get on well together, but they are getting on as badly as any novelist could ever imagine.
One nasty aspect of this enmity is the pretence that Chinese Singapore made, when the big concept of a united Malaysia began, to be a sort of Malay territory, just as in the days of Raffles. The republic of Singapore installed a Malayj president and announced that Malay was to be the first language. This linguistic fiction still goes on. Radio Singapura puts out Malay (per- haps the sexiest language in the world) all day long, the Prime Minister has, with Machiavellian skill, taught himself very good Malay (as also very good Mandarin,
Tamil and Russian), but there are few people in Singapore who naturally use the language. The Chinese island and the Malay federation, once aspects of a fairly genial British protective regime, now snarl at each other over the Johore Causeway. The black American thesis that racialism is a white invention rings a cracked bell here: if the whites in colonial south-east Asia had no other function, at least they were able to unify the diverse Asiatics in a com- mon unrest at European rule.
Singapore itself was, as little as a decade ago, a rather charming town, somewhat ramshackle, still breathing something of the spirit of the great amateur Raffles. It reeked of hot wet dishcloths, turmeric, cat- pee. The hotels had damp sheets, a parody of the British cuisine (itself a parody, any- way), vast public rooms with churning kipas-kipas or punkahs. The tuans were in government, or in transit, in dirty white, often with an oeuf colonial, drinking gin pahits or Tiger or Anchor. Good Chinese food was accessible only to those ready to brave sawdust, cuspidors, the earsplitting Chinese hoick known as the Call of the East. Now Singapore smells of orchids, which means of nothing. With so much air-conditioning everywhere, one can spend a far warmer day on a Stoke-on-Trent Easter Monday. There are now probably more good things to eat than anywhere in the world. American and Australian tourists, as well as soldiers on R and R from Viet- nam, don't ask for pink gins. No room for Somerset Maugham any more, except for that magic-of-the-east blurb on the Raffles Hotel notepaper.
The Chinese work like Chinese, and every- body is well-fed and happy. Singapore prosperity, as well as Singapore chic, is a great wonder. The smiling architect of it all is Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister, Harold Wilson's friend, who has gone prob- ably farther than even Harold Wilson would care to go. For democracy is a great joke, the People's Action Party rules without op- position, enemies of progress go to jail or on compulsory overseas self-improvement courses. Well, it's got things done, it's built a clean, proud, prosperous community. There's censorship of course, and progres- sive puritanism, but you can always get yourself picked up by a blue-film tout in Bugis Street.
When I was in Singapore these few weeks ago, Professor Denis Enright, along with his entire expatriate English department, was just getting ready to leave. A PAP vice-chancellor has been installed in the University, and there have been injunctions to academics to toe the line. Prime Minister Lee himself, in his progressive, pragmatic way, has told the sponsors of
the outmoded white colonialism that English Literature represents how sorry he is for them all—dealing as they are with a minority sub-culture, out of touch with the thrilling adventure of pragmatic modern state-building. Nobody will miss the study of English Literature, or of any other academic subject ' that inquires into the nature of man. Singapore has become the headquarters of scientific English teaching for the whole of south-east Asia: there is nothing controversial about phonemes. Skills are needed, not values.
Mr Lee's regime has, being pragmatic, no ideological basis. There is enough ideology being put about by those other Chinese. If one wants to find a justifica- tion for his toughness, one had better re- member that the Emergency, a very dirty business, has not been over all that long, and that Vietnam and Cambodia are not all that far away. (Since my departure, I hear that lethal Communist boobytraps have been exploding in Singapore.) The island was, in living memory, overrun by a 'fierce enemy—now, of course, a mild friend, blink- ing into the lens of his Hinomoto. Lee is on the lookout for subvertors of his naked island republic. But ends never justify means, except nowadays. Politically, Singa- pore is a sick country; British colonialism was juster and freer.
Forget politics, as you will if you're just down there on a visit. Forget history, too, though without history Singapore loses a lot of its meaning. To its credit. Singapore will not let you forget that Raffles built the place out of mangrove swamp: you can have a night out in Old-Time Singapore, complete with (map huts and bersilat and bersanding. Freed from time and politics, Singapore resolves itself into the most sense- oriented place on earth. The sweat starts gently in the satin night, the pores open up, tobacco bites and food has taste. The girls —Chinese, Malay, Tamil, Sikh, Bengali, Eurasian—are mostly exquisite. Only the white women, on naked display at the swim- ming clubs, blotch the scene with their blues, carmines, greens or fierce lobster. If our race is at all admired out there, it can hardly be for its beauty.
Singapore means sensuous cosseting. Even medicinally there is no place like it. You can use Axe Oil for awakening bron- chial tubes and sinuses, or easing a crapu- lous headache, or settling the stomach by sipping. There is a hell-black potion that raises wind from tartarean depths of the guts, there are dangerous but efficacious aphrodisiacs. I suppose the trouble with the place is that there is everything the body could possibly need: the needments and luxuries and junk of the world pour in and out of this free port. But nothing originates —no culture, no ideas. One would hate to think that new barbarous hordes might some day soon come hurtling from the north over the lohore Causeway, but ot what notions of freedom, other than free trade, is Singapore a bastion? Once there was an exchange of easygoing colonialism. which allowed the guns to point the wrong way, for a ruthless colonialism which always had its guns at the ready. All one can s*. of Mr Lee's dictatorial pragmatism is that it is somewhat more liberal than the ideology. that is burning to take over the whole ot the East. In Singapore, more than anywhere in the world, one puzzles over the meaning of terms like the good life, and freedom, and the nature of man. Then it's time for a Tiger.
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