#I do actually want to finish Gilded by the end of November just because i want to get it revised and printed before the winter break

[sergeantsporks]

"What are you doing for NaNoWriMo" Well, I'm just trying to finish writing the last 4 chapters of my fic that I've been working on for the past year and a half. But have fun with your 50,000 words in one month goals.

[nekojitachan]

How to Steal a Million

This is... part three?

We’re really starting to bring the gang together here, and the plot will really kick in after this!

*******

Neil lay sprawled upon a velvet-covered divan in Allison’s humongous bedroom while she stood in front of a gilded mirror which she claimed had belonged to Marlene Dietrich (he believed her), wearing nothing but lacy lingerie (he would go out on a limb and say that she had a date with Renee later) and tossing very (very) expensive pieces of clothes about while she decided what to wear that day. “So you’re basically telling me that you stabbed some no-name thief, bandaged him up and then let him go? Oh cutie-pie, just wait until I tell Renee! She’ll be so pleased to learn that you’re turning to the light, or something like that.” Allison beamed at him as she casually threw a Gucci shirt over her shoulder.

“I’m not going soft,” Neil sneered as he sat up, “it’s just that Stuart gets so grumpy when there’s blood on the Persian rugs and I spent all of last November swiping things for Berger to make up for taking out one of his best breakers.” He sighed as he thought of how he’d just wanted to spend the month hanging out with his friends before the city got too crazy for the holidays (too many tourists and people rushing about for the season), but no, it hadn’t worked out that way, had it? “Though he was American, so I doubt he’s associated with any of the local gangs.” Better safe than sorry, though, especially when dealing with a grumpy Stuart. There was just too much sighing and whinging and ‘where did I go wrong, Mary? Where did I go wrong?’

(Neil could give him one hell of a list, but there’d just be more damn sighing and whinging.)

“Hmm, caution’s not a bad thing,” Allison agreed as she eyed a Dior skirt before tossing it aside, too. “Though I worry about you, so damn cute and barely psychotic, and what do you do when you have a guy in your home late at night? You beat him up and send him on his way.” She shook her head as if disappointed. “It’s time for us to go to work again, grasshopper.” Her glossy red lips spread in a predatory grin before she leaned into the one closet to grab more clothes.

Hmm, that… that had possibilities; at the very least, it would serve as a distraction from the whole Venus mess, and it might be a good idea to have more cash on hand because of the Venus mess. “Who’s the mark, and won’t Renee be upset, talking about the whole ‘light side’?” Was that the right term? Matt had tried to make him watch the movies about the whole ‘light’ and ‘dark’ thing, but he’d fallen asleep within ten minutes.

It didn’t help that Henry had dared him to break into four mansions the night before….

“Oh, don’t worry, the target is grade-A asshole, so much that Renee won’t mind in the slightest. Now, what shall I wear?” She pulled out a slinky black McQueen dress with straps and rivets that would cover her from neck to ankles (for the most part) yet cling to a figure which attracted men and women alike (but not Neil), and a flowing light blue Chloe wrap dress.

“Definitely the McQueen,” Neil decided. “You’re clearly giving them fair warning that you’re ready to utterly destroy them, but they’re too busy drooling over your ass to care. Plus, I think Renee finds the skulls on the purses adorable.”

“As it should be, cutie-pie, as it should be.” Allison smirked as she dropped the Chloe gown to the floor; Neil shook his head and knew that Ines, Allison’s assistant, was paid more than enough to deal with the mess. “Once I slither into this, we’ll set about dressing you into something presentable and be on our way.”

Neil groaned as he lay back down and wondered if it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, to let L.A. kill him in his sleep last night or something.

*******

Andrew tapped his fingers on the table while he waited for his ‘contact’ to arrive; he’d kept track of her over the years, and when Kevin had ‘dragged’ him to Paris for this latest case? Reached out to her in case he had need of her knowledge.

After last night? He definitely had need of Renee’s knowledge of the city, even if she seemed to have gone ‘straight’ in the last couple of years.

Well, straighter.

He’d finished his second meager cup of coffee (really, what did the French have against a decent size of coffee?) and his third cream puff (much better than the coffee) at the café not too far from the burnt husk of Notre Dame when Renee appeared. He noticed her decent French, which she used to order coffee and a couple of cream puffs, how her hair was now bleached silver with rainbow colored ends, her clothes simple but of good quality, and how she basically… she looked good. Looked at peace with herself.

When he’d first met her, it was barely a year after she’d gotten out of prison and was still trying to leave ‘Natalie Shields’ behind; she hadn’t appreciated Andrew being pointed her way for help with a case, yet she’d obliged after a rough introduction. Andrew had thought it an act initially, her attempt to change her life, to move on from Natalie and become Renee Walker, but he’d been convinced by the time he’d solved the forgery case. She’d helped out a couple of other times, then moved to Paris to take a job at a woman’s shelter.

“Hello, Andrew. You look good.” Renee’s voice was still soft and possessed a hint of her North Dakota upbringing. Despite him calling out of the blue, her smile was warm and dark eyes bright with affection. “Do you like Paris so far?”

