Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  This time Teresa had another enthusiasm, a young theater group called ACTION Theatre. This, she said, was something really new in Singapore, a breakthrough of sorts. It showed that young Singaporeans were cutting loose. ACTION Theatre did plays that were quite close to the knuckle—about sensitive social problems, about sex. Naturally, I wanted to see this phenomenon for myself.

  ACTION Theatre was to perform in a lovely colonial villa, about a five-minute walk from Bugis Street, in a kind of designated “cultural” area, subsidized by the government, which had become increasingly concerned about “creativity,” or the lack of it, and culture. Next door was a dance studio, and next to that you could take classes in Chinese calligraphy. Around the corner were most of the city’s main museums. And there were coffee bars, done up in tasteful re-creations of the colonial style, where young people in Japanese designer clothes sat around discussing the latest trends in London and New York over their café lattes. I saw the director of ACTION Theatre, an affable young man from Thailand named Ekachai. He kindly gave me an invitation to the first night of the group’s next performance, a short play entitled Viva Viagra.

  If I had paid closer attention, I could have picked up the tone of the occasion from the invitation card itself, which mentioned that the dress code would be “resort gear or smart casual.” It also announced that the guest of honor would be Professor Tommy Koh, ambassador-at-large. I had never met Professor Koh, but knew of him. A bit of a liberal in his youth, like the property developer—although never, so far as I know, arrested—a man who had once had democratic ideals, Koh had become a prominent PAP mandarin; having also been an ambassador in Washington, he was an academic with a taste for the arts, an ex-chairman of the National Arts Council, and an active spokesman for “Asian values.” Some might say Tommy Koh had sold out. Others might call him a liberal, perhaps even a “reformist” inside the establishment, a man of culture, indeed a traditional type of Chinese intellectual, who advises his rulers and spreads the orthodoxy.

  The drinks party before the performance of Viva Viagra was civilized enough. People in smart casual resort gear drank chilled white wine and nibbled on non-fattening Vietnamese snacks. There were serious-looking women in black, a few homosexual couples in dark Kenzo T-shirts and heavy boots, and there was Tommy Koh, wearing a very smart casual blue-and-purple batik shirt, and modishly long gray hair wrapped carefully around his ears, smiling and chatting and working the room.

  The play itself was a kindly satire on modern Singaporean sexual politics. A young woman is shy about having sex with her boyfriend and shocked that her widowed mother should still have sexual feelings at all. The mother’s lover is too proud to take Viagra. Two young men take too much. But, partly thanks to the wonder drug, all ends well for everyone.

  More interesting was the speech by Tommy Koh before the play began. He spoke in English about his pride in being Asian. He pointed out that bureaucrats were not always “bad guys”; they could be “good guys,” too. This splendid new theater was made possible, was it not, by the active support of the Singaporean government. The audience applauded. A blue spotlight, bouncing off Koh’s glasses and the gray-blue highlights in his perfectly coiffed hair, gave him a weird shine, as though he were polished with wax. Many people, he continued, perhaps a bit incongruously, said that it would take many years to recover from the Asian economic crisis. But he didn’t share that pessimistic view. The Asians were clever and industrious, and they had pulled off miracles in the past. A new economic miracle was now just around the corner. However, the next step in the Asian miracle would surely be cultural. After Asian economic power, there would be Asian cultural power and, so Koh was happy to tell us, the whole world would sit up and take notice. Indeed, it was already happening now, in Singapore.

  More applause. Ekachai, the ACTION Theatre’s director, professed how moved he was, thanked Koh for all his help, and said there was a surprise in store. The lights dimmed, Koh blinked, and from the back of the theater about fifteen actors and actresses came in, carrying a huge cake and singing, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Tommy. . . .” Ekachai was smiling, Koh was smiling, everyone looked happy, and by the time they began to sing “For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow . . .” I thought here was an example of what was wrong with Singapore.

  It was trivial, of course, compared to being locked up for twenty-three years, or being worked to death in labor camps or tortured to denounce one’s parents or forced to worship a leader as though he were God, but it was an example of how some of the best and brightest are co-opted into an oppressive system even as others are crushed.

