scribbles from a small island

Stuff to entertain your gwai-lou friends...

Three men are sitting around a table outside a coffee shop. A 'coffee shop' in Singapore doesn't mean anything like Starbucks, even less a café in a hotel. It's a very downmarket place where you find cheap food, dirty tables, steamy air and disgusting social habits. Singaporeans frequently take their meals in coffee shops, with much insouciance.

All three men are wearing polo shirts with faded horizontal stripes and wilted collars. Two have sand-blasted denim jeans; the youngest one in his late twenties in a pair of bermudas. Two are in sandals, the third in boots. They're working-class men, maybe electricians or crane drivers.

There isn't much conversation. They just sit there, comfortable in each other's company, coming up with an occasional remark -- in Hokkien -- between puffs of tobacco. 'Unwinding', I suppose, is the word.

'Reddening' is another apt word. Their faces. Steadily reddening from beer. There are three large bottles on the table, mostly finished. Then along comes the Tiger Beer sales promoter in blue and yellow. She's in her mid-thirties, getting a bit plump, with hair and nails done up, and a skirt oh too short for her varicosed legs. Quite apparently, she's never heard of colour co-ordination either. Poised midway between being an Ah Lian and an Ah Soh, there is an attempt to be fashionable, crushed by the reality of working in a sweaty coffee shop.

But she's chatty, and the men's faces light up when she approaches. Heterosexual men are so predictable! They joke with her, she ribs them back, saucily. She refills their glasses from the last of the bottles, and ask if they want more. Ya, sure, they say. And she goes off to fetch another three bottles. What an easy job!

* * * * *

Smoking and drinking are, sadly, part of our broader culture. Men [seem to] think they're more manly or macho if they do that. It's very hard to deny men, gay or straight, their [idea of] masculinity. In addition, beer and tobacco are addictive. Once people are hooked, you can't ban it like you can ban chewing gum (but even then, I can tell you, the chewing gum ban doesn't work very well).

Unless we want to be isolationist like North Korea, it will be difficult to turn off the spigot. We can try to maintain a public policy that is at the more prohibitive end of the global spectrum of opinion, but we can't insist on a level of intolerance not supported by worldwide trends.

Or else, just imagine this scenario, say in the lucrative tourism sector of our economy, for one. If we totally banned smoking in Singapore, three-quarters of our Japanese and Chinese visitors would be suffering cold-turkey in our lushly carpeted hotel rooms, vowing never to come back. We wouldn't want that to happen, don't we?