As the expanse of sky shrank, so too did the sense of scale that I tried to preserve in a city of high-density living. Finally its completed facade became a wall between my reflections and me. Its wooden skeleton sectioned the black sky into picture frames through which the airplanes passed. The house sat on a small hill that allowed me to watch approaching and departing aircraft from the airport some twenty miles to the east, their landing lights visible on clear nights, until construction of a new house across the street edited my view. One by one the bungalows were destroyed around me, the worth of their lots in the millions of US dollars multi-storied buildings, symbols of wealth, sprang up that converted every inch of outside space to an interior to be kept freezer cold, as though in defiance of Singapore's equatorial temperatures.
I was out of sync in a young country in an economic boom where monetary success was a form of patriotism. My concern for the inevitable demise of the old houses was not understood by less sentimental Singaporeans, an affluent population seeking private property (what remained of it) and not the past. Fan-cooled and with walls perforated for additional ventilation, our house came with a small garden where I sat in the evenings cooled by monsoon breezes to watch an owl on its favorite perch in an adjacent tree, etched like a shadow puppet against the sky, until the tree was chopped down to make way for a construction site. It belonged to a neighborhood where the British street names evoked the colonial era but not as vividly as the hundreds of "black and white" mansions that survived on landscaped grounds in other parts of the island. I searched the newspaper ads for a rental house, finding it easily because it was waiting for me, a small bungalow dating from the late 1940s. There was never any one absolute experience: opposites were equally represented and, more often than not, the subtler of the pair was the closer approximation of a situation's truth and by far its greater lesson. What occurred between airport and hotel was an introduction to the contradictions that I was to discover were the norm of Singapore life, unexpected events because appearances often gave another impression, like those disfiguring scissors in a hairdressers that glittered like gold. A noisy thunderstorm broke soon after we left the airport, a near-daily occurrence on the island, the heavy downpours temporary relief from the unrelenting heat.
#Beautication charmas license
My husband waited outside with a company vehicle, an old Hyundai, which, despite its battered condition, cost more to license than an average down payment on an American home. Years later I found myself in Singapore's Changi Airport, declaring myself a new resident to an immigration officer. I selected a beauty salon in the refrigerated depths of a stylish Orchard Road shopping center and exited an hour later, chilled to the bone and most unhappily, regretfully, shorn. I stayed the three days long enough to take care of business - no different from today's millions of annual visitors. I had been traveling for months in Southeast Asia Singapore was my halfway house to and from destinations without hairdressers, bank branches, long distance telephone services and shops with my shoe size.
At an age when it mattered, I received a bad haircut in Singapore.
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