Social mobility: a door opened to some and not others?

Hi guys, for today's post I am going to tackle the tricky issue of social class - one that I have talked about a lot on my blog mostly because I live in the UK and British society is obsessed with social class. I've not really talked that much about my own experience and so I thought I'd talk about myself again, given that the last time I talked about my career, hey I actually got some pretty positive feedback. So I suppose I have to start with my family. I would describe my family as working class folks who have done pretty well for themselves. Some of you may say, wait a minute, your parents are teachers, they are hardly working class as typically, working class folks would be those who hold blue-collar jobs and most teachers would consider themselves white collar - but can we make such an assumption in this day and age?

British society is still very much divided by class.

Well, I think there's a huge difference between say a lecturer at a top university and primary school teachers and my parents were the latter, not by choice. It was not like they particularly enjoyed teaching younger children, rather their highest academic qualification apart from their teaching diploma was the equivalent of O levels, so that meant the only teaching job the MOE would let them do was teach in a primary school. That's right, back in the early 1960s when my parents qualified as teachers, you only need the equivalent of O levels to start training as a teacher as the general standard of education was pretty low back in those days and thus you can't measure it by our modern standards or compare it to the demands the MOE makes of teachers in 2017. So I think my parents did pretty well for themselves in getting themselves a white-collar civil service job that paid well and gave them a decent pension and even if you want to label their jobs as white collar, to all intents and purposes, they behaved and lived pretty much like blue collar folks.

One aspect of white collar people is their aspiration and that's one thing that my father totally lacked - his stubborn refusal to learn English or even attempt to speak it is an extremely blue collar trait. He has a total lack of interest in the world beyond his immediate community and culturally, he would have far more in common with a typical blue collar worker today (such as a postman, a bus driver, a supermarket worker) than a young primary school teacher in Singapore today. However, I don't think my father ever thought of his class identity - it just wasn't an issue for people like him: if you never ever meet a person of a different social class, then it is surprisingly easy for someone like him to be totally oblivious to the concept of social class. I remember trying to tell him how British people would look at little details such as the way you dressed or the way you spoke to try to determine your social class and my dad was totally confused. He said, "but surely everyone wears modern fashion these days, how can you tell and why would you do that?" I suppose his autism made him blissfully unaware of the opinions of others - it is impossible to teach him anything about the world.

Do you care about the opinions of others?

You know what the irony is? My father had a relatively privileged upbringing in Malaysia and came from a family rich enough to send him to study in Singapore - that was a luxury that many of his peers never had. You see, his family was from a relatively small town in Johor where there wasn't a secondary school then, so when children finished their primary school education, they either simply dropped out of former education (we're talking about the late 1940s in Malaysia here) or they were sent off to a bigger city like Singapore, Johor Bahru or Kuala Lumpur to continue their secondary education. So the fact that my father's family was rich enough to do that proved that they weren't poor at all, they were in fact pretty darn rich for they sent a number of my father's siblings away for secondary education like that - something few families in that town could have afforded to do. Thus in my father's mind, he was already middle class and white collar because he remembers how much more privileged he was compared to his peers back in his hometown. That's how he felt as a child growing up and he never changed that mindset - he is comfortable seeing what he wants to see.

Thus it is really hard to try to put my parents into the category of white or blue collar, working class or middle class. They showed characteristics of both sides of the divide - I suppose if you were to measure them by 1960s Singaporean standards, then they were probably white collar, middle class folks. But if you were to measure them by modern standards today, then they're definitely blue collar, working class folks. Everything is relative I suppose, back in the late 1940s, in the post war years, British Malaya was still recovering from the ravages of WW2, so within that context my father's family then was practically posh by late 1940s Malaysian standards, they were rich, they owed land and could afford the best education - he never thought about comparing himself with the richest Americans or British people in those days as their social paths never crossed. But for myself, I am directly comparing myself to the British aristocrats in London today and feeling somewhat inadequate when I consider my humble roots having grown up in Ang Mo Kio. My father has been quite comfortable being top dog in his community, whereas my social circles are completely different as I work in corporate finance in London - so it is unfair to make any kind of comparison and I am not passing any judgement.

