In 2007, a Smithsonian Magazine article declared, “Singapore Swing: Peace­ful and Prosperous, Southeast Asia’s Famously Uptight Nation Has Let Its Hair Down.” Remarking on his return trip to Singapore, David Lamb, former Southeast Asia bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times,marveled, “This tiny nation—whose ascendancy from malaria­infested colonial backwater to gleaming global hub of trade, finance and transportation is one of Asia’s great success stories—is rein­venting itself, this time as a party town and regional center for culture and the arts.”1 Implicit in Lamb’s fawning language is recognition of Singapore’s wealth: in 2021, Singapore boasted a gross domestic product (GDP) higher than that of 80 percent of the world’s nations, a feat the former British colony accomplished within roughly fifty years of independence.2 After its ejection from the Federation of Malaysia, Singapore gained independence in 1965 and became one of the wealth­iest countries in Southeast Asia under the leadership of former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party (PAP), the governing party that still man­ages Singapore today. Even more impressively, Singapore in “the early 1990s . . . reached rough parity, in terms of per capita Gross Domestic Product, with the United Kingdom, its former colonial power.”3 Though many may not know these exact details of Singapore’s economic ascendency, most are by now familiar with its “Third World to First World” arc.4 It is at this point well worn, almost a cliché