Singapore, meanwhile, has dealt with its own sex industry in two ways: by
turning its traditional red-light district into a themed attraction in its
own right, and by moving its massage parlors into the Beverly Centers.
Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of
place where one could have imagined meeting Noel Coward, ripped on opium,
cocaine, and the local tailoring, just off in his rickshaw for a night of
high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station
dropped on top of it. "Don't worry," the government said, "we'll put it
all back, just the way it was, as soon as we have the subway in." Needless
to say, the restored Bugis Street has all the sexual potential of
"Frontierland," and the transvestites are represented primarily by a
number of murals.

The heterosexual hand-job business has been treated rather differently,
and one can only assume that it was seen to possess some genuine degree of
importance in the national Confucian scheme of things. Most shopping
centers currently offer at least one "health center" - establishments one
could easily take for slick mini-spas, but which in fact exist exclusively
to relieve the paying customer of nagging erections. That one of these
might be located between a Reebok outlet and a Rolex dealer continues to
strike me as evidence of some deliberate social policy, though I can't
quite imagine what it might be. But there is remarkably little, in
contemporary Singapore, that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt
carefully deliberated social policy.

Take dating. Concerned that a series of earlier campaigns to reduce the
national birth rate had proven entirely too successful, Singapore has
instituted a system of "mandatory mixers." I didn't find this particularly
disturbing, under the circumstances, though I disliked the idea that
refusal to participate is said to result in a "call" to one's employer.
But there did seem to be a certain eugenic angle in effect, as mandatory
dating for fast-track yuppies seemed to be handled by one government
agency, while another dealt with the less educated. Though perhaps I
misunderstood this, as Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to
discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign
visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who
sweated slowly but continuously, like an aged cheese.

Ordinarily, confronted with a strange city, I'm inclined to look for the
parts that have broken down and fallen apart, revealing the underlying
social mechanisms; how the place is really wired beneath the lay of the
land as presented by the Chamber of Commerce. This won't do in Singapore,
because nothing is falling apart. Everything that's fallen apart has
already been replaced with something new. (The word infrastructure takes
on a new and claustrophobic resonance here; somehow it's all
infrastructure.)

Failing to find any wrong side of the tracks, one can usually rely on a
study of the nightlife and the mechanisms of commercial sex to provide
some entree to the local subconscious. Singapore, as might be expected,
proved not at all big on the more intense forms of nightlife. Zouk,
arguably the city's hippest dance club (modelled, I was told, after the
rave scenes in Ibiza), is a pleasant enough place. It reminded me, on the
night I looked in, of a large Barcelona disco, though somehow minus the
party. Anyone seeking more raunchy action must cross the Causeway to
Johore, where Singaporean businessmen are said to sometimes go to indulge
in a little of the down and dirty. (But where else in the world today is
the adjoining sleazy bordertown Islamic?) One reads of clubs there having
their licenses pulled for stocking private cubicles with hapless
Filipinas, so I assumed that the Islamic Tijuana at the far end of the
Causeway was in one of those symbiotic pressure-valve relationships with
the island city-state, thereby serving a crucial psychic function that
would very likely never be officially admitted.

Because Singapore is one happening place, biz-wise. I mean, the future
here is so bright.... What other country is preparing to clone itself,
calving like some high-tech socioeconomic iceberg? Yes, here it is, the
first modern city-state to fully take advantage of the concept of
franchise operations Mini-Singapores! Many!

In the coastal city of Longkou, Shandong province, China (just opposite
Korea), Singaporean entrepreneurs are preparing to kick off the first of
these, erecting improved port facilities and a power plant, as well as
hotels, residential buildings, and, yes, shopping centers. The project, to
occupy 1.3 square kilometers, reminds me of "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong"
in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a sovereign nation set up like so many
fried-noodle franchises along the feeder-routes of edge-city America. But
Mr. Lee's Greater Singapore means very serious business, and the Chinese
seem uniformly keen to get a franchise in their neighborhood, and pronto.