20. I Like It

Singapore Airlines was everything I expected from a top-notch airline and more. It seems to be one of the few airlines still untouched by the threat of age or sex discrimination suits of the American variety. I cannot think of another airline that dares to promote anything close to the fantasy of the Singapore girl. Of course, this does not in any way take away the high quality of its service, but simply enhances it. Courteous service and well-kept airplanes are almost taken for granted. The small touch of remembering my name or the set of active noise cancellation earphones are rarely found elsewhere. I like it.

Stepping into Chang’i airport terminal, I had no doubt that I was back in the modern world. Hey, there is a free public phone that I could use to call my friend, which I did. Hey, there were free maps I could take, which I did. Hey, I could even pick up a Motorola StarTac mobile phone, compliment of Singapore Airlines. Hey, the phone works! That’s a big change from Saudi Arabia. Hey, the taxis are clean. Hey, the taxi drivers don’t try to cheat me. Hey, the roads are clearly labeled. Forget the exotic, the adventurous, the challenging. I had enough of that shit to deal with. Give me back civilization. Things work here. And they work the way I want them to work. I like it.

By the way, when you arrive in New York, don’t expect free public phone, free maps, free mobile, clean taxis, or honest cabbies. The phones work, if you had one. The roads are kinda labeled if you had good eyesight.

Stringing along my flight home from Singapore to New York at the end of August in 1994, with one of the flights from New York to Riyadh, and now with the flights from Riyadh to Singapore, I can legitimately claim that I have circled the globe in about 1800 days. Between then and now, the vast majority of my trips have been to see places. Whether I know a friend or a relative in town has not been much of a consideration, only an added bonus. This trip to Singapore, however, was all about seeing people. The main occasion was the wedding of a graduate school friend. The rare convergence of coincidental events had also brought me to see a number of other friends and relatives from a long time ago. Besides, I had worked in Singapore in summer 1994. I am far too nostalgic and sentimental to pass up on an excuse to come this way.

I was to stay with Sanjay, a college friend, who had worked in Singapore for the last two years and was only a few weeks away from done with his stint. It would have been a nice opportunity for us to hang out for a few days, but we had only about two or three hours to catch up on things, before he gave me his key and left for a last-minute business trip. I made a round of calls, but had little luck reaching people. I called my old employer, Allied Ordnance of Singapore. The company is still there, but the guy at the other end of the telephone didn’t know any of the people I mentioned, except one, and she had left the company too. I had forgotten to take with me the home phone numbers of some old colleagues the last time I was in New York. That’s the problem with not having email. Email makes keeping in touch so much easier.

I went to Great World City, a nice shopping mall next to Sanjay’s Tiara Apartments building. The setup of cheap small mom and pop food stalls, even in an upscale mall, was unmistakably Singaporean. After five years, I was again in a hawker center having trouble deciding which stall to get my food from.

One of the things I wanted to do in Singapore was to get a haircut. The barber shop in Cordoba Compound was closed during the months of July and August because a lot of people left for their summer vacations. I didn’t know where else to turn and I wasn’t too sure whether they know how to cut my hair anyhow. The best way would be to fly 4100 miles to Singapore. They would know how to cut straight Asian hair without too much explaining from me. The salons in Great World City looked a bit too fancy for my head. I decided that perhaps it was time to take a little walk down memory lane to Clementi Station, near where I used to live. I took a bus to Orchard MRT station. The station looked familiar, but I had to ask about where to buy a TransitLink card. I also had to look at how other people stick their card into the turnstile. I had only lived in Singapore for two months and it was five years ago after all. The McDonald’s at Clementi still looked the same. Most things still looked the same to how I remembered. I walked by the little shops, the food stalls, the movie theater where I saw Speed, and the supermarket. The barber shop I used to go to was in some other part, which I couldn’t find the way anymore.

The hairdresser I visited was a small shop. For something like S$10, I got a simple haircut. Then she asked if I would like to have a wash. I almost never do, since whatever fancy stuff done to my hair all gets washed away in a few hours when I am home taking a shower. But I figure, what the heck, let’s have a wash. Well, a wash wasn’t just a wash, but a comprehensive package. Shampooing and rinsing were just a small part. The scalp, the neck, and a little bit of the shoulders all got massaged while I sat in the chair. I had to keep my eyes well shut because there was some soapy facial massaging while I got my hair rinsed. It was well worth the additional S$8. I like it. She asked if I was having a day off, since it was Friday afternoon. I had surely passed as a local to get a question like that. I told her that I was in fact not Singaporean, but from New York. It baffled her a little as I had also claimed to be Chinese.

I went to visit the bookshop where I had bought a globe last time I was there. I also picked up some red envelopes for the wedding gift tomorrow. Hey, where else could I find such things so easily. I like it. I would have stuck around bit longer, and maybe even gone to Faber Crescent to look up the house I had stayed in five years ago, but it was time to go back to the Indian High Commission to collect my expensive tourist visa.

