“Sure, Chu Kang. Whatever you say, mate ... Can we get a straitjacket, please? Now, lie back and close your eyes. You’ll just feel a little prick.”
The seven-storey pagoda was closed. I was quietly pleased. Had it been open, I would have been compelled to climb it in the oppressive heat. Instead I popped into one of the most noticeable beneficiaries of the ongoing upgrading—the public toilets. Clearly modelled on the Night Safari’s original and highly successful concept, the toilets had a rural, open-air feel, with no wall to separate the trees and plants from the sinks. This was rather startling. From the urinal, I noticed a middle-aged Caucasian couple strolling along the footpath towards the toilet. If I could see them, they could almost certainly see me. And no one is getting a glimpse of my pagoda. How did the planners overlook the obvious fact that male visitors can be peeped on while peeing? Admittedly I am taller than most Asians, but the sinks are low enough to affect just about everybody. Unless Snow White’s pals fancy a day trip here, every other man will feel embarrassingly exposed.
The site of my spiritual home in the Bonsai Garden was also closed. I was bloody apoplectic. The main gates to the Japanese Garden were also locked. This was getting ridiculous. As appealing as it may sound, I did not fancy dissecting my year at the nearby “live” turtle and tortoise museum that was now housed within the Chinese Garden. I might mutter to the occasional cleaner, but I draw the line at talking to a turtle.
At least the smaller twin pagodas were open. I climbed the spiral staircase to the third storey and surveyed Jurong Lake. From one vantage point, it was easy to pick out all of the basic ingredients of Singaporean living: a reservoir with an accompanying town park, HDB estates and condominiums fighting for the best view of the lake, MRT trains trundling over a canal, a golf and country club, a stadium, a community centre, a shopping centre and the faint outline of an industrial estate. If a foreign visitor wanted a visual microcosm of life on this island, a trip to the top of the twin pagodas would suffice.
I strode through the magnificent main archway of the Chinese Garden, crossed the white stone bridge and thought about the delectable Cleopatra Wong. In 1978, not long after the Chinese Garden had opened, the superbly cheesy martial arts flick They Call Her ... Cleopatra Wong was released throughout Southeast Asia. A sexy, deadly secret agent, Wong was Singapore’s answer to James Bond who, through wit, ingenuity, lots of sex and a crossbow, took out currency counterfeiters from Hong Kong to the Philippines. It was exploitation film-making at its most surreal, cashing in on an industry that had been kickstarted by Bruce Lee. But the film turned Wong into Singapore’s first and only international movie star to date. The actress now lives a quiet life in Katong but, in 1978, half of Southeast Asia wanted to sleep with her.
I watched a grainy print of the movie a couple of years ago at a film festival and was genuinely surprised by its cinematic legacy and its impact on contemporary pop culture. Wong’s striped leather costume and matching crash helmet, her motorbike, her martial arts and her sassy persona were all thrown into Quentin Tarantino’s melting pot to create Uma Thurman’s assassin in Kill Bill. The debt Tarantino owes Singapore’s only international superstar is considerable, but sadly the link between They Call Her... Cleopatra Wong and Kill Bill is seldom made by anyone outside of Tarantino’s circle of friends, so I am more than happy to do it here.
I thought of the sexy siren now because there is a wonderful scene in the film that is so daft that it could only come from a film dating to the 1970s. Never one to miss a trick, the Singapore Tourism Board must have had a hand in the film’s production because every attraction the country had to offer back then features in the movie at some point. And there clearly were not too many. Fleeing from the bad guys on what I believe is Sentosa, Wong jumps into a cable car. There are several shots of her looking behind nervously at the villains in the cable car behind. This goes on for quite a while. Looking terrified, she glances over her shoulder as the snarling scoundrels close in, smiling as their prey appears to draw closer. Now, how is this possible? They are both in bloody cable cars. They are travelling at the same speed and the cars are equidistant on the same cable line.
