Notes From an Even Smaller Island Read online

  I could not begin to imagine how he felt. To plant firm roots in a country, only to have them mercilessly ripped out by an anonymous bureaucrat must be soul-destroying. The poor sod told me he stepped out of the immigration building and started to cry. What else could he do? All his plans and ambitions for the next couple of years had been crushed by one man’s ‘no’. On top of this, Immigration is not obliged to give a reason for rejecting work permit applications so it did not. I know that Scott is just a number to them, a name on a piece of paper, but a ‘sorry’ would have been nice rather than something along the lines of ‘Sod off. We do not want you here. We accept that you’ve just moved into a new apartment with a lovely Indian family and have paid out over S$1,000 in rent and deposits but tough shit. As for the reasons for rejecting you, even though your work record is exemplary, we do not have to give them so we will not. Goodbye.’

  That is water under the bridge now and Scott has not looked back. The silly sod is now working for an up-and-coming architect’s practice in Central London. He has also married a beautiful girl from Wales. Make no mistake; he has come back with a vengeance. However, he is still prone to the odd cock-up from time to time.

  There is a London gangster movie called Villain that I absolutely love. Set in 1970, the movie stars the great Richard Burton as a sadistic gang boss. When I heard it had been re-released in England, I asked Scott to send me a copy and he kindly obliged. Then came the cock-up.

  One morning, I received a card from the Singapore Board of Film Censors informing me that a package had arrived for me and requesting that I go down to their offices for a little chat. It turned out that Scott, the dopey but honest soul, had carelessly noted that the contents of the package contained a video. Therefore, the parcel had been re-routed to the Board.

  I have always abhorred censorship so I knew that I might say something that my employment pass would later regret. As a precaution, I took Greg, my old boss and good friend, with me. Now Greg is as cool as they come and I suspected I might need to exercise his calm diplomatic skills and possibly his knowledge of other local languages. When we arrived at the offices of the Board of Film Censors, the guy at the counter produced my package and explained that he could open it only in my presence. Reluctantly, I agreed and surprise, surprise it was my movie from Scott. The guy then highlighted my ‘options’. I had the right to return the parcel to its sender, settling the issue on the spot. Alternatively, I could pay the Board to kindly view the film for me. The Board would then decide what was suitable viewing for me and I would have to pay them again if any cuts were made.

  True to form, I completely lost it. ‘Are you telling me that guys in this building, who have never met me, are going to decide what I can watch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait a minute. This is a gift from a close friend. How would you feel if one of your close friends sent you a gift, only for me to intercept it? I then open it and inform you that a stranger is going to examine it to decide which parts you can have. A service for which you have to pay. How would you feel?’

  ‘You can just send it back if you like.’

  ‘But it’s a gift. My friend has taken the trouble to send it. Why the hell would I want to send it back?’

  ‘In that case, you can have it viewed by the Board. Here are the charges.’ He then gave me a leaflet containing all the charges. It was so many dollars per 30 minutes and then a couple of dollars per cut. It was insane.

  ‘I’ve never heard of this policy. I know films are censored but I didn’t know you had a policy like this,’ I argued back.

  ‘Would you like to send the film back?’

  ‘No, it’s my bloody film. I don’t see why I have to pay you to cut it for me.’

  ‘Those are your options.’

  ‘I didn’t know about them, though. It’s not as if these leaflets are available in supermarkets or in MRT stations, is it?’

  We were going around in circles so Greg intervened, ‘I think there’s a lack of awareness here. My friend hasn’t been in Singapore for very long so perhaps it would be worth considering the idea that such material be made more readily available for foreign workers at airports and at immigration. This would be in the best interests of both parties and episodes like this could then be avoided.’ He was not saying anything radical but it deflated the situation a little.

  ‘I’ll pass on your feedback,’ came the quick, diplomatic reply.

  ‘That’s still not going to help me, is it?’ came the even speedier retort.

  I knew I was fighting a losing battle so I took a calculated gamble and lost. ‘Okay, I’ll pay you to watch my gift. I’ve watched the film dozens of times and I’ve seen more violence on a Channel 8 kung fu “family” drama. I’m convinced there’s absolutely nothing you’ll find worth cutting,’ I said confidently.

  When I collected my film a week later, it had two cuts and I received a bill for around S$10. It was impossible to fathom what scenes in the movie could be deemed cut-worthy. However, I was presented with a cute little censor information card, detailing the cuts and why they had been administered. Only a thoroughbred civil servant could have written the card. I have still got it somewhere and it says something like ‘Cut number 1, 58th minute, lady exposing both breasts.’ I burst out laughing. They are certainly taking the business of fun seriously down at the Censors Board.

  The lady in question was exposing not one but, shock horror, both breasts. If she had only exposed one of her breasts, perhaps the cut would have been half as long. The Board was right, of course, but it was such a trivial breast showing incident that I had forgotten all about it. Prior to beating a guy senseless in a men’s toilet (which is, of course, acceptable), Burton chats with the victim in a strip bar while a topless belly dancer is doing her thing in the background. Thus, I will put my hands up here and admit that I had missed that one. I had completely forgotten that you are permitted to watch a man be savagely beaten on the silver screen, a gruesome scene that I have been lucky enough never to witness in my life, but you cannot watch a woman baring something as natural as her breasts, a quite wonderful scene that I have been lucky enough to witness twice in my life.