Singapore was in fact cooler than either Dubai or Riyadh, but it’s much more humid. It didn’t take too much for me to be drenched in sweat, while the Singaporeans seemed perfectly dry. So the nice big pool at Tiara Apartments was a temptation too hard to resist. I didn’t have much else to do anyway, so I paid another visit to Great World City next door to get a swimsuit. I also picked up some contact lens supplies, which I couldn’t find in Riyadh even in specialty optics stores. Riyadh malls may all look shiny, but as I said before, the stuff they have I generally don’t want and the stuff I want I generally can’t find. I could really use the modern conveniences of Singapore. I like it.

Another graduate school friend, Yee Ping, called and told me to meet up at the Ritz Carlton for dinner with her two friends. She told me to call for a taxi, an advice I unwisely ignored. Why would I want to call for a taxi and wait for it, while there is a taxi stand right in front of Great World City? Well, there were fifteen other people queuing for taxis there. Some of the taxis only came to drop off passengers, but wouldn’t take on anyone. It was a long twenty-minute wait before my turn. I later learned that some taxis were on call somewhere else. Therefore, it’d be quicker to call for a taxi.

The next morning, I called for a taxi to Emily’s house. I gave the dispatcher the address, and then a computer took over to tell me that car number SHA#### would be there in five minutes. I put on my clothes and went downstairs. What do you know? Car SHA#### was already there waiting. Amazing! All the taxis in Singapore have satellite links and seem to be centrally dispatched. I couldn’t remember whether this was the case five years ago. The taxis themselves are not particularly good or new cars, but they are clean, well kept, and affordable. While it’s exorbitantly expensive to own a car in Singapore, the planners have provided the people with alternatives – a metro, bus, and taxi system that’s by far the best I have seen. I like it.

Most of my day on Saturday, July 24, was spent with Emily’s family. I didn’t get to see much of the bride and the groom. This was reasonably expected. I was appreciative of the fact that I had been invited to some of the more private functions. I was also coaxed into giving a speech at the banquet. Sunday morning, I met up with David at the Westin Stamford Hotel. Him I met on soc.culture.singapore when I was searching for a summer job in Singapore. This was during the days of newsgroups and gophers, before the advent of the Web. Oh, how things have so quickly changed in the last five year. How the paths of life of the people I once knew have diverged from mine. I am far too nostalgic and sentimental for my own good. But some things haven’t changed. I rode the MRT to Tampines and took Bus No. 29 to my relative’s house. It was exactly the same route as I remembered, and I had no trouble finding her place. The house looked a bit older than I remembered, but the interior seemed to have not changed much.

Years ago after I returned from my summer in Singapore, I wrote a few paragraphs, which I titled "Different Prices to Pay", about my experience there. Coming from an American perspective, I was not satisfied with the restrictions on personal freedom, the degree of state control in many aspects of private life, and the authoritarian government in Singapore, despite the safety, the convenience, and the high standards of living.

But this time, I had come from Saudi Arabia – one of the most conservative, restrictive, repressive, intrusive, intolerant, unjust, and unequal countries in the world. I have heard the term police state applied to both Saudi Arabia and Singapore. But I can tell you that police state is an apt description of the former and an overstatement for the latter. When was the last time you could go to the town square and see a public beheading? Well, maybe two hundred years ago in Paris but it’s Riyadh today and now. It’s simply medieval. It may be 1420 in the Islamic calendar, but it really does feel like 1420 in many ways here. Hey, in a couple of years, Columbus is going to discover America.

My conviction in the American form of government, law, and capitalism has not changed. My conviction in the American philosophy on liberty, tolerance, and equality has not changed. What has changed is my belief that the American style of government is necessarily going to work elsewhere on peoples with very different culture, tradition, and outlook. What has changed is my opinion that the Singaporeans have necessarily made the wrong choice. I have always believed that the best form of government is a benevolent monarch, except that I am also convinced that absolute power does corrupt absolutely. What Singapore has been able to do so far is to steer well clear of dictatorship of the African variety. Singapore has been ruled by a rather benevolent authoritarian with the capable assistance from a well-educated elite class. In some ways, it struck me as to resemble the Roman Republic. It has similarly achieved an astonishingly great deal in an exceedingly short period of time. As I went on to India, supposedly the largest democracy in the world, to witness appalling poverty and inequality, I was further convinced that democracy in and by itself was no panacea for all social ills. I imagined myself in the shoes of one of those desperately poor. Actually, the desperately poor can’t afford shoes. What then is the value of liberty and democracy when I am hungry? Giving up a little bit of personal freedom and participation in government in exchange for a Singaporean standard of living doesn’t seem to be all that hard a decision and all that bad a deal.

Terrence
Riyadh
August 25, 1999