Tiger Balm Garden is a good many acres of ground thickly covered by statues of rather poor quality.
And the Venus de Milo is a badly damaged statue of an overweight female with a busted nose.
You see? A factual description of a work of art is misleading; it does not convey the Gee-Whiz! element which is the difference-perhaps the only difference-between success and failure in art.
The statues in Tiger Balm Garden are of plaster and are painted in bright, garish colors. The modeling varies from adequate to poor. The statues do not sit alone on pedestals, but are in groups each of which tells a story; the background scene of each group is sculptured in full detail, furniture, landscape, or whatever is needed. Most of the statues are life size and the effect is to find yourself catapulted right inside a comic book. A sex-horror-crime-sadism comic book it usually is, too, for the emphasis is on the two eternal elements of drama, love and death. Most of the stories depicted are Chinese fairy tales, and pretty rugged fare for tots those stories must be-although classic fairy tales of any culture, including our own, run to themes that could give the comic books cards and spades any day and still excel in blood and violence.
But the themes and moods shift rapidly. Just beyond a long and very bloodthirsty tableau of a war between heaven and hell you find yourself suddenly faced by Donald Duck, seven feet tall and grinning down at you. No excuse is necessary for his presence here; Chinese children know Donald as well as their own fairy tales. A bit farther on is a modern tiled swimming pool, deep end, shallow end, diving board and ladders; it is inhabited by a half dozen mermaids, giant plaster fish and enormous crabs. Why? Well, don't you think a few mermaids would improve any swimming pool?
There is a long underground tunnel which is purgatory in gruesome, explicit detail. Chinese notions about these matters are less poetical than those of Dante, fully as imaginative, and much more drastic. The punishment for a woman guilty of adultery struck me as unnecessarily extreme, and the reward of usury was so horrible that I resolved never to touch the banking & loan business just in case there was something to it.
Ticky refused to look at this stretch. She complained that it made her ill.
But most of the groups and sequences did not show torture, but depicted simple, hearty violence and sex-for example wicked witches who disguised themselves as beauteous, bare-skinned maidens in order to lure wayfaring monks into their caves to rob them. The monks co-operated heartily and everybody had a good time right up to the last scene, where the monks were dispatched quickly and without sadistic furbelows.
What is art? Our own artists have been dinning at us all this century that art need not have draftsmanship, subtle use of color, nor any of the classic disciplines. Certainly these statues would make Praxiteles spin in his grave, but there is a mounting effect of awe, amazement, wonder, and sheer delight. If the scrawls and blobs of our own modernists are art at all, then these lusty creations must be great art.
The Tiger Balm Villas in Singapore and in Hong Kong were built by Aw Boon Haw, multi-millionaire publisher, banker, industrialist, and vendor of patent medicines. His Tiger Balm remedies, the most popular of which is Tiger Balm itself, are used throughout the East. I am told that they are quite useful. In any case they made him fantastically wealthy, much of which wealth he gave away. The Tiger Balm Gardens alone, which deserve to be classed with his charities, would have cost millions of dollars to build here and must have cost in excess of a million even in the Far East, yet there is not even a box in which to drop a voluntary contribution.
I heard two stories as to why he did it: one that he believed that as long as he was creating something he would not die, the other that he could teach basic morals through these frozen morality plays to that part of the population too poor and too ignorant to have had the opportunity to gain moral wisdom from textbook and schoolmaster.
I doubt if either story is true; I suspect that he did it because he wanted to.
United Press reports that he died in Honolulu 4 September 1954. May his unique spirit rest in peace.
