"There was enough commercial sex around in the towns of Malaya, but there was a certain discretion of display. The secondary exploitation of it, in stage shows or blatant underwear advertisements, was mostly abhorrent to the Eastern mind, though there was a famous Chinese striptease performer named Rose Chan who drew crowds of towkays panting under their binoculars. It was the white woman who was expected to be shameless and provocative. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell were to be seen in Cinemascope, and there was a full-page advertisement for The Barefoot Contessa in the Straits Times presenting Ava Gardner as "the most beautiful animal in the world". Some of my students pinned this page to the wall above their beds. The crinolined or embustled mems of the old days had been untouchable, but things were changing in the new age of democracy and equality. All Kuala Kangsar was on fire when a French film called Ah! Les Belles Bacchantes was shown. In it French women exhibited pert little bosoms and men of all races united in groans of lust. The Frenchwoman, or perempuan Paranchis, stood for lasciviousness, and the town of Kota Bharu on the East Coast was known, pathetically, as the Paris of the East because of the sexual licence that was believed to prevail there. There was a Frenchwoman in Kuala Kangsar, but she was a very austere doctor of medicine in a white coat. There was only one woman who, not behaving like the traditional English mem in the East and possessing the blonde beauty of a film star, was taken to be erotic in the French manner, and that was my wife."