It is 4 p.m.—the maddening mid-afternoon sauna of a sizzling Singapore summer. And it’s raining like Sumatra, with aluminum siding sheets of water sliding down from the sky.
I duck into the hotel car for the short drive to the Istana, which in the Malay language means ‘palace’, for the first two-hour session with Lee Kuan Yew. Tooling along exactly at the posted speed limit—no more, no less—the driver navigates steadily down Orchard Road, the glitzy shopping thoroughfare. My mind should have been doting on economic statistics, political philosophy, Chinese history and other such fine stuff. For months I have been boning up for this and I was as ready as I would ever be. But weirdly, the heat or the occasion or whatever must have gotten to me because I am off in some mad mind-sphere, imagining LKY as some mysterious mogul in the American movie business—as a famous Hollywood figure, in fact.
Outsiders sometimes diminish Singapore by suggesting it is no more than a nation-as-corporation and dubbing it ‘Singapore Inc’. What a misreading! No corporation in the history of the world was ever as interesting and complex as this place.
Unsurprisingly, Singaporeans tend to get riled by the Inc. moniker. I get irked by it, too, and I don’t even live here. I just hope my Singapore friends don’t get as irritated by my own Hollywood style analogy. It’s not Singapore as a bland corporation, but Singapore as a spectacular dramatic epic movie.
For worse or for better, I live and work in Southern California, in the vast sprawling suburb that includes the independent city of Beverly Hills where famous Hollywood people live—and then me. Here, people hunker down and mentally imagine the world as one big blockbuster movie or another.
Here in what we sometimes call ‘Hollyweird’, no reality is more real than the bottom-line figures of the Box Office take. The movie Titanic is a perfect example. Normal people knew it as a very familiar story of an historic cruise ship going down. But denizens of Hollywood, before opening day, saw it as a metaphor for a production company that would sink in a sea of red ink even faster than the real Titanic. They didn’t think it would float; they thought it would drop like a rock to the bottom of the sea. They were quite wrong.
And so it is with Singapore, imagined as a movie. Here is a story about a little island country that, perhaps until relatively recently, few had heard of—except perhaps about some nonsense or other concerning chewing gum and caning. Who cares? How can it succeed? What’s the hook?
Decades later, Singapore is one roaring success. It’s practically a classic. The bottom-line figures are as green as the carefully organized landscaping, and the place has an airport like a movie set and an infrastructure the envy of Dubai; it has home ownership for 95 percent of the citizens, shopping malls out of Beverly Hills 90210, public schools that put America’s to shame, international science and math scores even higher than Japan’s, and a national airline that reminds its passengers that flying needn’t be cruel and unusual punishment. What’s most telling is that giant countries, especially China, sometimes India, and now even fast-growing Vietnam, wonder how Singapore made it so big and so quickly. They want to learn Singapore’s secrets. Right, no one wants to imitate a failure. So if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Singapore today is one of the more flattered countries in the world.
Lee Kuan Yew, modern Singapore’s legendary founder, and his beloved country are interchangeable. Ton Nu Thi Ninh, that elegant lady from nearby Vietnam, puts this so well in the front of the book: “It is a fact … that if two names could be indissociable, these would be Singapore & LKY, and LKY & Singapore.”
That’s a nice high-level sentiment, but I am from crass Hollywood/Beverly Hills. So I am looking for something less intellectual, more like … gross bottom line! So I imagine Lee as a famous movie director. You can just see him sitting on the set in the Director’s Chair, barking out orders with his crisp, decisive, can-do autocratic style, his jutting jaw and drop-dead look. Go ahead, you wishy-washy liberals—Make My Day.
That profile is so beloved here in Hollywood. Knee-jerk ultra-liberals though many are, many here are also bottom-line studio executives and time-pressed stars and starlets alike. Don’t-give-a-darn decisiveness goes over big time in this town. Lee is like an autocratic Alfred Hitchcock folded into the trim figure of Ang Lee.
