A traveler once dismissed sanitized and safe Singapore as a G-rated ‘Asia lite.’ Returning with his 6-month-old baby, however, he starts to reconsider the merits of the highly controlled city-state. Editor’s note: This piece was selected as a finalist in the 2025 British Guild of Travel Writers awards for Feature of the Year.
Just over 30 years ago, William Gibson summarised all that could be said to be wrong with Singapore in his iconic essay “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” The title pretty much sums it up. Anthony Bourdain namechecked it in his Parts Unknown episode, and it’s become a byword for the clean, efficient, yet merciless city-state.
I first visited Singapore at the age of four, not long after Gibson’s article was published (though I had not read it at the time because it was not about bears, caterpillars, or diggers getting stuck in mud, my preferred themes at that age).
That visit is seared into my mind, a ‘core memory’ that was my first experience of a feeling that would come to define my adult life thus far. The thrill of arriving somewhere new, exciting, and strange. I would visit many more times as a child, accompanied by one or the other parent on the long journey from New Zealand to England and back again. Every time, I would get lost in the thrill of the exotic, those mysterious Chinese letters, and that incredible Asian smell, the scent of spice and life itself.
Memories of those brief Singapore sojourns were replayed over and over again as I daydreamed in the backs of clean Auckland classrooms. There was the chain-smoking rickshaw driver who gave up on a slight incline; my father got out and pushed, while they both insisted I remain awkwardly in the passenger seat. The touts around Boat Quay hustling us into their restaurants made me nervous but also excited; people didn’t act like that at home. Dried mango quickly became a childhood obsession, one which my mother had to wearily explain to paranoid New Zealand biosecurity officers on the way home. The weary, imploring face of that old woman squatting at the foot of a huge building, selling Hello Kitto dolls.
Singapore was my first encounter with the noise and brilliance of Asia. But I would later come to see it as more of an on-ramp, a clean and safe entrance hall to the real thing. The airport to Asia, but not the full-throated glorious chaos of Asia itself.
Twenty-something years later, living at the time in Chengdu, the capital of China’s spicy and, back then at least, still little-touristed Sichuan province, I was no longer the wide-eyed child who stood up in the back of that taxi and gaped at Singapore out the window. In Sichuan, unlike Singapore, no English was spoken. There was an edge of wildness. You probably wouldn’t get robbed. But you might. You probably would get lost. You might make a friend. Stepping onto the street was to encounter a pageant of wondrous drama, uncensored, unscripted, raw. A man may be pulling 30 chairs, alone, strung together, along a potholed street. A beggar passes by with a (literal) monkey on his back. Strangers, seeing a white face, approach for selfies, and gift you a bottle of pungent Chinese baijiu.
Singapore seemed, by contrast, quaint, safe. There was little risk of danger; likewise, the chances of one of those spontaneous friendships, cigarette-and-baijiu-exchanging drinking sessions that fueled life in China seemed equally impossible. Here, life was to follow a script, and the script was emphatically G-rated. One of my travel writing heroes, Paul Theroux, seemed to share this view. He had lived in Singapore when coming up as a writer and decried the technology-reduced freedom in the country he coldly dismissed in The Great Railway Bazaar as “basically an assembly plant for Western business interests.”
My friends who lived there felt differently. When I visited, we went out for dinner and then many, many martinis at a bar near Orchard Rd, and the political debate grew loud. I decried the censorship, the control, the predictability. “It’s the only country where you don’t even notice when you’ve left the airport,” I quipped. A friend retorted that it’s the only country he knows where four-year-olds confidently ride the metro to school. Safety, wealth, and comfort may come at a cost, but it was worth it, he was saying, a social contract most citizens seem to agree with. As our discussion stretched late into the night, a nervous waiter approached us. “Please don’t talk about politics so loud,” he said, “they are listening.”
I felt disturbed by that encounter, the genuine fear in the waiter’s eyes. For many years, I avoided the place. When transiting from family visits in New Zealand to various temporary homes in Europe, I elected for the quick transits through sinister and sweltering Middle Eastern airports rather than seeking out Singapore as my parents had consistently done. Yet finally, this past month, I returned. Not just for a few hours. But for three days. A long layover on the familiar NZ to Europe route. But this time, my wife and our 6-month-old daughter would be by my side.
How would Singapore feel now that my priorities were radically different as a father instead of a hedonistic adventure-seeking twenty-something?
We landed in the morning. The baby was tired after the 11-hour flight from Auckland. Despite a life of travel, I still get nervous before border checks. During the flight, I’d frantically submitted our online arrival declarations using the plane’s WiFi as I hadn’t known we needed them in advance. When we landed, however, things went smoothly. Very smoothly.
There was no queue for the e-gates. We could use them as a family, unlike in Europe, where if you’re with a child under 10, or if you happen to be a very precocious one alone, you need to queue for the manned booth. The three of us filed past an automatic gate, the baby remaining bemused in her pram. A ‘family photo’ was taken, and we watched the screen as our faces, including the baby’s, were instantly matched to our passports. The gate opened. We were through. From landing to baggage claim, in maybe five minutes. There was no queue at customs. We were in our taxi perhaps 15 minutes after landing. Off an international flight with a baby, three people with checked-in luggage. This was extraordinary.
We ate dinner in a hawker centre. These are the best of Asian cuisine, bunched together in little hubs throughout the city. Stand after stand of regional Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Indian food. Unlike most such fare when traveling, there is little to no risk of food poisoning as the health standards are stringent. And yet, with the exception of the sad affair at the top of the Raffles Center, these are not sterile malls. They pulse with energy as diners, often alone, sometimes in loud chattering groups, jostle and shimmy with their trays to find available seats, and slurp spicy soups without spilling drops on their designer suits.
Over three days, we had almost every meal in these hawker centers. Some even had high chairs for the baby. Otherwise, she stayed on one of our laps and munched happily on a plastic spoon, occasionally making hail-mary swipes at whatever steaming hot deliciousness was in front of her, fortunately always just missing.
Here’s the thing: When people want to claim a table to eat at, they leave something on it. Often, it’s something that looks valuable. An umbrella, maybe, but also perhaps a bag or a trinket. It’s always still there when the diner returns. After eating, you take your plate to a central location. We left my wife’s iPhone on our tray and only realized it five minutes later. Rushing back, we found it beside the friendly yet exasperated old woman who was cleaning the trays. “I yelled after you, but you didn’t hear!” she said, handing the phone over.
Singapore has been accused of burying its history beneath layers of malls. Of bland consumerism. Of being the nanniest of nanny states. All of this has weight. But it’s also a functional mix of cultures that co-exist without losing their temples, their tastes, their traditions, their vitality. It is the outcome of relentless purpose; unashamed meritocracy paired with ruthless opportunism. You could call it sterile or clean. G-rated, or safe. Yet I must confess, I felt comfortable there. I could experience the hot spices of Asia, dripping sweat into a steaming noodle bowl, cold beer in hand, this time with one hand gently rocking a pram.
As I cooled a mouthful of spice with a cold his of Tiger beer, I felt my attitude softening. I bought a copy of Lee Kuan Yew’s book From Third World to First at the airport that evening. If this were Disneyland, Lee Kuan Yew would be Walt, and I wanted to hear his story.
