Part 2: Of colours and cultures

I have decided to break my reply up into part 1 & 2 because this last section actually does deal with an issue which has nothing to do with the Yale-NUS debate, but rather it is about one's cultural identity. If you haven't read part 1, you may wanna start here: http://limpehft.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/yale-nus-saga-continues-part-1-of-2.html

Moving on: Barrie referred to me as a "UK/European wannabe Sg blogger". Let me give you a bit more from his blog: What they don't realise is that they are instead trapped in their own UK/Europe box and judge local Sinkies from that platform! Then they have the gall to mock local Sinkies of being unable to think outside the Sinkie box!
Limpehft's article is a perfect snapshot of the bizarre but typical behaviour of that UK/European wannabe Sg blogger who is guilty of the very situation I described!

Limpeh has lived in the Middle East, China and Thailand, not just Europe! 

Now this guy claims to have lived in Canada (and let's say we believe him on that one though I have nagging doubts), because someone who has lived in another country for a while should learn the nature of how living in another country shapes our minds. His analysis of "Sinkie box" vs "UK/Europe box" is plain flawed because our brains don't work like that.

He seems to be very passionate about the way Muslims are treated - hello? I've lived in Muslim majority countries, I've worked in the Middle East for crying out aloud and when I was in Singapore, unlike many Chinese-Singaporeans, I actually speak remarkably good Malay and some of my best friends in Singapore are Malay. Why does he get on his high horse and think that he is the only one qualified to lecture us about Muslim rights and the way Muslims are treated? But blind spot again, mark my words, he will conveniently choose to ignore that (along with my accusation that he has been homophobic in his previous post).

It's just so easy, too tempting for Singaporeans to paint this caricature of those of us who have moved to the west as some kind of SPG Barbarella floozy - but that is a very one-sided caricature, it's good for a laugh on The Noose but please, it's no reflection of the complexities that real life presents. "Tanks everybody tanks!" Sorry, Limpeh is not cute enough to pull off a "Barbarella" lah - I was the smart but nerdy kid in your class who had to depend on my brains and not my looks to get ahead in life.

Before we go any further, let me get this out of the way: I hate the way people use the word Sinkie or Sinkipore. It is disrespectful and the word 'sink' has negative connotations as opposed to the word 'sing' which is neutral or positive. If you're looking for a shorter, abbreviated way to refer to Singapore, I thought the common expression was S'pore or just Spore - but Sinkie? Where did the K come from? I don't like it. 

Let me explain to you my analysis of how our experiences shape our brains. When we are born as babies, our mind is a clean slate. Let's use a sheet of pure white cotton fabric to represent that clean slate. When we are first introduced to our first culture - say the culture of the country we grew up in or your parents' culture, that culture colours our brains. Imagine us taking that white cloth and putting it in a yellow dye, turning that cloth yellow. 

Dyeing fabrics

What do you think happens when we then move the person to another country and let him experience another culture? Let's use the colour blue to represent that culture. We put the yellow cloth into the blue dye and what happens at that stage? Is the cloth dyed: 

• yellow?
• blue?
• green?

That's right, the cloth becomes green - it is neither yellow nor blue, but green which is a combination of both cultures. Now if we take the green cloth and we dip it into another colour (representing a different culture) red, what happens when we mix green and red? You will end up with a shade of brown. Again, this brown is not like any of the primary colours that we had started with, but the result of blending and mixing all these colours together.

Please note that this is not an automatic process but involves a lot of effort on the part of the person moving to a different country. Some migrants pick up a new language very quickly, other's don't and I have discussed the situation in France in a previous post as well as the situation in Prague in a post I wrote last year. In my case, I have accumulated ten languages along with detailed knowledge of many cultures, I have successfully adapted to all the countries I have lived in. 

