Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Then count your fingers. And the fillings in your teeth.

  The little holes in the wall forming each side of Change Alley will sell you anything from really valuable precious stones, or carved jade of high quality, to plastic Buddhas made in Jersey City. Between them, almost covering the already-crowded and too-narrow pavement, traders operating from card tables, push carts, or even old newspaper spread on the street to protect in part their handfuls of merchandise, will sell you anything from a full meal to a Chinese New Year's greeting or a ring with a peepshow built into it. The feeling is Coney Island combined with Woolworth's, all with a lusty flavor of its own. I wish I could go there every day.

  A little shopping and a little sightseeing and it was time to go back to the hotel for lunch and a sight of our new room. We had selected the Raffles Hotel from Colorado Springs, because of its fame in history, legend, and fiction. It really is a fabulous old pile, a luxury hotel in every sense, ancient through it is, and a place where one expects an E. Phillips Oppenheim spy to be lurking behind every potted palm.

  We picked up our key at the desk and I led Ticky across the "World-Famous Palm Court" (it says so right here on this postcard), up a flight of outdoor stairs, and onto the gallery which led to our room. I let her in and watched her.

  She did not say much at first, but wandered around looking at things and touching them. The living room was twenty-five feet long, fifteen feet wide and about twelve feet high, furnished in ebony and trimmed in Chinese red lacquer, with several easy chairs, tables, lamps, a couch, and a buffet. There were two electric punkahs overhead. Beyond the living room was an enclosed porch with two day beds, a large and fancy bar, more easy chairs. Opening off it to the left was an open porch just as roomy which was furnished lavishly with smart garden furniture.

  Ticky turned back to me with her eyes wide and her expression solemn. "Yes, darling, but where do we sleep?"

  "In here," I answered, and opened double doors wide with a manner suitable to the janitor of a cathedral.

  The bedroom was twenty-five feet long, big as the living room, and contained two king-size Hollywood beds, chairs, two chaise longues, two enormous wardrobes, an oversize dressing table, and an executive desk. Two airconditioning units served it, one at each end. Beyond it was a tiled bath fifteen feet square.

  There remained one door I had not opened when I had taken the "room." We found beyond it a service porch, not shared with anyone, which had clothes lines, wash tubs, and other useful, homely items.

  Ticky came back into the bedroom, sighed deeply and said quietly, "But can we afford it? Heavens, can we even pay for it?"

  "Brace yourself. This so-called 'room' costs just three dollars a day more than the 'minimum' room we were in. At that differential I didn't think we could afford not to enjoy oriental splendor once in our lives-we never will again."

  Ticky gasped, sat down suddenly, and began to giggle.

  "Do you remember," I went on, "what we paid for just one room about half the size of any one of these four at Sun Valley last year? That one room without meals cost just what this suite plus six meals a day costs here."

  "Are you sure there isn't some mistake?"

  "There is no mistake . . . but I never saw a sharper proof that our own economy does not match in with the rest of the world; we are getting this much too cheaply. But I haven't told you the rest of the joke. The manager was reluctant to show me this place. He asked twice when we would sail; I told him I did not know but Wednesday looked like a good bet. He shook his head solemnly and said that he had one more 'room' but it was reserved for Wednesday.

  "So I suggested that he could move us a second time, if necessary, and he finally showed me this. But the last thing he said was, 'You understand now, if you take this room and stay past Wednesday, I'll have to move you. Mr. Rockefeller always has this room and he has reserved it and he will expect to have it this time.' "

  As it turned out, Mr. Rockefeller stayed as a houseguest of the Queen's Commissioner and canceled his hotel reservation, so, although we did not sail on Wednesday, we did not have to move. We enormously enjoyed the use of "his room" and could well understand why he would ask for it specifically.

  With the room came Foo. I think Foo was number-one boy for that floor, but he took care of the end suite himself. Kwai Yau had introduced us to the perfection that the Chinese can bring to domestic service; Foo continued this level of intelligent, anticipatory service but with some charming and individual quirks of his own. He was about four feet ten and could not have weighed a hundred pounds in his uniform. At a wild guess I would place his age at sixty, give or take ten years. His usual expression was one of self-contained rage, which gave way at rare intervals to a shy and surprisingly sweet smile.

