Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  The problem for Singapore is that its genius is so recent, and its past so thin. Almost everyone came from somewhere else. Yet that is also its fascination. Like Los Angeles or Miami, Singapore bears all the marks of recent invention. It is an Asian New World.

  One of the first things Lee Kuan Yew did after becoming prime minister in the early 1960s, was to launch a campaign against “yellow culture.” This included brothels and hot cabaret shows, of course, but also jukeboxes, for which the prime minister felt a peculiar, personal horror. (A fastidious man, he was reputed to have had his prime-ministerial swimming pool drained after an Indian dignitary had used it. Apocryphal, perhaps, but not implausible.) One place in particular embodied yellow culture: a narrow strip in the center of town called Bugis Street, where pretty prostitutes and often even prettier transvestites of all ethnic origins danced nightly to attract their international clientele, mostly drunken sailors, who would climb on an old urinal to watch the show. Bugis Street was eventually razed. But in the 1980s, in an effort to attract more tourists, and stung by a report in The Economist that Singapore was “boring,” the authorities decided to build the street up again as a perfect replica, without transvestites this time, but with the promise to offer “the quaint and the queer” of exotic Asian nightlife. This was vice as theme park, a simulacrum for family entertainment.

  Most of old Singapore has been torn down, like Bugis Street. But there are still pockets of history—a row of nineteenth-century Chinese shophouses here, an Indian street there. Few people actually live there anymore, but they are polished, dolled up, garnished for the tourists, and for Singaporeans, too, to give them at least an idea of the fairly recent past, as synthetic, as clean, and as organized as the “Asian Village” on Sentosa Island. This is not unique to Singapore. You see the same in China and Japan, not to mention the United States. But since the PAP government is forever tinkering with culture and language—launching campaigns to “Speak Mandarin” or to clean up the English language or to abolish local Chinese dialects, or to study Confucianism—culture and language in Singapore have a stilted, theatrical feel to them, something officially acquired secondhand, like the folk-dancing festivals in Communist states.

  Nothing in this small, rich, claustrophobic city-state is left for the people to work out for themselves, and consequently nothing feels quite authentic. Abolishing provincial Chinese dialects has had a particularly devastating effect, for they were the richest, liveliest modes of expression in a country of immigrants. But the dialect of Fujian or Hokkien, or even Cantonese, was considered to be too vulgar and provincial for a successful city-state. Like the old Bugis Street, it had to be replaced by something more respectable, more “rational” and businesslike. The officially approved languages, apart from Malay, are a pseudo-BBC English and Mandarin Chinese. To acquire the latter has become fashionable, especially among the English-speaking elite, as a badge of ethnic identity. You hear the official languages spoken on television, correctly but stiffly, even mechanically, not unlike the voices that emanate from computers.

  What makes theme parks in general so interesting, and also a little sinister, is the utopian illusion of technical perfection. Theme parks represent the dreams of their makers. They are usually extremely clean and even a bit puritanical, like Disneyland itself. I was shown around a theme park in Japan once, a model Dutch town, located near Nagasaki. The owner was a Japanese businessman who had dreamed of the perfect city, clean, crimeless, with a pleasant veneer of historical detail, a city without the messiness of human habitation, even though, paradoxically, he also had hopes that some people might actually want to live in his toy town. He showed me the splendid replica of the Royal Palace, the fake seventeenth-century town houses, the canals, and the authentic little tulip fields, but what filled him with the greatest pride, what almost made him cry with emotion, was the spanking-new sewage plant, which turned human waste into the purest drinking water.

  Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, once a dirty, bustling, crime-ridden port city, is now a bit like that. Cleanliness is almost a fetish; gum chewing and spitting are illegal. “Educating Singaporeans on the importance of discipline” is Lee’s proudest achievement. And Mr. Science has triumphed in a twisted kind of way, for everything in society is reduced to a technocratic problem. When Lee Kuan Yew became interested in gene pools and the prospect of more efficient ways to make sure educated Chinese married their own kind, he set up a “Social Development Unit.” He proposed to restrict nongraduate mothers to two children. “Creativity,” too, became a government project, when it was suggested that Singaporean students were dull. Committees of PAP cadres drew up plans to make them more “creative.” The plans, which do not allow for nonconformity, have yet to bear fruit. No wonder Lee once spoke of his citizens as “digits.” And the digits are perfectly comfortable, until one of them decides to be less dull and question the authorities; then, like the proverbial nail that sticks out, it will be hammered down with great force.

