Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

Eleven contractors, three householders and a petrol-kiosk proprietor, were fined a total of $6,035 yesterday for breeding mosquitoes.

Tan Teck Sen, 20, unemployed, was fined $20 for shouting in the lobby of the Cockpit Hotel yesterday.

Four people were fined $750 yesterday under the Destruction of Disease-Bearing Insects Act for allowing insects to breed.

Sulaimen Mohammed was fined $30 yesterday for throwing a piece of paper into a drain at the 15 ½ mile, Woodlands Road.

Seven or eight years is not an uncommon sentence for a political offence, and criminal offences usually include a whipping. An alien can be deported for having long hair, and anyone can be fined up to $500 for spitting or throwing paper on the ground. Essentially, these laws are passed so that foreign tourists will come to Singapore and, if the news gets out that Singapore is clean and well disciplined, then Americans will want to set up factories and employ the nonstriking Singaporeans. The government emphasizes control, but in such a small place control is not hard to achieve.

Here is a society where newspapers are censored and no criticism of the government is tolerated; where television is a bland confection of quiz shows, American and British situation comedies, and patriotic programmes; where mail is tampered with and banks are forced to disclose the private accounts of their clients. It is a society where there is literally no privacy and where the government is in complete control. This is the Singaporeans' idea of technological advance:

How would you like to live in a futuristic Singapore where mail and newspapers arrive at your home electronically by facsimile 'print-out'?

Sounds like science fiction, but to the Acting General Manager of the Singapore Telephone Board, Mr Frank Loh, they could 'become reality before long'.

He said, 'Developments in telecommunications have already done much to change the pattern of our lives. Concepts such as the "wired city" in which a single cable to each home or office would handle all communication needs could soon be put into practice.'

Mr Loh, who was speaking on 'Telephone Communication' at the convention of the Singapore-Malaysia Institutes of Engineers, gave more details of such exciting developments which the future holds.

'Imagine,' he said, 'at your home communication centre, both mail and newspapers might arrive electronically delivered by facsimile "print-out".'

(Straits Times, 20 November 1973)

It struck me as a kind of technology that reduced freedom, and in a society that was basically an assembly plant for Western business interests, depending on the goodwill of washerwomen and the cowardice of students, this technology was useful for all sorts of programmes and campaigns. In a 'wired city' you wouldn't need wall space for SINGAPORE WANTS SMALL FAMILIES and PUT YOUR HEART INTO SPORTS and REPORT ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS: you would simply stuff it into the wire and send it into every home.

But that is not the whole of Singapore. There is a fringe, latterly somewhat narrower than it was, where life continues aimlessly, unimpeded by the police or the Ministry of Technology. On this fringe, which is thick with bars, people celebrate Saturday with a curry lunch and drink beer all afternoon, saying, 'Singapore's a shambles – I'm going to Australia,' or 'You were lucky to get out when you did.' It is a place where nearly everyone talks of leaving, but no one goes, as if in leaving he would have to account for all those empty, wasted years playing the slot machines at the Swimming Club, signing chits at the Staff House, toying with a coffee, and waiting for the mail to arrive. On the fringe there are still a few brothels, massage parlours, coffee shops, and discounts for old friends; there are fans instead of air conditioners, and some of the bars have verandahs where in the evening a group of drinkers might find a half-hour's diversion in watching a fat gecko loudly gobble a sausage fly.

It was a gecko on the wall that provoked the reflection that sent me away. I was staying at The Mess, a tall airy house on a leafy hill, and I realized that I had been staring at a gecko on the wall for fifteen minutes or more. It was an old habit, begun in boredom. It seemed as if I had been in Singapore a long time ago, when I was young and didn't know anything, and being there this second time, after two years' absence, I had a glimpse of this other person. It is possible at a distance to maintain the fiction of former happiness – childhood or schooldays -and then you return to an early setting and the years fall away and you see how bitterly unhappy you were. I had felt trapped in Singapore; I felt as if I was being destroyed by the noise – the hammering, the traffic, the radios, the yelling – and I had discovered most Singaporeans to be rude, aggressive, cowardly, and inhospitable, full of vague racial fears and responsive to any bullying authority. I believed it to be a loathsome place: many of my students thought so too and they couldn't imagine why anyone would willingly stay there. At last I left, and on this return I could not imagine, watching this gecko, why I had stayed three years there; perhaps it was the deceived hesitation I had called patience, or maybe it was my lack of money. I was certain that I would not make the same mistake again, so after seeing a few friends -and everyone told me he was planning to leave soon – I flew out. The previous day I had spent at a club where I had once been a member. The secretary of this club was an overbearing man with a maniacal laugh, but he had been in Singapore since the thirties. He was a real old-timer, people said. I asked about him. 'You a friend of his?' said the man at the bar. I said I knew him. 'I'd keep that quiet if I were you. Last month he did a bunk with 180,000 dollars of the club's money.' Like me'- like everyone I knew in Singapore – he had just been waiting for his chance to go.

I went to Vietnam to take the train; people have done stranger things in that country. The Trans-Vietnam Railway, which the French called the Transindochinois, took over thirty-three years to build, but in 1942, a short six years after it was finished, it was blown to bits and never repaired. A colonial confection, like one of those French dishes that take ages to prepare and are devoured swiftly: a brief delicacy that is mostly labour and memory. The line went along the beautiful coast few of our reluctant janizaries have praised, from Saigon to Hanoi; but now it is in pieces, like a worm chopped up for bait, a section here and there twitching with signs of life. It is mined by the Viet Cong – even more furiously since the cease-fire (which is, willy-nilly, a painful euphemism); it is also mined by local truckers, cash-driven terrorists who believe the continuance of these railway fragments (to Dalat, to Hue, to Tuy Hoa) will prevent them from earning the livelihood Americans have taught them to expect. Like much else in Vietnam, the railway is in ruins – in northern Binh Dinh Province the line has been turned into rice fields – but the amazing thing is that part of it is still running. The Deputy Director of Vietnam Railways, Tran Mong Chau, a short man with thick glasses, told me, 'We can't stop the railway. We keep it running and we lose money. Maybe we do some repairs. If we stop it everyone will know we've lost the war.'

Tran Mong Chau warned me against going from Nha Trang to Tuy Hoa, but said I might enjoy the run from Saigon to Bien Hoa – there were fourteen trips a day. He warned me that it was not like an American train. That particular warning (though how was he to know?) is like a recommendation.

Outside the office I asked Dial, my American translator, a Marine turned cultural-affairs escort (he had – and smiled at the lechery in the phrase – made a 'lateral entry'): 'Do you think it's safe to take the train to Bien Hoa?'