As we were leaving Haw Par Villa with the Hos, something came up which made it appropriate and necessary for Ticky and myself to mention what church we belonged to. We had avoided the subject of religion up to then because we did not know whether the Ho family was Buddhist, Confucianist, Christian, or what. The precaution was not uncalled for, as an educated Chinese who also speaks English is not necessarily a product of missionary schools, nor certain to be a convert even though educated by Christian missionaries. On another occasion Mr. Ho had learned that I had studied oriental religions and some mention was made of Confucius-I may have quoted one of his extremely quotable proverbs, or perhaps he did. Two nights later Mr. Ho introduced me to another Chinese gentleman who got me aside and said solemnly, "I understand that you are a student of the Scholar."
I made an intellectual standing broad jump of fifteen thousand miles, recalled that I was somewhere east of Suez and "the Scholar" was not Aristotle, in these parts, but Confucius- so I nodded solemnly and admitted that I had that honor, in a small way.
From then on he treated me not as a tolerated white barbarian, but as an educated gentleman like himself, an equal. My actual knowledge of the great sage is microscopic, but my point is that I would never have been accepted as an equal had I given the impression that I believed that all wisdom and virtue was a monopoly of the Christian faith.
But the situation did come up whereby it was necessary and polite for Ticky and myself to admit that we had been reared in the Methodist Church-whereupon Mr. and Mrs. Ho said with delight, "Why, we're Methodists, too!"
Almost at once we found ourselves attending services in the Straits Chinese Methodist Church.
I found myself projected both in time and space, not merely back to the American middle west but back thirty years as well. This was no boulevard church with a microphone at the pulpit; this was a piece of my childhood. The ladies in the choir wore chang sams, all else was the same, even to the notice board with its movable figures which set forth the attendance last Sunday versus the attendance this Sunday, even to the announcement that the Ladies' Aid was giving a box supper next Thursday evening. I think perhaps it was the nicest thing the Hos did for us.
We visited other churches, among them several Buddhist temples and one Mohammedan mosque. I was not favorably impressed by the Buddhist temples, either by their alleged beauty nor by the attitude of the priests, who seemed to be indifferent to anything but the cash entrance fee. The mosque was much more attractive in its bare, austere beauty than were the temples, which were tastelessly jammed with ornate, overdecorated junk.
We had to remove our shoes to enter the mosque, of course, and Ticky swears that that was when she picked up athlete's foot-which I consider unfair to Islam, as there were daily opportunities to contract it in hotels or aboard ship, especially aboard ship. Ticky just resents that she was told that she must take off her shoes, or stay out.
Earl (the student of yoga) and Marianne, his wife, were also at the Raffles and were tracking down Hindu fakirs among the Tamil colony . . . but this was one religion we did not choose to look up; we had had enough fakirs for a lifetime in one day in Mauritius. There was one adept in town who did a very odd stunt: he would cut off the tongue of one of his followers without letting it bleed-then (so it was seriously claimed) stick it back in place and heal it. I don't know and I did not trot along after Earl and Marianne to find out. But it seems to me you would soon use up a lot of followers that way.
Instead, we went to the botanical gardens the morning that show was supposed to take place, a choice less educational, for me if not for Ticky, since my knowledge of botany is limited to digging dandelions, but a good deal more fun and easier on the stomach.
It was fun because of the monkeys. We purchased a supply of peanuts and bananas from junior merchants near the entrance; as long as the supply lasted we had little time for plants. Wild monkeys swarm in the gardens and they expect tourists
to feed them. They gathered around Ticky like a kindergarten class, accepted bananas from her, peeled them carefully, and ate them daintily. Ticky sat on the grass and stowed the peanuts in her lap in order to have both hands free to make fair distribution and maintain discipline, as the monkeys, like children, tried to shove and crowd and each get a lion's share.
While she was thus busy, one more enterprising monk sneaked behind her, made a long arm, and snatched her entire supply of peanuts out of her lap. He headed for a tree top while Ticky shouted, "Hey! come back here."
When she was forced to realize that he was not going to come back, then or later, she turned to me with her eyes round with astonishment. "Did you see that? Why, he's dishonest."
In two more years they will have to let those monks vote.
