by Paul Theroux
Singapore was very old then, not in years but in attitude and design because of the way the immigrants had transplanted and continued their Chinese cities, duplicating Foochow in one district, Fukien in another. As a feller who had seen Naples and Palermo duplicated down to building styles, hawkers’ cries, gangster practices, and patron saints in the North End of Boston, I understood that traditional instinct to preserve. The completely Chinese flavor of vice in Singapore made it attractive to a curious outsider, at the same time releasing him from guilt and doubt, for its queer differences (Joyce Li-ho had the tattoo of a panther leaping up her inner thigh) made it a respectable diversion, like the erotic art anthropologists solemnly photograph, maharani and maharajah depicted as fellatrix and bugger on the Indian temple. The sequence of activities in a Chinese brothel parodied Oriental hospitality: the warm welcome—the host bowing from the waist—the smoke, the chat, the cold towel, then the girl—usually the feller chose from one in a parade; money changed hands in the bedroom when the feller was naked and excited; then the stunt itself, and afterward, a hot towel and a glass of cold tea on the verandah while some old amahs ironed bedsheets and yapped beyond the rail.
It was the Chinese host’s puritanism, his ability to make pleasure into a ritual, that added so much enjoyable delay to it. And though the Chinese customers with a harelike speed treated the whole affair with no more concern than we would in popping out for a quick hamburger, the fellers I took along, mainly gawking travelers bent on carrying away an armload of souvenirs, welcomed the chance to enter, and more than enter—participate—in a cultural secret, to be alone with the exotic Oriental girl in a ceremonial state of undress, and later to have that unusual act of love to report upon. It was much appreciated because it was perfect candor, private discovery, the enactment of the white bachelor’s fantasy, the next best thing to marrying a sweet obedient Chinese girl. I could provide, without danger, the ultimate souvenir: the experience, in the flesh, of fantasy.
By never putting a price on my services, and by joking about the enterprise the feller would take so seriously—Americans treating it, they’d say, as part of their education, continentals looking on it as a kind of critical therapy, the English preferring not to discuss it—I always came out better. I was prompt and responsive; I didn’t insist on my presence; and I had a sense of humor.
“That was quite an experience,” the feller would say, his face flushed.
“Glad you approved,” I’d say, hailing my trishaw for the ride home.
“You’ve been a great help. Really, I—”
“Don’t mention it. It’s just a question of mind over matter, ain’t it?”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t mind and you don’t matter—hyah!”
My dedication to these souls, whom anyone else would call suckers, was so complete it made me unselfish in a way that calmed and rewarded me, for paradoxically it was this unselfish dedication that was commercially useful—I was making money. I was not so much a fool as to think that the money had been virtuously earned—there was no brotherhood in a cash transaction; my small virtue was a fidelity to other people’s passion, but I would not martyr myself for it, I expected some payment. I was not a pimp with a heart of gold; however, I knew and could prove that I had saved many fellers from harm and many girls from brutes—not only from greedy cabbies, but the curfew districts controlled by the secret societies, the streets where all the pretty girls were men with kukris in their handbags, the girls with pox, the sadists, the clip joints, the houses you came away from with the fungus on your pecker known as “Rangoon Itch.” “I’ve saved a lot of fellers from Rangoon Itch in my time,” is hardly a saintly testimony, but it might be the epitaph of a practical man who gave relief the only way he could, trusting instinct and operating in the dark. I took blame, I risked damnation, I didn’t cheat: A Useful Man, my tombstone motto would go. I was a knowledgeable friend in a remote place, able to read obscure and desperate verbal signals; with a deliberately corny sense of humor—the undemanding comedy that relaxed the fellers by avoiding all off-color or doubtful jokes, specifically the ones relating to lechery, which in the circumstances could only annoy the fellers by mocking or challenging their heat.
