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  For an encore, he picked up his cocktail, waded across the water, stretched out across the edge of the infinity pool, took a sip and threw his head back, the world literally beneath his feet. As the water poured around him, he reigned ... until a young Singaporean lifeguard came over and told him to take his glass out of the pool. The guy turned as puce as his back. Even in sexy Singapore, there are still rules.

  And three weeks after I visited, Marina Bay Sands introduced another one. SkyPark visitors are no longer allowed to view the swimming pool independently. Three guided tours a day, which offer a brief stop at the pool, are now available to observation deck guests. The area where I had sat and watched butterfly boy do his thing is now closed off to the public. Apparently, hotel guests had complained of a lack of privacy and crowds watching them while they swam.

  In my defence, I hadn’t laughed too loudly when the ang moh got told off.

  Three

  WHEN I grow up, I want to be Alice Tan. Even allowing for the indomitable, resilient reputation of the Singapore Auntie, Ms Tan is one extraordinary woman. The retiree somehow managed to gamble for six days straight without once changing her clothes or taking a shower. On the eve of Chinese New Year in February 2011, the mother of four was informed by a fortune teller that her “fortune star” was at its brightest. With not a moment to lose, she dashed to Singapore’s Resorts World Casino on Sentosa and set up home at the baccarat tables for the marathon six-day session. To underscore an obvious point, as I write this, Singapore’s temperature is hovering around the 30-degree mark with the humidity at 70 per cent. I cannot sit at a desk for six hours without getting an uncomfortable undercarriage.

  But Ms Tan did not wash for fear of scrubbing away her “fortune star”. She did not change her clothes for the same reason. She claimed in the Singapore media that there was “no need” for clean clothes as a wet towel and deodorant had sufficed during her baccarat binge (but her croupiers had needed asbestos gloves and gas masks).

  I retain a soft spot for Ms Tan because she reminds me of my grandmother in her prime. Her East London bathroom belonged in a show home, not because she polished regularly but because she had “a good stand-up wash in the kitchen sink” every morning. Why waste water and begrime the bath? My grandmother was conserving natural resources long before it became fashionable and Ms Tan did her bit at the casino. For six days, she had the smallest carbon footprint in Asia. And most certainly, the smelliest.

  The 64-year-old lived on coffee and Milo, slept in her car outside the casino for no more than four hours at a time, used panty-liners to save on underwear, played among the smokers to conceal her body odour, bet between $500 and $1,000 a hand and switched from the gaming tables to the jackpot machines when tiredness took its toll because they substituted brain power for mere luck, which she had in spades, remember, according to the fortune teller.

  She lost $12,000 and went home with a smell that will outlast religion.

  Her story made the newspapers in Australia, where I originally read about the feisty Ms Tan. Singaporean stories of this nature are popular fodder for the print press Down Under as part of a reciprocal agreement between the two countries. Australian tabloids report on money-obsessed gambling Asians, draconian government rulings and Caucasian clowns getting caned for vandalising MRT trains to reinforce archaic stereotypes while Singapore gives media oxygen to the Southeast Asian Satan Pauline Hanson, incidences of racial intolerance and any suggestion that the property market is on a downward spiral to hint strongly that Australia remains a racist, economic backwater rather than a green, spacious, stress-free haven to retire to with Central Provident Fund (CPF) savings. (Neither side is entirely right nor entirely wrong, of course, but the tabloid tennis between the territories has been thoroughly entertaining for the last five years.)

  As for the indefatigable Ms Tan, she is but a rookie in the ongoing gambling games of endurance currently being played out in the city. In the same month that Ms Tan was felling her fellow gamblers with a single waft of her armpit, South Korean national Dr Lee Pan Seop disappeared. He was last spotted at the Marina Bay Sands casino at 3 a.m. on 22 February. He failed to turn up for work. He did not answer his phone. His fearful friends then lodged a missing person’s report. Police attempted in vain to track Lee down. His vanishing act made the national newspapers. The 35-year-old with a PhD in international business was long gone.

  And then he emerged 16 days later from the Marina Bay Sands casino.

  He had not once stepped foot outside the casino during those 16 days.

