We need to talk about Kevin Kwan

Hi guys, we need to talk about Kevin Kwan, the writer of the book Crazy Rich Asians which has been turned into a hugely successful Hollywood blockbuster - set mostly in Singapore, much has been said about the film already but it emerged that Kwan couldn't set foot in Singapore as he would be arrested on arrival for failing to have fulfilled his NS obligations. Now a lot of hate has been directed towards Kwan once that emerged, but I'll like to introduce a bit of common sense into the issue and try to find out why these Singaporeans are so angry over Kwan's NS obligations. So let's start with some facts: Kwan was born in Singapore to a crazy rich family but left at the tender age of 11, which would have been around 1984. MINDEF has made it clear that Kwan had failed to register for national service despite letters having been sent to his overseas address in the US in 1990, when he was about 17 years old. Kwan had only tried to renounce his citizenship in 1994 but that was rejected as he had not served his national service. By then he had become an American citizen, so he has been unable to set foot back in Singapore over that situation which remains unresolved.

Would Kwan have been able to renounce his Singaporean nationality without having to serve NS if he had handled the matter more delicately? The answer is no - the rules are clearly explained in this article here but in short, this was not applicable in Kwan's case. Kwan had to have already obtained another nationality before the age of 11 in order to have gone down that path, but the only way that would happen for a child that young is if his parents had already obtained a new nationality in another country. Kwan had began the process way too late in leaving Singapore only at the ripe old age of 11. So Kwan had a choice to either come back to Singapore and serve NS in a country which he left at 11 and had no intention of ever living in, or simply continue life in the US, pursuing the American dream. He chose the latter, which in my opinion was the only sensible option really. The small price to pay for having that extra 2 to 2.5 years of his life was never being able to set foot in Singapore again, a small price to pay for not serving NS. I was wondering if he would be treated like Melvyn Tan - the world famous pianist who found himself in the same position, Tan's career as a concert pianist was just starting when he got called to serve NS. By then he was already a British citizen, so he just shrugged his shoulders and said, "fuck it, I'm never going back to Singapore." But because Tan became such a huge star, he was 'forgiven' and allowed back to Singapore in 2005 with no more than a small fine. Certainly, Tan was given preferential treatment because of his status, could Kwan expect the same treatment - especially after the huge success of the film?

Now unless you've attained some kind of celebrity status, I certainly would not recommend that you try to test the patience of MINDEF given how they even refused deferment to Ben Davis - the 17 year old who has just signed with Fulham FC. Of course, if Davis turns out to be the next David Beckham, he could well spend the next 20 years in the world of football playing and at some stage, decide to do exactly what Kwan and Tan did. Now whether or not Davis serves NS to me is inconsequential, I do feel that Davis has a chance in a lifetime to make football his career and that chance may not be there in two years but if Davis doesn't serve NS, it's not like something is going to happen to my parents in Singapore - it will make no difference at all. Allow me to give you an analogy to demonstrate this point: imagine if you are on your way home late one night and you hear some noises from a dark alley. You get curious and investigate: you see a young lady being dragged into the alley by three men and she is struggling, screaming for help. You look around you - the road is very quiet and you're not sure whether or not you can actually find anyone and it just so happens that your mobile phone battery is flat, so calling the police is not an option. If you do nothing, this young lady could be robbed, raped or even murdered. But if you intervene, you're afraid that these three men could turn their attention to you and you risk being dragged into something really awful - they have not seen you yet. What do you do?

In this scenario, the consequences of not intervening are immediate: something terrible will happen to this woman. If you got scared, ran away and then read the next day in the news that this young lady was raped and murdered, then you're going to be haunted with the guilt that you could have saved her but chose to run away. That's the kind of personal responsibility you have when you realize you're the only person who was in a position to do something to help. Let's compare that to NS in Singapore: if there was something really urgent that needed to be done by people like Tan, Kwan and Davis and great misfortune befell some poor Singaporean lady because they had shirked their NS duties, then I would have at least seen some justification for any kind of public anger. However, anyone who has been through NS would be able to tell you that we rarely felt as if we were doing anything of importance: at least for the first year of NS, you're mostly just living from day to day, trying to adjust to the new environment: trying to avoid the abuse and the bullying that goes on. That's one thing which really irks me: Singaporeans are in complete denial about the culture of bullying that goes on in the SAF and having survived my time there, having served 2 years 4 months from 1995 to 1997.

