Cities in Asia became places of turbulent competition. For new arrivals in Singapore or Shanghai, finding work and housing meant dealing with waterfront overlords, labour contractors or brothel madams with connections to one of the city’s gangs. These were often run on ethnic lines, operated by networks across long distances. In Singapore, Chinese associations worked specialized niches, Indian and Chinese lightermen fought a long battle for control for the waterfront, and struggles between rival Chinese broke into riots in November 1906. Workers, pedlars and drifters were pushed together in close proximity, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in indifference. People’s sense of self was often fragile, and their lives often ended in isolation and alienation.
A rare record is provided by the case files of coroners. In Singapore, for example, they were a catalogue of everyday death and injury: of knifings in dormitories over debt or disturbed sleep; of a child’s body in the wreckage of a collapsed tenement; of the frightening attrition of labour on the waterfront. In a new-forged society where women were few in number, there were many casualties in the frustrated search for affection and family life. Many people died unnamed and unclaimed. There was a case on New Year’s Eve in 1913, when a Chinese man of about thirty-five years of age staggered into the police station at Telok Ayer at around 8.05 p.m. He was dressed in black trousers and jacket and a small hat, and was ‘in the last gasp’. He was asked who he was but he could not answer as he had a cut jugular. There he expired, and no one was found who could speak for him, to say who he was, or who had done this and why.
Of the 171 investigations by the Singapore coroner in the first three months of 1916, sixty-one of them were classified as relating to persons ‘unknown’. Their remains were most frequently discovered by the roadside or in storm drains, although they were often found in the midst of the European suburbs too. Sometimes they had lain ignored for weeks: stillborn, or struck down by the omnipresent scourges of dysentery, tuberculosis and malaria, or plain worn out by exhaustion and morbus cordis . In the Telok Ayer case, the man had perhaps used a knife on himself, but it was never found. The case was singular only for the man having died in plain sight. More often people took their own lives seeking even the most meagre privacy: to cast themselves into the sea, or to hang from a tree in the scrub, from the underside of a bridge, or from a pipe in a prison or asylum latrine in the dead of night. Such deaths were a sombre, almost silent counterpoint to the colony’s self-mythology of migrant opportunity, free enterprise and benevolent government.
Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire
Oltre Mare 