  The second cut just knocked my socks off. Part of the scene in which Burton chats to his victim in the strip bar was cut. Why? Well, as the card says: ‘Poster on wall in background has pictures of women exposing breasts.’ The card did not go so far as to say whether the women were exposing both of their breasts but I suppose it is serious enough when more than one woman is involved. Now excuse my uncensored language but these people need to get a fucking life. Despite the number of times I had previously watched the film in England, I had never noticed the poster. Who on earth is censoring and cutting our movies? Have they ever been with a woman before? If they have not, I have a shocking revelation to make – women have breasts. Admittedly, they come in all shapes and sizes but women nonetheless have them. Why Singaporean film censors are hell-bent on denying their existence is a mystery to me. And let’s be brutally honest here. I know for a fact that you can see the real thing for almost the price of a movie ticket at any of the brothels in Geylang so what is the bloody point?

  Calming down a little, my foray into immigration and censorship is my long-winded way of coming round to the subject of politics and government. The reason being, as I hope I have made clear, you can feel the hand of the Singaporean government everywhere. An inevitable reality perhaps when you consider that we are living in what is essentially a one-party state. However, before anyone panics, namely civil servants and my publisher, I am not about to turn this book into a political treatise. I have no intention of writing an academic text on the nature of Singapore’s government largely because so many other writers (i.e., Singaporeans) could do a far better job. Besides, I have more positive things to say about this government than I do negative, which may surprise many people.

  My formative years of studying history had taught me that Singapore was a trading post for the Bri
tish, founded by that fella whose name is now shared with the hotel where you get the famous cocktail. Interestingly enough, the British prime minister at that time was one Lord Liverpool. Now wouldn’t it be marvellous if hotels, streets, airport lounges, MRT stations and goodness knows what else here were named after him? That would really make my day if the thousands of local Manchester United fans had to go into the Liverpool bar in Liverpool Street next to Liverpool Place station to watch their Devils play.

  I soon realised that knowledge of the East India Company, British imperialism and nineteenth-century trading routes was not heavily sought after in Singaporean coffee shop conversations. I also accepted that I could only take the Lord Liverpool joke so far, although he did have a foreign secretary called Lord Castlereagh who engineered the settlement after the Napoleonic Wars and then went and slit his own throat in front of a mirror. This, of course, has no relevance except for the fact that I use any excuse to tell that story. Consequently, I knew that I needed to brush up on my knowledge of this modern metropolis.

  Reading through travel books, I kept stumbling across the term ‘soft authoritarianism’. Western writers wrote of ‘subservient’, even ‘cowed’, Singaporeans who always did what they were told. Democratic elections were a formality as the People’s Action Party had been returned to power with huge majorities on every occasion since June 1959. Lee Kuan Yew was the youngest prime minister in the world at that time and when he chose to step down in 1990, he had become one of the longest-serving party leaders in modern leadership. I then discovered that one of his sons, Lee Hsien Loong, was deputy prime minister. Well, this sounded like a fun, Orwellian place to be with an all-powerful nepotistic government.

  Consequently, I was completely opposed to the Singaporean government for about two months after my arrival. I was totally appalled by the seemingly infinite number of fines that the government had introduced for what appeared to be such minor misdemeanours. For example, there are penalties for not flushing toilets, littering, eating or drinking on any form of public transport and jaywalking. Both Scott and I could not believe that such draconian measures were still being implemented and, more importantly, enforced in this day and age. I was becoming quite depressed by it all so I asked Justyn, an expatriate friend who had lived in Singapore for a number of years, if he believed that Singapore was an authoritarian state.

  He said, ‘Well, look at it this way. What is there that you can’t do? You can earn a decent living but you are not allowed to commit crimes. Really, there’s not a great deal that you can’t do except for the things you shouldn’t want to do.’

  I slowly began to agree with him. I have learnt to accept and agree with the majority of Singapore’s harsh laws. The obvious retort to this is that I have lived in the country too long and have fallen for the rhetoric. On the contrary, it was living on a working-class council estate for almost twenty years that changed my mind. It became an absolute joy to walk down streets that were not strewn with litter, dog shit and chewing gum that sticks to your shoes and requires the services of a welder to remove.

  When I first returned to England for a holiday over the Christmas period, I found myself complaining like a grumpy old man. There was litter everywhere and teenagers were still hanging out on street corners, only their language had become cruder. The local newspaper could print nothing other than murders, muggings, burglaries and demands for increased welfare benefits for Dagenham’s high population of teenage mothers. Sure, I could step into any store and buy an uncensored movie but why would I bother? There was plenty of sex and violence in my former home town to keep me entertained. Ironically, the setting up of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras just about everywhere confirmed that there was a ‘Big Brother’ world after all. Fortunately, I had left it to live in Singapore.

