Singapore Noir

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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.

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