“It’s crowded, the traffic is terrible and their coffee sucks. Plus, I was trapped on a plane for seven hours with Kevin Day. Seven hours,” he hissed as he folded his arms over his chest and slumped back in his chair. “Somehow, he’s still alive.”

“I’ll be certain to recommend you for sainthood over that extreme act of charity,” she murmured as she pushed the plate containing the cream puffs toward him. “Especially if he returns to the States alive as well.”

“Seven hours,” Andrew repeated as he did his best not to think about the flight home – one of them was going to be doped out of their minds for it, he just hadn’t decided who yet.

Renee stifled a giggle with the back of her right hand before she sipped her coffee. “Other than that, it’s going well?” She gazed at the band-aid on his throat before she looked him in the eye. “I assume if Kevin’s here, it’s not a vacation?”

“You assume correct.” He paused to eat one of the cream puffs (at least he was walking a lot to offset all the sweets) before he got down to business. “We’re here because of the Kleber-Lafayette Museum’s latest exhibit.”

“Ah.” Renee frowned as she turned her cup of coffee around on its saucer with the tips of her fingers. “I’m not sure what help I’ll be, since I’m not… well, I’m not involved in those things anymore, not really. And the little I am, just through a couple of associates, hasn’t brought me word of any trouble with that show.”

Now that was interesting – not that Renee knew ‘interesting people’, because he expected no less of the woman, but that she was already tied into gossip about the museum. “Really? Nothing at all?”

“No, nothing, it’s free of trouble as far as I know,” she insisted with a slight shake of her head.

Hmm.” Andrew had the last cream puff while he considered that. “What about Neil Josten? Have you heard about him?”

Renee was quiet while she finished her coffee then set it down without a sound, her motions smooth and too controlled. “I’m sorry, Andrew, but I believe we have a conflict of interests here.” That time, her smile was bland. “I do know him, but as a friend. He and his uncle regularly donate to the shelter, and he volunteers there as well.”

That wasn’t what Andrew wanted to hear, not about the sarcastic, handsome asshole who’d insulted him while bandaging him up last night – after nearly slitting his throat last night.

No one should look that damn good while giving him shit and continuously threatening to kill him. Maybe Aaron was right and there really was something wrong with Andrew….

Nah, Aaron was just jealous that Andrew was the older, better-looking, smarter twin.

Yet here Renee sat and proclaimed that Josten – the guy who’d tried to slit Andrew’s throat and gave him advice on who to rob – was a veritable angel. “Funny you say that, because I think I might be checking into his uncle because of work, and this,” he gestured to the little ‘scratch’ on his neck, “is from Josten.”

Renee frowned as she seemed to think about that. “Hmm, and what were you doing to provoke such a reaction out of him?” When Andrew was quiet, she nodded once. “Neil’s a good friend. He hasn’t had the easiest of times growing up, but he’s not a bad man.” She nodded again as she stood. “And I’d be careful, because he has people who care about him, who watch over him. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to return to work. Be careful, Andrew, you and Kevin.”

He watched her go then got up to leave himself, thoughts occupied with what she’d said – with what basically was a warning.

The more he learned about Neil Josten, the more the pieces didn’t fit together; if there was one thing (actually, there was a rather long list) that Andrew didn’t like, it was incomplete puzzles. He detested things that he couldn’t easily solve, that taunted him with their jagged edges that didn’t smooth out and fit together, with missing pieces and equations just waiting for that last bit to be figured out.

Josten? Neil Josten was all of that rolled together, was violence with a friendly smile, a teasing, lilting voice that poured out insults, a gorgeous man who’d shown no interest nor repulsion in Andrew despite his mild flirting.

Andrew had a job he was paid to do and now Riko Moriyama to deal with… but damnit, he’d figure out one Neil Josten before he left Paris, he swore to himself.

*******

Neil, dressed in McQueen as well (Allison had laughed as she ‘bullied’ him into the black blazer embellished with butterflies, but at least let him wear jeans and a pale grey shirt beneath it), escorted Allison into the cocktail party they were basically crashing (as if anyone would dare to throw Allison Reynolds out of a party she deigned to grace with her presence) – a cocktail party held during the middle of the day.

Someone was trying a bit too hard.

That someone turned out to be Riko Moriyama, which explained it rather well.

“Oh yes, Renee will even light a candle for us, I’m willing to bet,” Neil murmured in French as he gazed at the Japanese-American man who appeared to be boring Agnes Caron to tears; unfortunately, it was the freelance reporter’s job to suffer such things, and she probably was there to find out if he or his uncle were opening a new office in Paris.

Or, more importantly, if Riko’s brother was opening a new office in Paris, since the Stone Mountain corporation was much more important (powerful, wealthier, etc.) than Edgar Allan, one of its subsidiaries.

Was also free of rumored, quickly buried scandals – scandals tied to one Riko Moriyama.

Neil hoped that Agnes was careful, because she was a friend of Dan’s and never reported any lies about Allison.

Then he pushed all thoughts of the woman aside because Allison dragged him further into the room, right as Riko looked their way, an expression of interest on his face.