As a person who has lived in so many countries and cities from Singapore to Paris to Shanghai to London to Bangkok to Prague to Dubai to Bratislava to Istanbul to Geneva - my cloth is a vibrant mix of many different colours with a blend of Asian, Middle Eastern and European influences. This makes me distinctly different from my counterparts in all of these places where I have lived - it makes me very unique indeed. Okay, so many Barrie has only lived in one other place, Canada, apart from Singapore - but I would like to have imagined that his stint in Canada would have exposed him to a different culture and allowed him to evolve as a person, espousing the best of both worlds. What was he doing in Canada, hiding in Chinatown? 

Dubai - oh Dubai... what a crazy place. 

So in my case, it's completely wrong to talk about a UK/Euro box vs a Singaporean box - there is only one box for me, that's Limpeh's box which is pretty unique as it has a blend of gorgeous Asian, Middle Eastern and European designs, pretty funky and chic on the outside and very substantial on the inside. Why oh why would I want to give up this incredibly globalist, cosmopolitan box which encompasses a wealth of so many cultures and languages (of which I speak ten) and trade it in for a monolingual British box? It's not something I'd expect many people to understand but when you have moved around as much as I do, you genuinely feel like you're a citizen of the world rather than aspire to any one culture. Why aspire to only one culture when you can embrace them all?

Indeed, what I do for a living draws upon this very unique, international experience I have had - I work for a European company trying to expand their business into new markets and I do their business development on the ground for them in Europe, Middle East and Asia, helping these monolingual European overcome cultural and linguistic barriers in far away markets and find new customers there. If my box didn't have a distinctive Asian flavour to it, I wouldn't have been worth the money they paid me to work my magic for them in the Far East. I am the adaptor - allowing a European company to plug into new Asian markets and I am only able to do that because I know both cultures well. 

People like myself who have lived in many countries and speak many languages - we're a special breed of people not defined by simplistic nationalistic, cultural or linguistic definitions. My Austrian friend Markus is currently living and working in Istanbul - and like me, he speaks ten languages too (not the same ten though) and he has lived and worked in even more counties than I have. On Facebook, he announced recently that he is studying Icelandic, Basque, Hungarian and Japanese which should bring his total up to 14. We have this shared understanding about how such experiences shape our brains and when I told him about my analogy of dyeing the cloth with different colours, he totally understood me. 

Nonetheless he added, "it's not something I expect other people to understand, if they've not done it themselves. Sadly, people tend to default to their own experiences rather than accept that other people can do something they can't. Even if they are witnessing them doing it before their eyes, their brains will block it out, like a blind spot."  So Barrie, I have tried explaining this to you why your 'box' theory is completely wrong, but Markus is right, your brain will probably try to block it out because it's not something you can personally achieve. 

What I find really sad about Barrie's overall attitude is that he can't get over this "us vs them" attitude - US vs Singapore, Yale vs NUS, USA vs Muslims. Oh dear. It's so divisive. One thing I have learnt after living in so many countries and having so many friends of different nationalities, cultures, religions etc is this: there is so much shared humanity amongst us once you overlook the superficial differences. This is why I didn't like the way he approach this whole issue in a divisive manner - my approach is so much more zen: I simply welcome anyone who wants to talk about human rights and civil rights for it is better that we talk about it than ignore those issues. How would he feel if someone told him that because Singapore has a poor record on human rights, then as a Singaporean, he should shut up, he has no right to talk about the way Muslims are treated in the USA otherwise we shall label him a hypocrite. Ha! How does it feel to have the tables turned then eh Barrie?

But no, Limpeh is not like that. Limpeh cares about all humans all over the world on this planet, whether you're American or Singapore, black or white, Muslim or atheist, gay or straight and I believe everyone has the same rights. And that is why I was particularly offended by Barrie's blatant homophobia on his blog. So homophobia is okay but Islamophobia is not acceptable? You wanna talk about hypocrisy Barrie - can we start with you? Can you look in the mirror and face your bigotry and homophobia before you want to accuse Yale of hypocrisy?

So there you go. I have dealt with Barrie's questions and there won't be a follow up. Don't get me wrong, I have always indulged my regular readers with long series of posts just for them (Peixian, Naedyn, David Hu, theblankbox, Alan Heah, Winking Doll etc) but I don't like responding to people who are antagonistic. This was not the reason why I decided to write a blog.