Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  Intimidation in an authoritarian state works in insidious ways. I often noticed how people were afraid even when there was no ostensible reason. Fear gnaws away at people until it manifests itself in unthinking reflex responses. It actually seems to be worse in Singapore than in China, because the place is so small that you cannot avoid scrutiny. Singapore can feel like a boarding school run by a terrifying headmaster, who is constantly drawing up new, arbitrary rules while warning of the dire consequences of infringement. You never know when (or even why) you might be punished. The reflexes are often physical, like those of dogs expecting a beating. A British academic at Singapore National University once told me about a political scientist there who turned and ran when my friend showed him a faxed article from a British newspaper critical of Lee Kuan Yew.

  I returned to my hotel, after seeing Teo Soh Lung and Patrick Seong, pondering the effect of intimidation. I was thinking of my e-mail exchange with Chee Soon Juan a few weeks before I left for Singapore. He had asked me to give a talk to a group he had formed with Jeyaretnam, called the Open Singapore Center, which held regular meetings and invited guests to speak. It was informal, innocuous, and, I thought, worth supporting, a small drop of plain talking in a sea of shifty conformism. So I accepted. A week later I received another message from Chee. Since government permission was required for such gatherings, could I please send my passport number, date of arrival, and so on. Suddenly, I too felt the clammy chill of possible trouble. Would I still get my visa? Would I be stopped at the airport? Would I be followed?

  I canceled the talk. And I told myself that I had acted wisely. My purpose, after all, was to find out what Singaporeans had to say, not to hold forth. But I took no pride in my decision. I was reminded once again of the traveling writer’s odd position. The privilege of a foreign passport and the detachment of a temporary visit place a glass wall between him and the people he meets. The risks are all theirs. All the writer can hope to come away with is a deeper understanding.

  Entering my comfortable room, the air-conditioning set at a perfect temperature, I saw the red light blinking on my phone. It was a message from Teo Soh Lung. She had a package for me. Could I please come and pick it up at her office? This sounded mysterious. I wondered what documents it might contain.

  Teo was not in her office. The package was on her desk, a slim brown envelope. I opened it and found, somewhat to my surprise, one page, photocopied from a famous book by the British poet D. J. Enright, entitled Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor. Enright spent much of the 1960s teaching English literature in various parts of the world, including Singapore. Almost as soon as he got there, he ran into trouble. It happened during Lee Kuan Yew’s war against jukeboxes and other forms of “yellow culture.” Enright, the new professor of English Literature, gave an inaugural address, in which he pointed out, politely, that culture flourished when people were free to create and enjoy the arts as they saw fit. Culture, he observed in a memorable phrase, could not be produced from a test tube.

  In what came to be known as the Enright Affair, these remarks were pounced on by the government and the local press as a neocolonialist intervention in Singapore’s internal affairs. Enright himself described the affair in an amusing and lighthearted way in his memoirs. I cite the page that Teo left for me almost in full, because it is such a melancholy testament to the thwarted aspirations of Singapore’s brightest, liveliest, most decent men and women:6

  The Communist is accustomed to a party line and to obedience and to the idea of public confession. Unless he is a pure fanatic, he doesn’t find it overwhelmingly difficult to change his line from Communism to anti-Communism; and having recanted, having faced the mild ordeal by television in which he will play the hero as much as the villain, like a backward boy, previously despaired of, who has suddenly passed all the examinations, then often he will serve his new masters well. But the liberal, the man who believes in truth and justice, or in fairness and decency, he cannot be trusted. He is the enemy of all doctrine. . . . His politics were shifty to begin with and they will continue to be so. He sees good in practically everything, he sees bad in practically everything; he grants you your point, and then expects you to grant him a point in return. He cannot be relied on, he is undisciplined, unrealistic, ungrateful, and he pampers his little private conscience. Prison is his proper place.

