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I have long remained loyal to the cliché that the story of getting to the destination is at least as interesting as that of the destination itself. The last time I was in Singapore, I arrived aboard a cargo ship. We had anchored in the roads, and the next morning proceeded into the harbour with no sense of shame. There were fifty or so other vessels there, all of them, viewed from a distance, were magnificent compared to our own. This time I arrived during the global recession when it was estimated that 10 percent of the world’s deep-water cargo vessels were lying there for want of business, and I saw them only briefly and from above, for now I was travelling on Singapore Airlines, the best use to which anyone’s frequent-flyer points can possibly be put. Singapore is about twenty hours from Vancouver. It was midnight (but of which day?) when I looked out the window of the Airbus 340-500 and saw vivid clusters of lights scattered everywhere. The effect was something like firefly-patterned wallpaper in a room that is otherwise utterly dark. Then I saw the unmistakable Singapore Flyer, the enormous illuminated Ferris wheel-type contraption that emulates the Millennium Wheel in London. We would be landing soon. The intercom came alive with a slight crackle. One of the uniformly charming Singaporean flight attendants (they memorize the passengers’ names in advance) reminded us in a sweet Audrey Hepburn voice that bringing illegal drugs into the country is punishable by death and thank-you-for-flying-with-us-this-evening. Like my former ship, a rusty old hulk indeed, I knew that however much I try, I will never be well enough dressed to be in Singapore.

What everyone everywhere seems to know about Singapore is true, but it is never enough to break through one of the walls on the other side of which lies a more relevant understanding. Yes, it’s a tiny round island, 43.5 by 22.5 kilometres, once one of the jewels of the British Empire. That status was not in dispute until 1942. Singapore’s main defences faced south, toward the sea, not north, across the little Johor Straight that separates it from what was then the rest of Malaya. The Japanese came down from the north. They overran the British and Canadian garrison and slaughtered many of the residents, military and civilian alike.

Politics were often rocky in the few decades following the war, particularly as Malaya was in the bitter bloody process of becoming the independent Malaysia of today. The transitional structure between plain Malaya and the new Malaysia was called the Malay Federation, of which Singapore was a part. But the two entities broke off relations, leaving Singapore to go it alone as a city-state, which, in an informal sense, it had been for a long time. Since then, Singapore has been run by a series of authoritarian rulers, most famously by a father and his son, with a place-holder in between. It is prosperous, modern, beautiful, safe, business-oriented, and, yes, a bit rigid in matters of social behaviour, though far less so now than just a few years ago. It is no longer a crime to carry chewing gum into the country, but the government still makes a fuss when criticized in the Western press, from time to time restricting or banning the Economist or the Asian Wall Street Journal. Conversely, casinos have been legal since 2005: quite a change. Over the years, I have met a number of Canadians who have taken up teaching positions there for a year or so. I’ve always envied them. What else can I report? I was surprised to see local books about Singapore prostitutes being freely published and sold. It seemed obvious (but not blatant) that gay love and lesbian love, while forbidden in theory always, are practised without commotion at least on the weekends.

I wasn’t simply wandering round Singapore blindly and without aim, accumulating such offhand observations. I had no intention of loitering in the Raffles Hotel, worshipping its bar as the birthplace of the Singapore Sling, the way Western visitors enjoy doing. I had a contact to make. She is a friend of one of the Canadian teachers alluded to above, and her name is Evelyn Yang. She and I had never met, but I knew that she possessed Local Knowledge, that most valuable commodity required by travellers, for she is a native-born Singaporean whose family had come to the city from the fast-disappearing rural areas on the north side of the island where they farmed. She and I hit it off at once. She took me walking to illustrate how Singapore’s demography has evolved in such interesting ways.

Despite its slowly unbending reputation for clean-cut repression, Singapore is a society of expert compromisers. It has to be. Seventy-five percent of the people are ethnic Chinese, jumbling Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist beliefs, while 15 percent are Malays who practise Islam. The final 10 percent are South Asian, mostly Tamils. The demographic arithmetic under which Singapore operates so well is based on some ethnic and religious equations fundamentally different from those found anywhere else in this part of the world.

Evelyn pointed out old Sanskrit inscriptions on buildings that were most definitely Chinese. These were small emblems of the fact that if the French of Indochina had to find a way to unify Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina, Laos, and Cambodia without letting themselves be ganged up on, then the British in Singapore, all the way back to the arrival of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in 1819, had to learn how to profit from overwhelming numbers of Chinese of wildly different origins. As policies developed over time, this task came down to shuffling the deck to make separate districts for the Chinese as well as for the Malays and Indians. But the plan didn’t end there. It was also necessary to keep Chinese from squabbling amongst themselves. As Raffles had proposed as early as 1822, whole neighbourhoods were set aside for people from particular provinces. In such groupings, predictably, the matter of one’s exact ancestral origins on the map were inseparable from the question of which dialect one spoke. Speakers of Hokkienese were centred on certain streets, speakers of Hainanese on others. These in turn were quite separate from, say, those whose tongue was Cantonese (which in old Singapore was often called Macao Chinese, indicating those individuals’ connection to the former Portuguese colony below Hong Kong).

“These groupings lasted far into modern days,” Evelyn said. “But they fell away, a little bit at a time — like farm land being sold off to property developers.” The metaphor made her sound wistful.

