Singapore Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

  PART I: SIRENS

  Last Time

  COLIN GOH

  Raffles Place

  Detective in a City with No Crime

  SIMON TAY WRITING AS DONALD TEE QUEE HO

  Tanglin

  Strangler Fig

  PHILIP JEYARETNAM

  Bukit Panjang

  Smile, Singapore

  COLIN CHEONG

  Ang Mo Kio

  PART II: LOVE (OR SOMETHING LIKE IT)

  Reel

  CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN

  Changi

  Mother

  MONICA BHIDE

  Kallang

  Kena Sai

  S.J. ROZAN

  Bukit Timah

  Tattoo

  LAWRENCE OSBORNE

  Geylang

  PART III: GODS & DEMONS

  Mei Kwei, I Love You

  SUCHEN CHRISTINE LIM

  Potong Pasir

  Spells

  OVIDIA YU

  Tiong Bahru

  Saiful and the Pink Edward VII

  DAMON CHUA

  Woodlands

  PART IV: THE HAVES & THE HAVE-NOTS

  Current Escape

  JOHANN S. LEE

  Sentosa Cove

  Bedok Reservoir

  DAVE CHUA

  Bedok

  Murder on Orchard Road

  NURY VITTACHI

  Orchard Road

  About the Contributors

  Sneak Peak: USA Noir

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SULTRY CITY-STATE

  Say Singapore to anyone and you’ll likely hear one of a few words: Caning. Fines. Chewing gum.

  For much of the West, the narrative of Singapore—a modern Southeast Asian city-state perched on an island on the tip of the Malay Peninsula—has been marked largely by its government’s strict laws and unwavering enforcement of them.

  In 1994, American teenager Michael Fay was famously sentenced to six strokes of the cane after a series of car vandalisms in Singapore. Just the year before in a cover story for Wired magazine, William Gibson criticized the country, calling it constrained and humorless, saying “conformity here is the prime directive.”

  “Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia,” Gibson wrote, “an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.”

  As much as I understand these outside viewpoints, I have always lamented that the quirky and dark complexities of my native country’s culture rarely seem to make it past its borders. The Singapore in which I was born and spent most of my first eighteen years was safe, yes—so safe that I could wander its city streets without fear at two in the morning as a teenage girl. And its general cleanliness is unrivaled—even now, I feel sometimes that one could, in fact, eat off the streets.

  Beneath that sparkling veneer, however, is a country teeming with shadows. For starters, it has not just one but several red-light districts. There’s the large designated area, Geylang, which is filled with dozens of narrow lanes and alleys where one can find prewar houses festooned with red lights and prostitutes pacing along blocks, clustered almost as you would find them in a department store—older Indian girls on this end, mainland Chinese sirens a few alleys over, and so forth.

  And beyond Geylang, there are neighborhoods where one knows to go for Thai, Vietnamese, Filipina, and other girls. (Paul Theroux, in fact, set his 1973 novel Saint Jack amid the bordellos and triads of Singapore—a tale turned into a 1979 film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, which was banned in Singapore for its unsavory content.)

  Gambling and its many fallouts have always been an issue in this country, one that was pockmarked with illegal gambling dens long before Las Vegas Sands poured about $6.5 billion into building a casino in the heart of Singapore in 2011.

  And then there are the ghosts. Singaporeans love nothing better than to tell a good gory tale. And there are many. When I was a child, each time we passed a particular church along Orchard Road, Singapore’s main shopping street, someone would always whisper: “Curry.” In 1987, police arrested a woman and her three brothers, charging them with killing her husband, chopping him up, and turning his remains into curry, skull and all, in the church caretaker’s kitchen. While the charges were later dropped due to insufficient evidence, the story remains widely enjoyed. (Though no one I know has dared to have Sunday supper at that church since.)

  It could be said that of course noir is alive in a country built on the shoulders of entrepreneurs and rebels. My father likes to note that many of the ethnic Chinese in Singapore are descendents of fortune-seekers from the coast of Southeastern China, an area known, according to him, for “smugglers, pirates, and really good businessmen.”