  He should never have been allowed in the casino in the first place. He clearly does not play with a full deck.

  The longest I had ever spent in an Asian casino was around 16 minutes. In September 2001, I had spent three interminable weeks covering the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in Kuala Lumpur. As a reward, apparently, the journalists were driven to the dreary, grubby, nicotine-stained casino in the Genting Highlands, north of Kuala Lumpur. I took pity on a lonely croupier at an otherwise deserted black jack table. I sat down and handed over a 50-ringgit note. She took it, dealt me a 17, revealed her two-card 19 and the game was over and my money lost faster than the time it took me to type this sentence. I did not get it. And I still do not get it. But with a casino deliberately secreted away inside Marina Bay Sands quietly going about its business of funding the entire resort and fuelling Singapore’s economy, I was eager to at least try and grasp its magnetic pull. A pull so powerful, it cost a South Korean national his university research job and forced a retiree to wear panty-liners for almost a week.

  But first, I took my seat in the outdoor Event Plaza for the largest light, laser and water show in Southeast Asia. Situated between the two crystal pavilions with downtown Singapore as a backdrop, the Wonder Full fancy fountains extravaganza had an enviable location. From the Bellagio in Las Vegas to Marina Bay Sands, casinos cannot get enough of dancing water jets swaying to a stirring classical soundtrack. Someone had handed me a leaflet earlier in the day about the Wonder Full show and I was keen to take it in before venturing into the casino for two reasons. First, it was free. Second, the leaflet declared that—and I must quote verbatim here to do justice to the generosity—“Wonder Full is Marina Bay Sands’ gift to Singapore.” Dear me. Nothing like a bit of humility, is there? I wasn’t sure whether I should collect donations and thank you notes from grateful spectators or hand out sick buckets.

  The Event Plaza was eerily quiet for a free, family-friendly show (and one that was a gift to the people of Singapore, remember). Being 9.30 p.m. on a Monday night, a packed house was never likely but the fact that most of the families gathering around me were a mixture of Asian and Western tourists suggested, once again, that Singaporeans are yet to fully embrace Marina Bay Sands beyond its baccarat tables. (In the interests of objectivity, I returned again on a Friday night and was treated to both a second show and a superb live jazz band, neither of which was treated with the audiences that both performances deserved.) The resort’s appeal has not filtered down to the heartlands in the way that Orchard Road or even VivoCity at HarbourFront has managed to do.

  Still, the Singaporean skyline by night, surveyed from the south for the first time, is always appealing. I picked out the Merlion, just a white dribbling dot on the landscape from this distance, and found myself distracted, as usual, by the puerile rather than the profound. When admired from the angle of the Marina Bay Sands Event Plaza, the Esplanade’s Theatres on the Bay can be found in the northeast corner. From here, the Swissôtel The Stamford hotel stood resolutely and most erect between the two round theatre domes. I will say nothing further, other than should you visit the Wonder Full light and water show in the near future, casually turn your head to your right and tell me you do not also see the most impressive phallic symbol in Asia.

  Well, Marina Bay Sands’ free gift to the masses was always going to be something of an anticlimax after that. But I was pleased to discover that Wonder Full had followed the well-tr
odden path of its predecessors by creating a light, laser and water show seemingly influenced by copious amounts of hallucinogenic substances. The narrative involved little more than a series of unhinged images being projected onto three water screens. First, a lotus leaf opened. I got that one, the imagery paid tribute to Darth Vader’s sleeping chamber on the other side of the resort. But beyond the lotus leaf, I was lost in an assault on the senses involving giant eyeballs, green lasers and a disturbingly large baby with a humongous head straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey while Louis Armstrong thought to himself what a wonderful world it was. The only narrative that I could make out was the rather empathic banging of multicultural, multi-religious drums, with projected images of multiracial families hugging each other on the water screens. Backed by an uplifting symphony orchestra blaring through the stunning 7.1 surround sound system, Wonder Full felt like a National Day Parade rehearsal. All that was missing was Gurmit Singh jumping in the air and shouting, “Singapore! ... Are you ready to par-tee?”

