But Goldie, like many people here work very long hours and the trip never materialises. At least she visits, not like the other two.
Pansy’s condo is located in Aljunied, once a thriving Malay kampong community and agricultural area in eastern Singapore, named in 1926 after Yemeni businessman and philanthropist, Syed Sharif Omar bin Ali Al Junied. Like many of the traditional villages and farms which were wiped out by urban development in the 60s and early 70s, Aljunied is now a government Housing & Development Board (HDB) estate of subsidised housing and industrial buildings.
The area is adjacent to Geylang, another former kampong, now famous for its Minangkabau-design wet market, eateries and durian stalls. The durian is a soft custardy fruit with a hard casing of thorns or duri in Malay. Called ‘King of Malayan fruits’ for its exquisite taste and cost, its smell is very distinctive, fragrant to locals but disgusting to the uninitiated, especially Western noses. Since the smell tends to linger, the fruit is banned in air-conditioned places and on public transport. So here in Geylang, stallholders set up makeshift tables and chairs for patrons to sit down to eat and enjoy their fruit instead of having to cart it home. But in some of the less salubrious parts, the area has been usurped by girls from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. Amongst the narrow lanes, which retain their Malay designation, lorong, the girls tout for their clients in tight-fitting dresses and pelmet-skirts. The establishments they work in, with red oversized address numbers and lanterns, vie for space with Buddhist temples, from nearly every branch of Buddhism: Chinese, Thai, Tibetan, Japanese, Sri Lankan, Mahayana and Theravada. The two could not be more incongruous. Perhaps the temples were set up as refuges for the labouring girls or the men who made use of their services to cleanse their guilt! The most sought-after girls are those who are fair in complexion, as they are considered the epitome of beauty by local men. They are mostly PRC girls who make a point of keeping out of the sun or carry umbrellas when they have to face its intensity. Others flaunt their complexions and their charms in karaoke bars, table-top dancing joints, and so-called “massage parlours”, like those at Orchard Towers, to entrap and wed ang mohs for a ticket to luxury, or local uncles so that they can get Singaporean Permanent Residency or PR status. If they can’t find one to buy them an apartment in a private condo, at least they can capture one who owns an HDB flat in a public housing estate.
The trouble with Singaporean women now is that they’re so arrogant and don’t know how to please a man anymore, local men complain in the national newspaper’s forum, explaining why so many Singaporean men are marrying non-Singaporean girls.
So far, no Singaporean woman has come forward to suggest why many Singaporean girls are not marrying Singaporean men, or are not marrying at all. The latter is a headache for the government who is fighting a battle with falling birth rates, and worse, a falling birth rate of babies from home-grown Singaporeans. Imported Singaporeans are fast out-growing those who are born and bred here; pink identity cards are given to the very rich and talented and those who can bring fame to Singapore with prizes and Olympic medals.
But sex workers, bargirls and domestic workers are only here on a working pass with no rights to citizenship. You see the ‘China girls’ on the buses and MRT. They have debts to pay. Like them are the domestic workers from impoverished villages in China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Sri Lanka. Some have left old parents, siblings or children behind. Some have been yanked out by unscrupulous recruiting agents. The girls will do everything to not return to poverty and deprivation. Most of them are young and slim, so they wear dresses that look as if they’ve been painted on, teetering on high heels or platform shoes, their faces beautifully made-up, talking to the men they’re with in dolly-girl voices. They smile, tease, cajole and stroke the man’s ego, an art that many modern young women here, especially those in high-powered careers, have not cared to learn.
Which middle-aged man can resist such nubile charm and supple flesh when his career and other bits of his anatomy might be flagging? Care-worn and elderly men, who pair themselves with such young eye-candy, must have an infallible capacity for deception to believe that their lives with these young women can be secured by their status and fat wallets.
Pansy passes the girls standing at the corners in stark daylight and smiles at them, wanting them to know that she is not judging them, that if she were in their circumstances, who knows what she would have been forced to do. They are somebody’s sister, daughter, grandchild or maybe even somebody’s mother or wife. They all have someone they miss, and are not without feelings or shame. Pansy’s heart goes out to them. She gives them the gift of her smile.
“Aunty, zao an,” they greet her in Mandarin.
“Zao an. Zao an. Good morning,” she returns their greeting in mangled tones, never having to learn the language before.
In her younger days, the majority of people in Singapore spoke Malay and Chinese dialects such as Teochew, Hokkien, or Cantonese. Besides Malay, Hokkien was almost the lingua franca of the majority in the marketplace. Even Malays and Indians spoke Hokkien. The villages in coastal Bedok where Pansy was brought up had a strong Teochew community, besides the Malay folk. Teochew was the language closest to Hokkien. Pansy was told recently that if she went to Hougang, she would still hear Teochew spoken there, Hokkien in Pulau Ubin, and a smattering of both in Boat Quay, which used to be the combat ground of both clans, fighting for supremacy to own godowns and