*******

Last part can be found here

[lhs3020b]

I’ve not done a Diary of a Disaster entry for a while, mostly because we’ve reached the stage where it genuinely is too soul-destroying for words.

The Tory leadership election has already been a farce. After months of “never BoJo” posturing, guess what Tory MPs did? He got an absolute majority of them on the last ballot of MPs.

The runner-up was the loathsome Jeremy Hunt - the man who got caught trying to sell more of the media to Murdoch, then got to preside over the catastrophic reorganisation (read: stealth privatisation) of the NHS that started under the horrible Lansley and who also has a side-line in bloviating about US insurance companies on the floor of the House. (He apparently has the warm fuzzies for someone called Kaiser Permanente ... I made a conscious decision not to look up the details, because I didn’t even want to know what I might find.) Oh, and he’s also apparently the wealthiest member of the Cabinet, even amongst our government of millionaires. I mean, at the risk of sounding cynical, I suppose institutionalising kleptocracy would be consistent with our existing political practise, but it still leaves a nasty taste in your mouth.

And then we have BoJo, or to use his full name, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Incidentally, you never, ever hear the “de Pfeffel” bit mentioned in the British media - which is quite a significant indicator of how complicit our journalists are in his personal image-making. The other thing you never hear mentioned is that he was actually born in New York. That’s right - an anti-immigration rabble-rouser who is an immigrant himself.

As things stand, he appears near-certain to end up as Prime Minister. (The party membership haven’t finished voting yet, but no-one’s expecting any surprises. The only possible surprise is whether or not BoJo gets less than 60% of the Tory grass-roots vote.)

Also, it emerges that he’s an even worse person than we thought. Before this year, I’d thought of him as a greedy, shallow narcissist. None of that is appealing - but, we’ve had moronic narcs in Number 10 before (David Cameron is a prominent example, and Tony Blair had elements of that too). I’d previously assumed that between them, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office (the traditional behind-the-curtain dupoly in British government) could probably “manage” him. (”Yes, Prime Minister, this is a fantastic idea, it’s gilded and golden and we want to talk more about how wonderful it is, and we’ll do that soon, please just quickly sign these documents so we can get back to how wonderful you are...”)

Then the allegations surfaced about his treatment of Carrie Symonds, his girlfriend. All I’ll say about that is, don’t Google it if domestic violence, gaslighting and abuse are triggering things for you.

Basically, what we now know is that he’s a full-on sociopath. He has no principles and no values, he is just a complete howling void of personal monstrosity. The man is evil. I can’t think of any other word for it.

And of course the Tory Party will push that button, because there’s nothing that they won’t do for power.

As for the actual policies espoused in the leadership election, well, there aren’t any, really. Both candidates are promising that Everything Will Be Wonderful And There Will Be No Problems Ever, Just Vote For Me. The disconnection from reality is astonishing. And somehow, they’ve actually got worse on Brexit. Yes, they’ve got worse. It is, somehow, possible.Their stated positions are now even more delusional than the previous nadir, that being the “Malthouse Compromise” fuckery. It’s been three years. No-one has learned a single lesson. No-one is paying attention. No-one in power gives a shit.

In case you’re wondering where Labour is in all of this, they’re busy re-admitting the noted walking liability that is Chris Williamson. (In case you’re wondering, he’s neck-deep in the party’s ongoing antisemitism scandal, and neck-deep in the bad way.) Labour’s ongoing four-year civil war has reached the “doesn’t Corbyn look tired?” stage. Meanwhile, the odious Len McClusky is popping up across the media on how Labour mustn’t even consider a leftward move on its Brexit position. Apparently the 1/3rd of 2017 Labour voters who were pro-Brexit are completely essential, whereas the 2/3rds of Labour Remainers ... aren’t.

As to how the electoral arithmetic of this works, well, courtesy of Wikipedia, here’s what the current UK opinion polling looks like (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#Graphical_summary ):

Note the craziness at the end - we’re close to a four-way tie between the Brexit Party, Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems(!!). If that actually happened in a British general election, it’s anyone’s guess what First Past The Post voting would do with that.

You’d think Labour would be worried about seeing polling numbers as low as 18% ... but apparently not, it’s all fine. Because mumble mumble dialectic mumble authentic working-class social process mumble mumble, or something to that effect.

If (when?) de Pfeffel does end up as Prime Minister our one slender hope is a vote of no confidence in the House. However, Labour have been being surprisingly-rubbery about whether or not there’ll be one - apparently they’ve trotted Barry Gardiner out today to pour some cold water on the idea. At a guess, what’s going on is that the Labour Brexit lobby are trying to have their cake and eat it - basically, get their Brexit and have the Tory Party do it for them, on the assumption that they can squirm away from any personal pain. (As we can see on the above chart, this is unlikely to work for them.)