  One question continued to bother me in Singapore: If the PAP rulers had managed to turn Singapore into a theme-park version of Chinese authoritarianism, what about the people they governed? Does the sterile air of discipline and conformity have anything to do with the fact that almost 80 percent of the population is ethnically Chinese and thus heir to a Confucian tradition, as Lee Kuan Yew thinks? I was shown a newspaper clipping in Chee Soon Juan’s office, dated March 1985, in which Lee said: “Had the mix of Singapore been different, had it been 75% Indians, 15% Malays, and the rest Chinese, it would never have worked.” But then one would expect him to say that.

  It is, after all, the basis of PAP orthodoxy that obedience to an authoritarian state, also known as “consensus” or “society above self,” is an Asian virtue, while those who resist and continue to advocate more liberal politics are deluded by Western notions. Malays and Indians are Asians, too, of course, but for Lee they lack the Confucian values. Perhaps that is why a disproportionate number of lawyers in Singapore (half the members of the Law Society, in fact) are Indians. And yet Lee himself began his political career as a proud Cambridge double-first with Western democratic ideals. Perhaps he would argue that he gradually liberated himself from his colonial education and learned to think more like a Chinese. But then how do we explain Chia Thye Poh and his fellow Nanyang University graduates who opposed Lee?

  Being Chinese in Singapore is in any case anything but straightforward. For many people, especially among the lower, commercial classes—hawkers, shopkeepers, artisans, taxi drivers, minor civil servants—it is a matter of food, language, and vaguely remembered customs: burial rites, annual festivals, and family relations. Cultural identity is not something most of them are likely to worry about. They take it for granted. If anyone frets over identity it is the highly educated, English-speaking, westernized elite. It is they who want their children to learn Mandarin, take classes in Confucian ethics, and talk obsessively about being “Asian.”

  A few doors down the road from my hotel was a Chinese bookstore stocking works from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—novels as well as essays, biographies, and classics such as Dream of the Red Chamber and Confucius’s Analects. There were also CDs with folk songs and operas, and scrolls of rather mediocre landscape painting in the classical Chinese style. There were Chinese-English dictionaries and textbooks for learning Mandarin. And yet the predominant language among the Chinese customers was English. I watched them leafing through picture albums and glossy books imported from the People’s Republic of China that celebrated its fifty years: President Jiang Zemin beaming at a reception for African dignitaries, Mao Zedong pointing at a glorious sunrise, Deng Xiaoping inspecting a gigantic dam project. And I thought of the Chinese-speaking men and women who had resisted the PAP some twenty years ago and were punished for being “Communists.”

  I set off in a taxi to have lunch with J. B. Jeyaretnam in the Malaysian border city of Johor Baru. He can no longer afford to live in Singapore. The driver, a Chinese, speaking in a Hokkien accent, offered the list of complaints one often hears in the safe cocoon of a taxi. People say Singapore is rich. Well, it may look that way to you, he said, but life for ordinary people, especially taxi drivers, was very hard. It was okay for the higher-ups, always telling people what to do, but they don’t have to drive a car all day long for a pitiful profit, which is all spent on ludicrous taxes anyway. Now, his son, he was very smart. He was in England, studying to be an engineer. Hull University. He would do well out there, make money, and maybe not come back, la. You couldn’t blame him. Singapore was no good, too many rules and regulations, and too small, la.

  B
orders are often symbolic of the countries they divide. This one was no exception. On the Singapore side is a kind of high-tech medieval fortress, huge, gray, forbidding, with turrets and what look like stylized watchtowers at odd angles from a roof, which bristles, like a monstrous porcupine, with antennae of all sizes. Customs officers take an inordinate amount of time scrutinizing cars, especially those coming in from Johor, but also those belonging to people wishing to leave the Garden City. The other side is a different world. The smooth, clean, velvety roads running straight through the dense emerald-green landscape of Singapore become, on the other side of the causeway, a jumble of potholed streets filled with honking cars. Old ladies with heavily painted faces, Malay and Chinese, squawk at the men passing by the peeling shophouses and ask them to come upstairs for some fun. Dogs poke through the litter. And the stench of rotting food mingles nicely with the smells of cement, fried chicken, and diesel fumes. It all comes as something of a relief.