My world is extremely different from my parents'.

So as you can imagine, growing up, my parents did little to try to shape my identity as middle class - don't get me wrong, they did make some efforts. For example, my mother insisted that my siblings and I all had to learn how to play the piano. Now that's an extremely bourgeois choice on her part, but did she do it to try to make us more cultured? Well, not exactly - rather, she had always wanted to do it herself but felt it was too hard for her, so she decided to make her children do it on her behalf. Yet apart from the piano lessons, well there was nothing else - my parents' social circle did not extend beyond their relatives and colleagues, all of whom shared very similar social backgrounds with my parents. I became more and more aware of this when I met classmates who parents had white collar jobs like investment bankers, lawyers, doctors and scientists. I also watched quite a lot of TV as a child growing up, so by the time I was around 13, I realized that I was probably at quite a disadvantage when it came to my social background as I had pretty much been raised as a working class kid in Ang Mo Kio, regardless of what category you wished to place my parents in.

The rich kids at school had parents who were well connected - they were taken on fancy holidays where they were taught how to appreciate foreign culture. Me, I didn't even know how to hold a knife and fork properly as we never ate like that in my family. It was incredible that I even did well at English at school given that my father refused to speak any English at all and my mother's Singlish was questionable at the best of time. (Yes my mother got away with speaking Singlish and not English as a primary school teacher for four decades but she was hardly the only one from her generation guilty of that.) But thankfully, one thing my mother did right was that she insisted that I read a lot of books: I think she believed it would improve my English but it did more than that - reading a lot made me realize thee was a much bigger world out there. I devoured books from British and American authors as a teenager and learnt a lot from reading about the world out there - something my parents never did. Yes they read the newspaper when they had the time, but I had never seen them actually reading a book at all and don't get me even started on the internet and social media.

Social media - my parents have no idea what it is.

You know the saying, ignorance is bliss and that was pretty much my parents' case: they didn't realize just how working class they were as they had no concept of class. Whereas having read so many books about social class, I desperately aspired to be middle class whilst painfully realizing that I was extremely working class. Heck, I totally lacked class and sophistication as a teenager and that bothered me. I had a very low self-esteem then anyway and this was yet another aspect of my life that I didn't know how to fix. There wasn't a book in the library entitled, "how to become classy and sophisticated even though you are working class scum". No, instead I read books about beautiful people with such glamorous lives but there was no instruction manual as to how to become like those beautiful people. May I remind you that this was the pre-internet era, trying to gleam information like that was a lot harder in those days and I felt confused, frustrated and annoyed. I really didn't want to end up like my parents yet I wasn't sure how I was going to avoid that fate.

I suppose going into NS provided temporary relieve from that problem - you see in NS, you wanted to blend in and keep a low profile. Pretentious guys who tried to show off how classy they were usually became targets of bullying and the fact that I lacked any kind of sophistication then worked in my favour. NS presented a whole different set of social challenges, about settling into a new environment, learning to get along with people I had nothing in common with and you know the saying, every cloud has its silver lining. Whilst I had to deal with many difficult people in NS, I actually learnt an awful lot in NS about handling difficult people. It was a sink or swim situation and I actually learnt how to swim: either you learnt to get along with these difficult people or you end up totally isolated, bullied and miserable. I'm like the contestant who goes into Survivor and ends up making the most unlikely alliances with contestants he has nothing in common with. I left NS feeling a helluva lot more confident in my ability to get along with people - it was not something the SAF taught me, oh no, I'm not giving them credit for that. I have to take full credit for having figured it out under very difficult circumstances.

I actually learnt a lot in my NS days about human relationships.