Refusing to let science get in the way of a good cops-and-robbers chase, Cleopatra Wong flees the cable car and dashes to her Mercedes at what looks like Mount Faber. And not a moment too soon because the pursuing villains are, well, just as far away as they were when they were in the cable car. Wong floors the accelerator at Mount Faber, turns left and crosses the stone bridge that leads to the main archway at the Chinese Garden! From the southern tip of the country to the west with just one turn of the wheel. Cleopatra Wong was one classy act. Of course, the Chinese Garden was not the Chinese Garden but the secret, reclusive home of Asia’s most dangerous criminal. It took Interpol’s finest secret agents half the film to track down the hideaway because an extravagant Chinese mansion that size would be nigh on impossible to find in Singapore. Scott and I found it in less than an hour.
Delighted with our impressive sense of direction, I now strode purposefully down Chinese Garden Road trying to picture Cleopatra Wong astride her motorbike in her skintight leather suit. But it was an exercise in futility. I could only see Scott astride an armchair in his boxer shorts.
CHAPTER 13
My mother loves to walk. Some of my earliest memories are of my little sister and me being dragged out of the house to “go for a walk”. We strolled to markets on Sunday, shopping centres on Saturday and distant beaches on our Clacton-on-Sea holidays. Clacton, by the way, was once the popular destination of choice for the working classes of Essex and East London. Think Batam with fewer palm trees and more “kiss-me-quick” hats. My mother always led the way, guiding us past A-roads, speeding juggernauts bound for Dover, salivating dogs and the occasional motorway so we could find a distant Essex beach away from the sunburnt hordes. We would walk for hours to locate the beach, sit down for 15 minutes before she would say, “Come on, we can’t waste a day sitting here, can we? Let’s go for a walk.” And we would be off to another mystery destination that was after Clacton, but before Land’s End.
My mother still does it now. We barely have the chance to drop our suitcases in the hallway before she cries, “Come on, you haven’t come all the way from Singapore to spend your time in the hallway, let’s go to Deal! Then on to Sandwich, Broadstairs, Cliftonville and back to Ramsgate. Then we can have some breakfast. Right you lot, follow me!”
I have spent entire holidays in England when I have only ever seen the back of my mother’s head. It usually disappears over a grassy hillock and reappears at the next seaside town. It stops occasionally to reprimand us for “walking too bloody slow” and to berate Bruno for “pissing up the side of that baby’s buggy”. Bruno is the family’s pet poodle. He is not an incontinent uncle.
My mother’s fondness for long ambles through the city streets and country lanes of England is matched only by her impatience at bus stops. Now that is a sight to behold. When I was young, many a sunny afternoon was spent walking 5 miles home from a distant shopping centre because my mother’s fidgety feet had taken charge.
“Come on,” she would say to my exhausted sister and me. “We can’t stand here all day waiting for a bus that’s never going to come. Let’s walk to the next bus stop.”
“Mum, we’ve only been here for 37 seconds.”
“Yeah, but by the time it does get here, we could be home.”
“But this is Romford. Dagenham is 5 miles away. My feet ache and Jodie’s managed to fall asleep standing up.”
“Oh, stop moaning. Jodie, wake up! We’re walking home. Come on, follow me!”
Of course, we would walk 50 metres and the No. 174 bus would go racing past. My mum would pretend not to see it while I would mutter some half-baked complaint under my breath and then duck really quickly. My oblivious sister never saw the red double decker, having perfected the art of sleepwalking years earlier.
“That’s the trouble with buses here,” my mo
ther would say an hour later as we stumbled through the front door. “You wait for ages and they don’t come. Then when you start to walk home, what happens? Fifteen come at once. And they never stop where you want them to stop. Might as well bloody walk home ... Neil, what kind of brother are you? Go and carry your sister up to bed. Can’t you see she’s tired?”
I planned to follow in my mother’s footsteps and take a heroic saunter from the Chinese Garden, along Yuan Ching Road, past the former Tang Dynasty City, turn into Jalan Ahmad Ibrahim, amble over to West Coast Road and then push on to Pandan Reservoir. I got as far as a food court opposite Tang Dynasty City. It was rather pitiful, but the scorching sun was relentless. You could have fried an egg on my forehead. Both starving and parched, I ordered mushroom noodles and received what can only be charitably described as spaghetti and shiitake mushrooms drowned in Campbell’s mushroom soup.
