Singapore Swing

It was 3 a.m. and I was fresh off a Singapore Airlines flight from Newark—at 18 hours, the longest regularly scheduled, nonstop commercial flight in the world. Jet lag was playing havoc with my system. So I left the hotel and headed over to Boat Quay, not expecting to find much except fresh air and solitude. This, after all, was Singapore, long ridiculed as a prissy, soulless place, with no DNA for fun, culture or the arts. Singapore? Isn't that where chewing gum is illegal and Cosmopolitan magazine is banned as too racy? Where bars close before anyone starts having a good time, and everyone is so obsessed with work that the government launched a smile campaign to get people to lighten up?

The shoulder-to-shoulder bars in the quay were packed with hip young Singaporeans and European expatriates, drinking Guinness and Old Speckled Hen on draft and cheering a replay of the Liverpool-Reading soccer game on flat-screen TVs.

This tiny nation—whose ascendancy from malaria-infested colonial backwater to gleaming global hub of trade, finance and transportation is one of Asia's great success stories—is reinventing itself, this time as a party town and regional center for culture and the arts. "Prosperity is not our only goal, nor is economic growth an end in itself," says Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. Translation: let the good times roll. Suddenly people are describing the city with a word that, until recently, wasn't even in the local vocabulary: trendy.

Search as I might, I couldn't find the ghosts of the old Singapore. The musty romance of the tropics, the restless adventurers stooped with drink and island living, the echoes of Somerset Maugham and the sea captains of Joseph Conrad have slipped away, along with pith helmets and Panama hats. In their place are the trappings of a city that feels as new as Dubai, humming with efficiency and industriousness, living by its wits, knowing well that if it doesn't excel it will be swallowed up by the pack.

At independence, instead of tearing down the overt symbols of colonialism in a burst of ultranationalism, Singapore accepted the reality of the past. English was made the language of business, schools and government, and streets with names like Queen Elizabeth Walk and Raffles Boulevard are reminders that Singapore's history didn't begin in 1965. Rather than playing ethnic groups off against each other, as some governments did, Singapore gave top priority to creating an integrated, racially harmonious society where everyone shared the fruits of prosperity. Quota systems, for instance, ensure that all public housing has a representative mix of Chinese, Indians and Malays.

Singapore's crime rate is one of the lowest in the world. There is no litter or graffiti. Everything is orderly, on time, efficient….The "perfect" society. Yet perfection came at a price. Personal freedoms were surrendered, creativity and risk-taking never flourished, the leadership seemed to lurk behind every tree. Singapore was admired but not envied…

On my way out of town, speeding along a road whose grassy shoulders are as carefully manicured as the fairways at Augusta, I saw an unusual sight ahead. The gardeners had forgotten to mow a little patch where the grass stood a foot high. Ahhh, I thought: even in Singapore people can get lackadaisical. But wait. As we passed the patch,

...