  I asked Ekachai the next morning what he had really thought of Tommy Koh’s speech. He shifted a little in his plastic garden chair, looked at me with a degree of suspicion, and said: “Which part of his speech?” The whole speech, I said. And Ekachai, a lively, intelligent Thai, began to formulate an answer that sounded curiously like an opinion column in the Straits Times.

  Tommy was really quite liberal, he said. And anyway, he, Ekachai, was happy to receive the “hardware” from the government as long as he could choose the “software.” True, he still had to submit work in advance to the censors. But in fact Viva Viagra was really quite risqué for Singapore.

  Really? I asked, thinking of Kumar’s act only a few streets away. Well, he said, maybe not to him or me, but I should understand that the Singapore government was concerned to reflect the views of the majority of Singaporeans, and most Singaporeans are still very conservative. I was about to open my mouth, but he waved his hand as though to indicate that he already knew what I was going to say. Of course, the arts had to be a bit adventurous, but one should not be out of step with the people. And besides, while the government was loosening up, one didn’t want to go too far. It might “scare” them.

  Ekachai’s impassioned apologia had the sweet sound of reason and moderation. But it also had the deadening ring of submission to the paternal, authoritarian state.

  Sitting in the air-conditioned bus, almost soundlessly rolling along the perfectly paved coastal road to Changi International Airport, past the skyscrapers with their blinking neon lights, past the golf course, past the junction leading to the Whitley Road Detention Center, hidden behind the tall green trees, past the pastel-colored Housing Development Board apartment buildings, I thought again about Tommy Koh and Ekachai, and reflected on the sheer waste of talent and enterprise when there is no room between conformity and marginality. An artistic, intellectual, or political rebel would have to plump for marginality, of course, but here the margins were too ruinous. Ekachai’s fear of “going too far” and Koh’s talk about Asian “cultural power” were two sides of the same melancholy coin: energy misapplied, originality stifled, and liberty killed at birth. For most people, the suffering involved may be minor and may perhaps even pass unnoticed, soothed as most people are by material comfort. But it was there all the time, hanging in the air of almost every encounter I had in Singapore—the fear of authority and the anxiety to appease it.

  In the opulent splendor of the airport, I went through some of the items I had clipped from the Singaporean newspapers. One in particular, which had caught my eye, perfectly illustrated that pervasive Singaporean mood, a faint echo, muffled in affluence, of the same thing I had noticed in other parts of Greater China, and sometimes even in Japan.

  It was an article in the Straits Times about the new Madame Tussaud’s that had just opened in Singapore, featuring wax models of Einstein, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, Marilyn Monroe, and many other celebrated figures, including, of course, Lee Kuan Yew. There was a photograph of the waxen Lee standing stiffly, small, stern eyes staring glassily ahead, the prominent southern-Chinese jaw clenched tight. At his feet was a middle-aged woman. She was kneeling to smooth the knife-sharp crease in his dark-blue trousers. Her name was Karen Toh, a business manager. “I admire him a lot,” said Ms. Toh, “and have no chance to see him pe
rsonally. The figure is just like his real person. I feel happy to be able to touch him and not be afraid he’ll get angry with me.”

  Chapter 2

  Not China

  Kaohsiung, a port city on the southern tip of Taiwan, is no more or less ugly than most East Asian cities; that is to say, it is for the most part hideous, in the concrete bric-a-brac style of postwar Japan. It has none of the manicured slickness of Singapore. And what goes for the architecture applies to the politics, too. The Japanese actually built much of Kaohsiung, or Takao as they called it, when Taiwan was part of the Japanese empire, between 1895 and 1945. Before World War II, the new, prosperous parts of Takao were Japanese, with Japanese houses, Japanese department stores, Japanese inns, Japanese shrines, Japanese banks, and Japanese movie theaters. (Most Taiwanese lived in shabbier areas, filled with low houses, built along rank-smelling canals.) But so little is left of the prewar city that a group of elderly Japanese tourists staying at my hotel could no longer recognize a single street. They stood around the marble lobby shaking their gray heads and emitting throaty little sounds of disbelief. Like most East Asian cities, Kaohsiung has been totally transformed at least twice during the last hundred years.