Meanwhile, the economic news is grim - the UK economy contracted last quarter. You need two consecutive quarterly contractions to officially be a recession, so we’re not technically there yet, but I wouldn’t bet against it. (One thing I’ve noticed around town in Bristol is that some luxury goods shops are shuttering and all the others are running huge sales, and luxury stuff is the first thing to go when the economy starts to slide. Also it feels like I’m seeing more homeless people than even six months ago, which is another ominous datapoint. Lastly, in recruitment, from what I’m seeing, no-one anywhere is hiring, which is also a bad sign. Especially so for me, as I want out of my current job!)

So yeah, TL;DR the ruling party have irrevocably lost their marbles, the country is about to be run by a sociopathic narcissist and the economy looks ready to fall off a cliff. November will be such fun! Not.

[southeastasianists]

The late Singaporean novelist Gopal Baratham’s A Candle or the Sun, published in 1991, is rightly regarded as one of the finest works of literature to come out of the city-state (though probably not according to its government). Politically-minded, and not afraid to amble along a storyline of repression and state-enforced victimhood, it is small wonder Baratham’s writing was often compared to George Orwell’s. A Time magazine’s review of A Candle or the Sun states that it “picks up where George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four left off.” In the negative, both authors’ styles are admittedly a little too heavy with caricature and requisite pathos, especially when it comes to life’s victims. Indeed, A Candle or the Sun might initially catch one’s eye as a Southeast Asian transmutation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Baratham would say in an interview, he wanted to complete the book by 1984 “for Orwell” but couldn’t finish it until the end of 1985. The book is set in 1983. It took another six years to find a publisher, which was Serpent’s Tail, of London.

A more discernible reader, however, might also notice the traces of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. A bored salesman and failing amateur writer (a la Gordon Comstock), Baratham’s protagonist, Hernie Perera, gives up on his artistic dreams, though with the promise of literary success, when he accepts a job offer from an old friend to work at the Ministry of Culture producing propaganda. Both Comstock and Perera are susceptible to hypocrisy gilded in justification, mistreatment of their lovers for their own advancement, and an overestimation of their own literary merits.

Perera’s self-respect is lost (though later redeemed) when he betrays to his new employers his lover Su-May, a member of anti-government Christian sect that is printing a “street paper.” This oppressive state is ominously distant from the story, however. (The setting is clearly Singapore, despite the book’s forewarning that “any similarity of persons, places or events depicted herein to actual persons places or events is purely coincidental.”) Perera does muse on how the state wants a say in even the most minute points of life (“your masters kennel you in neat boxes, doctor your females, control litter size according to pedigree and tell you what names you can give your pups,” to give one example.) And Perera is later chided by the lover of his friend: “Did they never tell you that on this island of paradise of ours trade is a matter of security, education is a matter of security, health is a matter of security, how you wash your underwear is a matter of security.”

The Singaporean academic Ban Kah Choon apparently once described him as a “magician who stands before the unknown to decipher what has yet to be written.” Ignore the pretentiousness and incoherence of this statement; Baratham, after all, was fictionalising fact in A Candle or the Sun: specifically, Operation Spectrum, the Singaporean government’s attempt at McCarthyism. But he was certainly charting a new course in Singaporean literature. And instigators often have to be more obvious. Baratham was at his best when he was at his subtlest, though he often had the habit of repeating his understatements so often they become glaring. Indeed, re-reading A Candle or the Sun in light of the more recent politically-natured novels from Singapore (I’m thinking in particular of Jeremy Tiang’s understated State of Emergency, published in May) one gets the sense that Baratham subscribes to the hammer-to-crack-a-nut cliché.

Three years after A Candle or the Sun was published, Catherine Lim, another Singaporean writer, earned a rebuke from Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong for her articles in the Straits Times. Writers on the fringe must not challenge the government, the Prime Minister said. There were suspicions, during the ‘90s, of Baratham being the city-state’s “token liberal,” an author who avoided the sort of criticism and censorship others faced. “You should criticize the faults if you care for the society,” he said in 1996. “Some people say I’m the government’s token liberal. What can I say?”

His background, perhaps, afforded him some protection. Born in 1935, decades before Singapore became an independent nation, he followed his parents’ footsteps into the medical profession. At 36, he finally graduated from the University of Edinburgh, specialising in neurosurgery, after training at the Royal London Hospital. He would later return to Singapore, eventually becoming the head of Tan Tock Seng Hospital’s neurosurgery department. In 1991, the same year A Candle or the Sun was published, he was elected president of the ASEAN Association of Neurosurgeons.

His prominence in the medical field, at least in Southeast Asia, was not quite equalled by his literary recognition. A Candle or the Sun became his first published novel, after two collections of short stories, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1992, which he reportedly turned down because, he said, it was awarded based on the panel looking for a “Singapore style of writing” when he considered his work international (most of his work was published by British publishing house, not Singaporean ones). He attempted another novel and a non-fiction book after A Candle or the Sun but it was that work that kept his name in alive among the talking classes.

His death, in 2002, gave chance for his reappraisal as an interlocutor for free speech in Singapore. Teng Qian Xi, writing in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore at the time, offered a retrospective: “The criticism of the Singaporean ethos of conformity and rationality, as well as the questioning of memory, rhetoric and history which I often found forced in his stories became more exciting, less pedagogical in A Candle or the Sun.”

