Word: tanglin
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...expat ranks swelled and foreigners put down roots, the city's tonier districts filled up. Prices for apartments in Western enclaves like Tanglin and Orchard doubled in value from 2004 to 2008 as buyers snapped them up. Waiting lists for coveted spots at international schools like the Singapore American School or United World College of South East Asia were so long that expats were encouraged to register their children at birth in order to gain admission four or five years later. The cost of joining the Singapore Island Country Club and the American Club soared as transferable memberships were bought...
...more powerful in the late 1930s, when the novel is set. The story sprawls around the family of Walter Blackett, a wealthy British businessman who is clinging, with increasingly comic desperation, to the old colonial order as his beloved city lurches toward World War II. Around the bungalows of Tanglin his tempestuous daughter is conducting love affairs with variously unsuitable men, his son is proving too unreliable to inherit the family firm Blackett & Webb, and his business partner, once a model of rectitude, has become an aging eccentric who prunes his rose bushes in the nude. (See pictures of Singapore...
...Through these two characters, posh and seamy prewar Singapore come simultaneously alive. A contemporary tour of Singapore shows how Blackett's world, and to a great extent Webb's, are still around. Tanglin is where the moneyed still live, in jungle-shrouded black-and-white bungalows. The "marmoreal banks" of Collyer Quay are there too, even if their employees no longer take mid-morning tiffin or quit for a game of tennis in the late afternoon, as Blackett did. So is the Cricket Club, where around the teak-paneled bar titans of business are becalmed by an early evening beer...
...Victor Woo, driver, SMRT Taxis Start at Tanglin Village on Dempsey Hill, formerly home to military barracks and now packed with dozens of restaurants, bars and boutiques. Stroll around the antique-furniture shops and art galleries. For outdoor dining under the stars, go to Oosh, tel: (65) 6475 0002, for its lush greenery, huge waterfall and Western-Japanese cuisine. Try the warm Valrhona chocolate torte with ice cream. Afterwards, go to Bugis Village night market for some bargains, before ending with a supper of local fruits at Geylang district - it's the red-light district but it's also known...
...write history instead of fiction. For the book is not so much imagined as documented. Plot developments, like Singapore rickshas, serve to convey the reader from one exhibit to another. On your right are the rubber industry warehouses, repositories of greed; ahead is Chinatown; up the hill is Tanglin the English colony's surrogate Surrey...