The day was on us when we would have to leave Singapore, with its crowds and its pungent odors and its trishaws (the coolies no longer pull; they pedal instead) and its pint-sized taxis and its febrile, sleepless activity. We did not want to leave. While it symbolized all the ills of the East and the sins of colonialism, we found the city itself warm and friendly and wonderful, from the little goats that scampered loose on the streets and never quite got hit by the automobiles to the bazaarkeepers who would look you in the eye and try to cheat you, all with the warmest good will.
We wanted to entertain the Ho family at least once before we left; the obvious thing-almost the only thing we were equipped to do-was to invite them to dinner at the Raffles.
But a worry was niggling at the back of my mind. "Ticky, have you considered that we might have trouble? The Hos are not 'European' as the South Africans so squeamishly put it . . . and this place is the last stand of the pukka sahib. We may run into 'Jim Crow' rules. I certainly would not want to subject them to embarrassment."
Ticky nodded. "I've thought of it," she replied crisply, "and I've thought of an answer. We'll serve drinks up here; they can't stop us from doing that. Then we will go down to dinner and if anyone makes the slightest fuss we'll come back here and have dinner served privately up here. Then after dinner you and I will check out of the hotel and as we leave we'll set fire to it."
It seemed a good plan. But it turned out to be unnecessary; no one lifted an eyebrow at "non-Europeans" eating in the main dining room of the Raffles, although we had seen no others. The Far East is changing-Rudyard Kipling might have trouble recognizing the place.
X
The Underside of the Orient
This chapter is not for the squeamish.
On second thought, I will not be any more graphic than I have to be; if you get the notion that Indonesia is a good place to stay away from, that will be sufficient.
You may remember that we had not only been unable to book transportation from Singapore to Australia but also had not been able to get an Indonesian visa. The visa we did manage to get in Singapore through the intercession of a shipping agent who knew the ropes and was able, by personal favor, to get the consulate to bypass the processing of our papers through six different government departments. We made out endless forms again, naturally. Indonesia not only has the longest and most complicated forms in the silly business but also wants them made out in quadruplicate-original. But we did get the visas.
We found out that our experience was not unique but customary, for we ran into a couple in Singapore from California who had tried to get Indonesian visas from the consulate in San Francisco, only to be forced to sail without them. They tried again in Singapore, as we did, and found their own papers in Singapore, on file with the consul there-whereupon they were required to pay ten dollars apiece to have their old papers canceled before they were allowed to start over and reapply. There is something wildly comical about such super red tape; it excites admiration rather than fury.
I had wanted to go to Bali, but our visa was good only for Djakarta. I did not go to the foot of the line and start over, not merely because I was worn out with red tape at that point but also because I had learned something much more disheartening. For the tourist and photographer Bali has long had two outstanding points of interest, endlessly reduplicated. But the revolutionary government, in its wisdom, has decided that the folk ways of Bali were destructive to the dignity of the new nation; a law was issued requiring sarongs in Bali to start just under the armpits, as they do elsewhere in the islands, instead of considerably lower down as has always been the Balinese practice. Now Bali is just like the other islands of Indonesia.
"Come to Beautiful Bali" indeed! I'll take Minsky's.
And besides that, we couldn't get to Bali anyway. Shipping was awfully tight and we took the only ship we could get, one which stopped only at Djakarta, then went down the east coast of Australia to Brisbane and Sydney. We wanted to land on the west coast of Australia, cross the continent by train, and leave from the east coast. But we had no choice; the only cabin we could get from Singapore to Australia was the one we took, and we got the last cabin in that ship. There was a sister ship going to Fremantle at the same time, but it was chock-a-block, not a berth to be had for love or cumshaw.