And Singapore helped. It was that atmosphere that had been exported with the immigrants from China and the oldie-worldie style of the city’s subdivision into districts. To say that there was only one street in Singapore where you could buy a mattress is to describe the rigidness of the pattern; ship chandlers occupied one street, coffin makers another, banks another, printeries another. Brothels took up a whole block, mixed higgledy-piggledy with Chinese hotels, from Muscat Lane to Malacca Street, and the area was self-contained, bordered on one side by bars and noodle shops and on the other by laundries and pox doctors.
“It’s like something out of a myth,” Griswold had said. Without fuss, the excesses of Shanghai were available in the dream district—opium dens here, brothels and massage parlors and cockfights there—constructed by the wishful immigrant who in his homesick fantasy remembered a childhood longing for wealth and provided for his pleasure with the tourists’ subsidy. An American appropriately complimented the unreality of it by saying, “It’s just like a movie!”
“Jack, I want to tell you I feel very lucky,” the same feller went on. “Give them a few years and they’ll pull this all down and build over it—apartment houses, car parks, pizza joints, every lousy thing they can think of. Tokyo’s already getting commercialized.”
We were on Sago Lane, near Loon’s Tip-Top; through the upstairs window of Loon’s we could see two Chinese girls in red dresses, one smoking and looking out at the sky, the other combing her long hair.
“They’ll put a gas station there or some dumb thing. It gives me the creeps to think about it,” he said. “It’ll just ruin it.”
“It makes my blood boil,” I said. But I could not match his anger.
Then he said something I have thought of many times since: “I feel damned lucky,” he said. “At least I can say I knew what it was like in the old days.”
Nineteen fifty-nine! The old days!
But he was right; it was pleasant then, and it changed. Answering the squalor of the city were the girls; noiseless and glittering and narrow as snakes, they looked like anyone’s idea of the Oriental concubine. That was theatrical, a kind of costuming: the whore’s mask depicted the client’s sexual ideal—they were expected to pose that way, as in white shoes, I was expected to look like a pimp. It was the nearest word, but it didn’t describe me: I was gentle. The girls were practical and businesslike. Their obsession was with good health, and they treated their tasks like ritual medicine or minor surgery, assisting like sexy nurses, those dentist’s helpers who worked on complicated extractions, bending over a feller’s open mouth, making him comfortable and being quick when he grunted unusually. They believed in ghosts and had a horror of hair and kissing and stinks and dirt, and complained we smelled like cheese. Some didn’t feel a thing, but just lay there sacrificed and spread and might say, “You are finished, yes?” before a feller had hardly started. Most had the useful skill of the reliable worker, the knack of being able to do their job convincingly and well without having the slightest interest in it, and all had the genius to be remote at the moment of greatest intimacy, a contemplative gift. They were sensationally foul-mouthed, but they swore in English, and I was certain from the soft way they spoke to each other in Chinese that they seldom swore in their own language, and had that learner’s curious habit of finding it easy to say “fuck” in another tongue, for a foreign swearword is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learned it early in life and knows its social limits.
Dirty talk stimulated a lot of fellers, but left others cold. I remember a feller demanding to leave the Honey Bar, and as we left, saying disgustedly, “I could never screw a girl that said bullshit. Bullshit this, bullshit that. I’m not a machine. I like a girl I can talk to, a little human wa
rmth.”
Many of the girls were modest in a conventional way, which even as a pretense was a compelling sexiness in a whore: “I couldn’t get the little doll to take her dress off,” was a frequent comment from the fellers, and as no tipping was allowed in the houses, no amount of money could persuade the girls to disrobe. Yet far from diminishing their effectiveness it made them sought-after; any variation increased desire and the silk dresses gave these cold quick girls an accidental allure, titillating by flouncy mystification, partly concealing the act in the dark, keeping enough of it quaintly secret for a feller’s interest to be provoked. A girl stark naked was not sexy. Hing was driven wild by even a clothed woman on all fours—as long as she was Australian and large; Ogham said the finest pleasure was to stick an ice pick into a woman’s bloomered bottom; and once in the Bandung, when we were on the subject, Yardley said with awful sincerity, “Jesus, I love to see a woman with her mouth hanging open.”
