Final Notes From a Great Island

by Neil Humphreys

  The atmosphere is quite wonderful. Apart from an overriding sense of safety and security, there is always a communal feel to shopping in Toa Payoh. Customers and shop owners know each other and chat. Uncles sell ice cream or hot chestnuts from their bicycles. Aunties read palms for a few bucks and tell strangers their fortunes. Mothers stop in the packed street to gossip while their children play or browse around the toy shops. The mothers never have to worry where their children are. It is Pleasantville, Singapore-style, and it still exists in the 21st century. I see it every night in Toa Payoh.

  This scene was repeated at Heathway, the nearest shopping parade to my Dagenham home, when I was young. I knew the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer and the fish and chip shop owner because my mother sent me on regular errands to all four. Alas, there was not a candlestick maker. Today, however, Dagenham children are thrown into the car, buckled to the backseat and driven to a nondescript, all-under-one-roof shopping monstrosity on the outskirts of town. It is a dull, retail behemoth where greasy teenagers earn £5 an hour to tell you that the product you want does not fall within their area of expertise so could you kindly get lost because a senior citizen has fallen into the cornflakes’ display. Britain’s concrete car parks and shopping blocks are uniform, impersonal and repetitive, but they are cheaper than neighbourhood shops and an inevitable consequence of globalisation, apparently.

  If you want to sample that future of shopping in Toa Payoh, step away from the family-run businesses around the older parade and head for the ultra-modern HDB Hub. Opened in June 2002 at the costing of over $380 million, the Hub has a shopping centre and a 33-storey office tower that now overshadows, literally and metaphorically, the neighbouring older mall.

  It did bring about 5,000 office workers to the town centre, but they work mostly at the bland HDB headquarters, a skyscraping eyesore that towers above Toa Payoh. And yet its image is wiped from your memory as soon as you have passed it. It may have cost over $380 million but it is instantly forgettable. Whichever way you look at it, that is quite an achievement. Of course, you will find everything you could possibly need for a healthy, balanced lifestyle there: a McDonald’s, a Burger King, a Coffee Bean, a Mos Burger and a Kodak photo-developing shop. The trouble is, they are everywhere else too. Eventually, a shopping trip in Toa Payoh will be about as gripping as a shopping trip in Dagenham because the shops will be exactly the same.

  Before it got too dark, I bought some ikan bilis (dried anchovies) and gladly left the Hub hordes to have a quick peek around Toa Payoh Town Park. Although small and across the road from the choking fumes of the bus interchange, this green spot has always been a pleasant diversion with its stone bridges that surround its centrepiece—a 0.8-hectare carp pond that is also filled with turtles. When Scott and I first arrived, we often spent weekends at the park feeding the turtles after a Chinese uncle showed us how it was done. Okay, it was hardly a trip to Disneyland but we had not been in the country long and needed an afternoon attraction that cost less than $2.

  It started to drizzle as I peered into the pond but several plump turtles popped their heads out of the murky water and, in my eagerness to feed them, I inadvertently almost knocked their heads back into their shells with a handful of dead anchovies. At that moment, two urchins appeared from nowhere, looking like they had stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel and into Toa Payoh. The older Malay boy, about 11 years old and clearly the brains of the operation, pushed a bicycle along the edge of the pond while his younger brother, a tubby lad of about 7, leant over the water’s edge and dropped in a toy boat. Then he began slapping the boat on the surface of the pond. All that frenzied thrashing caused the turtles to disappear.

  “What are you doing, boys?” I asked, a tad annoyed.

  “Fishing, lah,” said the tubby one, flashing a cheeky grin.

  “Why are you banging that boat against the water?”

  “So the fish will come over and see what I’m doing.” The logic was flawed but he was serious about the job at hand.

  “If the fish do come, how will you catch them?” I enquired.

  “With my hands, loh.” His contemptuous look suggested I had just asked the stupidest question he had ever heard.

  “Do you think you’ll need a fishing rod?”

  “No need, lah. Aiyoh, just grab them.”

  And he continued to thrash the boat around in the water like a deranged munchkin while his older brother shouted words of encouragement. Bidding a fond farewell to my fisherboy friends, I had a quick look at one of the strangest buildings in Singapore. Okay, one of the ugliest.