Does Singapore have an extradition treaty with the USA? Yes, it does - but that is usually reserved for pretty serious cases involving dangerous criminals. One would have through that Amos Yee might just fall under that category given how he has gotten into so much trouble with the law here, but Yee is a free man in America today having successfully navigated his way through the system as a refugee. What is clear is that Singapore isn't prepared to flex her muscles when it comes to people like Kwan, no attempts have been made to extradite him to Singapore and his only 'punishment' so far has been a self-imposed exile, knowing that he cannot set foot in Singapore ever again. Yet somehow, many Singaporeans have gone as far as to call Kwan a traitor, even a villain - I would only use such language if there was some kind of obvious damage done, someone who is clearly a victim as a result of Kwan's actions. Time for an analogy: if I were to play music very loudly in my house at two (how about some Black Pink?) in the morning, then it would definitely wake the neighbours up and they would either come knocking on my door to confront me or call the police. That's because I live in  residential area in Camden - but what if I lived out in the countryside where I have no neighbours for miles? So if I were to play my music very loudly in the middle of the night, it doesn't actually affect anyone as there's no one there to hear it but me.  It is effectively a victimless crime as nobody else was affected by the music. I certainly would distinguish the actions which have an adverse affect others from those which do not affect anyone else.

So let me try to argue the other side of the argument for the sake of balance: if we allow one individual to shirk NS responsibilities and then punish him with no more than a little slap on the wrist in the form of a fine, then whilst that individual's contribution to national defence would not have made any difference, it may open a floodgate of cases whereby parents realize that they can 'get away with it', that the maximum penalty is never enforced (as in the case of Tan) and so more and more young men would be able to shirk their NS responsibilities. If this then leads to a situation whereby 10% to 20% of the young men you expect to serve NS end up mysteriously disappearing abroad, then it could lead to far more serious situation where the size of the SAF dwindles as a result and you have a man-made problem relating to the lack of manpower, simply because the people at the HR department (otherwise known as the CMPB: Central Manpower Base) are not managing this process properly. Sure you could turn to automation and foreign workers to fill the gaps - but that's hardly an ideal situation. Many SAF camps now use contractors staffed by foreign workers to do a lot of the maintenance and cleaning jobs, so the soldiers can focus on more defence-related work and not have to do tasks like cleaning toilets; it is a short-term solution of course but the question then is what will happen in the case of a war. Can you go to war with an army so dependent on foreign workers to carry out the most vital, basic tasks? Thus by that token, letting someone like Kwan off with just a slap on the wrist would simply make this bad situation a lot worse.

Is this a "death by a thousand paper cuts" situation then? After all, no one will die from a paper cut (even if it can be downright unpleasant and painful), but if you get a thousand of them, you could just bleed to death. If an individual like Kwan doesn't serve NS, it really doesn't matter as long as the rest do their duty. However, if a large enough number of Singaporean men decide not to serve their NS duties, then the SAF would be in big trouble. Let's compare it to littering: if just one person litters, say he throws away some used tissue out of his car window rather than waiting till he gets to a dustbin, yes it is technically speaking, of course very wrong to do so, but as long as he is the only person who has littered that day, it hasn't really caused too much of a problem on that street. But when you have a country that simply doesn't manage its waste, where people simply chuck large volumes of rubbish into the streets, rivers and seas, then you get the horrific scenes like in the Dominican Republic recently where a huge wave of plastic waste washes up on the beach after a storm. That is why countries like Singapore have little choice but to punish litterbugs and NS defaulters, thus nipping the problem in the bud before it is allowed to get much worse. I have visited the Dominican Republic back in 2016 and it isn't a clean country to begin with, but they have serious problems when it comes to dealing with their waste.

