Singapore’s theme park of the damned

Thieves were being frozen into ice blocks, drug traffickers grilled on rotisseries, kidnappers impaled on trees of knives, porn possessors sawed in half and classroom cheats meticulously disemboweled.

[...] there was one piece of the action that I wasn’t able to make out through the cluster of young families with small children who had stopped for a good, long look.

Picture “It’s a Small World” with set design by Hieronymus Bosch, and you start to get an idea of the “10 Courts of Hell,” a detailed tour of the sinner’s afterlife, and the centerpiece of Singapore’s Haw Par Villa.

[...] what emerged was a special place in hell for the unfilial.

Normally, I phoned home from wherever I turned up on the planet, but between the almost unnavigable time difference and overflowing itinerary on this trip, I resorted to quickie e-mails instead.

[...] one woman I chatted up told me that her brother — having just acquired his own mac daddy massage chair — decided to buy a burnable version for their mom, who surely would appreciate being as pampered in the afterlife as he was on Earth.

With that, I was officially guilt-stricken, and filial piety was all I could see, whether in the local papers, where pundits explored the economy’s impact on filial duties; on TV, where politicians condemned “the outsourcing of filial piety” to retirement homes; or in temples, where ancestral tablets filled entire pagodas.