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.
