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.