  Singapore began humbly, as a knot of tropical Malay fishing villages located near the equator. Its name comes from Sang Nila Utama, a Sumatran prince who called it Singapura—lion city in Sanskrit—after spotting a frightening beast on its shores while hunting which his men told him was a lion. He officially founded Singapore in 1324, believing the lion sighting to be a good omen.

  But it was only in 1819 that the island truly started growing—British statesman Sir Stamford Raffles sailed to its shores and established a military post and trading port there. Traders from India, China, and all over Southeast Asia began arriving, then settling. The country gained its independence in 1965 with Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, serving as its prime minister until 1990.

  Singapore in recent years has been in the spotlight once again—this time for its “tiger” economy, one that has made this 250-square-mile country one of the wealthiest in the world. (According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal story, the country had 188,000 millionaire households in 2011—which translates into one in six homes having disposable private wealth of at least one million dollars.) It has become one of the major safe havens for the rich to park their wealth; Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin made international headlines in 2012 when he renounced his US citizenship and became Singaporean. The country now boasts a bar that sells a $26,000 cocktail.

  Despite recent changes, Singapore is still an Asian polyglot—its five million population is about 75 percent Chinese in ethnicity, 13 percent Malay, 8 percent Indian, among others, which is what accounts for its distinct patois, Singlish. You’ll see some of it in the stories before you—this local pidgin is a combination of English, Malay, and a hodge-podge of Chinese dialects. Conversations may sound bizarre sometimes because although the words are in English, the sentence structure used may be Malay or Mandarin. The word lah is tacked onto most sentences for inflection—something like okay or man in American slang.

  And its stories remain. The rich stories that attracted literary lions W. Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling to hold court at the Raffles Hotel (where the Singapore Sling was created) are still sprinkled throughout its neighborhoods. And in the following pages, you’ll get the chance to discover some of them.

  British novelist Lawrence Osborne takes us along on a romantic, sinister romp in Geylang, while mystery writer extraordinaire S.J. Rozan explores the darkness that lurks in the cookie-cutter blandness of suburban expat Singapore. Hong Kong–based Nury Vittachi, creator of the Feng Shui Detective series, gives us a breathless fast-paced chase along glitzy Orchard Road, and American food writer Monica Bhide, in her fiction debut, weaves a heart-tugging tale of a boy and his mother.

  You’ll find stories from some of the best contemporary writers in Singapore—three of them winners of the Singapore Literature Prize, essentially the country’s Pulitzer: Simon Tay, writing as Donald Tee Quee Ho, tells the story of a hardboiled detective who inadvertently wends his way into the underbelly of organized crime, Colin Cheong shows us a surprising side to the country’s ubiquitous cheerful “taxi uncle,” while Suchen Christine Lim spins a wistful tale of a Chinese temple medium whose past resurges to haunt her.

  Colin Goh, a beloved Singaporean satirist, filmmaker, and cartoonist, delves into the seedy side of Raffles Place, the country’s deep-pocketed financial district, while award-winning playwright Damon Chua gives us a tour of life after dark near the Malaysian border. Maids—who regularly make the news in Singapore due to reports of abominable maid abuse—are the protagonists in stories by Dave Chua and Johann S. Lee, one of Singapore’s first openly gay writers.

  Black magic is threaded through the yarn by Ovidia Yu, one of Singapore’s leading and most prolific playwrights. And, of course, the enigmatic female figure, so alluring and so irresistible, is the key in Philip Jeyaretnam’s elegant story. As for mine, I chose a setting close to my heart—the kelongs, or old fisheries on stilts, that once dotted the waters of Singapore but are gradually disappearing.

  I have a deep sense of romance about these kelongs, along with the many other settings, characters, nuances, and quirks that you’ll see in these stories. They’re intense, inky, nebulous. There is evil, sadness, a foreboding. And liars, cheaters, the valiant abound.