The ship we managed to get would have been uncomfortable at best, for she was an old tub which had been designed for Chinese coastal service, overnight trips with two to three thousand Chinese stacked almost like firewood. Now with the Reds running China and that trade gone perhaps forever she had been sketchily refitted as a cargo liner, but the result was far from comfortable. Our stateroom was a third the size of the one we had in the Ruys and there were, of course, no private baths. The toilet and bath facilities for men were adequate if not appealing but Ticky found that she shared one facility, bath and toilet combined, with all the other female first-class passengers in the ship; in the course of a three-week voyage this produced more than one acute and embarrassing emergency.
But the worst thing about the ship was that it was filthy dirty. The ship had no purser; the chief steward, an Indonesian, doubled in brass and carried out neither the duties of a purser nor the duties of a chief steward properly. In consequence his Chinese staff, with whom he could communicate only through his Chinese assistant, ran the ship to suit themselves. Now it is an unpleasant fact that lower-class Chinese have no notion at all of Western concepts of sanitation; this is not a racist remark, it is simply a fact. Inasmuch as the stewards in this ship received no instruction in these matters and were subjected to little or no discipline, they did as they pleased-and what they pleased was often disgusting.
For example (and I will keep the examples down to a minimum), discarded towels were laundered only if visibly dirtied; otherwise the room stewards would let them dry, refold them and serve them as "clean" linen. The same practice was followed with napkins. The menus were fancy jobs of four-color printing but the cooking was poor and the food and the dishes were dirty-I once found a cockroach baked into a dinner roll. I won't describe the food-handling methods nor the condition of the galley, but they were nauseating.
The ship's doctor could have and should have made sure that the ship was run in a sanitary fashion, but he himself was a loafer who did not care. Some ship's doctors are excellent but there is a percentage who are the drones of medicine, who sign up for the easy life and are too lazy even to carry out the scanty duties of a ship's doctor. Unluckily ours was this sort. The ship's rules required him to be in his office at nine in the morning and five in the evening; he seemed to feel that he had no other obligations. I recall one morning when a passenger hurt his knee rather badly at deck sports. The ship's doctor was sitting a few feet away, watching and sipping a drink; the passenger went up to him and showed him his damaged and bloody knee. The doctor glanced at it and remarked coolly, "I shall be at your disposal at five o'clock"-and turned away.
While we were not well off in first class, the passengers in second class and in third were in squalor. Second and third class in the Ruys were modest indeed, but they were spotless and smelled clean. In this ship they were filthy, reeking holes with a stench better left undescribed. The ma
jor shortcoming about ship travel is that, if you do have the bad luck to get a bad ship, you are stuck with it as thoroughly as if you had received a jail sentence. For three endless weeks we could have quit this ship only at Djakarta-which we would have done had Djakarta been an improvement, which it is not.
Of course the Captain should have tightened up his ship by cracking down on the doctor, the chief steward, and his first officer. But, while there is never any real excuse for a Captain since he can never be relieved of responsibility for everything that takes place in his ship, nevertheless I felt a sneaking sympathy for the poor man in this case; he was so busy handling his ship that he hardly had time to worry about the internal administration. The passage from Singapore to Brisbane is no soft snap.
We first became aware of this the first day out, at boat drill. Abandon-Ship drill is never perfunctory in a well-run ship but in this case I was surprised at the extreme and careful thoroughness with which it was conducted. It had a wartime flavor to it; one might have thought that the ship's officers expected the ship to go down at any moment.
We decided later that such was very nearly what they did think; those waters are still infested with mine fields left over from the War and never swept. I once got a look at one of the charts we were using; penciled into it in many of the passages between islands were mine fields.
This voyage would not have been the sinecure which cruising the open ocean is in any case; we were hardly ever out of sight of land, the charts are only moderately reliable (some of the surveys are much more than a century old), and shore lights are not too well tended. The second half of the voyage, through the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, is comparable to driving a narrow and twisting mountain road; reefs and shoals abound, the channel is narrow and must be piloted with great caution-we passed the wrecks of ships whose masters had not been cautious, or lucky, as may be.
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