Colonial Singapore

~ Tanamera, by Noel Barber ~

When I first saw this title, I didn’t recognise it straightaway, being more accustomed to reading it as 2 separate words: ‘Tanah Merah” – Merah is red, and Tanah is soil, land, even territory. (The soft but pronounced ‘h’ sound at the end of each word is an intrinsic part of the word.) The entire novel read similarly for me, charming precisely because it depicts Singapore in such a recognisable way, but throwing me slightly off-balance, seen through the eyes of imperialists. It is set in colonial Singapore, beginning at the start of 1900 with ‘Grandpa Jack’, who built up the Dexter family fortunes in Singapore – and swiftly coming to the protagonist of the story, Johnnie Dexter, 2^nd grandson of Grandpa Jack. 

Johnnie Dexter, although the younger son, is ear marked to be “tuan bezar” – “tuan” in Malay means Sir or just a term of respect, in colonial times, particularly used for white men. “Besar” means big, or senior. (It is unclear why the novel keeps spelling this as ‘bezar’ although it gets the name of a road – Jalan Besar – correct.) The privileges of being a tuan are so taken for granted that they are only thrown into high relief by the war (the invasion of Singapore by the Japanese):

The trouble was that when dealing with the military you couldn’t act like a tuan. You couldn’t lose your temper. From the time of Grandpa Jack – even before, I suppose – any hitch in arrangements had caused an apoplectic outburst that was followed miraculously by instant action.

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Given such social norms it would be hard to imagine the British in Singapore behaving in any other way other than with a sense of proprietorship and arrogance, throwing their weight around, just to greater or lesser extent, crudely or more elegantly and discreetly, but nevertheless, throwing their considerable weight and influence around, living lives of great privilege and even if interacting with locals, always at a distance and from a vantage point of the superior.

Johnnie grew up in the Dexter ancestral house (built by Grandpa Jack) in an idyllic childhood, waited on hand and foot by local/native servants, doted upon and given everything he could desire; and Johnnie, in turn, born and bred in Singapore, loves the life there:

What made life so exciting was […] the fact that I felt an integral part of Singapore, part of the city in which every street I explored seemed to lead to the sea, to ships shimmering on the fiery horizon, to a glimpse of passenger liners in the outer roads surrounded by a flurry of sampans, or battered rusting freighters that might have figured in stories by Conrad or Maughan, for the Singapore of my youth was still the Singapore of Somerset Maughan.

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Life at Tanamera was one of indulgence,

We must have kept at least twenty servants in those days, ranging from old Li, the number one boy or major-domo, down through boys, cooks, amahs to us look after us, dhobies to wash our clothes, gardeners to tend our flowers, Sikh jaggers [‘jaga’ – in Malay means ‘security guard’] to guard our doors, syces to drive the cars.

All our young lives seemed to be filled with a succession of songs, charades, fancy dress balls, and home made plays […].

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It was the days where the colour code and bar was rigid, and the races segregated. There were British-only clubs (like Tanglin), and although the Dexters’ close family friends and neighbours, the influential and millionaire Soongs were their constant companions but  still could not cross the colour bar.  

But in those days, the white man’s superiority over all other races was so drummed into us that we all thought in terms like that. It was even natural that I should say to Natasha, ‘But he [a Japanese friend] can’t be a bad chap. He got a Blue for tennis in Cambridge’

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Johnnie’s father is English, and his mother, American. The Soongs next door apparently have a fraught marriage because P.P. Soong, head of a great trading house, married an American woman, and they had two mix-raced children (Eurasian), Paul and Julie, the latter whom Johnnie falls madly in love with.

Mixed marriages were out – there were no exceptions, no alibies, no discussions. it made no difference if you fell in love with the daughter of a Chinese or Eurasian millionaire – the girls we met and greeted politely at our mixed parties, in their houses or ours, were not available, and never could be. A liaison with one of them not only spelt social ruin for either the girl or boy) for what that stigma was worth); it was unfair on the girl because nothing could ever come of it, even if she had a child, for then her father would kick her out. Girls didn’t do that sort of thing before marriage – not well brought up Chinese girls, anyway.