  Wonder Full was confusing, bombastic, nonsensical and, at times, bewildering. It was marvellous. With Louis Armstrong ringing in my eyes, I felt unexpectedly invigorated and bounded off to the money-pumping heart of new Singapore—a casino that for decades the country swore it would never build.

  I joined a chirpy Chinese chap on the escalator. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. Neither was particularly smart. I peered down at my pressed trousers and collared shirt and felt distinctly overdressed.

  “Excuse me, are you going to the casino?”

  He smiled at me warmly.

  “Of course,” he replied. “Are you?”

  “Yes, I am. I was wondering about your jeans. Isn’t there a formal dress code here?”

  “Please lah, they don’t care about what you’re wearing, only what’s in your wallet,” he laughed. “Hey, you’re not Singaporean, right? Lucky for you, no need to pay an entrance fee, right?”

  “So you’re going to have to pay $100 then?”

  “No way,” he said decisively, producing a card. “I bought the annual membership instead. I will definitely go more than 20 times in one year. I can maybe go 20 times in one month.”

  And in he went, waving his membership card as he marched hurriedly towards another night with cold, stony-faced croupiers.

  To appease anti-gambling campaigners and, yes, religious groups, the government imposed a casino entry levy on citizens and permanent residents. In a bid to dissuade gamblers from low-income backgrounds, the figure was set at $100 per day or $2,000 annually. Do Singaporeans across the socio-economic spectrum still visit the casino? Do Singaporeans like to play blackjack over Chinese New Year? Does a bear shit in the woods?

  I found myself sandwiched in the queue between four ah bengs from Hong Kong talking baccarat tactics and a short Filipino in cowboy boots and a terrific white Stetson. The humourless security guard ordered him to remove his hat.

  “Why can’t he keep his hat on?” I enquired over Roy Rogers’ shoulder. “It’s a terrific hat.”

  “For security reasons, sir,” the security guard said in a firm, flat tone.

  “It’s not as if he’s going to put casino chips in the hat,” I persisted, compelled to defend any short man happy to wear an oversized Stetson in public.

  “No, he won’t be putting any chips under his hat, sir.”

  Of course not. How silly of me to suggest otherwise.

  Interestingly, the lack of humour permeated the casino. After showing my passport, I ventured into the main floor. There was red carpet everywhere, naturally, and ostentatious horseshoe-shaped curves above the gaming tables. I counted four floors: two for gaming and jackpot machines, a third floor comprising celebrity chef restaurants and a top floor of what appeared to be private rooms. The upper floors were clearly designated for the gambling whales, who could probably throw Stetsons on the heads of 20 hookers as long as their credit lines were good.

  No one smiled. From table to table and through row upon endless, monotonous row of slot machines, the casino appeared utterly devoid of joy. Whether they were sitting around tables, hovering overhead, counting cards under their breath or scrutinising the impassive croupiers, the gamblers, the overwhelming majority of whom were Chinese, exchanged little in the way of conversation. Simple pleasantries, greetings or even simple expressions of gratitude were exceedingly hard to come by. Hunched backs slumped in stools as glazed eyes followed reel after reel while zombies shuffled from one jackpot machine to another, kept awake only by the free caffeine the casino graciously supplied to keep the comatose alert enough to find the nearest ATM, to keep withdrawing, to keep spending. The repetitive, ticking drone of the jackpot machines was occasionally punctuated by the squeal of ecstasy, but such exclamations of victory were all too rare. Otherwise the sound of silence prevailed over the casino floor—the sound of losing.

  Las Vegas, for all its obvious faults, has a certain endearing tackiness, a kitschy quality that if not exactly charming is certainly entertaining enough to while away a couple of days laughing at the Elvis entertainers and ruddy-faced Americans in Hawaiian shirts. The end goal for both destinations is the same, but Las Vegas keeps the tongue in the cheek and plays up on the campiness. For many, Las Vegas is a pleasure. Marina Bay Sands feels too much like a business. If a film crew tried to shoot The Hangover in Singapore, taciturn punters would tell them to keep the noise down. Marina Bay Sands is closer to Genting or Star Cruises in tone and ambience, plusher perhaps, but the clientele is essentially the same—serious souls throwing down the Housing Development Board (HDB) mortgage on a hand of baccarat.

