Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 20 Singapore

Singapore seemed like a great choice, at first. The tiny island nation was at the inception of a multi-decade technology-building effort, so they treated all the expatriated scientists and students like they were celebrities. It was a creation myth, and everyone who could wield a hammer, if only on paper, could build a part of history.

Max's uncoupling with Joosey marked the end of his youth. During his years in Southeast Asia, his mother's photos-and dreams of finding of her replacement-were put in a drawer, the romantic Caravaggio boy faded away, and what or who emerged had a rapacious appetite for nameless sex and a notable capacity to dismiss the interior life of the people around him.

Max found plenty to distract his ravaged psyche advancing the island's genesis story. Always having a better idea about how things should be done, he was soon sought after, even though a lowly undergraduate, for his creative genius.

Singapore was and remains, though, a place of very strict rules and hierarchy. It's an economic miracle, but an Asian miracle, quite authoritarian by Western standards, if not by Asian standards. Bans on chewing gum. No smoking. No laughing. No whoring. Just joking, Disbelieving Reader, about those last two. But, boring gambling. Caning! Firmly enforced accounting procedures, unless you're a Party official.

Max was a bit too loose with his interpretation of reimbursable expenses. Party elders, exercising power through the Institute of Science Technology and Engineering Research, took away some of his privileges, excluded him from participation in the highest-level planning sessions, and encouraged him to focus on finishing his degree, all of which led to his characterization of them as SinISTER Fucking Idiots.

He had trouble getting dates, too. Too exotic. Too extreme. More than three-quarters of the students were Chinese. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's perorations on how to breed for a great society might have led the girls to Max for his IQ, but those slim Singaporean nationals, all lovely, upright, and well-educated, whose pasts had demanded obeisance to everyone older, richer, or more powerful, seemed to have been sent a message about him. If they were adventurous and ready to leave the country with Max, then maybe they'd consider dating him. If they were hoping to have a prosperous life in Singapore, they would just stay away.

Daughters of Indian potentates were headed for arranged marriages when they returned to their princely estates. They would titter among themselves about his eccentricities and his brilliance, but they wouldn't be seen alone with any young man.

The Eurasian girls, the mixed-race beauties at the top rung on the ladder of elitism didn't even notice him. His ersatz appeal was hidden below a sartorial affront to their tastes. He was not someone they could bring home to meet the parents.

There were some Caucasians. The Americans, a handful, or maybe only half a handful, were all transients there for a junior year abroad. They were away from home and wanted to live on chocolate rather than Max's vanilla. The Europeans, there to put down an anchor in Asia, included him in their partying and weekend traveling to beaches and cities from Hong Kong to Saigon and West Timor. More sophisticated than the Americans, they'd discovered that the overbuilt real estate market created great off-campus housing. He joined a group of them who lived in fabulous residences on Pasir Panjang Road.

For a while he honed the French he'd learned-at les seins de maman-on a girl he dated, but he was too quirky for her and her kind. Delphine was a type, the daughter of a Swiss banker seconded to Singapore. Riveted by fashion runways, fluent in a couple of Germanic and several Romance languages, and learning Mandarin, her sights were set on the kind of guy who'd be jetting to his own Lucky Strike, rather than on a scientific whiz kid who didn't own a suit. And after Delphine there were Gitta, Susann, and Chloe, and with none of them could he crack the code.

About that suit, it was a point of contention for the elders, too. If it sounds like a gross generalization to say that Asians love uniforms more than Americans, how far from the truth is it? Conformism, Confucianism, and Wa-the concept of group harmony-all lead to at least the occasional wearing of uniforms that demonstrate group solidarity. Uniforms had been as commonplace as postal workers and policemen in the United States, but they broadcast too much conventionality for the '60s, and their use went into decline. Japan's manufacturing success brought uniforms back to our attention in the '80s and '90s, but they had been ubiquitous in Asia's leading companies before. Now workers, managers, and owners were proud to wear the company colors. At SinISTER, whose emergence from landfill was a historic event being recorded and celebrated at every opportunity, the uniform was a dark suit with a dark tie over a white shirt. Max wouldn't wear it. His uniform was a pair of khaki pants with shredded cuffs, a red shirt half tucked in, and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap sometimes worn bill back. In those days, before he'd gotten fat, he did accept one deviation, shorts. The Institute could not have him in their group photos. He was an embarrassment to their sense of their own accomplishment.

At first he was invited to the photo shoots, and with a grimace, photographers hid him behind others as much as possible. When elders reviewed the pictures, they found everything about him offensive, but his cap, which he had refused to remove, was intolerable. In the age before digital retouching, a skilled technician in the darkroom could manipulate a negative or a print to fix an errant head, but the elders wanted to make a point. They insisted that the photo shoot be repeated, and that Max attend, but that he be excluded if he didn't conform. They hoped that pressure would do the trick. They hoped that he would be shamed into doing the right thing by being singled out as the cause of everyone having to spend time and money on a second attempt to do something that should have and could have been done right the first time. Their hopes were dashed on the rocks of his response. "I prefer not to," he said.

Even in the yearbook of the National University of Singapore, the institution granting his degree, he is absent from all individual and group portraits. The only photo of him is one where he is coming out of the water after an expedition with the Dive Club. He was wearing the right kind of suit for that.

The growing ostracism from officialdom drove him further into his work. He hardly needed any encouragement there. Ultimately, and to the chagrin of some administrators and the delight of his curriculum advisor, he won the Best Undergraduate Thesis Award in the School of Science. A condensed version of it would eventually be published in Physical Review Letters, the hot American journal for short physics papers.

Studies aside, he found Asia beyond Singapore had other charms, in particular, and not necessarily in this order, exotic diving, legal gambling, and a vibrant sex trade.

Max's Caucasian friends at nus were always talking about getting away for the weekend to Kuala Lumpur. KL has long been an import center for trafficking, so there was a greater variety of girls there than in Singapore. They, my downtrodden yellow- and brown-skinned soul sisters, are brought in from every country in South and Southeast Asia. Young and younger, and not just girls. The nus boys raved on and on about the selection. There was no gambling to speak of, though, and Max was generally satisfied by the Chinese and Malay girls for hire he found only minutes away in town. Unless he could persuade those boys to go diving on Pulau This or Pulau That, a trip to Malaysia held no allure. Macau, on the other hand, that would be worth the effort.