From 2020
The Bugis people were great voyagers from Sulawesi. They sailed small crafts from Padang Padang to many ports of the Far East ranging from Burma to Northern Australia. Many practiced piracy and as Thomas Forrest wrote in A Voyage from Calcutta to the Mergui Archipelago, “The Buginese are a high-spirited people: they will not bear ill-usage…They are fond of adventures, emigration, and capable of undertaking the most dangerous enterprises.”
Most westerners are unfamiliar with the Bugis and especially their complex five gender society.
Men and women are joined by ‘bissu’ which combined all five genders, ‘calabai’ a false woman, and ‘calalai’ a masculine female.
Thriving Bugis communities existed throughout the Orient, although few as famous as Singapore’s Bugis Street on which calabai transgenderettes gathered in the 1950s to sexually entertain randy sailors and curious travelers. According to legend the easy way to discern which working girls were female and which were trannies was that the calabai were beautiful and the female hookers were ugly.
Singapore banned wanton behavior in the 1980s to transformed the tawdry area into another worthless shopping mall.
In 1990 I flew from Sumatra to Singapore. Back to the modern world away from orangutans, volcanos, jungles, and cannibals. My bag wasn’t in the carousel. I informed the airline of my loss. They gave me money for a hotel and food and said to come back tomorrow. I had the shirt on my back. I exited from the terminal to discover a elderly Chinese man sitting on my bag. He didn’t understand a word I said, but surrendered my bag. Lucky and I took a taxi to stay at a cheap Chinese hotel on Bugis Street.
The trannies were few.
The sidewalks were clean.
The Long Bar at Raffles was undergoing renovations.
I left the next day for Penang.
Each time I returned to Singapore, I stayed for enough the time to catch the train.
Singapore has nothing to offer anyone looking for a walk on the wild side. Not anymore.
It’s the most boring big city in the Orient, but not in the 60s.
It swung with the best of them.
Bugis Street selama-lamanya.
Forever.
