I am 42 this year, and for the past three decades, I have been living in Joo Chiat. Every Friday and Saturday, my neighbours and I will go to one of the pubs down the road from Joo Chiat Complex; and from around 9pm we will drink until the place closes at 1am. Thereafter, we may take our party over to Geylang, where pubs can open till much later.
All of my drinking buddies are fellow Joo Chiat residents. And to be honest, most of the faces we see in the Joo Chiat pubs are those of long-time neighbours. Familiar faces. Is this not something different from what the public usually hears? Is there not a stark contrast with how everyone thinks that Joo Chiat residents want the ‘sleaze’ cleaned up?
Here is another side of the story.
We actually like the Working Girls. On the more superficial level, I believe it hard for any Singaporean to deny that these girls are attractive. They are young, they are thin, they are fair as porcelain, and their features neat and delicate. However, most noteworthy is how BRAVE, INDEPENDENT, and RESILIENT they are to leave their families, friends, homes, cultures, and even lovers behind to come to Singapore and earn a living here. Working in a pub can be dangerous and humiliating, but many of them stay strong. Many of them are poor girls, hardened in the streets.
It is not just about the girls, but perhaps the whole red-light industry itself. ‘The oldest profession’ is raw, and it is in this rawness that it is so real. Prostitutes are daughters of parents who love them no less than our parents love us; and they are girlfriends and eye candies of boys like us elsewhere; and in their youth, they used to dream as our children do. Yet they have to survive. In prostitution we see how money really drives people, how the exchange is so transparently harsh and bitter. Here in Joo Chiat, the pubs represent BRAVE SURVIVAL.
Knowing so, why the push towards a ‘sleaze-free’ Joo Chiat? And most essentially, why champion against the pubs and KTVs when you yourself frequent them? Why are my friends so hypocritical – patronizing the girls and then betrayingly say, ‘I want this dirt cleaned up’? Most of them cite property values as reasons. Some of them mention wanting a decent environment for their kids to grow up in. Some of them condemn the pubs simply because their jealous wives do.
These hypocrites want to be seen in public as respectable men. They call themselves ‘high-class’ family men – English-speaking, God-fearing. Yet they contradict themselves so deeply. Imagine an analogous scenario: telling your girlfriend that you love her and then telling everyone else that she is a disgusting slut. Then trying to get the police to arrest her.
I think the hypocrisy is more disgusting.