  Kaohsiung today is an urban sprawl, some of it built on reclaimed land between the South China Sea and a ridge of green hills that is often hidden behind a shimmering screen of industrial pollution. It looks much like a large, provincial Japanese city in the southern palm-tree zone: the same jumble of quasi-Western-style buildings—raw concrete if built in the 1960s; steel, glass, and granite if built in the more prosperous 1980s. There are the same garish advertising banners with Chinese characters splashing down from roofs or strung across the streets and the same higgledy-piggledy skyline bathed in bright neon, which looks especially fine at dusk. And yet there is a roughness, a loudness, and a hint of rebelliousness to Kaohsiung that is more typically Taiwanese.

  You notice it in small things as well as large. The “elevator girl” working the lifts in a new Japanese department store in the center of town wore a Japanese uniform of white lace gloves, beret, high-heeled shoes, silk stockings, heavy white makeup, skirt just above the knee, all prim, cute, and proper. She was trained to move in the precise, oddly stylized manner of the typical Japanese elevator girl: gloved hand pointing up or down, falsetto voice announcing the different floors, forty-five-degree bows to customers entering and leaving. But where the actual Japanese elevator girl is drilled to be virtually indistinguishable from a mechanical doll, and would rather die than display a flaw in her dress or demeanor, everything about the girl in Kaohsiung was slightly out of kilter: her shirt was stained, her hat askew; she lifted one foot to scratch the back of her other leg, twirled a chunky jade ring around and around her little finger, and grinned at me as though to show how ridiculous this prissy Japanese charade really was.

  The Kaohsiung elevator girl was almost certainly a “native Taiwanese.” Most people in Kaohsiung are. They call themselves native because their ancestors moved to Taiwan from the China coast before 1945, often as long ago as three hundred years. The “natives” make up about 85 percent of the population. Taipei, where the government is located, is home to many Chinese “mainlanders,” who came over only in the late 1940s, with General Chiang Kai-shek’s army, after the Nationalists had been defeated by the Communists in the Chinese civil war. Until recently, mainlanders dominated the ruling party, the bureaucracy, and the armed forces. Their children, born in Taiwan, are still referred to as mainlanders. Standard Mandarin Chinese is their common language, spoken on state radio and television stations. In Kaohsiung most people speak the dialect of their Fujian forebears, like many Singaporeans.

  Most native Taiwanese are in fact from the same Hokkien stock. But while the Singaporeans have been browbeaten into political submission, the Taiwanese have rebelled against autocracy and established the first democracy on Chinese soil. The south of Taiwan is their stronghold. Some would say the democratic revolution that led to the first free presidential elections in 1996 began in Kaohsiung, on Human Rights Day, December 10, 1979. Political opposition to the Nationalists, or Kuomintang (KMT), came to a head that day in a violent clash between activists, mostly native Taiwanese, and the police. It was a chaotic demonstration, with people gathering in different parts of the city, singing patriotic songs, making speeches, and demanding democracy and independence. Violence threatened from the start. A number of activists had been tortured at a local police station. Demonstrators came armed with sticks. Riot police charged. Street battles ensued. Every major opposition figure was there, from underground journalists to members of the legislature, and almost all were arrested. After a much-publicized trial, some were sentenced to life for sedition.

  The “Kaohsiung Incident” was, in a way, the Taiwanese Tiananmen. The confrontation resulted in failure. Freedom came later, after martial law was lifted in 1987 and after President Chiang Ching-kuo, like a Taiwanese Gorbachev, helped to dismantle the system that had given him absolute power. He had done so for various reasons. Pressure from the United States was one. His realization that the KMT government, in order to survive, could not rest on brute force was another. He needed the consent of most native Taiwanese, and elections seemed the best way to secure it. Also, the KMT, unlike the Chinese Communist Party, was founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1912 as a democratic party. Regardless of how it later functioned in practice, its roots were democratic. It came to power in China in 1913 through a national election. But pressure from dissidents, at home and abroad, was also an important factor, and the Kaohsiung Incident was, many still believe, the moment the KMT dictatorship began to show cracks.

