Would you choose to make your son do NS if you had a choice?

Hi guys! Let's revisit another favourite topic of mine - national service in Singapore. Now before we get started, a little context: there is a Facebook group called Singaporeans in the UK Association, abbreviated as SUKA. That is an intended pun as the word 'suka' in Malay means 'like', it is also a loanword that has been borrowed into Hokkien with the same meaning, though it tends to sound more like 'sukat' in Singaporean-Hokkien. Although some people have pointed out that 'suka' is also a common swearword in Russian "сука" (pronounced 'suka') and that is considered very rude. Suka is also the way some people have shortened the word 'sucker' in English, which is a derogatory term as well. I stumbled upon this group last year when I was doing research for my start up and was thinking of promoting one of the products to groups of foreign students. I then found the group particularly useful to get information when researching for the Irene Clennell story. The people in the group tend not to be Singaporean students in the UK, but rather long term residents in the UK who have held on to their Singaporean nationality. Former Singaporeans who have adopted British nationality are quite unlikely to be members of SUKA. So with that in mind, let's look at their attitudes towards national service (NS).

Is NS actually good for your sons?

They clearly prefer to be Singaporean rather than British, because most of them probably can naturalize as British citizens today if they wanted to, but because Singapore does not allow for dual nationality, many chose to hold on to their Singaporean passports whilst keeping their expatriate status in the UK. One of the tricky issues often discussed on the Facebook group is the issue of NS: even though these Singaporeans are resident in the UK, their sons are required to return to Singapore to serve NS should their parents choose to make them adopt their nationality (instead of making them British). It seems like a pretty shocking decision to me - to put your son on a flight halfway around the world, to an alien culture, where they may face huge language and cultural barriers to serve NS? Woah. That seems particularly harsh if the boys were brought up in the UK and have barely spent more than a few weeks at a time visiting Singapore on holiday. And what do you gain by making your sons do NS then? Besides, whilst their peers have started university, you're disrupting their education and putting them 2 to 3 years behind their peers by making them return to Singapore to serve NS. To me, it is definitely a very poor choice, I just hope their sons had a say in that decision though I strongly doubt it. For a Singaporean boy born abroad to avoid NS, it is a tedious process that has to begin before the boy turns 11 and if you miss any of the steps, then the boy will either have to serve NS or never set foot in Singapore again. 

But there are loads of Singapore in SUKA who are singing praises of NS and plenty more with sons born and/or raised in the UK, these parents fully intend to put their sons on a plane when they turn 18 and send them back to Singapore to do NS when really, they had the option to dodge it. So why would someone in that position voluntarily subject their sons to NS, whilst thousands of Singaporean men are trying to find ways to get a downgrade? I usually sit back and don't say much in that Facebook group, but I just had to engage this guy who sang praises of NS. I made it clear that I had a nephew in Singapore who would have to do NS in about 4 years and if I had a choice, I'd rather he didn't have to do it but it is too late. This is what he had to say about NS, let's call him Mr YS and this is what he said. What he said does go a long way to explain why Singaporean parents in the UK would gladly send their sons back to Singapore to serve NS. 

Would you avoid NS if you had the choice? 

"NS is good. Learning how to submit yourself to authority, learning the discipline to do things you don't want/like to do. I've heard positive things from employers with global work experience comment on how much more mature Singaporean men are. How much more mentally tough they are. If you put your time in NS in a positive manner, you will get a lot of confidence by the time you're done. It reflects life in many ways. You don't always get to choose your bosses, colleagues or work. NS teaches you a lot if you are humble, positive, open about it. It's a system that sees all kinds go through."