  The Toa Payoh Viewing Tower stands at the end of the town garden and looks down upon the town centre. Built in the 1970s to complement the garden, the vertical tower stands at a height of 27 metres. It has a light green exterior with a dark green spiral staircase running through the middle. The top of the cylindrical building juts out on one side, something architects usually call a feature. This means, of course, that the “iconic” tower resembles a giant penis, complete with bulbous foreskin at its summit. Being green merely underscores its aesthetic shortcomings, suggesting that the penis has recently caught a venereal disease of some unsavoury description.

  As part of the town park’s recent upgrading, the tower was repainted and given a little moat with cute fountains spouting muddy water. There was even a small path leading up to the entrance of the tower, which was blocked by a green grille. Naturally. When are the authorities going to learn to trust their own people? For whatever reason, the viewing gallery over at Block 53 was locked, the empty shell of what used to be a restaurant overlooking the carp pond was locked (even though the second storey provides pleasant views of the park) and the Toa Payoh Tower was locked. The message was clear: Look but do not touch because you cannot be trusted. That is how you speak to highly-strung grandchildren.

  When I came to Singapore, the tower was still open and I climbed to the top to get a bird’s eye view of Toa Payoh. There were used condoms all over the floor. Many couples once took their wedding photographs in Toa Payoh Town Garden. Even more couples used to have sex at the top of its tower. Combining two significant erections at least gave the tower a purpose. It is no coincidence that the government’s preoccupation with falling birth rates has intensified since the town council closed the Toa Payoh Viewing Tower. To the people in power, might I make a humble suggestion: Reopen the green penis and the townsfolk will gladly shag for Singapore once again.

  CHAPTER 3

  I decided to return to my first home in Singapore, only to find it was a mess. I moved into the HDB flat of David’s late grandparents in Block 230, Lorong 8, Toa Payoh, in November 1996. We lived on the 13th floor. That was not unlucky, but sharing a bedroom with my then girlfriend (now wife) and my best friend Scott was a touch horrific. Allowing us to stay at the apartment, rent-free, for a couple of months was an extremely touching gesture on the part of David’s family but our living conditions were becoming a Freudian nightmare. So Scott rented a room from a lovely Indian family while my girlfriend and I rented a room from a mad Indian woman who made roti prata with her enormous boobs exposed. We all remained in Lorong 8, though. Returning there now, the place was in a terrible state.

  The government’s Main Upgrading Programme (MUP) was in full swing, which meant new car parks, gardens, a basketball court and renovated apartment blocks were on the way. I visited in the interim period and found myself surrounded by scaffolding, tins of paint, bags of cement, water-filled ditches and yellow boots. The incessant drilling was intolerable. But I was here now and decided to have one last peek at our first home on the 13th floor. As the lift doors opened, I heard a voice mutter “chee bye”. The block was haunted by a foul-mouthed ghost. I immediately wanted to move back in.

  Disappointingly, the Hokkien vulgarity came from a plasterer beneath my feet, who was busy laying new tiles outside the lift. I had unknowingly stepped on his work, knocking a couple of tiles out of place. He had a right to be cross.
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br />   But isn’t chee bye a wonderful vulgarity? It is truly delightful and easily my favourite Singaporean expletive, precisely because it does not sound like one. It is Hokkien for “vagina”, but it is so much jauntier than its British four-letter equivalent, which sounds so guttural, particularly when it is said sneeringly through the side of a Londoner’s mouth. Like my mother’s. That always got my attention when she called me in from the street.

  Chee bye, on the other hand, comes across as a formal farewell to the unfamiliar ear. You can almost imagine Jeeves and Wooster crying “Cheerio! Bye!” Such a breezy exclamation, it appears to crop up at the most inappropriate junctures. Two drunks argue in a Toa Payoh coffee shop and, no matter how personal and objectionable the bickering gets, they conclude by shouting “Cheerio! Bye!” Well, that is jolly decent of them, isn’t it?