I then moved to the UK to start university in 1997 after getting a scholarship to UCL. Immediately, I was in a course with posh students from really privileged backgrounds. When I sat down and chatted with my new friends, I realized I had so little in common with them - for example, I had never gone skiing as a child and never gone sailing, those were the kinds of things that rich people did. Their parents took an active interest in their careers whilst my father didn't even know which university in the UK I was studying at, since he didn't speak English. I suppose when you're thrown in that kind of situation, there are two ways that one would typically react: the first would to completely embrace whom you are, become unapologetically working class with a certain bravado, "yeah I'm working class - you have a problem with that? What's wrong with being working class?" The other would be to feel ashamed of being working class and pretend to be middle class - I don't know why I chose that option, it wasn't even a conscious decision. I was an outsider coming into British society and I was given the opportunity to redefine myself, I didn't want to insert myself into the lowest rung of the hierarchy, to be at the very bottom of the food chain! I knew I could never at least be at the top, but I could be in the middle and that began a long exercise to understand the rules of the game, how the British social class system worked.

I guess my point is that for all the misgivings one may have about British society in light of what was revealed through the Grenfell Tower disaster, I did manage to succeed despite having the odds stacked against me. I was an working class Asian immigrant who came to the UK, yet after 20 years, I am effectively middle class by any definition you wish to use: be it in my social circles I move around in, in the amount of wealth I have, by the kind of education I have had or my social habits. What does this say about social mobility - is it really that easy to cross the social class divide in the UK? Clearly not - that's why we still have so many poor people living in the UK today and the divide between the rich and the poor is getting wider all the time. So how did I manage to cross the huge class divide when so many others who were born and bred in this country struggled and fail? I would like to think that I'm simply smarter than everyone else - but even I have to admit that's simply not the case. Instead, I think I owe my success to a certain mindset and discipline I picked up as a gymnast. Please have a look at this training video below for a skill called the toe-on toe-off to handstand:

This is a rather difficult skill for women's gymnastics, certainly not something beginners can contemplate learning. A few weeks ago, I suggested to my friend Claire that she could try the skill - she made a few valiant attempts, failed and declared, "no I doubt I can do it, I think it is way too difficult for me." She was prepared to give up then I dug up this video for her, to demonstrate the various drills she had to do before she could put it all together and perform the skill. The sheer number of drills presented even in this short clip is quite daunting - well, it isn't a simple skill after all. But this is what we gymnasts do - once we decide to learn a complex, difficult skill, we accept that it is going to take us many months, even years to master it and these drills break down the different aspects of the skills down to little bite-sized segments. So whilst the final product is difficult, the drills are all relatively easy: the gymnast masters each individual drill and then progresses to put the whole skill together like a jigsaw puzzle. Claire is making good progress with the drills, she is still not able to put it all together but at least she now understands what she has to do in order to train the skill.

You may think, okay breaking down complex problems into smaller component parts, that isn't rocket science but perhaps the hardest part of this process is self-doubt. Each time I check in with Claire and see how she's getting along with the drills, she says, "oh I can do the drills, I just can't put it all together yet, sigh." Even good gymnasts get frustrated sometimes and give in to self-doubt if they do not feel like they are progressing fast enough. How many people take on a complex challenge, break it down into smaller component parts and then give up on themselves because they lack the self-confidence to follow through with everything necessary? I suppose a lot of that depends on whether they have someone to help guide them along - the same way I am encouraging Claire to keep doing those drills, you're far more likely to succeed if you have someone there for you: be it a teacher, a cheerleader or a coach - to give you whatever you need to stick to the long term plans. Having trained so many skills that took months, even years to learn and perfect as a gymnast, I am not afraid to take on complex new challenges knowing that I can break them down the same way I break down difficult new gymnastics skills and I know have the resolve to follow through with such a process. That's how I crossed the class divide: by tackling one small aspect of my life at a time until the transformation was complete.