Now I didn't want to submit Mr YS to a wall of text, so I am writing a longer reply here because I prefer expressing myself on my blog than on Facebook. I didn't want to make it sound as if I was picking a fight with him either - he's entitled to his point of view and what he wants to subject his son to, well, that's his business. I do feel that what he said was misguided at best. Firstly, I am shocked at the way he talks about the young men who start NS at the age of NS: these are not children who have learnt absolutely nothing at school, nor have their had any discipline from their (very strict) Asian parents! Dealing with authority? Don't Singaporean students do that at school already, right from the point they begin kindergarten or play school? Discipline is enforced from a very early age in our strict Asian culture - it is not like the students get to run amok and do what the hell they like in a consequences free environment whilst the teachers stand back and do nothing. If anything, Singaporean students are put under an insane amount of stress by extremely strict teachers and parents, setting very high standards, pushing them to achieve a lot, working to strict deadlines and that's just in the classroom. Those of us who have also done sports as students experience that same kind of super strict discipline when training - that is the reason why Singapore is a country that punches above its weight in sports internationally despite being a relatively small country. I had the Chinese piano teacher from hell, who would hit my knuckles with a cane if I struck the wrong notes even though I was 5. If I struck a few notes wrong, she would pick up the music book and slap me across the face with it. She was simply seen as a strict teacher enforcing discipline, rather than insane. So you wanna talk about discipline? This is Singapore, our very strict Asian discipline starts at a very young age!

I'm sure my readers are all nodding in agreement when I talk about the kind of strict upbringing that Singaporean kids are subjected to - so why is Mr YS talking about them as if they are a bunch of ill-disciplined, narcissistic, lazy kids who need to be 'reformed' through the harsh regime of NS? I think he's being extremely unfair to the vast majority of Singaporean young men who have had the kind of strict Asian upbringing I have talked about and on the day of their enlistment, they already have a good attitude, already have a healthy relationship with authority and know a great deal about discipline - they have already gleamed many valuable lessons from the first 18 years of their lives. And of course, there will be some Singaporean young men who have fallen through the net - maybe they came from broken families and their parents didn't really care about them, maybe they dropped out of school and fell into the wrong crowd in their teenage years. Maybe they have already had run-ins with the law prior to their enlistment - well guess what? NS isn't a magic wand that is going to reform all of these troubled characters. There are complex underlying reasons why these young men have become the way they are and if the underlying problems are not addressed and resolved, then they will keep on getting into trouble during NS and after NS. Putting them in an environment where they are forced to submit to a very strict regime will only make them rebel even more, especially if one just assumes that they will conform like everyone else.

In the second half of my NS stint, I worked in a reservist unit where I had to deal with a lot of reservists during their various activities and I had access to all their dockets. Boy, there were a lot of stories about men who have had very troubled backgrounds and difficult childhoods (often through no fault of their own). Putting them in NS wasn't some kind of magic solution that suddenly gave them a sense of home and belonging they never had, instead when you throw in a bunch of guys who have little in common with each other - you are bound to have friction and subsequently, trouble. A lot of it.  There were so many stories of guys who rebelled against the authority of the SAF because that's what they did in school with their teachers and at home with their parents. A boy will obey his parents if he respects them and defies them if he has nothing but contempt for them. And if a recruit has no respect for the authority of the SAF, there will be trouble and that's why many young men end up in the Detention Barracks (ie. military jail). The SAF can punish these troubled young men but punishment and rehabilitation are two quite different things.When you don't have the latter, you get repeat offenders who never change. It takes a certain level of emotional maturity to figure how to work with senior officers in the SAF whom you really dislike and have little respect for but unfortunately, the SAF gives you no help at all in that aspect. The young recruits are simply placed in a difficult situation then expected to take advantage of that by figuring this quagmire out for themselves and then say, "hey, I've learnt a lot from the experience." Well it takes a lot of intelligence and EQ to figure that one out and not all young men will be able to do it on their own, certainly not without a lot of help.

Do you have the EQ to deal with difficult people in NS?

This is tantamount to chucking a bunch of people out of a boat in the middle of the sea and saying to them, "for those of you who don't know how to swim, now's a good time to learn!" Some of us enter NS with better social skills than others whilst others enter NS with very little social skills. It is a fallacy that NS teaches you social skills - no, it doesn't. If your social skills suck on the day of your enlistment, at the ripe old age of 18, then I blame the parents for not having done more to have developed that aspect of the child's soft skills because these are things you pick up as a child, not as an adult. If the parents have messed up, don't expect the SAF to fix your child's problems. That is wholly unrealistic and unfair - you jolly well do your job as parents, how dare you have the nerve pass the buck to the SAF at the age of 18 when you've totally let your son down. I was very lucky in that I had older siblings and many cousins whom were a big part of my childhood, so from a young age, I was always playing with other children and even simple things like listening to others or expressing empathy are often taken for granted. In contrast, I worry about my nephew who is an only child and spends long hours on his own either studying hard or playing computer games. Either way, he is not interacting enough with other children and thus his social skills are not as well developed as they should be. Chucking him in a sink or swim situation will have predictable consequences and thus that is why I am quite concerned about him serving NS.

