Life in Disneyland in the South China Sea

Part 1: Welcome to Singapore--just don't chew any gum!

I had heard so many appealing things about Singapore that I could hardly believe my luck when I was actually assigned there in the fall of 1990—as the U.S. Embassy’s regional personnel officer for three Southeast Asian nations (Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia). My exhausting assignment as administrative officer in one of the world’s true basket cases—Suriname, in South America—had led me briefly to consider leaving the Foreign Service completely, just to keep what little sanity I had left. After knocking myself out for two years trying to keep a dysfunctional embassy running in a broken country few had heard of, I was worn out. I was certainly ready for a taste of paradise—a place where the water was safe to drink, a few amenities were actually available, and transportation was not hit-or-miss—and economic and political stability were close behind. Singapore seemed the answer to that dream.

Just to provide a frame of reference: Foreign Service Officers are expected to be available for worldwide service as ordered, and to work 24/7 if that’s what it takes. And not to make any trouble for the Department when it came to onward assignments. I had admittedly caused myself a lot of difficulty by asking for a four-month break between postings—not unreasonable, I thought, even after the mandatory 30-day home leave—but was summarily threatened with an even worse assignment than Paramaribo, i.e., a “directed” assignment for the troublemaker, if I persisted in causing Washington any paperwork problems. I did not like that threat—typical of bureaucrats eager to clear their desks at 5 o’clock.

The list of available choices for bidders off the normal cycle did not offer much of interest to me. I had never wanted to be an administrative officer at all—the veteran journalist in me had wanted to join the U.S. Information Agency, still separate from the State Department in those days—when I was recruited out of graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill, but funding problems had caused a freeze in USIA entry-level positions that year. So I wearily dusted off my resume and considered going back to graduate school to finish the Ph.D. in journalism I had interrupted in 1983, and finally become a professor instead. I was disappointed that a once-promising career might end so abruptly, but that was life.

Then suddenly, the job in Singapore appeared, when a colleague of mine switched jobs unexpectedly, in mid-cycle. I suppose I did not consider what exactly led her to “jump ship” so soon after arriving—I found out soon enough—but I still had broad shoulders and an optimistic nature, plus the necessarily weak mind, some would say. It also required several months of job-specific training at the Foreign Service Institute (but no language training, another bonus)—added to my home leave, a pleasant enticement—and would put my wife and me in sunny Singapore in mid-January 1991. Although our townhouse in Fairfax County was rented out, a housing allowance would cover most of the costs of a short stay, and it sounded exciting.

My standards had, of course, been lowered during my tumultuous two years in Suriname. But it sure sounded great, on paper, like paradise to a weary officer desperate for rescue from purgatory—and even pleased my wife, a former flight attendant who loved nothing more than traveling to a new place, especially one she envisioned as a jumping-off point to the rest of Asia. So far, a win-win.

All of this falls under the heading of “be careful what you wish for.”

* * * * * *

Margaret and I took a week off in Honolulu en route to Singapore—another place I had always wanted to see—and spent a couple of nights in San Francisco, another one of my favorite cities, beginning on New Year’s Eve. If our hotel was evacuated by an unexplained fire alarm in the middle of the night—a cold, snowy night—we did manage to get back to sleep, and spent the next day touring Alcatraz Island. (More recently occupied than Devil’s Island, it compared favorably to French Guiana as a tourist location, for those who remember my Surinamese-exile vacation.)

Getting to Oahu was no problem. But the hotel she had carefully arranged for our private stay turned out to be undergoing renovation, and lacked a working restaurant, and “beach access” to Waikiki meant walking six blocks to a sister hotel actually on the beach—three little things they neglected to mention—but we were playing happy tourists, renting a car, driving around the island, seeing the sights. It really was fun. We toured Queen Liliuokalani’s palace, climbed Diamond Head—quite a feat in flip-flops!—and did almost all the things tourists do—except getting to tour the site of the sunken USS Arizona. As an Army draftee in 1941, my late father had helped clean up the island after Pear Harbor, and I was badly disappointed not to see the ship.) Tickets were completely sold out for the day we got there—Japanese tourists had snapped up every ticket available to enter the viewing platform!!—and we opted not to come back on our last day in Honolulu.