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Johnnie and Julie have a heat-searing love affair for some months before their secret is discovered. Strangely, Barber writes a most discordant and unlikely episode of a Soong relative, called Kai-shek, confronting Johnnie – where apparently Kai-Shek sets on Johnnie with a dog when he comes to drop Julie off at the house, and goes mad with rage, calls Johnnie a ‘white monkey’. Barber has Kai-Shek dropping his ‘r’s for ‘l’s in a ridiculous stereotype, and adds in some rather disturbingly bigoted and racist remarks about this man:

His hair was an untidy shock, his pockmarked skin was sallow, and as usually, he looked aggressive, which was understandable for his mother was a Hakka, and Kai-shek had inherited all the arrogance which has stamped Hakkas since they originated in the tough climate of northern China.

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He even adds, “All Chinese love big dogs […]” – some of the racism is quite bewildering. To add to the unlikeliness of this whole episode, P.P. Soong, the patriarch, comes in on this scene, knowing full well he had asked Johnnie to drive his daughter home, and slaps Kai-Shek,

`You have insulted the son of an honoured friend. To set a dog on an honoured friend is unpardonable. You will apologise’

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Nothing about this dialogue or scene rings true. It seems a very clumsy narrative device in an otherwise well-told narrative. In fact, all the later episodes where Kai-Shek emerges are the weakest passages in the novel: poor Kai-Shek is a straw man, a villain, set up as the foil to our gallant protagonist.

Upon the discovery of the mixed-race lovers, Julie is sent away to her mother in San Francisco, and Johnnie is sent to the Dexter’s London office. This is 1936, and in a time when England still did not believe it was going to war. Through his love for tennis, introduced by Miki (the Japanese friend from Singapore, who comes to England on mysterious business), Johnnie meets the Bradshaws, an aristocratic, tennis-mad family, and has an affair with their daughter, Irene, a good humoured girl he is not in love with. Tim, Johnnie’s elder brother who long left Singapore to join the army in England, meets Irene through Johnnie, and is instantly smittened. Tim and Irene become engaged, but shortly after, Irene confides to Johnnie that she is pregnant, with his baby. Johnnie who has given up hope of Julie and that love affair after Julie’s mother made they both promise not to write, offers Irene marriage, thinking she would be excellent wife material for a tuan bezar. After a showdown with Tim, with whom there has never been any love lost, Johnnie marries Irene and takes her home to Singapore in 1937.

This period leading up to the early 1940s, and the sentiments in Malaya and Singapore, is well summed up by one sentence in the novel:

But despite the fact that my parents were now being bombed in London, I found the war in Europe hard to believe. And even more, the prospect of war in Asia.

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Life in fact continued as normal in Singapore in the Cricket Club and other colonial hangouts – for the white man, at least. Until the unthinkable happened, and the Japanese invaded from the north, taking Malaya in 55 days in a rampage that stunned the British.

The next sections of the novel deftly weave Johnnie’s personal life with the context of the Japanese bombing and eventual occupation of Singapore. Although these sections are extremely well written, it is almost stretching the reader’s credulity to breaking point at how charmed Johnnie’s life seems, that even amidst all the horror of war, he still emerges the golden boy. And yet, it is a lovely read, not one which for a moment trivialises the war and all its context, but which does not overly harrow the reader because our protagonist always manages to fall on his feet. He is recruited for the elite Force 136, particularly useful because of his extensive local knowledge and ability to speak Cantonese and Malay, and proves not just an excellent businessman, great lover, all round good egg and honourable gentleman, but also a war hero and a tremendous officer. And yet, so skilful is the writing that instead of getting impatient with this paragon, the reader is firmly on his side and wishing him well.

