Sasha Frank: Geylang is still wild but may be safe from wreckers’ ball

In my weekly catch-up viewing and reading of YouTube, TikTok and other social media, I came across this interesting YouTube vid picked up by STOMP.

British banker-comedian Sasha Frank was telling YouTuber Max Chernov, “I feel safer in (Geylang) the red-light district of Singapore than I do in a normal street anywhere else in the world… I never feel like there’s any threat around here.”

Frank, who is a single mum with an 11-year-old daughter, lived in Geylang for two years until April. She said: “I can walk out of (my house) at any time of night and get food… I can get a haircut at midnight… I can get a manicure.”

Ah, Geylang – maybe the last true frontier of a colourful olde Singapore, a never-dull corner of the island that offers more than just food to attract and keep visitors awake all day and night.

Joo Chiat /Tanjong Katong was once a fairly serious rival to Geylang. Its bars were notorious. And in the heydays of the great invasion of foreign workers in the 2000s, nightly spillovers of the “tan chia” girls from Geylang to the neighbourhood led to petitions and complaints from worried residents.

Now Joo Chiat is family-safe and has mainly food and heritage (peranakan shophouses) left to distinguish it from other places. But Geylang is still Geylang, though it may be simply hanging on because of benign or possibly even strategic neglect.

It is still a wild frontier, despite Sasha Frank’s confidence that it is safe.

I think it is by design that Geylang has been left alone. I remember Lee Kuan Yew once said that Singapore had become so modernised and safe that he decided to keep the old Geylang to remind younger Singaporeans that the world around them was not perfect.

Geylang was and is red lantern all the way. I can testify to this as I was a born and bred Geylangian, having stayed in Lorongs 3, 6, 7 and 17.

My first house was in Lorong 7 which was relatively peaceful but would usually tense up whenever one Geylang gang imposed a “curfew,” which was usually respected by any rival group unless it was keen to rumble.

Still, fights would take place quite regularly. They could be over territory, girls or “face”. And if these clashes did not take place, there would be frequent raids by police squads hunting for wanted gangsters. Gunshots were often heard late at night.

Almost every lorong, especially those on the Sims Avenue side, was a gangster hideout. Each would have its cluster of squatter huts.

These gangs were part and parcel of a thriving ecosystem of brothels, massage parlours, girlie bars, karaoke lounges and two-hour stay hotels.

In Lorong 6, my family rented a flat overlooking a mixed brothel of “normal” call girls and transvestites (that was what they were called last time, with apologies to the LGBTQ fraternity). You could say that in growing up in such an environment, I grew up faster than other boys.

Until then, in the 2000s, even till today, Geylang is not 100 per cent safe.

As the police slogan says, Low Crime Does Not Mean No Crime. Fights between drunken people, over women, money or simply because of unfriendly stares do take place now and then.

There is another possible reason why Geylang may well be left intact, the itchy hands of our gentrification-crazy urban planners notwithstanding. If it suits everyone to have a place like Geylang, why take that neutral ground away?

Tan Bah Bah is a former senior leader writer with The Straits Times. He was also managing editor of a magazine publishing company