RESEARCH scientist Kee Chuan is beginning to feel the pinch. He's an Oxford graduate, returned to his native Singapore where he works in his local university. In his honest face you can detect the deepening symptoms of mad bull disease - for Kee is 31 and still a virgin. He is researching his prospects of getting married. "I'm desperately looking for a wife," he says, trying to smile away the obvious tension of testosterone build up.
Kee has the government on his side in his search to get a mate. As a graduate in the world's sharpest economy, the state is keen that he should procreate. Kee's hotel cleaner father, however, has no great faith in state aid for such enterprises. A laconic sort, Daddy Chuan offers his considered judgment: "Kee was born ugly. Very ugly. No woman would look at him." What a dad, eh? No bullshit. . . just jealousy!
Anyway, Kee has joined Singapore's dating agency for graduates, the SDU - Social Development Unit - or Single, Desperate and Ugly, as it is better known on the island. Under the Sun: Singapore Singles followed Kee Chuan and two professionally successful, thirtyish women - Rosemary and Madeline - in their searches for true love through the SDU. At their first lecture, the middle aged, female course director confided that her "ideal man is Rock Hudson", a peculiar choice, surely, for a procreative enterprise.
To be fair to Kee, he seemed more realistic about the search than the women did. Perhaps this was because mad bull disease is great for focusing the mind or maybe, as the course director put it: "Ladies are more romantic. They read Mills and Boon and Barbara Cartland, whereas men read encyclopaedias, things that give them knowledge." You can see how these different reading habits might cause problems.
Certainly, Kee, Rosemary and Madeline behaved as you might expect encyclopaedia and Mills and Boon readers to behave. He knew what he was after but was as socially wooden as a fence post; the dreamy women were as giggly as teenagers. Madeline, in particular, who lives with a few hundredweight of fluffy toys, while worrying that because of her executive job as a systems designer, she strikes men as "too sophisticated", seems thoroughly unprepared for the sweatier side of human rumpo.
The three joined an SDU party for "a romantic weekend in a fisherman cottage". The fisherman must have seen them coming for the place was deserted when they arrived. "I expected it to be a bit more fancy," said Madeline. But the group played parity games with balloons, danced an oriental version of The Walls of Limerick and sang Love Me Tender, their yearnings wafting sadly and comically across the water at dusk. They were pleasant, generally hopeful people, but it all seemed anti romantic in being so structured.
Still, the pressure is on them to marry. Repulsive television ads give marriage the hard sell. In one of these, two blokes in shirts and ties are standing in the office of the senior one. It's in skyscraper country, so we're probably talking banking or insurance here. "Hey Peter, can you give me some advice? My girlfriend and I have talked about getting married, but I wonder if it will hinder my career," asks Brian, the junior one.
Avuncular Peter puts one arm around Brian's shoulder and picks up a framed family photograph from his desk with the other. "Marriage," he says, smug as you like, "has made me more stable, more understanding and helped build my career. Get married, Brian!" Government pressure on graduate women to get hitched is even greater. But because men and women are not encouraged to mix until they finish their education, young professionals are desperately gauche. Sometimes, you've got to think, there really is a place in the world for the flagon of cider, inhibition buster to the young verdict on the romantic weekend in the fisherman's cottage: "It was okay." For Rosemary: "It was okay, I guess." Still full of Mills and Boon, they had rejected all overtures from smitten suitors. And for Kee: "It was great," he said. He had paired off with a girl named Serena. Months later, they're still together. The SDU is very hopeful of scoring a marriage between Kee and Serena. We didn't get to hear what Kee's dad thinks.
WITHOUT doubt, the television programme of the week was Return to the Dying Rooms (reviewed in The Irish Times on Wednesday). In fact, because this documentary was so astonishing, it seems right to return to Return to the Dying Rooms, for we may not see investigative TV like it for a long time.
By now, most readers will be aware that this sequel to the original The Dying Rooms (screened last June) has charged China with deliberate mass murder of abandoned female babies. The original documentary featured film of the dying baby girl, Mei Ming (No Name), whose disbelieving gaze stared out through the sores which encrusted her eyes. Nobody who saw it will ever forget it. And yet, there was always the possibility that Mei Ming was an isolated, or at least rare, case.
Not now. The updated documentary, much of its new evidence based on a report by Human Rights Watch, after a visit by some of its members to the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute, found proof of a deliberate policy of starvation. It did not supply proof of the claimed extent of this policy - known as "summary resolution" - but it did supply adequate proof of its existence.
Doctored medical records mean that the Chinese authorities can dispute the extent of "summary resolution", which HRW's report suggests is so grave that it amounts to a form of genocide. But, either way, the appalling and lethal conditions in China's state orphanages cannot be dismissed as a fabrication. Viewers, understandably and rightly, feel great outrage and upset after Return to the Dying Rooms.
THERE is, though, a grave danger of Western smugness and sanctimoniousness polluting such reasonable reactions. Looking, last Sunday, for something inconsequential to watch, I settled on Baywatch (which I've never actually reviewed because I'd never before seen an entire episode). It was, of course, the softest of soft porn - corny and curvy swimsuit opera - but there was a timely nastiness to the plot which was alarming.
Underneath the gems of dialogue ("Way to go, Mitch. You're a hell of a guy, do you know what?" and "Something's going on over at the showers. Will you watch my water while I check it out?") was a tale about a Chinese woman, pregnant with her second child, trying to enter America as an illegal immigrant.
You don't really need to know how Mitch and the babes, with the aid of American technology and derring do, saved her life, her husband's life, her baby's life and routed the scurrilous Chinese ship owners, who were on the brink of murdering their smuggled human cargo. Nor do you need to know that under US immigration law, because the woman is pregnant with her second child, the family will be allowed stay and the couple's first daughter will be reunited with her parents in America. You don't need any of that US flag waving. What's important is the anti Chinese message in this piece of popular TV trash.
With 1.2 billion people, China is inevitably going to try to control its population. Starving female babies to death cannot possibly be an acceptable way of doing this. But, with the world's population growing hugely, the greater fear which Return to the Dying Rooms generates is the prospect that China may be only the first country to adopt such barbarous human culling as we approach the new millennium.
Of course, this week's extraordinary documentary means that China must be severely condemned. But this week's very ordinary beach bunnies series shouldn't be allowed promote racist, Western smugness. While nobody has suggested that our own orphanages engaged in murder campaigns, rampant cruelty and sexual abuse destroyed a lot of children here too. But, keeping that context in mind, Return to the Dying Rooms was superb, albeit horrific, television.