Part 11: Expat Life in Singapore
[In Part 10, I began my legal career at a Chicago law firm, and after two years, the firm asked me to move to the new Singapore office.]
For several weeks after my arrival in Singapore, I lived at the Ming Court Hotel, at the junction of Tanglin and Orchard Roads. (Fun fact: the hotel was right next door to the Tanglin Shopping Center, home to a shop called Antiques of the Orient, which became Orientalia in my novel The Last Bird of Paradise and played a pivotal role in the narrative.) In January 1984, the Ming Court was already a little run-down, but some years later, the owners remodeled, abandoning the hotel’s faux-Imperial Chinese decor and reopened as the Orchard Rendezvous Hotel. At the end of January, I was glad to move into a unit at the Far East Plaza Apartments on Scotts Road, also quite near Orchard Road, then and now Singapore’s premier shopping district.
Although I’d visited Singapore just six years earlier, becoming a resident of the city was a different proposition. In those early days, I needed to furnish the apartment and explore my surroundings, discover where the grocery store and dry cleaner were, and try to get used to Singapore’s heat and oppressive humidity. It seemed a completely different city from the one I’d experienced superficially as a backpacking tourist.
The Far East Plaza Apartments were not great. The apartment tower sat on top of a tacky shopping center sandwiched between two luxury hotels. It had amenities, though: a parking garage, an enormous swimming pool, and tennis and squash courts. While I spent as little time as possible in the shopping center, I did frequent a small but excellent Indian restaurant on the fifth floor. Still, the area was congested—not at all like my quiet side street in Chicago—and there always seemed to be hordes of people just outside the building.
The building’s parking garage was handy because my firm had arranged for me to have a car, an older Mitsubishi, which I needed for my commute to our office in Singapore’s downtown. Our Shenton Way location was once important for its proximity to the city’s financial services firms, but even in 1984, those were shifting several blocks east to the Raffles Place area near the Singapore River. Later, after the Mass Rapid Transit system opened its first subway line in 1987, I could use the MRT for my commute, although I frequently drove anyway because by the time I walked from the downtown subway station to my office, I would be sweat-soaked or drenched from one of Singapore’s frequent rainstorms.
Gradually, I met people, made friends—mostly other expats—and settled into a routine at work. I worked on projects for our US bank clients primarily, although I pitched in on other projects as well. One huge matter, involving the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the newly established Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX), took up a lot of my time. But the experience in the office was far different from what I’d had in Chicago. There were just two of us (plus staff) instead of the many hundreds of lawyers in the Chicago office, and the managing partner wasn’t the kind of patient mentor I was accustomed to.
After a couple of years, the managing partner moved to a different office of the firm, and another partner from Chicago arrived to take his place. This was someone I knew and liked, so the atmosphere in the office took a turn for the better. At the same time, I became involved in the restructuring of a large, syndicated loan that took me to Bangkok frequently, which was exciting. I also traveled occasionally to other cities in the region, including Hong Kong and Jakarta for work, and to various nearby beach destinations like Phuket and Bali for vacations. I also made some longer trips within Asia (Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam) and visited Australia and New Zealand.
In early 1987, I moved to a nicer apartment. This place also had amenities (a pool, squash courts), plus fantastic views, and I was no longer on top of a shopping center. The firm upgraded my car to a new Alfa Romeo, which I was happy about, and life was good. I enjoyed the city more, took up jogging and biking, frequently went sailing with my boss, and generally felt at home. When my boss and his wife moved back to Chicago, the firm replaced him with a seasoned international lawyer I also liked, and we added a third lawyer to the office.
Toward the end of 1988, however, the firm informed me they wanted me to return to the US. In Singapore, I had only worked for a couple of partners, and in order to be promoted to the partnership level, more senior members of the firm needed to observe my work. I thought that meant a return to Chicago, but it turned out the Los Angeles office was building a banking practice and needed a senior associate to support the partner who would run it. So, in the spring of 1989, that’s where I went. So long, Singapore; hello, L.A.
Next up: To Los Angeles and back.