After my mediocre makan, I found a bus stop outside the former Tang Dynasty City on Jalan Ahmad Ibrahim. The bus services in Singapore are truly outstanding. I was standing in the middle of a highway, the street was deserted and the area was more industrial than residential, yet the No. 30 bus picked me up and dropped me beside Pandan Reservoir. Commuters are so well served here and I think their occasional gripes in the newspapers lack perspective at times. Buses in Singapore are generally frequent and inexpensive and there really is no need to walk 5 miles to your destination, unless you really want to. Of course, that did not stop my mother when she visited Singapore for the first time in 2004. She was a visitor whereas I lived here and yet I spent most of the fortnight following the back of her head. It was most peculiar.
But at Pandan Reservoir, however, I turned into my mother for several draining hours. Have you ever been to Pandan Reservoir? It is bloody huge. According to an officer at the Public Utilities Board, the reservoir was completed in 1975 and boasts a track that is 6.2 kilometres in length. Cyclists and joggers adore this place and speak lovingly about the sun rising above the reservoir as they fly around the gravel track every morning. The lake is also available now to canoeists and rowers for the odd tournament. But they all have one advantage; they are fit. I, on the other hand, had turned up at 7pm already exhausted from my trip to the Chinese Garden. But the cooler, dusky air made a walk around the reservoir deceptively inviting so I thought, “Since I’m here ... ”
I trotted briskly along the gravel path that separated the narrow Sungei Pandan from the main Pandan Reservoir. Surrounded by water, I savoured the gentle breeze and quietly cursed every fit bugger who dashed past me without having broken into a sweat. Then, as I turned a bend and found I had the entire reservoir to myself, night happened. There was no warning. It just happened. The sun dropped behind the housing estates of Jurong and Bukit Batok and it was suddenly pitch black. There was no dalliance with greys or dark blues. The sky simply said, “That’s it, I’ve had enough. Make it night. Now! Let’s scare the shit out of that ang moh below who has decided to walk around an entire reservoir after 7pm. Idiot. Right, here we go then ... let it be night!”
No one had thought to light the path around the reservoir because no one had thought that anyone would be daft enough to go for a stroll after dinner. I quickened my pace by imagining my mum was ahead of me shouting, “For goodness sake, Neil, hurry up, it’s almost dinner time. And you’ve got to go to the fish and chip shop.”
Then I was attacked. It was my own fault really. No one should head off on an impromptu trek into an unlit area after dark, even if it was on property controlled by the Public Utilities Board. I felt a minor blow to the back of the neck, then another to the side of the face. The aggressors were unmistakable—midges. They pounced from every angle until there was a sizeable cloud of them permanently above my head. From a distance, I must have looked like Roger Moore in The Saint. The tiny flies flew into my ears, my eyes and my mouth, often all at once. One kamikaze midge even flew up my nostril, where he was quickly drowned in a reservoir of snot.
In a fit of temper, I threw my rucksack down onto the ground, grabbed the insect repellent and sprayed like a madman in every direction for a good 30 seconds. My random, uncontrolled spraying stung my eyes and I petulantly screamed, “Bloody midges!” An action I immediately regretted. There was no need for such uncouth, uncivilised behaviour. I am sure David Attenborough does not scream “Bloody midges” when he is in the Amazon. He would know the exact breed of insect he was cursing.
I sprayed my hair, my neck, my cap, my rucksack and all my clothes but the swarm pursued me right around the rim of Pandan. I could have surrendered. I could have waved a white flag and stepped down from the path and onto Jalan Buroh, a main road that ran alongside the reservoir. However, I stubbornly persevered, determined to complete the circuit. If I could walk from Romford to Dagenham at the height of summer when I was 11, I could perambulate the boundaries of Pandan Reservoir. Besides, the view from the other side of the lake was quite spectacular. The lights of the housing estates reflected off the water and, from where I stood, it all looked rather serene. Of course, I hardly saw any of this because I had a street directory stuck to the right side of my face. With the wind blowing towards me, the swarms of midges were splattering into my cheek. The street directory provided a temporary respite from the persistent little bastards.
But I completed Pandan Reservoir and, feeling that momentum was now on my side, decided to push on further west. So I shook the dead midges out of my hair, wiped them off my street directory and strode off into the darkness of Jalan Buroh.