  Foo stood for no nonsense from his guests. They were going to be served properly whether they liked it or not. The conventional term for this is "keeping face," and so it is, but I prefer to state it more explicitly; Foo had a steel-hard personal integrity which made him require of himself nothing less than perfection in everything that he did no matter what anyone else thought of it.

  We shared with him a modicum of language, not quite English, not quite Pidgin, which did well enough for domestic matters. Ticky's first chore was to sort out clothes requiring laundering and drycleaning-practically every stitch we owned since we had had no chance for drycleaning since leaving Buenos Aires and had not been able to send laundry the last few days before arrival in Singapore. She was pleased to see that twenty-four-hour service was available for a 50% extra charge, pointed it out on the ticket to Foo, and explained to him most carefully that we wanted everything back the next day.

  "Too much money," Foo answered.

  Ticky explained that she knew it cost more but that we needed the clothes.

  "When you sail?"

  Ticky admitted that our ship did not sail until the middle of the week following but told him again that she wanted the hurry-up service anyway. Foo shut up and staggered out with most of the contents of ten suitcases. I had saved out one suit and a nylon shirt and some shorts; Ticky had the dress she had come ashore in and one dinner dress.

  The next day a couple of shirts and some underwear came back, nothing else. To Ticky's inquiry Foo answered, "Tuesday!"

  "But I wanted them today!" Foo shrugged and would not answer.

  We made do with what we had. My one suit was beginning to smell like a bear rug; it was well to be upwind of me. On Tuesday all the rest came back. Foo brought them in, hung up the suits, stowed the laundry, and presented Ticky with the chit, stabbing his finger at it and saying with fierce triumph, "See? I save twelve dollars!" (Straits dollars).

  We thanked him sincerely and did not laugh until he had left. Then we gratefully put on clean clothes.

  We had been there two days when Foo braced me on the subject of shoes. I have never gotten used to the cosmopolitan custom of putting one's shoes outside at night to be polished. In the Ruys Kwai Yau had noted this and had taken care of it his own way by selecting a pair each night and putting them out himself; he never mentioned it. Foo's approach was different. He stepped up to me, looked up, glared, and said angrily, "Tonight-you put shoes outside bedroom door! Never mind corridor, just bedroom door. I come in, get!" He grew almost purple and jabbed his finger at my feet. "Your shoes are too dirty!"

  I put my shoes outside the bedroom door.

  Some days later Ticky and I were entertaining in our "room" before dinner. We had become used to having Foo pop up whenever needed and to his being never more than a buzzer signal away. This time for the first time, when I pushed the service button, a strange Chinese appeared. I asked, "Where's Foo?" but could not understand the answer; this staff member had very little English and I had no Cantonese at all. So I said, "Never mind," and ordered drinks-with no difficulty, as such international words as "gin sling" and "martini" we shared.

  The drinks arrived in a few minutes. About ten minutes thereafter Foo showed up, in uniform. We m
anaged to get it straight that I had simply wanted bar service, that it had been provided and I wanted nothing else. Foo left.

  The next day I remembered to ask him about it. After a certain amount of semantic difficulty I got it clear: The strange bellman, while weak in English, had nevertheless understood that I had inquired for Foo-so a message had been sent out into town, Foo had dressed again in his uniform, left the bosom of his family, and had come at once to find out what I wanted, even though he was not on duty. I tried to apologize; he shrugged and closed the subject.

  We did not tip him at all until we left. The amount had been the matter of much thought and had been arrived at by starting with a formula which one of the international oil companies advised their employees stopping in Singapore hotels to use; to this we had added a percentage to allow for the fact that Americans are expected to tip higher than others, plus a percentage for superlative service, plus the amount he had saved us on drycleaning. It added up to a generous tip by Singapore standards but a stingy one (in comparable circumstances) in the United States.