Instead, we walked around the city, and I stepped off one of those too-high sidewalk curbs in low-cut tennis shoes—I knew I should have chosen real, lace-up walking shoes with high tops!—at an intersection, came down wrong, and sprained my ankle. Not a terrible sprain, but by the time our flight left a day later, it was swollen enough to make hobbling around without a crutch uncomfortable. That’s when we found out that our onward flight to Singapore, transiting Tokyo, had an extended layover at the old, crowded, and cramped Narita airport—instead of a simple 2-hour flight direct to Singapore—because US regulations required USG personnel to travel whenever possible on US-flag airlines. [Curses on my home state senator, Jesse Helms, who hated the State Department and, I heard, helped enact that requirement!]

We spent seven unpleasant hours at Narita, waiting for our US-flag airplane to depart. By the time we finally got to Singapore—late at night—I could barely walk. Our new apartment—like the magnificent Changi airport, then state-of-the-art—was large and beautiful, with lots of glass, in a modern suburban building preferred by expats—but we had no car, and getting to the otherwise-excellent subway system required a bus ride and lots of walking. No one was impressed when I arrived by taxi at work the next morning and immediately asked to be taken to the ER for an X-ray. Medical care in Singapore is quite good, and the Embassy nurse made all the arrangements quickly; I ended up going to a therapist for weeks, but it eventually paid off and I walked normally!

Back then, the Embassy in Singapore was still located in downtown, within walking distance of most businesses, food stalls—the best place to eat!—and government buildings. And best of all, it sat on a lot next door to the tiny Armenian Church, which I could see from my office—one of the oldest structures left in a fast-modernizing city, and at lunch, I used to walk over and sit in the open-air church: quiet, rarely used for services, mostly rented out for evening or night-time events. Peaceful … I think the tiny Armenian community had all but died out, but left us a lovely legacy. (When the Embassy years later moved out to a larger, more secluded and “safer” space—behind a perimeter fence—I grieved a little…not just because having a car became absolutely necessary…)

Singapore itself is a city-state on one island, covering less than 300 square miles, with dozens of offshore islets. In 1991, it held between 3 and 4 million people, mostly of Chinese ethnic heritage, with large communities of South Asian (Indian) and Malaysian residents; by 2020, it held about 6 million. Located at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, it is the world’s second most densely populated country, at more than 20,000 people per square mile—after much smaller Monaco (about 40,000 people in less than 1 square mile!]—but surprisingly, it doesn’t feel nearly as crowded as New York City (26,000+). The state has built many skyscraper population towers—30 stories and taller—and even on a busy day, Singapore had a remarkably comfortable feel to it.

It also felt safe. And clean. And air-conditioned. Like Disneyland on steroids. In fact, called it the Disneyland of the South China sea—expecting to come back in 10 or 20 years and find a dome over the entire island, making it unnecessary to run between stores or buildings in the often-stifling heat. So much of the old city had been torn down—and replaced with 60 or 70-story hotels— by the time state leaders realized their error that little remained to preserve for tourists to see.

Yet it was also entertaining, if within carefully-circumscribed limits. Wholesomeness was enforced. There was no “red light” district—the nearest one was in the next country, Malaysia—and the one-party state government of founder Lee Kuan Yew, who retired the year before I arrived, and his successors carefully molded the cultural offerings, much as they stifled dissent.

And in the year I was there, they even successfully banned chewing gum—which vandals apparently chewed and left under subway seats. Failing to flush public toilets—apparently another common practice (how did they know—without cameras, I asked?)—led to humiliating arrests and stiff fines, as did the more common offense—urinating in public elevators on their everlasting 30+ stop rides. Men were photographed on the newspaper front page being taken in handcuffs—only their eyes blacked out—from the elevator, which had censors to detect urine—and stopped, cold, until police came. Imagine. Sounds vaguely like the worst of the Soviet gulags…

And there was an almost creepy feeling of being watched. One of my favorite travel writers, Paul Theroux, once wrote that the only country he felt spied on in more than one-party dictatorship Communist China was, in fact, Singapore. Democratic Singapore. There was a death penalty for dealing in drugs. Period. No exceptions.

But the country was still a resounding international success. More than 20,000 Americans lived there the year I did, serving all nations in the regions with daily flights to every possible destination from Changi—and routinely praised it as the best Asian city for families.

Next time: Trouble lurks in paradise for troublemakers, unwary travelers, and naive diplomats