Freedom from speech

I do not know how widely A Candle or the Sun is still read in Singapore. I am told anecdotally that, like Nineteen Eighty-Four is around the world, it’s known by many but read by few. I hope not. Nonetheless, it remains an easy-to-hand reference for free speech matters. Indeed, how little things seem to have changed since it was published. The People’s Action Party (PAP) is still in power, as it has been since Singapore gained its statehood. The country’s media remains closed. MediaCorp dominates television and radio, and is the only terrestrial TV broadcaster. It happens to be controlled by the government-owned investment arm, Temasek Holdings, the CEO of which is Ho Ching, the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. As for the newspapers, the Straits Times is owned by Singapore Press Holdings. Its current CEO is Alan Chan, who previously served in several government positions, and its chairman Lee Boon Yang, who served as an MP for the ruling party from 1984 until 2011, and held Cabinet positions during that time.

When Baratham was interviewed after the publication of A Candle or the Sun, he laconically defended himself: “It’s not that I want to irritate, but I just speak my mind… You should criticize the faults if you care for the society.” But this is a concept that still doesn’t find ear among the ruling elite, despite its rhetoric. In February, the Prime Minister commented: “If all you have are people who say, ‘Three bags full, sir’, then soon you start to believe them, and that is disastrous.” On the same day, as the Economist pointed out, a respected former diplomat who now runs a public-policy institute at the National University of Singapore, said Singapore needs “more naysayers [who] attack and challenge every sacred cow.”

Singapore is now a 21st century economy propped up by 20th century politics. And the Sedition Act, on the books since the late 1940s, is still brought out to slap down those naysayers, especially those who criticise the sacred cows, namely religion and race. PM Lee Hsien Loong has defended Singapore’s limits on free expression as a means to safeguard social stability. “In our society, which is multiracial and multi-religious, giving offence to another religious or ethnic group, race, language or religion, is always a very serious matter,” he said. This has been the case since Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister (and the current PM’s father), promised in 1965 to build a multiracial nation. “This is not a Malay nation; this is not a Chinese nation; this is not an Indian nation. Everyone will have his place, equal: language, culture, religion,” he commented that year.

Today, Indeed, Singapore is a multiracial state. And a heavy dose of state-enforcement has gone into defending this idea. Singapore celebrates Racial Harmony Day—July 21, the day when the riots broke out in 1964—and schoolchildren are taught about religion and ethnicity. But the idea that by suppressing “hate-speech” one can improve society reveals hidden impulses behind those who call from restraints. It is, at the same time, utopian and nihilistic.

I’ll take a fairly positive-slanted story from the Straits Times, dated November 8, 2015, as an example. The article’s author describes Singapore as a microcosm, “which pledges to be color-blind in its meritocracy and economic growth by providing opportunities for all”. From these, and numerous other reports, one gets the sense that perhaps the government is justified in trying to silence what it considers hate speech.

But a number of commentators are quoted as saying that Singapore is “nowhere near being a race-blind society” because racist undertones are hidden under the surface of a seemingly cohesive society. They also said that “some people and groups are downright ignorant and biased, others merely tolerate, but others are proactive in understanding and being appreciative”. One sociologist opined that “bubbling beneath our civil veneer, there are prejudices and stereotypes which occasionally surface to trigger bouts of soul-searching”. Indeed, the death of a foreign worker in Little India in 2013 led to a riot of more than 300 people, during which 54 officers and eight civilians were injured.

But silencing any public discourse on race or religion doesn’t seem to have done much good (just as banning mention of food isn’t a cure for malnutrition). As seen over the decades, while tensions remain dormant most of the time, they do have the recurrent habit of bubbling up. Moreover, not talking about the issue doesn’t always mean it will go away. A 2013 survey found that almost half of Singaporeans didn’t have a close friend of another race.

At some point in A Candle or the Sun, Perera is warned: “culture is a matter of security.” So, too, is culture a matter of free speech. While “hate-speech” does exist, all too often free speech is curtailed in Singapore over claims that individuals have offended a religion or race, when what they have really done is criticise the government. A casual glance over the cases of people recently prosecuted for free speech reveals that courts tend to find some facet of religious or racial offence in the person’s comments.

Take the case of the blogger Amos Yee, who was prosecuted twice for wounding religious feeling, not for criticising the government. As Singapore’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Foo Chi Hsia, said in 2015, “Amos Yee was convicted for insulting the faith of Christians…Protection from hate speech is also a basic human right.” Indeed, from this comment one can denote the legal contortionism of the Singaporean government: its citizens have the right of freedom from speech, which, to the government, is more important than freedom of speech. Yee might have gone on a tirade against religion, but his main target for criticism was the government, specifically the death of Lee Kuan Yew, in 2015. He called the late leader “a horrible person”, an “awful leader” and a “dictator,” as the Economist reported. Indeed, the American government was clearly of opinion that Yee was persecuted for his political views when it offered him asylum this year. “This is the modus operandi for the Singapore regime – critics of the government are silenced by civil suit for defamation or criminal prosecutions,” one American immigration judge wrote during Yee’s asylum ruling. To which the Singaporean government responded that America allows “hate speech under the rubric of freedom of speech.”