  Having apologised profusely to the plasterer, I found myself in a scene from a science fiction movie. The door to each unit was covered in plastic sheets. It was like E.T. At any moment, I expected a scientist to step out from one of the units in a radiation suit and take away my BMX. I got nowhere near my old flat. Even the lift was boarded up, which at least provided some priceless examples of Singaporean graffiti.

  In a society where respect for law and order is a given, examples of anarchic behaviour often seem so pitiful, they are almost endearing. Rather like those American teenagers who occasionally loiter around Orchard Road with their skateboards, baggy pants and baseball caps, imitating white trash from a Detroit trailer park. In reality, of course, they invariably attend an international school here, their fathers are high-salaried executives and their real home is a leafy suburb in Middle America.

  Singaporean graffiti is equally as lame. On one side of the lift, someone had scribbled “Your backside!”. Perhaps he manufactured cream for piles. Underneath that hard-hitting attack, someone had retorted with “NO NEED TO SHOUT! Don’t grumble like old lady!”. On the other side of the lift, a vandal had changed tack by writing “Merry Xmas, may peace with you”. The scribbler was so sincere, he obviously felt correct grammar was not required. Indeed, when Singaporean graffiti does bear similarity to the more explicit stuff often spotted inside London’s telephone boxes, the grammatical deficiencies weaken its impact. In a public toilet in the Specialists’ Shopping Centre, I once read “Miss X will hard suck you”. Now, that would make your eyes water. And it would make you grumble like an old lady, too.

  Speaking of grumbling old ladies, I felt compelled to return to the home of one of the most famous in Singapore. I wanted to revisit my second home in Lorong 8 to see if my infamous bare-breasted landlady still ruled the apartment block with an iron fist and her enormous boobs. So I left the dusty, discordant upgrading work of the government and headed over to the ageing, largely neglected world of the political opposition.

  Toa Payoh is truly a fascinating place to begin a valedictory tour of Singapore, and not just because it happens to be my home. The town encapsulates the general landscape of the country and Lorong 8 illustrates its political make-up. It is a street where two distinct political worlds collide. My first block, 230, falls under the jurisdiction of the Bishan-Toa Payoh Town Council, a Group Representation Constituency (GRC), which was formed in January 1997 and covers three main estates: Toa Payoh, Bishan and Thomson. It is controlled by the PAP, the party of government led by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

  A five-minute walk led me to my second home in Singapore, Block 220, which is also in Lorong 8. But this small corner of Toa Payoh falls under the Potong Pasir Town Council, a single member constituency currently under the control of the Singapore People’s Party’s secretary-general, Chiam See Tong, who has gamely been the constituency’s MP since 1984. I say gamely because he is up against an incumbent party that has been returned to power with massive electoral majorities since Lee Kuan Yew took control in 1959. Chiam and the residents of Potong Pasir are well-respected by politicians on all sides of the spectrum, and they damn well should be.

  The contrast between the two sides of the same street was obvious. The area around Block 230 was being transformed with an amphitheatre, new sports facilities, car parks, gardens and upgraded homes. But the area around Block 220 desperately lacked such swanky social amenities. There was no multi-storey car park, the units had no additional rooms, the children’s playground was basic, there were no landscaped gardens and the void deck where I sat a decade ago was still filled with odd, battered chairs that had been donated, I presumed, by the residents. Everything about the estate still felt rudimentary.

  Moreover, in recent general election campaigns, the PAP has often played hardball, telling voters that the estate will only be upgraded after those under PAP control have been spruced up. In other words, if you do not vote PAP, you do not get an extensive makeover. Yet the admirable Potong Pasir residents, young and old, still believe the glass is half full in their estate. Ignoring the enviable building work across the street, they proudly focus on the upgraded “speaking” lifts and the freshly painted blocks and, most important of all, the fact that their MP offers an alternative voice in Parliament. He still does. Three months after I visited my old home, the admirable people of Potong Pasir returned Chiam to Parliament with a slightly increased majority in May 2006. Political pride had triumphed over material incentives once again.

