Tramp Royale (33 page)

It still is not clear to me just why hospitality was so heavily lavished on us. We had made it clear at the outset that our acquaintance with the Naybergs was of the slightest, covering only a few hours of our short stay in Montevideo. Mr. Ho had himself never met the Naybergs and knew them only by business correspondence. It seems to me that protocol would have been more than satisfied had Mr. Ho taken us to lunch and advised what to see and where to shop-not that we had even that coming to us but to show courtesy to the Naybergs.

Whatever the reasons were (and I can't believe it was just our sweet dispositions even though we usually get along all right with children and dogs)-whatever the reasons, we were given a free ride through Singapore which could not have been purchased from a travel agency at any cost. The Hos even included John Lloyd in much of it, simply because he was with us much of the time-John was enjoying an indefinitely long vacation in Singapore at his employer's expense because his permanent-residence visa for Manila had not yet come through.

We were treated to superlative Cantonese food, food which made us realize that even the best Chinese restaurants in the States do not bother to supply the real thing to unappreciative and ignorant heathen. Bird's-nest soup and shark fin were the only items I could identify but I must state emphatically that chop suey had no part in it. Mr. Ho insisted that Ticky must use chopsticks and instructed her in the art to the point that she learned to pick pieces of cracked ice out of a bowl with smooth plastic sticks. Try it sometime when you are feeling lucky; the coefficient of friction between ice and smooth urea plastic is zero followed by a string of noughts. The trick is to use the sticks as gently as possible, almost no pressure; occidentals tend to use them like a pair of pliers.

Often the whole family escorted us, Mr. and Mrs. Ho and four children-Ho Chee Pen, Ho Chee Fei, the one daughter Ho Mei Ling (after Madame Chiang), and the baby Ho Chee Cheong. Boys carry a generation name, in this case "Chee," as well as a family name and a given name. Mrs. Ho was an exquisitely beautiful little girl who had kept her figure and her sweet disposition through four children. The children were all well behaved but so shy that we did not get well acquainted with them.

Mr. Ho dressed much as I dressed and the kids were dressed like the kids back home but Mrs. Ho usually wore a chang sam, which is the formal, stylized Chinese dress with the high collar, skirt slit at each side, and quite tight. It must be tight-Mrs. Ho, modest herself as a nun, once went home to change because she decided that the chang sam she was wearing was too loose.

Ticky had to have a chang sam and Mrs. Ho advised her where to go. Singapore is a place where they will take your measurements in the morning and deliver a tailor-made suit to your hotel in time to wear it to dinner the same day. Ticky's measurements were not taken until around noon but the dress was delivered about five o'clock. I concede that tailoring a chang sam is not the job a man's suit is, but try to get that service in New York. The dress was midnight blue heavy silk with a dragon of sequins coiled across the chest-price, $10 U.S.

It appeared to have been sprayed on with a paint gun, rather than tailored and it met with Mrs. Ho's approval. The peekaboo effect of the side slits is rather startling. Shorts show a lot more skin but shorts do not dress up the landscape the way a chang sam does.

The Hos took us to one of the "Worlds"-there are three, the Great World, the Happy World, and the New World, and they are the Singapore versions of Coney Island, so much like our own amusement parks that there is no need to mention anything but the differences, the first being theaters for classic Chinese drama and the second being Joget dancing. The Chinese theater was the sort which can be seen in New York and San Francisco in the States-days-long performances, extremely ornate costumes and hair-dos, stagehands that sit and smoke and have lunch right on the stage, very stylized acting and a singsong delivery not like ordinary Chinese speech. Since we did not understand the dialog and did not know the traditional plots it was interesting only as an oddity to us. But I was impressed by one thing: I had been told that all the female parts were taken by men. This may be so; I found it almost beyond belief. Those cunning little "girls" with their high voices were much more convincing than any female impersonators I have ever seen before.

