You can see some of the contrast here: Chinese New Year decorations over Singapore’s old Chinatown neighborhood, itself somewhat disheveled and worn down. Beyond it, the grand skyscrapers of the new, planned, tightly governed environment.
Before the city-state was refurbished and its rigid government emerged, Chinese immigrants came by the thousands to settle among “their own” and build new lives. In a cruel similarity to the sweatshops and tenements that were the lot of the wave of Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, they lived in impossibly crowded quarters in Chinatown, huge families in one room. Their stories were further colored by the fact that many were kidnapped upon arrival and sold into slavery or made to work for almost nothing. Their average life expectancy: 35.
And that was just the men. Sex trafficking is, sadly, a timeless curse and so it was in Singapore. Women were seized and brought here to serve as sex workers from the beginning of Singapore’s rise. In the streets of the city’s Chinatown, they lived and worked and often, we learned, lost their lives early, through murder or suicide, while still in their teens.
In a peculiar set of contrasts, the tour we took tonight, “Secrets of the Red Lantern,” walked us through two eras of suffering: the Chinatown Heritage Center with its recreated tenement, similar to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Geylang, one of Singapore’s sanctioned red light districts.
It wasn’t much fun; most of what we learned was sad. Not that there’s much unfamiliar about abused workers and sexually exploited women. Even so, both of us felt left the tour sad and heavy and angry, not only about what we heard, which wasn’t SO different from the western history we know, but that we spent one of our three nights here learning about it. This morning though, I’m glad we went.
This is one of the richest populations in the world, and like most wealthy communities, it was built on the backs of the desperate. Despite its public righteousness, Singapore legalized prostitution and established red light districts to contain it. With labor and with sex, as with so much else, things are as they have always been.
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Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
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