  Jeyaretnam was waiting in the lobby of the large hotel where we had agreed to meet. He is over seventy but wears his years lightly. After taking me to task for refusing to speak at the Open Singapore Center, he suggested several places where we might have lunch. Indian? Malay? Chinese? European? J.B., as his friends call him, is a caricaturist’s dream, a dark Victorian gentleman, with long, gray side-whiskers sprouting from his chocolate-colored cheeks, a hawkish nose with large nostrils, and eyes that change color according to the light, from gray-green to the purest blue. He was dressed casually in a blue polo shirt, slacks, and sandals.

  Although I had hoped to engage him on the topic of race, the Chinese compared to the Indians, he was more interested in straight politics. Unlike Chee Soon Juan or Chia Thye Poh, Jeyaretnam is a born politico, eager for a good fight. The last election, in 1997, was a scandal, he said. He had been robbed of his seat. Though there were enough uncontested seats to ensure a PAP victory, they still could not let his party win. I had heard the stories before—how the prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, threatened that votes against the PAP would turn a district into a slum; how J.B.’s fellow Workers’ Party candidate, Tang Liang Hong, was accused—in a heavily Catholic area—of being an “anti-Christian Chinese chauvinist”; how, after Tang filed a police report protesting such false allegations, he was sued by Goh, Lee Kuan Yew, and other PAP ministers for defamation, which effectively bankrupted him, since he was ordered to pay $5.65 million; and how J.B. himself was forced to pay $59,000 in damages because he had mentioned Tang’s complaint in an election speech. J.B. had not yet been able to pay. Bankruptcy would mean the end of his political career.

  J.B. ate in the way he spoke, slowly but with enormous gusto. More and more food arrived at our table: fried chicken, fish swimming in flaming red chilies, fresh green cabbage with bean curd and sliced eggs, chunks of suckling pig basted in a sweet mango sauce. His nostrils widened with each new dish. And his eyes gleamed when he spoke of the next election, which would probably be his last. Here was a man who called himself a political animal but who had been battered all his life fighting in a system where the odds were stacked against him. In the ideal Chinese authoritarian state, a man like J.B. is not supposed to exist.

  I remembered another sensualist at odds with a society created in the puritanical image of its first prime minister. He was David Marshall, an Iraqi Jew born in Singapore, a hard drinker and a ladies’ man. Marshall had been a heroic figure in his day: a tireless fighter against British colonial rule, he was the first elected chief minister in 1955 and founded the Workers’ Party in 1957. Lee feared him as a rival, and then, after Lee had acquired almost absolute power, despised him—for being too full of life and for lacking the ruthlessness that Lee prized above all other qualities. To get rid of him, Lee made Marshall his ambassador in Paris, a seductive option, but a bittersweet end to Marshall’s political career. When I last saw him, not long before he died, Marshall, who had once fizzed with vitality, looked exhausted—not only because he was already very ill, but because he felt his battles had all been in vain. He felt, like Lee himself, that Singapore was a Chinese creation, and he feared for the future. The Chinese, he said, were brutal in their politics. They had no understanding of democracy. They killed their enemies. With the deep melancholy of personal defeat, Marshall said: “With the ebbing of American influence, and the flowing of Chinese influence, we see an extension of nails in our [Singaporean] coffin, and an expansion of our ruthlessness.”

  J. B. Jeyaretnam did not talk like that. Instead, he reminded me that his supporters in the 1981 Anson by-election had been mostly Chinese, even though his opponent from the PAP was also Chinese, and the nephew of a cabinet minister to boot. In fact, he said, Chinese in Singapore—bus drivers, taxi drivers, hawkers, and so on—constantly came up to him to shake his hand. J.B.’s eyes shone when he said this: “They tell me I am a great man. I’m not great, I tell them. I just say they must all do their bit.”

  And yet J.B. knows he does not stand a chance. He would like to live out the last years of his life in peace. So the next time around he would tell people that if they wanted the PAP, then so be it. He had done his best. And he had paid a high price for it. I asked him what the worst of it was. He said, after a long pause, that he had lost everything—his apartment, his money. Because of his opposition to the PAP, his law practice had floundered. “I’ve never praised the system,” he said, “and that is why, Mr. Buruma, people don’t come to me. They assume I will be treated differently from other lawyers in the courts. They avoid me like the plague.”