Joget dancing is the sort of social dancing the Mohammedan Malays do-mostly extremely sexy rumbas and foxtrots. The "Worlds" have several dance halls with taxi dancers available, all just as one finds it in America save for one point: their religion frowns on bodily contact, even with the finger tips, so the taxi dancers follow their partners without the help of any physical lead; they "shadow dance." They are very skilled at it and never fumble in even the fastest and most complicated steps. It appears to be a skill developed by years of practice; we noticed several apprentices, nine or ten years old, who hardly ever gained partners but would join some couple and duplicate every motion of the older girl. The kids seemed only slightly less skilled at it than were the grown women.

While the religious injunction forbade touching, it did not seem to forbid anything else. The couples danced only an inch or two apart and the undulant gyrations they went through would cause them to be thrown off the floor anywhere else. A hula dancer would have blushed.

The long drive the Hos took us on into the Sultanate of Johore was remarkable on one point only-a sight of royalty. Singapore is an island like Manhattan, larger than Manhattan but much smaller than Long Island; it is connected with the mainland, which at this point is Johore, by a causeway, one which the Japanese armies found very convenient when Singapore was caught with its guns facing the wrong way.

We passed through customs for once with just a wave of the hand. Singapore is a free port while Johore is not, but the guards at the border did not seem worried about smuggling. The countryside, the manners, and the people seemed no different from Singapore save that we were now out in the country and passed through only an occasional village; the buildings were substantial in structure and Western in appearance-no grass shacks, no mud huts.

We glanced at the palace grounds from the outside, then went on to the zoo. It was like any other fairly large zoo except for one thing: it was not, strictly speaking, a public zoo although it was open to the public. It was the private property of the Prince Regent ("Regent" because the old Sultan is ill) and existed only because he likes animals and wanted a zoo. While we were poking around among his caged tigers and apes and so forth, we ran across him. Mr. Ho pointed him out.

It is my contention that the least he could have done, with due respect to the romantic notions of citizens of democracies who gain their notions of royalty from books, would have been to show up riding an elephant and wearing a turban. But he was leaning against a borrowed Jaguar sports car and wearing a beaten-felt hat, a sweat-stained khaki shirt, and wrinkled khaki trousers. We knew the car was borrowed because, as Mr. Ho pointed out, the license plate was that of a private citizen.

If this sort of thing keeps up, I shall have to give away my copy of
The Little Lame Prince.

But the most amazing place the Hos took us to was the Tiger Balm Garden, also known as Haw Par Villa. There is another one like it, named the same and built by the same man, in Hong Kong; otherwise I am reasonably sure that there is nothing else in the world even remotely resembling it.

Several people aboard ship had said to us, "Be sure not to miss Tiger Balm Garden."

"All right," I had answered. "What is it?"

"Well, uh . . ." Our advisor would pause, look helpless, and add lamely, "Never mind. Just be sure you don't miss it."

I am going to have the same trouble now. I will try to describe it but I probably won't manage to put over its essence. Just be sure that when you go to Singapore
you
do not miss it. It is free, it is not advertised, and nobody cares whether you go or not. It is unlikely that a guide or a taxi driver will suggest it, as there is nothing in it for them. But
don't
miss it.

Tiger Balm Garden is a good many acres of ground thickly covered by statues of rather poor quality.

And the
Venus de Milo
is a badly damaged statue of an overweight female with a busted nose.

You see? A factual description of a work of art is misleading; it does not convey the
Gee-Whiz!
element which is the difference-perhaps the only difference-between success and failure in art.

The statues in Tiger Balm Garden are of plaster and are painted in bright, garish colors. The modeling varies from adequate to poor. The statues do not sit alone on pedestals, but are in groups each of which tells a story; the background scene of each group is sculptured in full detail, furniture, landscape, or whatever is needed. Most of the statues are life size and the effect is to find yourself catapulted right inside a comic book. A sex-horror-crime-sadism comic book it usually is, too, for the emphasis is on the two eternal elements of drama, love and death. Most of the stories depicted are Chinese fairy tales, and pretty rugged fare for tots those stories must be-although classic fairy tales of any culture, including our own, run to themes that could give the comic books cards and spades any day and still excel in blood and violence.