  Some of the veterans of 1979 were hanging around the Kaohsiung election headquarters of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the winter of 1996. I was greeted at the door by a small, dark-brown man in a blue suit. His tie was a riotous affair in red, purple, and pink. “Welcome,” he said in English, and invited me to sit down for a chat on the second floor of the gray two-story building, decorated everywhere with the DPP symbol—a blue map of Taiwan in the shape of a whale. Sounds of honking, moaning whales wafted through the open windows from loudspeakers outside. A middle-aged woman whose teeth were stained red from chewing betel nuts offered me a plate of fresh pineapple chunks and spat a crimson gob on the concrete floor.

  It was, in fact, an extraordinary occasion, for this was the first time in history that a Chinese people was freely electing its own president. General Chiang Kai-shek, and then his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, had ruled Taiwan as dictators. After Chiang Ching-kuo’s death in 1988, party chairman Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese, became president. He carried Chiang’s political reforms even further. Now he, too, had to run for election. Even the fact that the People’s Republic of China had decided, in a spasm of belligerence, to shoot off missiles across the Taiwan Straits didn’t dampen the mood of celebration. On the contrary, it seemed to have pulled the Taiwanese together in a spirit of defiance. They would have their democracy, whether Beijing liked it or not.

  All over Taiwan, streets were festooned with banners and posters bearing the portraits of candidates: smiling, pink-faced men in blue suits and party badges, rather like provincial bank managers—a world away from the stern Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (the “Gimmo”), who ruled Taiwan as a martinet after 1949. The airwaves were filled with political chatter: call-in radio shows, interviews with politicians, debates between experts, journalists, professors, pop stars, and whoever else thought he or she had something to say. Every taxi driver seemed to be tuning in. I picked up snatches of radio conversation about the future of the KMT and the interference from mainland China. Taxi drivers explained the political demographics of their hometowns. Men and women who had been in jail as political dissidents only a few years before were now openly discussing their views. Like a political Rip Van Winkle, Peng Ming-min, the DPP’s presidential candidate, had come home in 1992, after twenty-two years of exile in the United States.

  M
emories of political violence were still raw in 1996. Less than two decades earlier, one of the opposition leaders, Lin Yi-hsiung, had lost his mother and small twin daughters—stabbed to death by unknown assailants—while he was in jail as a political prisoner. In 1981, an academic named Chen Wen-cheng, visiting Taiwan from the United States, was found dead on the lawn of Taiwan National University, with thirteen broken ribs and ruptured internal organs. The police claimed they had had “a friendly conversation” with the professor. In 1989 an elderly opposition politician in Kaohsiung County, Yu Teng-fa, died in a pool of his own blood. He had been about to take his bath. There was a nasty gash in the back of his head. Perhaps it was an accident. His family suspected foul play. The wife of Chen Shui-bian, the dissident lawyer who was to become the first DPP president of Taiwan in 2000, was paralyzed by a hit-and-run accident in 1985. An accident, possibly, but Chen suspected the worst; during election campaigns, his wife would be wheeled onto the speakers’ platform as a reminder of the pre-democratic past. These cases were never cleared up. But the point was less whether the deaths were in fact due to political violence than that people automatically believed they were. Paranoia was the legacy of years of terror.

  Violence still flared up here and there in the cauldron of politics and crime; in Kaohsiung a politician was killed in a nightclub by a colleague with gangster connections. But in 1996, the official terror was over. Like South Korea and the Philippines, Taiwan had made the transition from military rule to democracy, a feat received in other parts of the Chinese world with a degree of churlishness, even pique. So-called liberal officials in Hong Kong had told me that Taiwan was sliding into “chaos.” In Singapore, too, Taiwanese democracy was not hailed but seen as an affront: It made the “Asian values” propaganda seem absurd. There were various reasons that China decided to herald Taiwan’s first free presidential election with a missile launch, but anxiety about a fledgling democracy on what China regarded as its national soil was surely one of them.