  So why do some digits continue to get out of line? The rewards of conformity are, after all, considerable. It is an odd sensation, driving around this suburban paradise, with its silky green golf courses, splendid public libraries, superb tennis courts, lavish shopping malls, excellent housing, and fine restaurants, trying to meet the tiny awkward squad. But in fact the material comforts of Singapore make the reasons for dissent more interesting. Many Singaporeans, from either fear or complacency, will tell you that there is no need for opposition in the Garden City, that it is of no use and only causes trouble. By contrast, the few open dissenters are forced to justify the value of dissent itself. I had met some of them before, in the late 1980s and mid-1990s. In 1999 I paid them another visit.

  My first appointment was at six o’clock in the evening on the corner of Serangoon Road, in the heart of the Indian district. The air was hot and clammy, after late-afternoon rains had brought a temporary relief. It was November, the eve of Diwali, when Hindus celebrate the Festival of Lights.

  Serangoon Road, a strip running through Little India, dotted with restaurants serving hot, runny curries on floppy green banana leaves, was packed with well-dressed people carrying cameras and shopping bags, marked BENETTON, GAP, or BALAKRISHNAN SHOPPING EMPORIUM. They were tourists, but also Indians, who had come in from the affluent suburbs to sample the traditions of a country their parents or grandparents had left long ago. Smells of sweet incense wafted from souvenir shops and the two Hindu temples. In the larger one, with its façade of gods and goddesses, their tongues out, writhing and wriggling in a brightly colored stuccoed mass, I watched men kneeling on the shiny marble floor to an image of Kali, the terrifying mother goddess, who was wearing men’s severed heads around her neck and plucking the entrails from their bodies. The wailing sound of South Indian musical films playing on cassettes was everywhere. And in the midst of all this, the milling crowds, the wailing music, and the sweet and pungent odors, stood a small, portable wooden table with a pile of booklets and papers stacked on top. Three men, one Indian, the others Chinese, stood around the table trying to sell the papers. The Indian kept repeating the words “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be bullied by the PAP. Buy our paper. Don’t be afraid.”

  But his voice was largely drowned out by the music and the chattering crowds, who passed the table by without a glance. They seemed less afraid than indifferent. There was an air of futility about the three men selling papers nobody wanted, and yet there was more to this scene than was immediately apparent. For one of the Chinese, a trim figure in his thirties, wearing a neat white shirt and glasses, looking rather like an accountant on his day off, was Chee Soon Juan, the secretary-general of the tiny Singapore Democratic Party (SDP). Before turning to politics, he had been a neuropsychologist. Apart from the veteran chief of the Workers’ Party, J. B. Jeyaretnam, Chee is the only leader of an organized opposition left in Singapore. His story is all the more remarkable because he is the perfectly placed Singaporean, ethnically Chinese, English-educated, bright, ent
erprising, eminently respectable. He could have joined the elite, if only he had played the game. And yet here he was, almost penniless, sacked from his university job, without a seat in Parliament, continually harassed with lawsuits and arrests, hawking unread leaflets in the streets.

  The leaflet in question was not a revolutionary tract. Called “The New Democrat,” it had on its cover a picture of Chee, grinning in a blue suit and tie, shaking hands with Jimmy Carter. Readers were invited to join the SDP to “ensure transparency and accountability in the PAP government.” Cases were mentioned of alleged government blunders, which a lively press would surely have exposed. And there was a note of protest against the way PAP candidates, including the prime minister, Goh Chok Tong had threatened people with dire consequences if they voted against the PAP. But most of the paper was taken up with a defense of freedom of speech, as though its value were not self-evident. The authors argued that speaking out freely did not mean riots in the streets. “Freedom of speech,” they said, in perfect Singaporean technocratese, “generates an open and thinking society which is the corner-stone of a knowledge-based society.” That this passes for subversive literature in a sophisticated city-state is both bizarre and sad. Chee’s books are filled with similar sentiments, and although they are not exactly banned (only deemed “undesirable”), bookshops are afraid to stock them.