Coming out of the war period, Johnnie does even better, now fully tuan bezar of the even more successful Dexter company, riding the post-war boom, cementing an alliance with the Soongs, and holding out the hand of friendship to other Asian partners;

If we believed in a multiracial future as the only hope for Asia, we would have to include the Japanese despite what had happened […]

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Johnnie is also perhaps one of the few who seem to genuinely believe that the promise of independence for Malaya is necessary, and that if the British are to remain, it must be on terms of greater equality than previously.

Born and bred in Singapore, Johnnie Dexter is different from many other British imperialists and British troops, who have no connection with Singapore, or even if who are connected with Singapore, have little loyalty to the land or country. Johnnie intends to make his life in Singapore, always, loves Singapore passionately, perhaps as passionately as he loves Julie, his half-Chinese, half American childhood sweetheart. His early example from Grandpa Jack and Papa Jack predispose him well towards natives:

my father had an almost passionate love for the people of Singapore and Malaya

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And yet, troublingly, dear, sweet Johnnie is still a racist at heart. Despite his good treatment of ‘natives’, his grandfather’s attachment to Singapore, his father’s excellent treatment of locals and strong relationships with them, Johnnie’s sentiments are often imperialistic – and indeed, it would be hard to believe they could be anything else, given that period, the setting, and his upbringing and privileges:

I knew that Li must have known about Julie in the old days, Chinese boys know everything. […] What he thought didn’t matter

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Li is Johnnie’s contemporary, not a child, but of course, still derogatorily referred to as a ‘boy’, who serves his ‘tuan’. And most damningly, that it did not matter what Li thought of Johnnie’s affair with a Eurasian woman, because of course, as a servant, he cannot possibly judge his master, and his loyalty is assumed and expected, even when the master transgresses.

There is an exoticisation and undeniable condescension in how Johnnie remembers his wonderful childhood: “all offered to us by gentle brown or yellow hands jutting out from stiff, starched white sleeves”.

Johnnie is remarkably self aware:

Of course, looking back to the pre-war days, from the vantage point of a tuan bezar in  multiracial state, I sometimes feel a sense of real shame at the way we all behaved, even thought. How absurd they were, the shibboleths, the snobbery, the spurious dignity that divided the British and the ‘Europeans’ from the people whose country this really was.

Papa was always telling us how wonderful the ‘natives’ were, but his was a lone voice. We were all guilty. I suppose. The code of conduct had been devised when the British had first opened up India. It had never been revised. The world was changing. Had changed, but not the attitude of white men to those whose skins were darker. In fact, the more the world did change, the more apprehensive the white colonial governors became, and so they fought harder than ever to divide and rule.

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But even as Johnnie criticises the white man for his lack of investment in the colonies where they made their fortunes and careers, oblivious to native life, he still objectifies the natives, and still sees them through western lenses, othering them even as he appreciates them:

Most Europeans in Singapore lived like exiles in an alien land, as they strived to make their fortunes or waited patiently for their pensions to mature. For the most part they skimmed over the surface of what they politely called native life without ever seeing, without even noticing, the placid happiness of the Malays, the beautiful languid rhythm of the riverine kampong life; nor could they really see the energy of the Chinese throngs busily pursuing their life, which to the uninterested white men was so remote they might have been inhabiting a different planet.

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And yet, for all the mild criticisms in this review, it cannot be denied this is a wonderful read, a tremendous saga of a book of more than 700 pages, which still leaving a reader wishing there was more. It is the best kind of book, the craft of a real storyteller, engrossing, gripping, perfectly paced, holding the reader’s attention effortlessly page after page. It shows great depth of local knowledge, a lot of authenticity, a sense of ‘having been there’. Barber may be an orientalist, but one which has extensively tempered his orientalism. Though told through western lenses, it is nevertheless such a good read that I will be procuring copies for family and friends.