  Quickly stepping down from my soapbox, I headed over to the lift lobby of Block 220 to visit my formidable old landlady. I was certainly apprehensive. The woman was now in her late seventies and I had written about her tendencies to flash her boobs and her penchant for verbally battering the neighbours before. In fact, her antics had become well-known in certain circles and I owed her quite a lot. When I knocked on the door, I half expected her to laugh and knock me out with a swift left hook. Instead, a Filipino girl answered. She told me that the flat had been sold several years ago to an old Chinese couple. “That big-sized Indian lady” had moved somewhere else, but had left no forwarding address. For some inexplicable reason, I was deeply saddened by the news. One of the most entertaining, and most memorable, chapters of my life had finally closed. I had told stories about the old woman for years and was eager to say “cheerio” (the appropriate one) to her before I left Singapore.

  But I knew that wherever my old landlady was, some other poor soul was now enduring the odd nipple in the eye. Strangely comforted by that surreal image, I meandered over to Lorong 7 to see Victor, one of my oldest Singaporean friends. Just a few days before Christmas in 1996, he allowed me to use the fax machine in his photo-developing shop—for free—so that I could send off my résumé to an English speech and drama school. Victor and I became friends, I got the job and, a decade later, I found myself asking him to take me on an unusual, and slightly macabre, tour of his neighbourhood.

  Adrian Lim was one of the most infamous people Toa Payoh has ever known. On the morning of 25 November 1988, he was hanged for his role in the ritual child killings that had taken place seven years earlier. In 1981, the bodies of a 9-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy were found outside an HDB block in Toa Payoh. Lim was soon arrested at his home in Lorong 7 and the subsequent High Court trial of 1983 became one of the most sensational in Singapore’s history.

  Singaporeans were stunned to learn that Lim was a self-styled spirit medium, who lured women of all ages to his flat. Using cheap tricks and simple gimmicks, Lim claimed he possessed supernatural powers. The charlatan said he could cure young women of their various ailments through the guidance of the sex gods, which invariably enabled him to commit unmentionable sexual acts on women who usually consented. Lim, a thoroughly despicable and evil man, preyed on the weak and the mentally disadvantaged, who flocked to his home in Toa Payoh, willingly offering money or sex in exchange for a little attention from the gods.

  Rituals included covering crucifixes and Hindu and Taoist idols in blood, dispensing tranquillizers and applying electric shock treatment. At the trial, it was revealed that one of Lim’s mistresses had allowe
d her husband to suffer the electric shock treatment to get rid of evil spirits. It killed him.

  From his “altar” in his flat, Lim told his mistresses that he needed to offer human sacrifices to the gods. They obliged. The heinous crimes committed against the young girl and boy before they died do not bear repeating here.

  Victor was around the same age as the victims, when the bodies were found around Block 11 in Lorong 7. Victor lived in Block 9. He was terrified. “It was really bad. Couldn’t go out and play,” he recalled. “I used to play at the playground where they say the women looked for children to take back to Lim. And the church. They went to my church, too. I always used to say I was a potential victim. I lived in the flat next door and I was the same age as those kids who died. I was a potential victim. Ask anyone in Toa Payoh, they’ll remember Adrian Lim.”

  That is why we stood outside the apartment block where the killer had once lived. Almost every Singaporean knows Lim’s name. The dead man has become an omnipresent monster, the country’s pantomime bogeyman, the ghost who can be called upon to scare children to sleep. Singapore’s Jack the Ripper. Throughout the 1980s, parents could order their children indoors at the mere mention of his name. Yet he was arrested in 1981 and hanged seven years later. Why is the name still so familiar in Singapore? Because he is the only one. There has only been one Adrian Lim. There have been other murderers of course, but none so reprehensible.

  In Britain, there can be two different murders involving children in a single week. It happened shortly after I met up with Victor. Over seven days, I read about two teenage girls being stabbed and shot. Only one survived. That was followed by a story highlighting the “happy-slapping” phenomenon, whereby teenagers pay warped homage to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange by assaulting innocent strangers and recording the beatings on mobile phones, which are subsequently posted online. In one attack, a young barman was kicked to death. Although the details of both cases were published in the national newspapers, I can no longer recall any of the individuals involved. In Britain, there have been countless Adrian Lims, to the extent that their identities are now indistinguishable. And monsters are only forgotten when there are too many to remember.