  When Chee tried to sell his books in the streets, he was arrested for illegal hawking. When he tested his right to express his opinions in public by making a speech in a busy shopping center, he was arrested, jailed, and later fined for failing to apply for a permit. And when a reporter for a Western news agency asked people what they thought of this, he was told (by a young financial consultant):3 “The government cannot please everyone. [Chee] is only saying bad things about the PAP. You must admit we have a good life under the PAP.” At dinner with an intelligent, successful Singaporean businessman who had little sympathy for the government, I mentioned Chee. He thought Chee was wasting his time. Admirable, to be sure, but also a bit of a fool. “What’s the use?” he said. “Debate, politics, not practical, la, no use, la.”

  Chee and I sat down in a “hawker center” off Serangoon Road, an open place filled with Chinese, Malay, and Indian food stalls. Chee ordered some Malay and Hokkien snacks. He ate his thin fried noodles with fiery red chili sauce and helped me to some creamy white bean curd dunked in a sweet peanut paste. When I asked him how things were going, he pulled a face, and waved his hand in the direction of the crowds. “Tourists,” he said. Nobody was from the district. Normally, Indians were receptive to the SDP. Many were not as well off as the Chinese, and were more outspoken in their views. But not today.

  Again I sensed an air of futility, of fighting a losing battle. Arguments I had heard or read played through my mind: Liberal democracy is a Western value, most Asians care only about order and a full bowl of rice; men like Chee are westernized, confused, and out of place in their own culture. . . . Just then, a Chinese man shuffled up to our table, dressed in shorts and a dirty, torn T-shirt with a beer brand stamped on it, a worker from one of the food stalls, perhaps. He reached into his pocket. Chee looked up, as though to shoo him away. “Chee Soon Juan?” asked the man, and bared a row of broken red teeth. “Yes, I am.” The man’s red mouth opened wider and he said in Hokkien: “Sir, you’re a great man. I’d like to help you out.” And he shook Chee’s hand after handing over a grubby bit of plastic. It was a half-used telephone card. Chee turned to me with a smile, his spirits visibly revived, and said: “It happens all the time.”

  I had met Chee once before, in 1995, at the Singapore Sheraton Hotel. He struck me then as an amiable if slightly naÏve idealist, a do-gooder, the kind of clean-cut young man who volunteers for campaign work during elections in the United States. The meeting had an air of absurdity. We sipped cappuccinos while a man in a lime-green tuxedo played Mantovani favorites on a grand piano. Well-dressed yuppies were ordering salads and Perrier and chatting loudly into cell phones. The air-conditioning was turned up to just the chilly side of cool. This could have been anywhere—Sydney, or Tokyo, or Atlanta. Chee spoke earnestly about the importance of free speech. And around us, sitting amid the huge tropical plants, were three silent young men in polo shirts, trying to look nonchalant. Each was carrying a black bag with a neat little hole drilled into the side facing us. “Cameras,” said Chee.

  Now, four years later, Chee told me his life story in more detail. We had agreed to meet in the office of the Indian who had helped hand out leaflets in Serangoon Road. It was located in a row of shabby two-story Chinese shophouses, with a pawnshop on one side and a little store selling dumplings on the other. Inside the house, on the wall, was a large picture of Sai Baba, a plump Indian guru with a necklace. The owner’s wife was a follower. On the second floor I met Chee’s Taiwanese wife, who was cradling their baby. She spoke in Mandarin to Chee, though he is more fluent in English. He grew up speaking the Hokkien dialect with his parents but still has trouble reading Chinese. He said he was taking lessons.