And by far—we imagine—LKY’s most famous film would in fact be ‘Singapore’. We imagine his masterpiece in the grand tradition of Gone With The Wind. It is a tale of how one man’s honest team of founding fathers sweep into power after the collapse of the brutal occupying Japanese (normal casting: almost always the bad guys in Hollywood films), fight off alien communists (as well as corrupting Western values), marry Malaysia and then divorce her after just a few years (typical Hollywood, right?)—see “Trouble in Paradise”—and then with Machiavellian acumen manage to outwit the Western multinational corporations seeking to exploit the country and its hardworking people. The movie ends with sweeping pans of the bursting skyline and well-manicured parks and immaculate homes of this Asian neo-utopia, the richest country in the region and, perhaps, its most envied.
And it takes LKY and his team less than a generation to do this. What a story! And what a commercial success! So, should we get Lee ready for the ritual pounce up onto the Oscar Stage to pick up his Lifetime Achievement Award and to thank everyone in his extended Chinese family?
In truth, the controversy over this ‘Singapore’ blockbuster is not quite settled legend yet. The place somehow remains a perpetual puzzle. Who knows where Lee will wind up in the firmament of greats! But one thing is certain: there’s never been a production number quite like Singapore.
So this is the story of what it’s like to spend a few hours in deep conversation with this iconic and fashionably authoritarian director.
It’s a story that needs to be told. Many people, mainly those who have never visited, think his Singapore is some sort of tortured totalitarian Martian planet out of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World—the sort of never-never land where that which isn’t prohibited, is mandated. And in some limited sense they are right. But just go there and visit, and you’ll see they are also quite wrong.
Your first time, you think there is something surreal about it all. The feeling (it’s not creepy, just palpably different) hits you minutes after you land. The airport is a knockout and the sense of not being on this planet proceeds apace on the drive from the airport to your hotel.
You glance out a car window. The scene is not quite right. Something is missing. It bothers you, but what bothers you worse is you can’t put your finger on it. And you think maybe it should hit you right in the face.
But then you get it—it’s what’s NOT visible. There are no McDonald’s bags, no KFC containers, no abandoned cars, no dead bodies (only slight joke, I was raised in the New York/New Jersey area), no homeless camps, no in-your-face beggars (where are they? they have to be somewhere!). It’s absolutely, totally, amazingly, and unbelievably … clean!
This is a city? It’s not any place I’ve seen, you say …
The same feeling hits you downtown where, you discover, women
claim they can walk the streets any hour of the night without hassle, much less
assault. Drug gangs don’t monopolize
the parks and intimidate moms, strollers and families that are hoping for
nothing more than some urban peace. Again, where’s the street-side littering,
the homeless mini-cities, the screaming traffic horns? Green trees and flora
everywhere, and the air—even the air feels clean.
You don’t see that much laundry hanging out on the terraces, as in many parts of Asia. You can sit down at a café and put your hand under the table, and never come in contact with a ‘pre-owned’ piece of gum left behind as if a deliberate irritant. Call this the poisoned fruit of authoritarian rule, if you will; I call it sane and sanitary, and I’m for more of it!
Also notably missing in action are the feral traffic snarls (like in notorious Cairo) or the endless cascades of dirty concrete jungle (like in the city-state of New York) or the teeming masses out in the open whose zip codes stand for little more than one big forlorn shantytown. Oh Calcutta!
Not here.
But there are other things you might genuinely miss, though it may take a few days to sort it all out in your head—and this is the other side of paradise. You might truly miss vigorous criticism of the central government in the news media, or the kind of British-style parliamentary debate that stands your hair on end. You can go to the gorgeous parks but perhaps miss the anti-establishment political orators, the cup-open itinerant musician, the oddball scene of any kind. What’s more, you may miss the drama of jury trials; they don’t have them here—and they are proud of having qualified judges making the call. You may also be offended by the policy of capital punishment for drug dealers (again, without peer jury—the judge is the jury).
On the other hand, you’ll be happy about the relative absence of corruption (even police are paid as well as other government civil servants, which is well above the Western average), admire the low infant mortality rates (Singapore’s health record leads most countries in almost all health categories), and appreciate the gun policy (no one has them except the police).
But, then again, back to the other hand … you might really miss the atmosphere of vigorous open criticism of the city-state’s leaders. There isn’t any to speak of. Don’t you dare disrespectfully criticize, for this is Singapore, and since the 1950s, it has been run by one man (and the elite around him). His full name is Harry Lee Kuan Yew, but Harry is used rarely, maybe by close friends, or enemies who needle that he’s more British than Chinese. Anyway, LKY, at this writing, is now 86 years of age. It’s past time you meet him.