Pearls

The mid-fifties, early sixties kind of working lady: bob cut, demure décolletage, only just above the knee skirt, and the telltale, signature addition - a tight string of pearls. (No matter the glass.) Not one of the confident, saucy kind. Hesitant. New. Wary of police, immigration. A loner too, never in any kind of company. Both earlier in the week and last night too crossing Aljunied - unlike most of us, waiting for the green. She doesn't stand up at the next corner you could safely wager. Most nights there would be three dozen there leaning against the closed shop shutters, in the midst of an assortment of edgy, hovering men, the sharpest of whom almost with a look of users. Would most of these mainlanders have a child back home with their mothers like the Indonesian maids? If they could get work permits for house-keeping no doubt at all most of them would take it. The pearl without a shadow of doubt. She's not after fast money. Why the careful discrimination by the authorities? The mainlanders might more easily find husbands and settle? Not yet come across an Indon girl found that luck. Not one. A prudent social policy. Chinese floodgates must be kept tightly locked. Female and male. Drips and drabs as needed, at time of choosing, numbers, particular projects, fixed terms.
The poor girl won't make a success by any measure here where raunch prevails among the night angels. Not exactly young either. Catch the eye of the old landlords perhaps passing through. Take them back. Pearls before swine.
This is not a retro as we know it back home. Here it is a dominant strand in the Asian catchup—aping—gotta-get-me-some of the fully realized, successfully attained western woman. Every day on every street in the city you see these odd echoes of bygone days, days of hope, innocence, refinement, poise. In the TV dramas playing in the Eateries the same. There will be raunch in Guangzhou, but there and in HK, Shanghai and Macau, as here in Singapore, there will predominate this early sixties top of the range ultimate fashion-plate. (The spiral beyond that period nothing more than degraded excess: that would be the judgement.) Not as flimsy as our retro.