  So what are some of the so-called draconian laws enforced by the Singaporean government? Western travel writers constantly bemoan the fact that Singapore is a ‘fine’ city and tourists even buy the ‘Singapore’s a “fine” city’ T-shirts that mock all the things that cannot be done here. To me, this is such a naive perception. At the end of the day, if you think that the fines are ridiculously steep (for example, around S$1,000 for littering), then the simple solution is not to break the laws in the first place. I will not apologise if I sound like an eighteenth-century Tory here. Singapore is spotless and it has some of the cleanest public amenities I have ever seen; a fact that is all the more impressive when you consider its high population density.

  When I was growing up, I had the misfortune of needing to visit the little boy’s room urgently on several occasions and had no choice but to use the ones found in London Underground train stations. The foul stench numbed the sinuses on entry. Graffiti was everywhere and, in some instances, it seemed marker pens were not readily available so the artist had managed to ‘produce’ a different kind of writing material. Unsurprisingly, there was hardly ever any soap in the dispensers and as for finding any toilet paper, well, you had more chance of bumping into George Michael. In Singapore, of course, all of the above offences would carry fines, but most public facilities are rarely abused or mistreated. Funny, that, when you think about it.

  Please do not think for a second that England is a lawless society, far from it. The home secretary has got laws coming out of every orifice. These laws, however, are not enforced in the same way. That is the crucial difference. Being caught on the train or the tube without a valid ticket in England makes you liable for an on-the-spot £10 fine (about S$25). In Singapore, on the other hand, if the ticket inspector finds you without a valid ticket, he will usually take your farecard and charge S$1 to it (just 40 pence).

  When I was a teenager, I needed to get a train to and from school. I always had my train fare but I would more often than not spend the money on something else and sneak through the station without paying. Looking back, this was, sad to say, probably as easy as it sounds. All you had to do was evade the eyes of one guy. That was it. One guy, who was usually overweight, would sit in his little glass cubicle and you would flash your school pass or your daily ticket at him and walk past. It was such an easy, low-paid job and most of the time the guy only gave a token glance up at the hundreds of blurred tickets that whizzed past him. Still, when I was thirteen years old, it seemed like Mission Impossible.

  Of course, it was wrong to evade paying my fare and thus break the law, but it was so easy. If I was caught, I would just tell the man that I had made the shortest journey possible and give him 30 pence to pacify him. Officially, he was supposed to hand all monies in but when he walked home, he could play the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’ without moving his lips. That was how it was in England, just about everyone broke the law on British Rail.

  Now, there are ticket barriers at the entrance and exit of each train station, while London Underground has gone one step further and installed CCTV cameras and alarm barriers that can only be opened with a valid ticket inside every tube station. Have these improved the system? What do you think? Little laws have been broken for so long that there is now no turning back.

  Coming home on the tube a couple of years ago, I watched dumbstruck as two kids jumped over the barriers and walked off without showing their tickets. They did this under the watchful eye of the CCTV cameras and in front of commuters and the on-duty station officer. The boys made no attempt to run and no one, including me, dared to stop them. Life is just too short. I would have lacked the balls to carry out such an act of bravado at their age. Then it occurred to me. They were roughly the age I was when I used to carry out my Mission Impossible routine. The obstacles might have changed but the crime remains the same. Both they and I have been conditioned by an environment in which laws are rarely enforced. And as for that seemingly draconian on-the-spot £10 fine? Flummoxed Metropolitan police officers are continually being given false names and have to spend thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to track down the offenders to retrieve the fines.

  Singapore, on the other h
and, enforces its laws and is not afraid to mete out punishment. Admittedly, the size of the island certainly aids law enforcement as criminals are not exactly overwhelmed with a choice of safe houses. If you rob a petrol station, expect imprisonment. If you commit rape, expect imprisonment and the cane. If you commit a murder or bring heroin into the country, expect the rope. To middle-class Western academics, who tend to live in little suburbs with white picket fences and are very quick to criticise Singapore’s stance on crime without actually living here, my retort is simple: do not break the law. I know what to expect, Singaporeans know what to expect and Michael Fay knew what to expect.

  In 1994, the American teenager achieved global fame when he was given four months imprisonment and four strokes of the cane for vandalising cars. Like many expatriates here, he obviously had too much time on his hands and was soon bored with the kind of luxuries that the Singaporean kids living in my HDB block can only dream of. The spoilt brat deserved everything he got. After all, I do not like everything about Singapore but if I am content to take home its dollars every month, then I have to accept certain things like having my video censored for me. Similarly, Fay’s family had to accept that ‘when in Rome’, they cannot behave how they please, safe in the knowledge that Uncle Sam will come in and save the day.

  After doing a search on the Internet for Michael Fay-related sites, I was quite surprised to find that he did not have too many sympathisers. In fact, one or two Americans even applauded the no-nonsense and no-exception policy of the Singaporean government. After all, if its lawmakers chose, quite correctly, not to spare the life of Filipina maid Flor Contemplacion after she was found guilty of two murders in 1991, why the hell should they spare some irritating American adolescent from a few strokes of the cane?

  Of course, the Singaporean government is not perfect and sometimes its leading ministers make pronouncements that send me reeling in disbelief. There are just two areas that really rankle with me: censorship and homosexuality.