  This is a Singapore rarely explored in Western literature—until now. No Disneyland here; but there is a death penalty.

  Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

  March 2014

  PART I

/>   SIRENS

  LAST TIME

  BY COLIN GOH

  Raffles Place

  Last time.

  That’s how Singaporeans say both “on a previous occasion” and “in the old days.” As in, “Last time I saw her, she was wearing an emerald-green Moschino dress that accentuated her clavicle,” as well as, “Last time, Singapore lawyers also used to wear wigs.”

  There’s a photo of me wearing a wig on my desk at the firm. It’s made of white horsehair, fringed with several rows of frizzy curls (the wig, not the photo). I’m also wearing a black robe with wide, open sleeves and a sort of flap over the left shoulder, the garb of an English barrister.

  It’s made by Ede & Ravenscroft, I said, handing her her tea. They’re the queen’s robe makers.

  “You graduated in England?” She blew lightly on the tea before taking a sip. I’d left the door of my office open and could feel the eyes of the rest of the firm searing into the back of my neck.

  No, I laughed. I had the picture taken during a holiday in England just before my final year at the National University of Singapore’s law school. I’d been visiting friends who were graduating as barristers and thought it fun to get myself snapped in their ridiculous getup as well.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  It’s ridiculous, I said, shaking my head. We stopped being a colony over forty years ago, but Singaporeans who study law in Britain are still in thrall to the “tradition.” (In hindsight, I am annoyed that I felt compelled to illustrate this observation by making quotation marks with my fingers.) I guess it’s an understandable impulse, I continued, like visiting Disneyland and buying a souvenir T-shirt. But they soon learn we have to be who we are.

  As she lowered her cup, my eyes followed the lipstick she’d left on the rim. The Singapore legal profession did away with wigs ages ago, I added. They’re simply too hot for our tropical climate. In Singapore, pragmatism invariably trumps sentiment.

  “But you still wear suits,” she replied, picking up the photo frame and turning it over slowly. She ran a long, tapered finger over some lettering on the frame’s back. “Made in China,” she smiled, placing the photo back on my desk.

  I remember my scalp tingling. It’s funny the details that stick in your head.

  * * *

  “Last time, this all used to be the sea,” our driver said, motioning with his hand as we headed down Marina Boulevard toward the Sands.

  She didn’t say a word, but her gaze was clearly fixed on the casino’s dolmen-like silhouette.

  I adjusted my tie and said, People say it looks like . . . and here I fumbled. I didn’t know what Stonehenge was in Mandarin, so I just said it in English.

  “What’s that?” she asked, without looking away from the window.

  A very ancient monument in England, I said. A group of stones that archaeologists think was a burial ground of some sort.

  “You know too much about England.” She leaned back in her seat and reached over to pat my jaw. “You should get to know China more. You’re Chinese, after all.”

  I’d like that, I said softly. Through the rearview mirror, I saw the driver waggle his eyebrows at me.

  * * *

  The last time I saw the Comrade was in the casino’s main theater, on the night of her final performance. I was in the back row, tapping away absently at my iPad as she went through her routine of mic checks and lighting cues. A Facebook message came in with a photo of some of my fellow junior associates raising their middle fingers at me. Bastard gets to bill for spending time with her, ran a comment. What does that make him?

  I smiled and looked up to see her waving at me. I waved back, and then realized she was actually waving to someone else behind me. Feebly lowering my hand, I turned around to see the Comrade lolloping down the stairs in a way that might have been comical except for the ashen look on his face.

  I shot up and began shimmying toward the aisle, but was stopped by a grim-looking Mr. Chong, who’d appeared at the head of the row of seats. “Better stay here,” he said. He was my boss, so I did.

  Meanwhile, the Comrade had already stormed onto the stage, where he’d begun barking at her in his impenetrable Beifang accent. Clearly bewildered, she reached out to touch him, but he brushed her hand away and began stabbing an accusatory finger at her. From my vantage point, I couldn’t make out their exchange, but she was now pleading with him. And when she tried to pull him closer, he struck her across the face.