But the themes and moods shift rapidly. Just beyond a long and very bloodthirsty tableau of a war between heaven and hell you find yourself suddenly faced by Donald Duck, seven feet tall and grinning down at you. No excuse is necessary for his presence here; Chinese children know Donald as well as their own fairy tales. A bit farther on is a modern tiled swimming pool, deep end, shallow end, diving board and ladders; it is inhabited by a half dozen mermaids, giant plaster fish and enormous crabs. Why? Well, don't you think a few mermaids would improve any swimming pool?

There is a long underground tunnel which is purgatory in gruesome, explicit detail. Chinese notions about these matters are less poetical than those of Dante, fully as imaginative, and much more drastic. The punishment for a woman guilty of adultery struck me as unnecessarily extreme, and the reward of usury was so horrible that I resolved never to touch the banking & loan business just in case there was something to it.

Ticky refused to look at this stretch. She complained that it made her ill.

But most of the groups and sequences did not show torture, but depicted simple, hearty violence and sex-for example wicked witches who disguised themselves as beauteous, bare-skinned maidens in order to lure wayfaring monks into their caves to rob them. The monks co-operated heartily and everybody had a good time right up to the last scene, where the monks were dispatched quickly and without sadistic furbelows.

What is art? Our own artists have been dinning at us all this century that art need not have draftsmanship, subtle use of color, nor any of the classic disciplines. Certainly these statues would make Praxiteles spin in his grave, but there is a mounting effect of awe, amazement, wonder, and sheer delight. If the scrawls and blobs of our own modernists are art at all, then these lusty creations must be great art.

The Tiger Balm Villas in Singapore and in Hong Kong were built by Aw Boon Haw, multi-millionaire publisher, banker, industrialist, and vendor of patent medicines. His Tiger Balm remedies, the most popular of which is Tiger Balm itself, are used throughout the East. I am told that they are quite useful. In any case they made him fantastically wealthy, much of which wealth he gave away. The Tiger Balm Gardens alone, which deserve to be classed with his charities, would have cost millions of dollars to build here and must have cost in excess of a million even in the Far East, yet there is not even a box in which to drop a voluntary contribution.

I heard two stories as to why he did it: one that he believed that as long as he was creating something he would not die, the other that he could teach basic morals through these frozen morality plays to that part of the population too poor and too ignorant to have had the opportunity to gain moral wisdom from textbook and schoolmaster.

I doubt if either story is true; I suspect that he did it because he wanted to.

United Press reports that he died in Honolulu 4 September 1954. May his unique spirit rest in peace.

As we were leaving Haw Par Villa with the Hos, something came up which made it appropriate and necessary for Ticky and myself to mention what church we belonged to. We had avoided the subject of religion up to then because we did not know whether the Ho family was Buddhist, Confucianist, Christian, or what. The precaution was not uncalled for, as an educated Chinese who also speaks English is not necessarily a product of missionary schools, nor certain to be a convert even though educated by Christian missionaries. On another occasion Mr. Ho had learned that I had studied oriental religions and some mention was made of Confucius-I may have quoted one of his extremely quotable proverbs, or perhaps he did. Two nights later Mr. Ho introduced me to another Chinese gentleman who got me aside and said solemnly, "I understand that you are a student of the Scholar."

I made an intellectual standing broad jump of fifteen thousand miles, recalled that I was somewhere east of Suez and "the Scholar" was not Aristotle, in these parts, but Confucius- so I nodded solemnly and admitted that I had that honor, in a small way.

From then on he treated me not as a tolerated white barbarian, but as an educated gentleman like himself, an equal. My actual knowledge of the great sage is microscopic, but my point is that I would never have been accepted as an equal had I given the impression that I believed that all wisdom and virtue was a monopoly of the Christian faith.

But the situation did come up whereby it was necessary and polite for Ticky and myself to admit that we had been reared in the Methodist Church-whereupon Mr. and Mrs. Ho said with delight, "Why, we're Methodists, too!"

Almost at once we found ourselves attending services in the Straits Chinese Methodist Church.