The Last Great Strike by Clement Mesenas

Author:Clement Mesenas [Mesenas, Clement]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814435833
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

09

THE ANG MOH AND STORIES OF LOVE AND LUST

In the days of the Vietnam War, Singapore was an R & R (rest & recreation) oasis for war-weary American GIs. Girls used to flock to Serene House in Farrer Road where the men were staying. Uproarious parties, with naked men and women cavorting by the poolside, soon got the neighbours up in arms, and Singapore decided that the R & R business posed too great a threat to the fledgling social moral fabric. The GIs headed for the more tolerant climes of Bangkok and Pattaya. We shook our heads with righteous repugnance at the salacious ways of the westerners, or ang moh as we used to call them and still do up till today. But these days, the term ang moh is no longer derogatory. Many, including me, use it with a measure of affection. The original term, used for decades in Singapore, was ang moh gui, meaning, a Caucasian devil (more accurately, a red-haired devil). More often than not, the term was used to refer to Singapore’s colonial masters, who were mostly Britons. Today, the gui has been dropped and there is no hatred when ang moh is used to address the hordes of white expats who have flocked to our shores.

Despite the departure of the GIs, there was still plenty of scope for the pursuit of human interest stories — sex, crime, the sordid underbelly of life. Peter Lim, then executive editor of The Straits Times — before the onset of “developmental journalism” — wanted the most interesting crime stories of the day placed in columns 7 and 8 at the top of page one. The other six columns of the front page carried banner headlines, two decks, for weighty political stories. If there was a good picture, the lead headline would shrink to three columns, three decks, with two or three columns for a deep picture. But columns 7 and 8 would stay for the crime stuff. And it became my job with the other crime reporters to chase such stories.

There was the story of a woman who was stabbed in the neck in a small village in Changi as she returned from work along a dirt track in the dark. I spoke to her husband by the glow of a carbide lamp as he perched on a raised platform outside his atap hut (made of wooden walls and a roof made from coconut fronds). He was non-committal. Much older than his wife who was 35, he said she came home at the same time each night, but she was strangely late the night she was killed. He found her body by the side of the dirt track, in the bushes. No, he did not know who did it. Or why she was killed as she had no enemies. The investigation officer told me: “Don’t tell anybody I said it, but the woman was killed with the blade of [a] nail clipper. It hit her in the carotid artery in her neck, and she bled to death.

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