Return to Singapore 1995

Guo Hanyue also said with interest: "This place feels a bit like an ordinary old street in Xiamen and Guangzhou..."

"Was it a vegetable market? A market? A snack street?" Liu Mengchen guessed.

"Haha, none of them! Let me tell you, do you know that in the 1950s, this place was a famous red-light district in Singapore!"

"Ah? Red-light district? I heard my colleagues talking about it. The red-light district in Singapore should be in Geylang!" Guo Hanyue said curiously.

"A few days ago, I borrowed an English book called "No Money No Honey, written by a British journalist in Singapore, describes the grand nightlife of Bukit Timah! Are you interested in reading it? "

Liu Mengchen waved his hand: "It's an English book, forget it, we can't understand it! Li Xiaofan, then you tell me, what is it about in the book?"

"In the 1950s and 1960s, Singapore's economy had not yet taken off. At that time, Singapore still belonged to the old Malayan Federation, and warships of the British and American empires often docked in Singapore Port. This place once attracted many foreign sailors and soldiers to come here for the feasting and drinking. Now if you travel to Thailand, you can see all the transvestite and adult performances, such as PP flame dance, raising goldfish, glass bead shooting, opening beer bottle caps, etc. It is said that you can watch them here before. At that time, this place was more famous than Pattaya and Bangkok!"

"Li Xiaofan, what is PP flame dance? And what are the things I just mentioned about raising goldfish, glass bead shooting and opening beer bottle caps?" Liu Mengchen asked curiously.

"The book said that the dancers in this area liked to perform a kind of table dance on the table. They used their buttocks to hold the burning paper to perform a striptease, commonly known as the buttocks flame dance. It is said to be a very magical dance and was very popular at the time! The following projects are not suitable for children, and they involve organs that cannot be described, so I won't explain..."

"Why are they not suitable for children?" Liu Mengchen was curious to get to the bottom of it.

"I really want to know?" Li Xiaofan laughed. These adult performance projects in Thailand were also eye-opening for him when the company organized a group tour to Thailand before his rebirth. In his previous life, in the last two years in Singapore, Li Xiaofan moved out of the factory dormitory and heard that the Singaporean landlord, An Ge, also talked about the grand occasion at that time.

"Yeah!" Liu Mengchen nodded.

Li Xiaofan roughly explained it to them...

"Oh my god, this is too disgusting!"

Guo Hanyue said angrily: "Li Xiaofan, you made me want to vomit, I can't eat ice cream!"

"Haha, you guys forced me to say it!"

"Who knew it was such a disgusting project!"

...

After eating ice cream, Li Xiaofan took them to walk slowly from Middle Rd to Sim Lim Square.

Sim Lim Square was the largest comprehensive market for electrical and electronic products in Singapore at that time, a six-story complex shopping area, very similar to Zhongguancun Electronic Street or Shenzhen Huaqiang North Electronic Market. Basically all electrical and electronic products on the market can be bought, of course, there are also a lot of mixed goods, and there are many parallel imports.

Li Xiaofan was most interested in computers. After a round of browsing, he roughly understood the configuration of popular computers nowadays: 486 CPU processor with Hz, 4-8M memory, 540MB hard disk, VGA, SVGA graphics card, 1X/2X CD-ROM drive, 14-inch CRT monitor, 8/16-bit compatible sound card, VCD decompression card, and free installation essential software UCDOS, ARJ, FPE, PCTOOLS, HD-COPY, WinG, etc.

But the price is not cheap, generally more than 2,000 SGD, and expensive brand machines cost more than 3,000 SGD. According to these bosses, the main reason is that the 486 CPU is very expensive nowadays.

Such an expensive price made Li Xiaofan unable to buy it for a while. In his previous life, it seemed that the epoch-making Win95 window would be launched in July or August this summer. If not, he would have to wait and see.

There are many audio brands in the Forest Building, including the United States's **L, BOSE, Denmark's Dynaudio, Germany's ELAC, Britain's Bowers \u0026 Wilkins, Monitor Audio, Tannoy, and Japan's Denon, Onkyo, Yamaha, Marantz, Pioneer, Sony, JVC, LUXMAN... There are so many brands that he was dazzled.

Li Xiaofan studied electronics, and his roommates were all audiophiles. At that time, they had no money, so they mail-ordered copper foil circuit boards and made their own circuit boards with ferric chloride. Then they went to the flea market, found various electronic components from smuggled foreign electronic waste, and soldered them on the circuit boards with tin to make amplifiers. They also made their own audio equipment, mail-ordered large speakers, and bought wooden boards to make boxes.

Before they graduated, the audio industry suddenly became retro, and tube amplifiers became popular, which used the once obsolete tubes as amplifiers. Because tube amplifiers work under high voltage and low current conditions. The screen voltage of the final power amplifier tube can reach 400-500V or even thousands of volts, while the current flowing through the tube is only tens of milliamperes to hundreds of milliamperes. The input range is large and the conversion rate is fast.

The sound quality of the tube amplifier is obviously better than that of the transistor amplifier. The transistor amplifier sounds like there are more high frequencies and mid-high frequencies, and less low frequencies. The transistor amplifier sounds harder, especially the low frequencies are not soft enough, and the high frequencies are sharp and dry. Sometimes it sounds like there is crossover distortion in the high frequency band. When the frequency increases and the volume is very loud, these phenomena are more obvious. The sound quality of the tube amplifier is generally soft and pleasant, the low frequencies are soft and clear, and the high frequencies are delicate and clean. The performance of human voice is its strong point, making it a favorite of audiophiles.

Therefore, Li Xiaofan and his friends later also liked tube amplifiers, and ordered tube amplifiers by mail to make their own amplifiers.

After listening to the imported brand tube amplifiers in Forest Tower, the quality is absolutely first-class and very comfortable. But the prices are also very expensive, at least more than 2,000 Singapore dollars, which made Li Xiaofan unable to buy them at once.

Since they spent a lot of time visiting Bugis Commercial City, it was already past six in the evening when they finished walking around Forest Square. Liu Mengchen didn't eat much for lunch and was already hungry and wanted to find food.

Li Xiaofan accompanied Guo Hanyue to buy a few CD players and left Forest Square.

When the three of them were on the bus, Guo Hanyue saw a movie advertisement in Lianhe Zaobao today that a movie adapted from Zhang Ailing's novel, "Red Rose and White Rose", was popular in Singapore these days. She suggested to Li Xiaofan several times that she wanted to watch this movie in the evening.

"Red Rose and White Rose" is a love movie directed by the famous Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan, starring Chen Chong, Zhao Wenxuan, Yip Yuqing, Shi Ge and others. The film is adapted from Zhang Ailing's novel and mainly tells the two emotional stories of Tong Zhenbao, a textile engineering designer who returned from studying in the UK, and his friend's wife Wang Jiaorui and his wife Meng Yanli in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s.

Guo Hanyue is a loyal reader of Zhang Ailing's novels. She and Liu Mengchen have not been to a movie theater in Singapore since they arrived in Singapore and want to broaden their horizons.

On the way here, Li Xiaofan had promised to accompany them to the Lido Cinema on Orchard Road to watch the movie tonight.