Timber lorries, each one loading three sawn trunks of chengai, meranti, or seraya wood from the timber concessions in the jungles of Malaya, rolling forward to the building boom of the city. Lorries of sheet rubber, packed in square blocks sewn in jute bags white with lime dust; lorries of liquid latex, painted silver or painted red, lumbering at twenty miles an hour. Lorries filled with Chinese factory girls, standing in the packed vehicles, dressed in vests and trousers of flowered cotton, all with permanents stiffly fringing curls round their faces, all with gold-edged teeth … Gold teeth, so fashionable now at factory level. Twenty years ago they had been the fashion among the wealthy Asian bourgeoisie (only at that time they had been called Asiatics, not Asians, and made to keep their place, while now Raffles Hotel was full of them every night, and even the Tanglin Club had its one night a week for Asians). Asians now spoke of themselves as we-Asians, as if Asia were an entity, when really it was a huge agglomeration of continents and cultures and races and religions and governments further apart from each other than any European country could be from any other European country. And yet we-Asians gripped the imagination … it meant something. There was a feeling of akinness, from Egypt to Japan … and all these countries were changing, changing, running the centuries into days, hurrying and scrambling forward, at a breathless speed which left European prejudices and platitudes about them as far behind as the buggy horse was left panting after a jet plane. Somehow Europe appeared so staid, stay-behind, and unimaginative beside this surging exaltation
of Asia …

Gold teeth, thought Luke, as his car flashed by and the factory girls cheering his speeding, bent over the lorry sides to smile at him in exuberant early morning happiness, jeering also, to observe once again that it was a police officer breaking the traffic law (but then military and police vehicles were always in a hurry), and he waved at them out of his car window. Who was it had gold teeth like that? It was at that party at Quo Boon’s … his daughter, she of the small thin face, and the neat wit; strange with what pleasure he remembered her ugliness.