It is often too easy to defend the freedom of speech for the likes of Baratham, a learned doctor and adroit novelist. Harder, though, to defend the uncouth ramblings of someone like Yee. As I wrote in the Diplomat at the time: “It is clear that most of [Yee’s] comments were crude and inarticulate and, befitting his age, childish. This doesn’t mean, however, he ought not be defended for merely uttering an opinion.”

Taking the candle

George Orwell once described Speakers Corner, in London’s Hyde Park, as “one of the minor wonders of the world.” On my last visit to Singapore, last year, a reposeful afternoon provided me with a moment to visit the city-state’s own attempt at a Speakers Corner, located in Hong Lim Park. Oh, how imitations are inferior. The Economist described it thusly:

[A] spot set up for Singaporeans to exercise their freedom of speech without any restriction whatsoever, beyond the obligation to apply for permission to speak and to comply with the 13 pages of terms and conditions upon which such permissions are predicated, as well as all the relevant laws and constitutional clauses.

That article was about the prosecution of blogger Han Hui Hui who, in 2014, journeyed to Speakers’ Corner to protest the management of the Central Provident Fund, the city-states compulsory social security fund. She was found guilty and fined more than $2,000 last year not for voicing her opinion, a government spokesperson said, but for “loutishly barging into a performance by a group of special-education-needs children, frightening them and denying them the right to be heard.”

But what’s surprising about Speakers’ Corner is that Singapore would even attempt a parody. But, then again, Baratham understood the importance of the masquerade. The real heft of A Candle or the Sun is not in how an oppressive state operates but how people are so ready to sacrifice (and justify sacrificing) freedom for “good housing, safe streets, schools for your children and… three square meals a day and a colour TV,” as Perera says. Indeed, principles are sacrificed with only the slightest enticement by the state, unlike in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In 2013, a survey of 4,000 Singaporeans asked whether they preferred “limits on freedom of expression to prevent social tensions” or “complete freedom of expression even at risk of social tensions.” 40% of respondents went for limits and 37% said complete freedom. The remaining 23 percent had no opinion on the matter, which perhaps says something about public participation in Singaporean society.

If Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel that represents what Orwell described as “the dirty-handkerchief side of life” then Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published 17 years earlier, is its saccharine facsimile. Huxley in a letter to Orwell shortly after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

A Candle or the Sun serves somewhat as a synthesis between the censorial warning of both dystopias. Baratham understood that too much jack-booting, never the first port of call for the Singaporean repressors anyway, couldn’t last. (A Candle or the Sun happened to be published the year the Soviet Union collapsed). Equally, permissiveness, unlike in Brave New World, had to be carefully managed: provide a glimpse but never the real thing. Perera, an intelligent man, understands the cognitive dissonance one needs to survive in such a world. A noted passage in A Candle or the Sun finds him musing over whether to take the censorial job. He compares his position to that of a prostitute. “Once I’ve accepted Sam’s job,” he thinks, “I was sure I would have to do things distasteful… I suppose this loss of self-respect is what distressed me. It must be something that all whores grappled with.” But as he soliloquises, he swiftly talks himself round to a justification:

The analogy with prostitutes was a good one. There must be prostitutes who are wives and mothers, who ran families, loved their husbands. Their salvation must lie in an ability to separate in their minds acts which were physically identical.

The psychically identical act, for Perera, was to be able to write artistically and censorially at the same time. In short, selling something that one doesn’t want to, nor believes in. Indeed, from his days running a furniture store, Perera reflects that salesmanship “consisted not of providing people with what they needed, but with that was essential to their dreams.” Shortly afterwards, he comments: “The possibility of winter is essential to the happiness of people living in the tropics.” Dreams, Perera realises, are all too willingly indulged and what people really need (freedom and autonomy) sacrificed. Indeed, do people want the candle (the intimation of freedom) or the sun (the real thing)? The government’s art of salesmanship, as Singapore’s history has shown, makes sure people readily opt for the candle.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •   •

Editor’s note: readers interesting in buying The Candle and the Sun can find copies available through Marshall Cavendish or at AbeBooks

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[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

The Dark Side of the Moons – Nansook Hong

November 22, 1998

Nansook Hong was 15 when she was forced to marry into the ‘True Family’ at the head of the Moonies religious cult. It was the start of two decades of physical and mental abuse, from which she has only recently escaped. Here, for the first time, she tells James Langton of the ‘hypocrisy and evil’ at the heart of the Unification Church.

In the comfortable anonymity of a Boston coffee bar, a slender and solemn but pretty Korean woman in her early thirties is sipping a cup of raspberry tea and talking openly about her marriage. It is a story of beatings, drugs, under-age sex, adultery and fraud.

What makes Nansook Hong different from other abused women is the name she shed in the Massachusetts divorce courts. The husband she disparagingly refers to now as “my ex” is Hyo Jin Moon, eldest son of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon – a Messiah to the faithful of the Unification Church, but to the rest of the world the leader of the religious cult known as the “Moonies”.