I thought I had made a mistake at first. I walked for hours. Wandering through the deserted Jurong Industrial Estate at 10pm felt like a cross between The Hills Have Eyes and Wolf Creek. Although the area was not unsafe, there was still a perceptible sense of uneasiness. I know that Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world, but the dark, eerie atmosphere still lent itself to the remote possibility that drunk fishermen could jump onto Jalan Buroh Bridge, rip my eyeballs out with a fishhook, garrotte me with a filament line and leave my carcass to the packs of stray dogs that patrolled the area.
Jalan Buroh was an endless line of factories, dotted with the occasional piece of vacant land, the long grass of which provided an unkempt shelter for the strays. I rarely saw the dogs, but they were there. I could hear them running through the grass and occasionally howling at the moon. Almost every factory was labelled in the street directory. Except one. No. 51. It was just marked as a sizeable pink square, indicating it was a public or commercial building. This told me nothing. It could have manufactured anything from condoms to concrete. The property was certainly spooky. The security post was empty and its windows were broken. Grass and weeds grew through the fence, around the gates and up the security post. In the distance was a lone lorry parked in front of a dark warehouse that had its shutters raised high enough for employees to go in, but not high enough for casual observers like myself to see what was going on inside. But the strangest part was that there were no signs anywhere. Not one. This is Singapore for heaven’s sake, a country that indicates lookout points at the top of a nature reserve. Nevertheless, here was a property sitting on quite a chunk of prime industrial land and it was not labelled. And it was deserted. I did not spot a single employee and I stood there for several minutes. In the distance, I could hear a faint, rhythmic pounding. Someone was clearly banging an object repeatedly, slapping it down on a table, turning it around and hitting it again.
Of course. No wonder the guys inside wanted to maintain a low profile. They must have been playing mahjong. It was an illegal gambling den. I expected the police to arrive on the scene and drag out a mahjong table, hundreds of packets of instant noodles and a dozen middle-aged aunties. Then I made out the tiniest of road signs that said “Jurong Abattoir”. Ah. That made more sense than an illegal gambling den run by triads, even if it was far less glamorous.
A couple of days later, I called the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) and asked for the exact address of Jurong Abattoi
r to satisfy my curiosity. The conversation would have been less conspiratorial had I called the Internal Security Department instead.
“Ah, hello. I’m just calling to check if 51 Jalan Buroh is the address of Jurong Abattoir,” I asked an AVA officer in my best telephone voice.
“Why do you want to know where Jurong Abattoir is?” That was indeed a very good question. Other than being a nosy bugger, I did not really have a reason. So I made one up.
“Well, because I’m standing outside it right now,” I replied from the sofa of my Toa Payoh apartment. “And there are no signs outside. I’m looking for a factory in Jurong and I don’t want to walk into an abattoir by mistake because I’m having pizza later.”
“Oh I see, then yes, No. 51 is Jurong Abattoir. That’s where we slaughter pigs.”
Ah, touchy subject. Hence the secrecy. Checking the map again, however, I noticed that the property next door at No. 53 was marked down as a pet hotel. A bloody pet hotel! Imagine getting those two buildings mixed up. It was not as difficult as you might think; one of them was not even signposted. I hope no one ever uses No. 51 as a short cut to get to No. 53. That would be one short hotel stay for poor Lassie. A bellboy would not be much help, but a taxidermist might be of some assistance. The street directory calls No. 53 a pet hotel, but the AVA prefers the term “Jurong Animal Quarantine Station”. Naturally.
The closer I got to Jurong Pier Flyover, which is the turn-off for Jurong Island, the quieter the street became. By the time I had reached an SPC garage, I was venturing into the land that time had forgotten. Indeed, the garage could have been a saloon from an old western. It just needed a pair of louvre doors for me to push open. There were no customers, only a couple of elderly employees sitting on a wall stroking a dog. The snarling canine was golden in colour, but its breed was difficult to ascertain. Its perpetual drooling suggested it was born in a test tube in South Korea. As I headed towards the petrol pumps, the eyes of the two men and their salivating pet followed me across the garage forecourt. I fully expected one of them to spit out a toothpick, kick over a spittoon and, in a slow, Texan drawl, say, “Where might you be goin’ stranger? You better git goin’ real soon or little Clint here will bite yer bawls off. And if that don’ work none, I’ll set the dog on ya.”
Final Notes From a Great Island Page 11
