Singapore: Day Four

Day Four: The Newspaper. A Hotel Lunch.

Akira leaves for work at about eight in the morning, every morning, and after he leaves sometimes I go to the gym to workout and sometimes I go to the pool to lay in the sun and read and sometimes I draw the curtains and go back to sleep and sometimes I lay in bed and read the complimentary copy of the Straits Times, Singapore’s English language newspaper.

I am amused by the newspaper and read it from front to back--skipping the sports, of course. One morning, I read an interview in which a young successful advertising executive, when asked if she thinks that Singaporean women are becoming too mannish, replies, “Well, yes, we have to. Have you seen our men lately?” I am amused by the grandmotherly restaurant reviews (imagine your own grandmother reviewing a restaurant, any restaurant) and enthralled by the ornate obituaries that include pictures of the deceased.

I read articles about a sixteen-year-old sentenced to five years and twenty-four cane lashes for robbing taxi drivers. I read about a three-year-old girl losing her toe to a shopping mall escalator. I read the comics and the letters to the editor. In one letter, a woman writes that she wants the government to offer a way for her to have a negative evaluation placed on her former maid’s permanent record. She writes that she isn’t objecting to the maid’s services--she was fine at her job--it’s that the maid insisted on dating several young men in the neighborhood. She sincerely wants other potential employers to be spared the embarrassment.

There is a lot of news of maids in Singapore. Singapore is a wealthy nation compared to it’s neighbors and between 100,000 and 150,000 women and men from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Burma, and the Philippines are said to work in Singapore as domestic workers.

As full-time live-in maids, such men and women can earn between $200 and $350 SGD ($130-$225 USD) per month. That’s $32 to $57 US dollars per week for a full-time job that includes cooking, laundry, and cleaning--but which doesn’t necessarily include more than one day off each month. In fact, some maids agree to work their two year contract with no days off--that’s not a single day off for 730 consecutive days--for less than $3,000 per year. To raise the money that ensures placement by a maid agency, sometimes the maid is compelled to work up to six months without pay.

Women employed as maids are required to take medical tests, some monthly, some annually, including AIDS, STD and pregnancy tests. A positive result sends them packing back to their home countries. Online databases allows you to search for maids and includes biographical information about each woman: Age, height and weight, complexion, marital status, religion, number of children they have, whether they are willing to handle or able to eat pork, to work on their day off or wash the car, to care for the elderly or infants or pets, to keep their finger- and toenails clean and refrain from wearing makeup, and what languages they speak. Many speak more than one language including English, Mandarin or Cantonese, and Malay. The website helpfully provides two pictures of each woman, a headshot and a full-body shot.

The want ads are filled with offers of their services--and the news is filled of articles about abused maids. Fines and jail times are levied against employers who abuse their employees. One woman is sentenced to fifteen months in prison for burning her maid with a hot iron and breaking her foot by stamping on it. One man has over 80 charges of abuse levied against him. The problem is so bad that the Indonesian and Philippine embassies have shelters for maids who flee their employers.

These are the problems of a modern-day Singapore, the country that fines you the same amount for chewing gum as for abusing your Indonesian maid.

I finish reading the Straits Times and toss it in the garbage.

For breakfast I eat apples we bought at 7-11 near the hotel and I drink cups of coffee or tea. After a bit, I get dressed and try to decide on lunch. Today I think I’ll see what one of the hotel’s three restaurants has to offer.

There are three restaurants in the hotel. La Cantina in Venizia serves Italian food on the uppermost floor of the hotel, next to the pool. I have never seen a single person inside. There’s Ryan’s Washoku, which purports to serve Japanese food. I have seen the occasional table of Japanese tourists having dinner there, but Ryan doesn’t strike me as being a very Japanese-sounding name, so I skip the washoku. The Saltwater Cafe offers a buffet. I ask the price and am told that it is twenty-five dollars and change, not including drinks. I decide I’ll give it a try.

The food is big hotel food, soulless. There is a heavy reliance on seafood and seafood-based dishes like fish curry and such. But for some reason, The Brain has decided that seafood is an off-limit food. The entire time I am in Singapore, I am unable to eat seafood. There isn’t a large vegetarian selection--though there is a salad made of bread, cucumbers, and fresh mozzarella. And there is fruit.

Ah, fruit. Maybe it’s the season, but fruits here are not as abundant or as varied as they seemed to be in Thailand. On the day I went with Akira to Little India, we wandered the markets looking for fruit. There were apples, pineapple oranges, bananas, carambola, dragonfruit, and longan. That was really about it in Little India. I bought some rose apples, carambola and dragonfruit because Akira had never eaten them. In another market, the supermarket in the basement of the airport, I saw a variety of pears from China and plums from the US. During our stay, we had no luck finding durian, rambutan, or snakefruit, and only later succeeded in finding jackfruit and custard apples (cherimoya).

At the buffet, I eat a few plates of rice and salad, some fruit. I ask one of the women in chef’s whites for some chili and am given a small dish of Heinz chili sauce. It’s fitting. I pay my $30 bill and spend another dollar on a Kit-Kat from the hotel lobby gift shop.