Taking such an approach to complex problems may be nothing new - say when you do a degree, you probably try not to think about how you're going to accumulate enough knowledge and skills to pass those final exams, you're probably just taking it one essay, one project, one assignment, one topic at a time. However, that's a well trodden path - loads of people go through a 3 or 4 year programme at university and emerge the other end as graduates. But wait, what if you had to take on a difficult, complex challenge that has never ever been done before by anyone else - would you have the self-confidence to spend months, even years working on it, with enough faith in yourself that you will succeed in the end? You'll be amazed how many people actually would back away from something like that, simply because they are so risk-averse they would rather stick to a tried-and-test formula that has been done by many others before. That is why those who do have the balls to do something like that usually either succeed or they crash and burn - it is whether you want to take the risky route or the safe. You've heard the saying, no pain no gain - one of my favourite gymnasts of all time is Svetlana Khorkina of Russia because she is one of the most innovative gymnasts of her time and has invented so many skills that are named after her. If I hadn't grown up in this kind of environment where risk-taking and originality is valued and rewarded, I think would be quite a different kind of adult today. Some people would give in to the mindset of, "no one in my family has gone to university before so I can't it", whilst I prefer Khorkina's attitude, "no one in the world has done this skill before because everyone thought it was impossible - watch and learn, I'll be the first gymnast in the world to do this new skill." I had been very fortunate to have trained with some incredibly gutsy, ambitious gymnasts over the years.

Well, I know what some of you are going to say already: that the crucial factor for my social mobility were my scholarships - well, I beg to differ. I think that would be simplifying a complex issue. Allow me to tell you about a Singaporean scholar I met whilst at my university: he was so smart that he had special concession from the Singaporean government to do his undergraduate degree in maths before even completing his A levels or national service. However, this guy is strange and that's like saying the sea is a bit wet or the sun is kinda hot. He was obese, had bad breath and a severe body odor problem; I hope he was on medication for his acne and he wore extremely thick glasses. Despite being a maths genius, he had zero social skills and I remember meeting him at an event at university and he just started telling me about his interest in mathematics, without once checking if I actually gave a shit about what he was studying - he may be capable of some of the most complex mathematics in the world, but he didn't have a clue about things like basic hygiene, never mind social skills. Oh I don't doubt that he's a super genius of course, they don't give out these special scholarships to normal people. But he had no friends at university, I would spot him alone in the cafeteria sometimes and I would avoid him. On one hand, sure I felt rather sorry for him. On the other hand, he was downright creepy.

I assume that he would have returned to Singapore after he graduated and be given a job as part of his scholarship bond - no doubt he would be successful in his job and would have made a lot of money. But would he ever cross the social divide and become effectively middle class? I think that's a moot point - even if someone like that makes millions of dollars, there's a special class for people like that: creepy loner, weirdo freak - call it what you want, whether he is working or middle class is totally irrelevant. After all, us humans, we're social creatures and we crave a sense of belonging with people we identify with. If you follow me on Instagram, you will see that I was at the Henley Royal Regatta this week and that's the kind of social event that not just the elites of British social would hang out. And it is not just being able to afford a ticket - you see, it is a social event: you don't go there on your own, you would usually be invited there by someone who has booked a VIP area in an enclosure and you would need to have some pretty rich and posh friends to move around in those kinds of social circles. I work in banking, I have some extremely rich and posh clients and business partners thus one of them invited me there. Even if our maths scholar from Singapore wanted to attend an event like that, well, he could, I suppose, turn up on his own and book a table in an expensive restaurant in the area - but that's as far as his money can take him without the social connections. His money could buy him his things like cars and fancy holidays, but his money will never buy him social connections and social mobility to be accepted by the upper or middle classes.

So in conclusion, I suppose I was lucky: I was given the opportunity and I made the most of it to get to where I am today. I have seen so many people who were given so many opportunities but squandered them all because they just weren't motivated or hungry enough to grasp that chance. So what do you think? What are the key factors to social mobility? How do you feel about your class identity? Let me know what you think, leave a comment below. Thanks for reading.