  Like Chia Thye Poh, Chee was not a natural activist. Although he had been a rebellious student at his Methodist secondary school, he never really thought much about politics. After all, he was being groomed for success. And politics in the 1970s was for “losers.” Unless, of course, you joined the PAP. But when Chee was a university student in 1981, something happened that changed his life. Perhaps people were getting tired of being nagged by the government. For the first time since the country’s independence in 1965, a member of an opposition party had managed to break the PAP’s absolute monopoly in Parliament. A local by-election in a district called Anson was won for the Workers’ Party by J. B. Jeyaretnam. It became a legendary event. At last there was a voice of opposition. What is more, it was an eloquent voice. Trained as a barrister in England, Jeyaretnam, a Sri Lankan Tamil, spoke the queen’s English, with an even plummier accent than Lee’s.

  Everything was done to reduce Jeyaretnam to silence, first by ridicule and abuse, which declared that he was immoral. When he won for a second time, in 1984, the tactics were harsher. Charged and subsequently convicted for irregular campaign financing, Jeyaretnam was disqualified as an MP and barred from practicing law. Though the Privy Council in London—still the court of final appeal in those days—judged him innocent of all charges, the government refused to give him his seat back in the assembly. The Singapore Law Society decided he could resume his work as a lawyer. (From that moment, the Law Society, too, was marked for “fixing.”) Jeyaretnam managed to return to politics a few years later but faced an endless barrage of lawsuits and other chicaneries, which virtually bankrupted him. But this man who would not shut up inspired a new generation of Singaporeans, including Chee Soon Juan. The more the government bullied Jeyaretnam, the more Chee liked him.

  Soon after the famous by-election, Chee left for the United States to study neuropsychology in Georgia and Pennsylvania. In the vast American continent, Singapore politics receded. But Chee preferred not to stay in America. He went home in 1990 and became a lecturer in the department of social work and psychology at the National University of Singapore. He had a nice house, a good car, a high salary. He was a member of the elite. Yet he had doubts about the way that elite was formed. These doubts were not overtly political. They had more to do with his own area of professional expertise. He was disturbed by the education system, which divided children into winners and losers from a very early age. Children who had not made it to the top stream were treated as if they were crippled. The obvious thing to do, he thought, was to express his views in a letter to the Straits Times, the main English-language newspaper. This seemed pretty safe. He was not challenging Lee Kuan Yew. But it upset the head of his department, who warned Chee that it could seriously affect his career. Why didn’t he join the PAP and get into the PAP Youth League? He had everything going for him. Why ruin things for himself now?

  Chee refused to listen. Instead, he decided to join the Singapore Democratic P
arty and run for office. He told me he would never have gone into politics in a democratic country. His main interest was science. But after a group of young Christians and social workers got into trouble in 1987 for advocating civil rights, the government announced that those who wished to “dabble” in politics should join a party, and do it full-time. So, like Chia Thye Poh a generation before, Chee felt it was his civic duty to enter Singaporean politics. To shut up and play the game, as most people did, would be too humiliating. And that is when his troubles began. For the government challenge was disingenuous. The only party that could offer its activists a decent living was the PAP. If you chose an opposition party and wished to survive, you had to keep your regular job.

  Soon after Chee put up his name as an SDP candidate, he was sued by the head of his department for misusing university funds to mail a personal document. It was an extraordinarily petty charge. But Chee lost the case and his job. His allegation that the charge was politically motivated was dismissed, and he was forced to pay $235,000 (U.S.) in damages. A hat was passed around for donations from wealthy Singaporeans who had often grumbled about the government in private. But they turned away now, as though Chee had a contagious disease.

  Chee had to sell everything he had. More lawsuits followed, as well as problems with the tax authorities. Though he is the only qualified neuropsychologist in Singapore, no one will employ him. The promising young man had lost his caste, and would now live on the margins. Officially, he had become a bad character, a threat to the common good. Former colleagues refused to return his calls. Fear of contagion from a political dissenter is physical as well as mental. Chee had become literally untouchable. He told me that people who bought his book in the streets would throw money at him so as to avoid direct contact—and these were, presumably, sympathizers. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong crowed that “we annihilated him.”