  Foo seemed quite pleased with it. But he left rather hastily and returned with the corridor boy who did the heavy cleaning. Foo pointed at him. "He good boy, too!"

  I had no formula to help me in this, so I gravely presented the other man with a tip which I hoped was appropriate in view of their relative ranks. Foo seemed to approve-he did not glare at me.

  Pleasant as our suite-cum-Foo was, we spent little time in it. A few peanuts fed to a dog in Montevideo began to pay off in most surprising dividends. Señor Maurice Nayberg had given us cards of introduction to business correspondents of the Nayberg firm in various ports; we looked up one of them here, Mr. Ho Choy Moo.

  From the moment we met Mr. Ho until the day we sailed we were taken in charge, driven around town, taken to dinner, helped with our shopping, taken sightseeing, taken on a long drive north into the Sultanate of Johore, taken to amusement parks, even taken to church. And when we left, Mr. Ho supplied us with letters of introduction to smooth our way through Indonesia.

  It still is not clear to me just why hospitality was so heavily lavished on us. We had made it clear at the outset that our acquaintance with the Naybergs was of the slightest, covering only a few hours of our short stay in Montevideo. Mr. Ho had himself never met the Naybergs and knew them only by business correspondence. It seems to me that protocol would have been more than satisfied had Mr. Ho taken us to lunch and advised what to see and where to shop-not that we had even that coming to us but to show courtesy to the Naybergs.

  Whatever the reasons were (and I can't believe it was just our sweet dispositions even though we usually get along all right with children and dogs)-whatever the reasons, we were given a free ride through Singapore which could not have been purchased from a travel agency at any cost. The Hos even included John Lloyd in much of it, simply because he was with us much of the time-John was enjoying an indefinitely long vacation in Singapore at his employer's expense because his permanent-residence visa for Manila had not yet come through.

  We were treated to superlative Cantonese food, food which made us realize that even the best Chinese restaurants in the States do not bother to supply the real thing to unappreciative and ignorant heathen. Bird's-nest soup and shark fin were the only items I could identify but I must state emphatically that chop suey had no part in it. Mr. Ho insisted that Ticky must use chopsticks and instructed her in the art to the point that she learned to pick pieces of cracked ice out of a bowl with smooth plastic sticks. Try it sometime when you are feeling lucky; the coefficient of friction between ice and smooth urea plastic is zero followed by a string of noughts. The trick is to use the sticks as gently as possible, almost no pressure; occidentals tend to use them like a pair of pliers.

  Often the whole family escorted us, Mr. and Mrs. Ho and four children-Ho Chee Pen, Ho Chee Fei, the one daughter Ho Mei Ling (after Madame Chiang), and the baby Ho Chee Cheong. Boys carry a generation name, in this case "Chee," as well as a family name and a given name. Mrs. Ho was an exquisitely beautiful little girl who had kept her figure and her sweet disposition through four children. The children were all well behaved but so shy that we did not get well acquainted with them.

  Mr. Ho dressed much as I dressed and the kids were dressed like the kids back home but Mrs. Ho usually wore a chang sam, which is the formal, stylized Chinese dress with the high collar, skirt slit at each side, and quite tight. It must be tight-Mrs. Ho, modest herself as a nun, once went home to change because she decided that the chang sam she was wearing was too loose.

  Ticky had to have a chang sam and Mrs. Ho advised her where to go. Singapore is a place where they will take your measurements in the morning and deliver a tailor-made suit to your hotel in time to wear it to dinner the same day. Ticky's measurements were not taken until around noon but the dress was delivered about five o'clock. I concede that tailoring a chang sam is not the job a man's suit is, but try to get that service in New York. The dress was midnight blue heavy silk with a dragon of sequins coiled across the chest-price, $10 U.S.

  It appeared to have been sprayed on with a paint gun, rather than tailored and it met with Mrs. Ho's approval. The peekaboo effect of the side slits is rather startling. Shorts show a lot more skin but shorts do not dress up the landscape the way a chang sam does.

