Jan 20, 2008

A Seedier Singapore


Fellow travelers have all sorts of snippy things to say about Singapore, its love of social engineering, its smoothly functioning modernity--as if, being in Asia, Singapore has a duty to be exotic. But as a tourist, I love it. I love its cleanliness, its excellent public transportation, its punitive measures to discourage driving. I love its hawker centers, its tropical fruits, its beautifully landscaped parks. I wouldn't want to live in a paternalistic one party democracy, but I'm glad Tiger Air will give me an excuse to return again and again.

That said, we were still excited when our friend Sherry and her police detective boyfriend Steven promised to show us the seedier side of Singapore in the red light district of Geylang.Because Geylang is almost as much about food as it is about sex, we started out the evening with some excellent dim sum. Isaac claims it was the best cha shu bao he's ever eaten, but he tends to lavish superlatives on whatever is currently making his stomach happy.

Next, we made the rounds of the groups of street girls, who each staked out a different block: the beautiful and expensive young women from mainland China in their tiny, tiny shorts, glittering belly rings, and push-up bras; the more casual Filippino women; the handful of Indian women dressed modestly in saris; the transvestites and lady-boys; and saddest of all, the China mothers, women who have been allowed to accompany their school-age children but denied working visas and so prostitute themselves in order to maintain their family.

We finished our tour next to the carefully numbered bungalows serving as legal brothels with "fishbowls" of Thai women lounging around in lacy underwear: apparently, the Singaporean government has decreed that only the Thai shall be prostitutes. Isaac and Steven were given two minutes to go inside.

As we threaded our way through some back alleys, we also spied on card tables layered with pornographic DVDs or serving as platforms for rolling the dice. The more serious gambling is tucked away inside, only accessible to those who know somebody, as is the limited amount of drug dealing which still goes on, despite the mandatory death sentence for drug trafficking.

We finished off the evening with more food, heading for a string of roadside fruit stalls piled with mangosteens, rose apples, star fruits, lychees, dragon fruit. After warning us not to over-indulge in rambutans or dukus, which are considered "heaty," the proprietor filled up small pink plastic sacks with fruit. But this was just a diversion: we had been brought here for the high-grade, D-24 durians selling for 10 Sing dollars a kilogram at a stall on the corner. All over SE Asia hotels and other public spaces guard against this fruit's offensive smell by posting "no durian" signs. But to anyone who has encountered the Bangkok-sewer smell of stinky tofu, the durian's odour isn't so off-putting.

Optimistically, we bought a beautiful 2.5 kg specimen and some cooling fresh young coconuts, durian also being notoriously "heaty". We each took a chunk and Isaac, being the type to scald his tongue on chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven, stuffed his mouth with the creamy flesh, which he immediately spit out. After he had swished out the taste with enough coconut water, he passed his judgment: rotten onions. Sherry and Steven were incredulous, defending, as many people from the region do, the "king of fruits."

Isaac, with his prodigious sense of smell and imagination, is also the type to declare perfectly good food "soapy" or "moldy" or "footy," but this time he was dead-on. The durian tasted like rotting onions. Still, I ate my share, one nibble at a time, hoping this was an acquired taste I could achieve. I was punished for this adventurousness with durian burps all night long.


Jan 17, 2008

Blind Man Drives Autorickshaw; No One Hurt


New Year’s morning found Isaac inordinately crabby and complainy, even for him: I slept for hours as he warned of mounting hunger pangs, and when we finally made it out of our guesthouse I deemed Kashi, our favorite cafĂ© in Fort Cohin, too crowded with tourists for my taste, dragging him to a malarial “eco” garden restaurant where he waited yet another forty minutes for stale toast. A subsequent cold coffee at Kashi restored his spirits somewhat, but what really turned his frown upside down was seeing the flag drop for The Rickshaw Run, in which over sixty autorickshaw teams from countries with traffic laws attempt to race each other over the potholed, cow-infested streets between Fort Cochin and Katmandu, a distance of over 2,000 miles, in two weeks. He rhapsodized about the race all day, until our new expat friend Mathew, who keeps an autorickshaw handy for dissertation breaks during the monsoon season, offered to let him drive his.

Several days later Isaac and I met Mathew in front of the Santa Cruz Basilica and drove south to the Veli field, a dusty parade ground adjacent to the municipal crematorium and the Little Flower Church Cemetery. Isaac wasn’t the only student that day: we saw ladies being tutored by the St. Jude’s School of Motor Driving and Mathew’s wife Susana, who never learned to ride a bike growing up in Cairo, was practicing independently on a rusty three speed without working brakes.

Isaac had some trouble starting the autorickshaw, but once Mathew got it going, he took right off. Of course, if you give a license-less man a taste of motorized power, he is loath to give it up, and Isaac made three or four long passes before he stopped to take us on as passengers. We bumped around the Veli field with Isaac changing gears, dodging novice scooter riders, honking the horn; Mathew proclaimed him a natural. But perhaps it’s for the best Mathew remembered he had laundry to drop off at the dhobi khana next door and interrupted our jaunt: Isaac, grown bold, was anxious to try some “maneuvers”—perhaps reversing at full-speed, as Mathew had rehearsed in his former capacity as an Iraq-bound Australian diplomat?

Alas, no stunts for Isaac. When Mathew tried to re-start his vehicle, it simply shuddered with the same painful metal-scraping-metal noise we had briefly heard and ignored earlier, on our ride to the field. This time, though, the noise persisted. The left axle turned out to be broken, and divine intervention must have kept it functioning long enough for the blind man to have his ride. Eight hundred rupees and one enterprising mechanic eventually fixed the problem, but that afternoon, Isaac’s driving lesson ended with the boys pushing the vehicle into the shade while we sat and waited for help. But I don't think this is the end of the story...

Mathew has plans to cover his autorickshaw with chrome paint (the black-and-yellow is reserved for taxis); unbeknownst to him, Isaac has plans to adds plans to add airplane wings and film a music video. And I have a sure-fire way to lure Isaac back to India.