I knew the girls too well to think of them as kindly and cheerful, but they understood their cues and were dependable. Observe what virtue was in them: obedience, usefulness, reliability, economy—not mortification and solitary prayer. On one occasion, boarding a launch for a run out to a ship, Doris Goh (never absent, never late) stumbled and fell into the water at the quayside. She could not swim and went rigid as soon as she went under. I hauled her out; soaking wet, her dress stuck to her, her make-up was streaked, and her nice hairdo became a heavy rope of loose braid. I told her she could go home if she wanted to, but she said no and soldiered on, earning forty dollars in the wheel house while her dress dried on a hanger in the engine room. They were unambitious in some ways, but not at all lazy and didn’t steal.
So it surprised me—my amusement crept upon by an old slow fear—when I opened the Straits Times and saw, under ISLAND-WIDE VICE RING BROKEN—JOO CHIAT RAID NETS 35, a photograph of five girls being dragged by the arms toward a police van while grim Malay policemen watched, sturdily planted on widely spread bandy legs, holding trucheons and riot shields. The girls’ faces were very white from the flash bulb’s brightness and their astonished eyebrows were high and black, their objecting mouths in the attitude of shouting. That they were objecting did not surprise me—they were indignant, an emotion as understandable in them as in any harmless lathe operator yanked from his machine. But that particular raid was a great surprise: the Joo Chiat house was thought to be safe, with a Chinese clientele, protected by the fierce Green Triangle secret society whose spiderlike and pockmarked members could be seen at any time of the day or night playing cards by the back entrance, their knives and bearing scrapers close to hand. The article in the paper said this was “the first raid in an all-out campaign launched by the P.A.P. to rid the island of so-called massage parlors.”
There were two raids the following day. One at an opium den resulted in the arrests of seven elderly men, six of whose worried, sunken-eyed faces appeared in the paper; the seventh was pictured on a stretcher with his hands clasped—he had broken his leg when he slipped trying to escape across a steep tile roof. The second raid was at a massage parlor very close to Muscat Lane where all the girls, and the decor, were Thai. The raids disturbed me, but the picture I made of it in my mind was not of the girls—it was the terrifying vision of the old addict being hounded in his pajamas across a clattering rooftop.
I decided to lie low that night at the Bandung. “You don’t understand the political background, Jack,” Yates said. “I’d steer clear of Chinatown if I were you.”
“Don’t say we didn’t warn you,” said Yardley.
“I never go to Chinatown,” said Froggett. “Bloody waste of time.”
“Harry Lee’s putting the boot in,” said Smale. “I hate that little sod.”
“I was just wondering what was going on,” I said.
“Nothing that concerns you,” said Yardley. “So keep out of it.”
The next morning I went to see Mr. Sim. He seemed suspicious at my arriving so early, and reluctantly let me in. I asked him about the raids.
“Must be careful,” he said. “How Kheng Fatt is keeping, okay?”
“Hing? He’s doing all right. I’m only putting in a couple of hours a day, unless I’ve got business on a ship.”
“So what you are worried? You got a job, neh?”
“If you want to call it that. Look, I earn peanuts there—little-little money. I can’t bank on it. If they go on closing the houses down and arresting the girls I’m going to be out of luck. And so are you!”
“Better than in jail.”
“What are you going to do?”
He didn’t look at me, but he showed me his face. He said, “Funny thing. You know new wireless I got? Yes? It don’t work now. I enjoy that wireless set, but it need repair.”
“Where are you planning to go?” I asked.
He discovered his shirt and smoothed the pockets.
“They say a lot of the cops are plainclothes men,” I said. “You know, Special Branch fellers wearing shirts like mine and plain old pants, pretending they want a girl. They pay up and just before they get into the saddle they say, ‘Okay, put your clothes on—you’re under arrest.’ I think that’s terrible, don’t you?”
Mr. Sim twisted the tail of his shirt, and he worked his jaw back and forth as he twisted.