I would also challenge what Mr YS said about "you don't always get to choose your bosses, your colleagues, your work." Actually, that's not always true - unlike NS, we often do have a choice about what we want to do. Students start planning their future careers as early as secondary school, as you need certain subjects to go down a certain career path. So if you plan to become a doctor, then you would need to do biology. Then after you graduate, you start that process of looking for that ideal job. If you don't like what you are offered (low pay, long hours, don't like the boss etc), you can always say no and look for something better - you do have a choice.  We are constantly exercising careful judgement and making big decisions for our careers. And even if things start out okay at a company, you may end up having new colleagues or a new manager whom you just don't get along well with - you're not a slave, you always have the option of leaving to find a better job if things really became unbearable. In fact, bosses are very conscious about how they treat their employees because if you push them too hard, they can just quit and you don't want to lose your best talent like that. Whereas in NS, the only way to leave is to finish serving the full duration of your conscription - that is why it is massively different from the civilian world. If your boss is a dumb jackass, then quit already. But if your commanding officer is a dumb jackass, oh dear, there's little you can do about the situation apart from putting up with it. I would never encourage anyone in the civilian world to put up with an awaful situation at work if they had the option of simply quitting.

You can always quit, you know.

But wait, students and teenagers have to put up with a lot of crap they don't like either. Student gets no say over the teacher they get in school - short of changing schools altogether (a pretty drastic step), you are basically stuck with whomever you get whether you like them or not, whether they are good or terrible. And need I state the obvious? Children don't get to choose their parents - it is fine if you do get along with your parents but if you don't, then the situation can become very difficult (and that is why I am living 8 time zones away from my parents today). Oh I bet so many of the parents in SUKA just assume that their children love and adore them, but how many of their children are actually just putting up with them in a diplomatic manner, just waiting for the day they are old enough to move away from their parents? How is that any different from the way a soldier puts up with a commanding officer he can't stand, slowly biding his time, waiting for the day of his ORD? Children not only don't get to choose their parents - oh no, they are constantly overruled by their parents: major decisions are often taken by parents on behalf of their children and the poor kids just don't get a say even in a decision that could affect them adversely. Children don't get a say when they take on their parents' religion, they get very little or no say in their education, they need their parents' permission even just to go to the movies with their friends, heck they probably have little say in where the family goes on holiday. Oh and the classic example of this is when Singaporean parents in the UK send their kids back to Singapore to serve NS. Whatever made Mr YS think that children actually have no experience putting up with crap they hated? This is nothing new for them.

Let's move on to the bit which made me laugh out aloud. "I've heard positive things from employers with global work experience comment on how much more mature Singaporean men are. How much more mentally tough they are." Yeah right. As if. I've never once heard that and I have been working in so many countries around the world, with people of so many nationalities - they have had good and bad things to say about Singapore, but Singaporean men being more mature and mentally tough? Oh what utter bullshit! Firstly, let's take a look at this list of traits displayed by emotionally mature people. Now to be fair, if you are emotionally mature, you will cope well in NS because it means you can adapt to the new environment a lot more quickly, you will be able to relate to people around you a lot better, you will be far more resourceful to resolve conflicts you may encounter in camp and you will rise to the challenge of being taken out of your comfort zone. Are all guys who served NS emotionally mature? Hell no, I've seen so many guys struggle from the day they enlist to the day they ORD. This is because the SAF doesn't really do anything to try to nurture that aspect of your emotional maturity - it is just taken for granted that you should try to become more mature in your outlook as that would make your life easier. NS doesn't make your more mature - however, people who are more emotionally mature will thrive a lot better during NS and get a lot more out of the experience. When I questioned him about this claim, he played the "I'm only reporting what other people have said, that's what I have heard them say" card, rather than defend his claim.