At 15, Nansook became the child bride of a deeply disturbed young man who already had a history of heavy drinking and drug abuse. Smuggled illegally into the United States by church officials in the mid 1970s, she arrived at the Moon family mansion north of New York speaking no English and never even having dated a boy.

“I have never known exactly why Sun Myung Moon chose me to marry his eldest son,” she writes at the beginning of her recently published autobiography, In The Shadow Of The Moons. “I came to believe that my youth and naivety were the central reasons for my selection. His ideal wife was a girl young and passive enough to submit while he moulded her into the woman he wanted. Time would prove that I was not nearly passive enough.” Nearly two decades later, Nansook has emerged to tell her story. It is set against the background of the increasingly turbulent affairs of the self-proclaimed “perfect family” at the head of one of the world’s most controversial religious cults.

“The evil at the heart of the Unification Church is the hypocrisy and deceit of the Moons,” she says now, “a family that is all too human in its incredible level of dysfunction. To continue to promote the myth that the Moons are spiritually superior to the idealistic young people who are drawn to the church is a shameful deceit.”

At the peak of their powers in the late 1970s, the Moonies mesmerized the popular imagination. Worldwide membership was believed to run to hundreds of thousands. The Reverend Moon would marry off thousands of young acolytes — who had never previously met — in huge public ceremonies which were every parent’s nightmare. At a higher level, Moon enjoyed the patronage of Republican power-brokers drawn by his deeply conservative message on family and marriage and, perhaps, by his lavish hospitality. What Nansook is saying now would once have seemed to her blasphemous. From her earliest memories, the Rev Moon was the Lord of the Second Coming, his wife the True Mother and their offspring the True Children. Her own parents were one of the 36 Blessed Couples, the original followers of Moon when he was an itinerant and persecuted preacher seeking disciples in the chaos of post-war Korea. Like all members of the Unification Church, Nansook knew that she would one day be “matched” to her husband by the True Father, perhaps to a man she had never met.

Nansook was studying music at The Little Angels, the exclusive performing arts school founded by Moon in Seoul, when she was ordered into a limousine and driven without explanation to the True Family’s Korean mansion. Her parents were also there, but said nothing. “My mother?” says Nansook now, “I think she knew what my life would be like. I know that she did, but that she also believed she was sacrificing my personal happiness for God.”

Nansook had been aware of Moon’s son Hyo Jin, a student three years her senior at Little Angels. In contrast to the other members of the deeply conservative church, he wore tight jeans and his hair long. There were rumors of cigarettes, girlfriends and drinking. He was, however, the heir to the True Father and, therefore, in the church’s teachings, without sin. When the Rev Moon asked her if she would marry his son, it was a question with only one answer.

For much of his early life, Hyo Jin was raised by babysitters and church elders. In 1971, when Hyo Jin was in his teens, the Moonie entourage moved to America. In a confessional speech before church members in 1988, Hyo Jin revealed that he began to take drugs after being sent to live with an elder in a wealthy suburb of Washington. The son of the “Messiah” also complained that his father was remote and uncaring. “I thought the best way was to disappear, then I would have no burden,” he said. “Many times I sat with a gun pointed to my head, practicing what it would be like.”

This was the 19-year-old who was to be given a virginal school-girl as a wife. Nansook says she was barely aware of the facts of life when she arrived in the US under the pretext of being a competitor in a piano festival, hastily organized by church officials as a cover story.

Life with the True Family proved anything but perfect. Church rules say that couples must not have sex in the first three years of marriage. Hyo Jin was having none of that. No sooner were they alone after the wedding ceremony than he demanded that his bride strip naked.

“He was very rough, excited at the prospect of deflowering a virgin,” Nansook writes. “I just followed directions. It was all I could do not to cry out from the pain. It did not take him very long to finish, but for hours afterwards my insides burned with pain.”

Nansook says now that she knew from the very beginning that her husband was a monster and that her in-laws were little better. The honeymoon was in Las Vegas — a place she had never heard of — with the True Family in tow. In the casino she watched the Mother of the True Family “cradling a cup of coins and feverishly inserting them into a slot machine”. The “Messiah”, who publicly condemned gambling, explained that it was his duty to mingle with sinners to save them. He would position a senior church official at the blackjack table and whisper instructions from behind. “So you see, I am not actually gambling myself,” he told his young daughter-in-law.

Back in the Moon compound at Tarrytown, 40 miles north of New York, Nansook was sent to the local high school with instructions not to mention her marriage or the Moons. In the evenings she would finish her homework and then brace herself for the arrival of her husband, usually drunk and demanding sex. Within weeks she was pregnant. She also contracted a sexually transmitted disease, the result of her husband’s continued philandering. “I tried to love him as a husband,” she says of the early years of her marriage. “I asked myself later if there was any happiness in our relationship. There was not one moment.”

In 1982, the Rev Moon was imprisoned for tax evasion, claiming the church was a charity and then spending the money lavishly on his family. There is a photograph of Nansook in a staged demonstration outside the Danbury Federal Penitentiary. Her neatly stenciled placard reads: “Religious Freedom Now.”