  But, he continued, there was something worse than that, something infinitely more painful, and that was the suffering of his wife. She had been diagnosed with cancer in 1977 and had died in 1980. If he had stepped back from politics and gone to live in England, well, then perhaps she would have lived. A tear trickled from his pale blue eyes. Perhaps it was his neglect of his private life—the bane of every political animal—that haunted him more than the remote chance of his wife’s survival. But for an instant I felt something of the loneliness of being a dissenter in Singapore, of being on the edge of society, always hounded, ridiculed, and made to feel small and pointless in a place one had fought all one’s life to improve.

  I knew that J.B. was an Anglican. Even so, his religious feeling took me by surprise. When I asked him what had kept him going, he passed his hand down his face, as though in a gesture of ritual cleansing, and said: “I suppose its my Christian faith. I suppose we are made in the image of God. That is what we are taught to believe. I feel very strongly about the dignity of the human being. Jesus spoke about that, you know.”

  The influence of faith as an alternative to political orthodoxy shouldn’t be underestimated, even though the institutions of Christianity in Singapore have been cowed into silence, and even, sometimes, into active collaboration. That is why J.B., like Chee Soon Juan, refuses to attend services at his church. But what was it about Christianity in particular that sustained these men and women? The Christian faith, especially Roman Catholicism, was neither liberal nor democratic, except perhaps in the sense that all men are equal in the eyes of God. I recalled my conversation with David Marshall, who had been born in the East but had lived some of his life in the West, an Oriental Jew whose native home was among Malays, Indians, and Chinese. Did he feel closer to the European tradition? He opened his dark eyes wide and said in his broken voice, which had once boomed from the hustings, that most certainly he did: “The brotherhood of man, equality, what a beautiful concept! What a beautiful thing: a religion that makes brothers of all men.” Egalitarianism as a universal idea was of course inspired as much by the French Revolution as by the Judeo-Christian God, and an idea, moreover, that in Marxist garb had once swept across the Chinese empire too, and burned almost everything before it.

  According to the Straits Times, more than 90 percent of Singaporeans whose opinions were polled said they wanted the government to censor the Internet: not families, teachers, or “communities,” let alone individuals,
but the government. The worry was pornography, as well as religious cults and other “undesirable” stuff that might be downloaded from cyberspace. I mentioned this to a sociologist born in China and living in Singapore. He took a rather macabre interest in what he called the “experiment” of the PAP state. He admired it as an exercise in sociopolitical skill; otherwise he found it stifling. He was not surprised by the result of the opinion poll. Since people assume there is a government line on everything and individuals cannot always be sure what it is, they consider it safer to leave such matters up to the authorities. Did this seem sad to him? “No,” he said. “Since I am not a Singaporean and have no intention of changing anything, I cannot muster enough emotion to find it sad.”

  Teresa Ma (not her real name), an old friend, is a regular visitor to critical websites on the Internet. She refuses to be intimidated. She simply behaves as though she lives in a free country. This gets her into trouble, but she still has her pride. Being the way she is, she has developed a fine nose for the pockets of freedom that open up here and there, little oases that allow a person to breathe—in cyberspace, but also in real life.

  The last time I was in Singapore, she had taken me to the Boom Boom Room, a nightclub on the second floor of a corner house on Bugis Street. The main attraction was a brilliant entertainer called Kumar. Tall, Indian, male, and dressed in an extraordinary array of shimmering saris and glittering evening gowns, Kumar sashays onto the Boom Boom’s stage like a breath of fresh air. Screeching in Singlish, the Singapore street language, mixing English freely with Malay and Chinese, Kumar says things that no one is supposed to say in Singapore: He makes fun of ethnic stereotypes, laughs at the prissy, Boy Scoutish respectability of PAP orthodoxy, and is merciless to the buttoned-down yuppies who make up most of his audience. The atmosphere in the club is not entirely different from that at gatherings of evangelicals in expensive hotel function rooms. People come to shed their social straitjackets, if only for an hour or two. Kumar became so popular that he was offered a slot on television. The show was quickly taken off the air.