"Oh I've heard someone say that..."

There is another aspect of NS that doesn't make men more 'mature' - men are in fact infantalized in the army. You are told what to wear, when you sleep, when you wake up, what to do each day, what work to do, how to do it, you eat what you are given, you are even ordered to drink water (ie. the infamous 'water parades') - essentially, you have to follow strict orders and any decision making is completely removed from your life. That is exactly what happens to a toddler, would a parent trust a 3 year old boy to take care of himself? Absolutely not - there will always be a responsible adult to make decisions for all aspects of the boy's life. It is only as adults that we take on more and more responsibility. How are you going to mature when you are simply blindly following orders, without exercising any judgement whatsoever? Even if an order seems like a really bad idea, the default response of the soldier is simply, "I had better not say anything, just in case I get into trouble for questioning authority. I don't want to cause offence." How is that any different from a young boy feeling frustrated with his parents' poor decisions, but knows that he has no influence over them? Putting men in that position simply makes them switch off, keep their heads down, their mouths shut and go into that child like mode - that's the complete opposite of maturity. You want your son to be mature - send him away to work for a year in another country where he has to fend for himself, make every single decision for himself everyday and take responsibility for them.

As for being "mentally tough", that's an assumption that Mr YS made because many soldiers are made to endure some very physically and mentally demanding activities during their time at NS and having survived that makes you tougher. Well, I beg to differ. You can put ten guys through the same training regime and get ten different responses. Some people respond well under stressful circumstances, in fact, it may take a bit of pressure and compteition to bring out the very best in them. I see that a lot in gymnastics, where gymnasts push themselves very hard in order to beat their rivals. However, some people do not respond well to this kind of pressure and may fall apart in quite a spectacular way, the classic example is the case of Ouyang Xiangyu - the scholar who tried to murder her lab mates when she succumbed to the stress placed on her at Stanford University. Mr YS is making the assumption that the men will respond positively to all these difficult challenges and come out stronger - well that's just being blindly optimistic because quite a lot of men will crumble under the pressure if they are just not mentally strong enough to cope with it. Many of the factors that determine whether or not a young man will be able to deal with that kind of pressure depends on the first 18 years of their lives, their upbringing and childhood, prior to their enlistment. And even if you have a great son who is a mature, independent and intelligent young man, you still have no control at all over what kind of people he would have to live and work with in NS - they may turn out to be the nastiest people from hell and will give your son a hard time through no fault of his own. 

Now what I am saying is just common sense and I assure you that people in the West do not have any kind of favourable impression of Singaporean men just because they have served NS. Yes there are some favourable stereotypes of Singaporeans in the West: like all other East Asians (South Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Hongkongers, Taiwanese etc) we are perceived to be very hardworking but that stereotype applies across the board including to countries like Japan, China and Hong Kong which do not have conscription and they are considered no less inferior to those from South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan where the men have to serve mandatory NS, In fact, if you were to ask a typical white person in London the question, "which East Asian countries have mandatory military service for men and which don't?" Chances are, they would not be able to answer that question correctly as it is an issue that simply doesn't affect them at all. Their favourable impressions of East Asian people in general - including the women, who do not have to serve NS anyway - is based on our Asian culture, parenting methods and work ethic. NS, really, nothing to do with the favourable stereotypes of East Asians in general here in the West. It is one thing for older Singaporean men to have an opinion of the impact of NS as they have been through the process themselves, but what about your average white person in London, New York or Sydney? Most Angmohs would simply say, "Well, I don't know enough about how national service works in your country to form any kind of opinion about the issue, so I shall just treat each Singaporean man I meet as an individual and access each of them on a case by case basis, rather than make any sweeping assumptions, okay?"