  The Hos took us to one of the "Worlds"-there are three, the Great World, the Happy World, and the New World, and they are the Singapore versions of Coney Island, so much like our own amusement parks that there is no need to mention anything but the differences, the first being theaters for classic Chinese drama and the second being Joget dancing. The Chinese theater was the sort which can be seen in New York and San Francisco in the States-days-long performances, extremely ornate costumes and hair-dos, stagehands that sit and smoke and have lunch right on the stage, very stylized acting and a singsong delivery not like ordinary Chinese speech. Since we did not understand the dialog and did not know the traditional plots it was interesting only as an oddity to us. But I was impressed by one thing: I had been told that all the female parts were taken by men. This may be so; I found it almost beyond belief. Those cunning little "girls" with their high voices were much more convincing than any female impersonators I have ever seen before.

  Joget dancing is the sort of social dancing the Mohammedan Malays do-mostly extremely sexy rumbas and foxtrots. The "Worlds" have several dance halls with taxi dancers available, all just as one finds it in America save for one point: their religion frowns on bodily contact, even with the finger tips, so the taxi dancers follow their partners without the help of any physical lead; they "shadow dance." They are very skilled at it and never fumble in even the fastest and most complicated steps. It appears to be a skill developed by years of practice; we noticed several apprentices, nine or ten years old, who hardly ever gained partners but would join some couple and duplicate every motion of the older girl. The kids seemed only slightly less skilled at it than were the grown women.

  While the religious injunction forbade touching, it did not seem to forbid anything else. The couples danced only an inch or two apart and the undulant gyrations they went through would cause them to be thrown off the floor anywhere else. A hula dancer would have blushed.

  The long drive the Hos took us on into the Sultanate of Johore was remarkable on one point only-a sight of royalty. Singapore is an island like Manhattan, larger than Manhattan but much smaller than Long Island; it is connected with the mainland, which at this point is Johore, by a causeway, one which the Japanese armies found very convenient when Singapore was caught with its guns facing the wrong way.

  We passed through customs for once with just a wave of the hand. Singapore is a free port while Johore is not, but the guards at the border did not seem worried about smuggling. The countryside, the manners, and the people seemed no different from Singapore save that we were now out in the country and passed through only an occasional village; the buildings were substantial in structure
and Western in appearance-no grass shacks, no mud huts.

  We glanced at the palace grounds from the outside, then went on to the zoo. It was like any other fairly large zoo except for one thing: it was not, strictly speaking, a public zoo although it was open to the public. It was the private property of the Prince Regent ("Regent" because the old Sultan is ill) and existed only because he likes animals and wanted a zoo. While we were poking around among his caged tigers and apes and so forth, we ran across him. Mr. Ho pointed him out.

  It is my contention that the least he could have done, with due respect to the romantic notions of citizens of democracies who gain their notions of royalty from books, would have been to show up riding an elephant and wearing a turban. But he was leaning against a borrowed Jaguar sports car and wearing a beaten-felt hat, a sweat-stained khaki shirt, and wrinkled khaki trousers. We knew the car was borrowed because, as Mr. Ho pointed out, the license plate was that of a private citizen.

  If this sort of thing keeps up, I shall have to give away my copy of The Little Lame Prince.

  But the most amazing place the Hos took us to was the Tiger Balm Garden, also known as Haw Par Villa. There is another one like it, named the same and built by the same man, in Hong Kong; otherwise I am reasonably sure that there is nothing else in the world even remotely resembling it.

  Several people aboard ship had said to us, "Be sure not to miss Tiger Balm Garden."

  "All right," I had answered. "What is it?"

  "Well, uh . . ." Our advisor would pause, look helpless, and add lamely, "Never mind. Just be sure you don't miss it."

  I am going to have the same trouble now. I will try to describe it but I probably won't manage to put over its essence. Just be sure that when you go to Singapore you do not miss it. It is free, it is not advertised, and nobody cares whether you go or not. It is unlikely that a guide or a taxi driver will suggest it, as there is nothing in it for them. But don't miss it.