But it was a different set of policies that pushed Singapore into the contemporary world. For years, the British had been promising that the Chinese would hold real political power in the run-up to Independence in 1959 and of course thereafter. In Singapore and the rest of colonial Malaya, Chinese residents were given ever bigger roles as a way of making them feel like important stakeholders. Let subjects become fully engaged citizens (and let small-business owners become capitalists). According to the logic of Whitehall, that would keep them from giving aid to the communists, particularly those active next door, on the Malay Peninsula itself. As it happened, this plan worked surprisingly well, the usual turmoil and bloodshed notwithstanding. The Singaporean Chinese evidently felt a diminished sense of Chinese nationalism based on race and a greater sense of being Singaporeans in particular. As certain sociologists would say, there has been a lessening of the sojourner attitude. This was in contrast to what, in recent years especially, seems to have been the emotional trend in many other segments of the worldwide Chinese diaspora. The Chinese in Singapore get along rather well as Singaporeans. As Evelyn said to me over lunch one day, “I speak Hokkienese. My husband is Fuzhou-speaking. At home, we use English.” She laughed at the wonderful incongruity of it all.

Yet our midday meal, paradoxically, was quite nationalistic in feel, owing to the extremity of the multicultural impulse behind it. We were at a tiny spotless restaurant with a feng shui mirror over the front door to misdirect bad spirits. It served Peranakan food, which is sometimes called Nyonya. This cuisine is not fusion, a term that suggests that elements have been combined artificially or at least deliberately. Rather, it is a style of cookery that has risen in organic fashion from various traditions over the five centuries or so that Europeans have been doing business in coastal Asia. Just as British, Dutch, and Portuguese traders mated with Chinese, Malays et al., so did Malay curries take up with Indian spices and Siamese herbs until there no longer seemed anything strange in the result. Described in theory this way, Peranakan doesn’t sound all that unusual. But several key ingredients local to the region make it nearly irreproducible anywhere else. One is buah keluak (in English: candlenut), which grows mostly in Indonesia and Malaysia and is poisonous until reasoned with. In one dish, its kernel is pulverized, sweetened, salted, and mixed with very spicy chicken or pork (the latter indicating that Muslims avoid Peranakan meals).

Like other sophisticated women in Singapore, at least in my observation and experience, Evelyn was apparently not affected in the least by the reckless use of scandalously strong spices nor by the fact that walking through the streets was like exercising in a steam room. She was crisp, pressed, stylish, and poised. I imagined she always was. I never quite got up the courage to ask her what her Chinese name was. Living in Canada, where a quarter of the population is from somewhere else — and residing as I do in one of the two cities where the figure is 50 percent — I know that scratching the veneer of another person’s reinvention is the essence of poor etiquette. Evelyn was Evelyn, with her perfect hair, Gucci bag, and (here I am only guessing) $700 shoes. In one of our talks, however, there did come a point where, bolstered by context, I thought it safe to inquire about how her family made out during the Japanese occupation, so many years before her birth. At first she sidestepped the question with diplomatic ease. Later, on her own accord, she returned to it, and recounted horrible scenes of rape and death as she had learned about them from her grandmother. “She could not forgive, she could not forget.”

In another two days, I would be crossing over into Malaysia. Bypassing Kuala Lumpur if possible (for I have bad memories of the place — details to follow), I would make my way up Thailand to rendezvous with my friend Christopher G. Moore, the thriller writer. Many of his books are set in Bangkok, though his experience of Southeast Asia overall is long, wide, and deep. He has expert Local Knowledge written all over him.

Before I left Singapore, however, Evelyn wanted to take me to Thian Hock Keng. I believed I knew why. This temple in the middle of Chinatown is the perfect illustration of how Singapore’s past and present connect in the way they do. For years, Thian Hock Keng, built in 1840 and thus one of the oldest buildings in Singapore, was the largest structure on the island. It took generations to complete, and the long-term commitment of poor immigrants as well as wealthy min businessmen. It is located on Telok Ayer Street, in the centre of the area that was so long ago decreed the Hokkien heartland. No doubt the neighbourhood always has been densely populated, but originally it must have been quite compact in area. I presume that the fact that a thoroughfare named Synagogue Street is only two or three blocks to the north suggests how closely it once bordered another very different community. I wish I knew about more the historical relationship between Jews and Singapore. What I do know is that the funeral customs of some Singaporean Chinese are quite close to those of Judaism. Mourners perform a ritual very much like sitting shiva. Mirrors are either draped in cloth or turned to the wall.

Thian Hock Keng follows the architectural conventions of Chinese palaces, with its upswept roofs, courtyards, and red-lacquered rooms with exposed beams. To say the least, it has multiple layers and levels of religious and mythological adornment, including stone windows decorated with a bat motif. Bats, whether living or symbolic, are valued because in Mandarin the word for bat (fu) is pronounced the same as fu, meaning good fortune. The complex faces south, and I would guess was once closer to the waterfront than it is now. In any case, its main hall is a shrine to Ma Zu, the sea goddess, whose day is the twenty-third day of the third lunar month. Workers either coming down from China to earn a living or returning home after a lifetime of labour would go there to give thanks for a safe sea journey or to pray for one. Over time, an assortment of other important deities, Confucian and Daoist, as well as Buddhist, protected the temple, and the place lost — outgrew, but not abandoned — its association with migrants. It became an important religious centre for Singapore Chinese, regardless of geographic ties of linguistic allegiance. It became, in fact, the very symbol of a strong, permanent, and self-sustaining Singapore that grew out of the sojourner experience.

On entering, I left my shoes on the stone steps, as one does. On leaving, I thought for a moment that they had been stolen. But no, an attendant of some sort, a surly fellow, had separated them from the shoes of Asian worshippers on the topmost step and placed them on one much lower down, indicating what in his view was my less than elevated status. I picked them up and carried them a short distance away before putting them on, so I wouldn’t give further offence by tying the laces on temple property. He glowered at me as I did so. Evelyn betrayed no reaction whatsoever. Such was her natural dignity that she refused to take notice.