To be fair to Mr YS, I did give him a chance to respond to my points - I didn't want to leave you with the impression that he is completely brainwashed by the PAP that NS is the best gift from the Singaporean government to you male Singaporeans. I think that he has already made up his mind that he is going to send his son back to Singapore to serve NS, so he's just going to assume that it is all going to work out fine. It's a bit like when I had booked that holiday to the Dominican Republic last year - I had heard both good and bad things about the country, I even got nervous about how predatory it was going to be and how poorly organized public transport was there. But once I had booked the flights, I decided to adopt a positive attitude and convince myself that I was going to have a good time there. Sure things weren't perfect when I got there but there's no point in trying to talk yourself out of a decision once you have already committed to it. You may as well just hope for the best and not think about the worst case scenario. Would Mr YS's son cope well in NS having grown up in the UK? We don't know. But for what it is worth, here is Mr YS's response to some of the points I have made (I am compiling several comments which he has posted - it would be way too long to cut and paste all of it).

"NS is not going to a fix-all. Of course there will be idiots. No one said every single post-NS male is a dream hire. It is of course meant in a general sense. People like you who have a great upbringing, others who don't, could do with some NS. Many 18 year olds do not have a purpose like you do, representing your country. Everybody arrives at NS differently and it is an opportunity for those who haven't, to grow up. So NS can serve as a good opportunity to bring them up to speed on life - if they keep a positive and open attitude as I said. You won't figure everything out, you probably still won't know what you want to do with your life but by golly, you find out what you don't want to do. And it put things in perspective. By contrast, a lot of things in life don't seem as bad. NS is of course not the be all and end all. I'm just saying that if taken correctly, you can make something of it. Sometimes you learn something without even knowing. Years later, you can be working another incompetent buffoon but because it's nothing new to you, you are able to take it in stride better or you may have learnt to deal with him/her better and to be able to negotiate a better outcome for yourself because you have experience with the situation. It is but an opportunity is all I'm saying. As parents, it's important to frame the situation for our kids because they are not going to just get it. If you have to spend 2 years in NS, make the best of it. What do you think you can learn from it. People skills? Things they don't teach in school? How do you deal with adversity? How do you explore your own limits? Like I said, NS like every institution you will be a part of, is an opportunity. Nothing more. Maybe I am overly optimistic, but I think there is no point in not being so. If I can find a positive out of a shitty experience such as NS, I can find a positive out of any experience in my life."

Oh he seems to have changed his tuned at the end of all that - after having sang so many praises about NS, he ends with calling it a "shitty experience". Oh my, what a contrast.  The change of tone in his response in drastic but it also reflects a far more realistic and honest reflection about Mr YS's own experience with NS. If he had offered the second piece in the first instance, maybe I wouldn't have reacted quite the way I did because it does sound a lot more reasonable than the first. This tells us a lot more about what is actually going on in his head here - this isn't that different from say a father sending his child away to university. Sure there are things that can go wrong - the child  could totally crack under pressure like Ouyang Xiangyu or even have a miserable time trying to fit in and find new friends. But of course, the parents know that worrying about the worst case scenarios is fruitless, so they try to convince themselves that everything will be fine by talking about all the positive aspects of going to university, focusing on the success stories whilst ignoring any evidence to the contrary. If Mr YS's son is going to have to do NS regardless, perhaps Mr YS is trying hard to convince himself that everything is going to be alright, that he has indeed made the right decision for his son because regardless of how Mr YS may feel about the SAF and NS, I am sure he wouldn't want to see his son crumble, suffer and end up totally resenting his father for having made a wrong decision. Mr YS is in a tough position, I'm sure he has all the best intentions and wants the best for his son but time will tell whether or not he has made the right decision. 

Do you think Mr YS has made the right decision?

Okay, so that's it from me on this issue. Over to you, if you were living abroad and had the opportunity to make sure your son doesn't have to serve NS, would you spare him of that liability? Or would you agree with Mr YS that it would be the best thing for the boy? What factors would influence your decision whether or not NS is right for your son? Or would you allow the boy himself to make that decision? Personally, I believe the opportunity cost of spending 2 years doing NS is extremely high - but that is only if the boy already has a place in a good university and should just get on with his education. If he has nothing better to do with his life and nothing to lose by spending two years in Singapore, then that new experience might actually be quite beneficial for him. Let me know what you think please. Many thanks for reading.