  I immediately bolted from Mr. Chong’s side. By the time I reached the stage, two of her security detail had pinned the Comrade to the floor. He didn’t put up a struggle; he seemed to know he had crossed a line. Her entourage was now swarming around her, but she waved them away with one hand, the other cradling her cheek. She wasn’t crying. In fact, it was the Comrade who was whimpering, fat tears streaming down his Botoxed face.

  Shall I call the police? I held up my phone as I drew closer to her.

  She whipped her head around, a brief yet intense flicker in her eyes that jolted me. Then she fell into my arms with a shudder. “No,” she whispered. As I held her close, I could see, past her perfect shoulder, Mr. Chong leaning over the orchestra pit, rubbing his jaw.

  * * *

  The first time I was in Beijing, I realized I wasn’t truly Chinese after all.

  Ethnically, perhaps. My family could trace its lineage to the Daoguang Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, and I spoke Mandarin fluently enough that I’d anchored my secondary school’s Chinese debating team, a detail Mr. Chong felt necessary to invoke while explaining why he was dispatching me to the PRC to handle some matters for the Comrade.

  Culturally, though, I had more in common with the American attorneys seated across from me at the conference table. Over dinner, we merrily shot the breeze over Seinfeld, Star Wars, and the byzantine narratives of the X-Men while the Comrade and his comrades downed their Château Lafite-Rothschild with Sprite.

  But when she walked into the private dining room, I felt a ripple inside me, as if my ancestors had cast a plumb line into the well of my soul.

  I’d heard the rumors about her and the Comrade, mostly from my secretary, who follows these things. But I never got the fuss, since I didn’t know who she was. I loathe Mandopop, which I find either derivative or treacly or both, and a starlet canoodling with a businessman with party connections just wasn’t news.

  But seeing the Comrade drape his nicotine-stained fingers over her knee, a spider crouched atop a magnolia blossom, I was surprised to feel something akin to anger. I was just as surprised to find myself afterward at a music store in the Gulou district buying her entire back catalog.

  Initially, I’d chalked it up to being starstruck, but the crush’s load never ebbed. For some unfathomable reason, she attended almost every meeting I had with the Comrade. In fact, she asked almost all the questions while he mostly nodded as he puffed on one Double Happiness cigarette after another.

  You should perform in Singapore, I said to her the first time we were alone together. Providentially, the Comrade had dashed out of the room, clutching his guts and cursing last night’s lamb hotpot. She smiled and said she’d been planning a few dates, probably at one of the casinos. I told her that I’d like to take her to some of Singapore’s best eating spots, but was afraid she’d be mobbed.

  “Are Singaporeans like that?” She looked at me quizzically. “I thought you were all very restrained and law-abiding.”

  It depends on the subject, I replied. We’ve famously come to blows over Hello Kitty giveaways at McDonald’s. And you sing much better than Hello Kitty, I grinned, since you have a mouth.

  She laughed at this and said, “You must protect me, then.” I willed myself not to blush.

  * * *

  Your first time in Singapore and even more people turned up to greet you than for Prince William and Kate Middleton, I felt proud to tell her.

  “You mean you’d expect more Singaporeans would turn up for their former colonial masters?” She interlaced her fingers and stretched out her arms.

  The bellboy patted her luggage and bowed. He didn’t even look at me as he accepted my tip. His gaze was fixed firmly on her as she leaned against the glass window of her hotel suite, the evening sun glinting off her jewelry, transforming her into a literal star.

  Mainland Chinese aren’t exactly Singaporeans’ favorite immigrants at the moment, I explained as I shut the door. They feel the working class are taking away the low-end jobs while the upper class are driving up prices. (I recalled the scene earlier that day of the Comrade in the conference room at my firm, signing purchase after purchase of property and stock, pausing every so often to spew a gob of phlegm into the wastepaper basket, and wondered into which class I would place him.)