Singapore is a city of tragic wives, There are thousands of us, pale and bored, dressed in monotonous white "wash dresses," fretting away an exile's life in the hottest city in the British Empire.
You may see us in the early morning, before the spotlight of the sun reveals the glaring buildings in a shadowless dazzle, listlessly poking through the shops.
The wives of Singapore find no thrill in shopping. We gather at noon in restaurants, in hotels, to hold depressing "pa hit parties." A number of ux try to drink away ennui with gin and bitters. Then comes a hot, fitful sleep beneath a suffocating mosquito net, At night we dance, "sometimes ith young bachelors "fresh fron home" who still retain their northern vigour and insouciance. We play feverish bridge for heavy stakes or motor out through the unchanging and merciless rubber plantations with the Intex and acid hanging in the sti night air, One day rolls into another. Heat, pa hits, and gossip. The tragedy of the Singapore wife is that who has nothing, absolutely nothing. to do. Housework and bringing up children are unheard of where boys can be hired for £1 week and ayahs (nurses) for less.
And_yet of all the cities in the Far East, Singapore is the most Dlessed. While civil war rages round Shanghai and Peking, while Hongkong echoes with the murderous atrocities of Canton, Singapore, a great junction of all Eastern commerce, and the mouth of the greatest river of rubber in the world, is thriving.
Stately buildings are rising along the water front. New hotels are projected. Harbour development grows apace. The "roads" are packed with the greatest maze of shipping in the Far East.
The men, in there crinkly white suits and topees, are busy making and unmaking. No men in the East prosperous and busy as the Singapore men.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.