“I’ll level with you, Mr. Sim. The reason I came over is I’ve got a plan. We know they’re trying to close things up—they’ve already nabbed about a hundred people. So why wait? Why not just put our heads together and set up somewhere safe. Like I was telling you. We’ll go where they least expect us, rent a big house up on Thomson Road or near a cemetery, get about ten girls or so and run a real quiet place—put up a sign in front saying ‘The Wongs’ or ‘Hillcrest’ or ‘Dunroamin.’ What do you say to that?”
“It is a very hot day.” He went imbecilic.
“Come on, we haven’t got much time. Are you interested or not?”
“It is a hot day,” said Mr. Sim. “I am expecting my auntie.”
“No taxis allowed—only private cars, no syces. Girls by appointment. If you think the Dunroamin idea is silly we can put up a sign saying ‘Secretarial School—Typing and Shorthand Lessons.’ No one’ll know the difference.”
He had twisted his shirttail into a hank of rope and now he was knotting it. “My auntie is very old. I tell her to stop so much smoking—forty-over sticks a day! But old peoples. Kss!”
“Okay, forget it.” I stood up.
Mr. Sim let go of his shirt and leaped to the door. “Bye-bye, Jack. See you next time. Don’t mention.”
That night I brought a feller to Muscat Lane. I had met him in a bar on Stamford Road. He had asked me if I knew a good “cathouse,” and I told him to follow me. But the house was in darkness, the shutters were closed, and the red light over the altar was turned off. I rapped the lock against the gate bar, but no one stirred. Mr. Sim had run out on me.
“This looks like a washout,” the feller said. “I’m not even in the mood now.”
“They’re worried about the cops. There’s a political party here that’s putting the heat on—trying to close down the whole district. They’ve got everyone scared. It didn’t use to be this way, but maybe if we walk over—”
“I don’t know why it is,” said the feller, “but people are always saying to me, ‘You should have been here last year.’ It really burns me up.”
“That’s natural,” I said. “But you gotta understand the political background, you see.”
“Political background is crap,” he said. “I’m going back to the ship.”
“If there’s anything else you want, anything at all,” I said. “I could find you a gal easy enough. Fix you up in a hotel. Bed and breakfast.”
He shook his head. “I had my heart set on a cathouse.”
“We could try another one,” I said. “But I don’t want you to get in dutch. How would it look if you got your picture in the papers—cripe!”
“Makes
you stop and think, don’t it?” he said.
“Sure does,” I said. “But if there’s anything else—”
“Naw,” he said, but saying so, he laughed and said again, “Naw,” as if he was trying to discourage a thought. I was hoping he didn’t want a transvestite—it would be hours before they’d be on Bugis Street.
“What is it?” I asked in a whisper. “Go ahead, try me. God, you don’t want to leave empty-handed, do you?”
“Naw, I was just kicking around an idea that popped up,” he said, laughing down his nose. “I don’t know, I’ve never seen one.”
“Seen what?”
He stopped laughing and said gravely, “Back home they call them skin flicks.”
The room was stifling with all the shades drawn, and the screen was a bedsheet, which struck me as uniquely repellent. We sat, six of us, wordlessly fixed on the blue squares jumping and flickering on the screen while the rattling projector whirred: the countdown—a few numbers were missing; the title—something about a brush salesman; the opening shot—a man knocking at a door. We fidgeted when the man knocked; no knock was heard. It was a silent film.
The absence of a soundtrack necessitated many close-ups of facial expressions; and a story was attempted, for both characters—salesman and housewife—were clothed, implying a seduction, the classic plot of conquest with a natural climax—an older concept of pornography. The salesman wore a tweed double-breasted suit and his hair was slick and wavy. I guessed it was late forties, but what country? The housewife wore a long bathrobe trimmed with white fur, and when she sat down the front flapped open. She laughed and tucked it back together. The salesman sat beside her and rolled his eyes. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one, a Camel. So it was America.