Today Nansook says that the family saw her as “a china doll”. For her part, she attempted to make sense of her unhappiness. “I had my faith in God that I had been put there for some purpose. I struggled for years over Moon. He was so egotistical, so selfish. How could he be the person he claimed to be?” In 1992 she went on a fundraising trip to Japan with the True Mother. Before the return journey, she says: “I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills. I hid them beneath the tray in my make-up case. I knew that smuggling was illegal, but I believed that the followers of Sun Myung Moon answered to higher laws.” Much of the Moon money was given to Hyo Jin to fuel his cocaine and alcohol binges.

Hyo Jin, she says, would frequently beat her. “I once tried to flush his cocaine down the toilet. He beat me so severely I thought he would kill the baby in my womb. He made me sweep up the spilled white powder from the bathroom floor even as he continued to beat me. Later Hyo Jin would offer a religious justification for beating half-senseless a woman seven months pregnant. He was teaching me to be humble in the presence of the son of the Messiah.” Her children, she says, were her only reason to live. “My main goal was to raise them decently.” Her children would ask her: “Why do we have a bad dad?”

By the middle of the 1990s, Nansook was old enough to realize that life could be different. Hyo Jin had all but abandoned the marriage, retreating to New York to make bad rock’n’roll in a studio bankrolled by his parents. Nansook’s parents had abandoned the Unification Church. So had her older brother and his wife.

In August 1995, she finally found the strength to leave. “I was frightened that Hyo Jin would stop us if I was open about my plans,” she writes. “He had threatened to kill me so many times, and with a veritable arsenal of weapons in his bedroom, I knew he could.” Her brother, and a close friend who had left the church, helped to smuggle her children and a few possessions past the guards at the Moon compound. A bitter and protracted legal battle followed. In the end, a settlement was reached and the divorce finalized last year, although the Moons refuse to pay maintenance.

Nansook now lives in a modest house in an anonymous suburb. In the gilded cage of the First Family, she had never cooked, never even folded clothes. Now she must do everything, but says she feels free for the first time in her life.

She wrote her book — for which her advance was said to be small — “because by writing it all down I made something of my life, it had not been just wasted. I also don’t want anyone else to go through what I did.” She has returned to college and plans to devote the rest of her life working for battered wives.

Her former husband still retains visiting rights. The children visit him in New York and return with lavish presents paid for by the True Grandmother. The exception is her eldest daughter, who refuses to see her father. She is 15, the same age as Nansook when she was handed over to the Moons. “She seems such a baby to me. I can’t even begin to think that she could get married.”

On the loss of her own youth, Nansook says: “I feel duped, but I do not feel bitter. I feel used, but I feel more sad than angry. I long to have the years back that I lost to Sun Myung Moon. I wish I could be a girl again. I wonder if I will ever know romantic love, if I will ever trust a man or any so-called leader again.”

Nansook can never fully escape the Moons. It is not just the occasional church official who arrives unannounced on a mission to reclaim her for the church. The Rev Moon, despite “shoe-polish black” dyed hair, is 78 and in the final years of his life. At least two of his children are known to have deserted the church which, according to Nansook, now has only a few thousand supporters in America, his country of adoption.

In Japan, the main powerbase of the Moonies, there are thought to be only 10,000 active members, and in Britain no more than a few hundred. Moon’s natural successor would be Hyo Jin. But because of his obvious failings, it is believed that the True Father and Mother have decided to anoint their third son instead (their second, Heung Jin, died in a car crash, aged 17, in January 1984). Hyo Jin is unlikely to abdicate his throne without a battle, however, and since he has supporters even inside the True Family, a power struggle seems likely after Moon’s death.

Nansook knows that her oldest son Shin Gil, as the crown prince, could become a pawn in any Moonie civil war and fears, as with all her children, that he might he tempted back to the Unification Church. Even as he wanes, Moon still has the power to take hold of weaker minds than his. Nansook says that he enjoys the process of humiliating those beneath him. Even so, she suspects that Moon is haunted by the problems in “the family without sin”. “Deep down, under the ego, I think that the failures of his children do bother him,” she says.

As for her former husband, she believes he is crushed by his relationship with his father. “He has hatred towards him, but he also knows that without his father he is nothing.”

The Moons, she says, would accept her back if she was prepared to apologize, even after the publication of her book, which they have studiously ignored. She still appears on official Unification Church photographs and no mention is made of the divorce.

At the lavish banquet for the Moons which followed a mass wedding in New York last year, there were place cards and empty chairs for Nansook and the other children who have long fled the True Family.

More and more, it seems, the Rev Moon is simply deceiving himself.

In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life In The Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family, 1998, by Nansook Hong, is published by Little, Brown & Co. ISBN  0-316-34816-3

Nansook Hong, transcripts of three interviews, Inc. ‘60 Minutes’

Nansook Hong interviewed by Herbert Rosedale

Nansook Hong In The Shadow Of The Moons, part 1

Sam Park reveals Moon’s hidden history (2014)

Sam Park 2015 response to feedback from my presentation