  A casino floor supervisor type hurried past me pushing a wheelchair. With all the discretion that a 1.93-metre-tall Caucasian wielding a notepad in an almost all-Chinese casino can muster, I followed from a suitable distance. I need not have bothered. The smell led me to the commotion. Six casino employees busied themselves around a jackpot machine that emitted a stench fouler than Alice Tan’s used panty-liners. Peeking out from a bank of machines opposite, I glimpsed the cause of their consternation. A scruffy, unkempt thirty-something Chinese guy (who must have seriously stretched the boundaries of the establishment’s dress code) was slumped in a stool, his head resting on the jackpot machine. He was covered in vomit. So was the jackpot machine. So was the carpet. He turned slightly and the vomit dribbled down his chin and across the machine’s buttons. Whether he was exhausted, unwell, pissed or a combination of all three was impossible to tell, but he was certainly delirious.

  With an efficiency that was as effective as it was rehearsed (clearly, this was not their first time), the staff had lifted him into the wheelchair, whisked him through an emergency side door, cleaned the machine, washed and vacuumed the carpet (even though the carrot blended in well with the “lucky” red colour scheme) and disinfected and deodorised in less than three minutes.

  Two Chinese aunties playing on the jackpot machines nearby didn’t bother to look up. They were busily feeding $10 notes into their games from a distance of less than three metres away and were not about to allow a comatose gambler to disrupt their momentum. They reminded me of my mother, my mother-in-law, my grandmother and my late great-grandmother, all of whom adhered to the same money maxim: never mess with a woman when there’s gambling involved.

  Singaporeans may recall the shuffling, tapping sounds of mahjong tiles from their childhood as their aunties played in a room next door. I remember torturous afternoons sitting in British caravan sites staring at bingo cards. As any British working-class woman will tell you, there are only two rules in prize bingo. Rule number one: the first player to complete a straight, vertical or diagonal line (or four corners) wins. The second, and probably the most important, rule is this: don’t even think about interrupting a woman when she’s playing prize bingo. Children may pee their pants before they are allowed to ask their mothers where the toilet is during a game of prize bingo. Husbands may keel over with heart attacks but they must never, ever, cause a disturban
ce if their wives are only one number away from a full house. As a child, I was always expected to sit silently while my mother marked off the numbers of her bingo card, desperate to win a tea towel worth less than the cost of five games of bingo.

  “Stop talking,” she’d hiss, glaring at the bingo caller for not uttering the right numbers. “This is for a full house.”

  “I’m not talking, I’m just sitting on the chair,” I’d plead truthfully.

  “Well stop breathing so loudly then. I’m playing two bingo cards at once here.”

  “They cost you 10 pence each, mum.”

  “That’s not the point. I want to win that Stonehenge tea towel.”

  “But we’ve never been to Stonehenge.”

  “Right, that’s it. Here’s 10p. Don’t spend it all at once. Go and share it with your sister.”

  My mother was in the Marina Bay Sands casino. She was everywhere. She was hunched in front of a computer screen for electronic roulette (which was as dull as it sounded), hushing family members around the blackjack tables, checking her change, counting losses and privately cursing the winners.

  I inadvertently wandered across to the smoking area of the casino floor and soon felt nauseous. The croupiers, some of whom were only in their early twenties, stood helplessly exposed, lost in a fog of nicotine, their lungs presumably at risk from the omnipresent second-hand smoke. Regardless of whatever tips they received—and from the nature of the chain-smoking, complaining, ah-bengish clientele in their smoking dens, I’m thinking they weren’t getting enough to retire—no employee should be threatened by such harmful levels of passive smoking in the workplace in 2011, should they? Or should the casino staff join hands and express their gratitude at being part of the Marina Bay moneymaker? The resort is projected to stimulate around $2.7 billion, or 0.8 per cent of Singapore’s gross domestic product, by 2015. Thanks to the casino and the industry around Marina Bay Sands, more than 10,000 people will be employed directly, with another 20,000 jobs created indirectly, as those 600 gaming tables and 2,500 slot machines and electronic table games need to be serviced and maintained. What’s a little lung damage among such financial figures?