So if Kwan isn't some nasty person who has done some heinous crime, why are so many Singaporean (mostly male) lining up to attack him then? Well I have a theory which I would like to run by you and this is the totally politically incorrect explanation. As discussed many times already on this blog, Singapore is a very rich country that suffers from wealth inequality - what that means is that there are some very poor people struggling to make ends meet in a country where they will struggle to earn in a year what some of these rich people make in a month or even in a week. This leads to envy and jealousy becoming an endemic part of our society, there's a huge gulf between the 'haves' and 'have nots'. In an ideal world, many believed that the shared experience of NS would help eradicate these differences and bring men together from different social backgrounds: in forcing them to spend time together and get to know each other, the rationale is that most of us would be compelled to form working relationships with people we don't have much in common with and this experience would help us understand others who have come from very different social backgrounds. Well, at least, that's the principle many believe in - reality however, was very different. Instead of bringing out the best in our men through this shared experience, it often brought out the very worst because of jealousy would rear its ugly head.

This is the one social context in Singapore where your parents' wealth makes no difference, you will have to suffer like everyone else and believe you me, that is not good news. I'm not saying that all men go power crazy in the army but in this context, there is a culture of bullying whereby those who have had a difficult childhood, who have come from poor families vent their frustrations on those who have come from rich families. Why do they do that? Because the moment these people finish NS, they are probably going to end up working for these rich people anyway and get abuse from them for the rest of their lives so if they happen to be in a position of power over these rich kids in the military, they will go out of their way to tekan (bully) these rich kids whilst the tables are momentarily turned. Does any of this make sense? No, because this bullying is based on a lot of assumptions: "I'm poor, so I am going to end up in a shit job in the future and I will be bullied by a rich boss in a few years' time, so whilst I am of a senior rank here, I may as well bully some rich kids because there will come the day when this kid or his father will bully me in the civilian world." Or sometimes, it's not even that rational: "I'm poor, I've had to struggle with so much shit all my life and I had a terrible childhood - that rich kid there, he grew up with loving parents in a big house with a swimming pool, it is not fair. He is going to have a much brighter future than me. I'm going to take it out on this rich kid because he has had everything I never had growing up."

It sounds totally irrational, unreasonable, even downright crazy when I put it like that but this has been the elephant in the room that nobody talks about. After all, we're not meant to be irrational, we're meant to remain in control of our feelings no matter how unpleasant they may be. Ironically, a lot of the rich people go out of their way to try to rationalize a lot of the bullying that goes on despite their sons being victims. I remember years ago, there was this doctor at my church in Singapore (yes I was a church-going Christian when I lived in Singapore but I am an atheist today) - his son was really badly bullied by his superiors in the army but this doctor calmly explained that it was a necessary evil in military culture because the officers had to create a mindset whereby the soldiers would simply obey without question. "What if there is a war tomorrow and the soldiers get sent to the front line to fight the enemy? Do you want an army where the soldiers obey the orders or do you want an army where everyone thinks for themselves and does whatever they want? It is not that I condone the bullying, but I can understand why you need to allow the superiors to bully the low-ranking soldiers, so they are afraid enough and will respect the authority above them, so they won't question order when a war breaks out. This is military discipline: it is not something we experience in our civilian lives but in the context of the army, it is necessary."

Now what irked me about that situation was that this man was a doctor and everyone had this attitude that because he was a doctor, he must be so much wiser and more educated than everyone else that he can't possibly be wrong about anything. I thought of speaking up but was afraid I was going to be criticized by the others who really respected this doctor - who was a thoroughly nice person. Don't get me wrong, I do respect doctors of course but this doctor was utterly and totally confused at best. But here's the major flaw in his logic: soldiers who are constantly bullied may be afraid of authority and obey, but this obedience is based on a fear of being bullied rather than respecting the whole ethos of the organization. Thus when it comes to a real war situation when the soldiers are charging towards enemy fire at the front line, a bullied soldier would be thinking, "they treat me like crap and bully me everyday and they expect me to become cannon fodder? Fuck this, no way - I'm going to accidentally trip, drop my rifle, pretend to be hurt, fall behind and let the others die first before I see how this is going to turn out - if they can fend off the enemy, I'll then join in at the back; but if they are being slaughtered, then I will hide until everything is clear then pretend to be seriously wounded. You can't expect me to sacrifice myself for an organisation that has treated me so badly. Over my dead body - no pun intended."

Perhaps you wondered why I mentioned the detail that I knew this doctor from my church back in the day - that seems like a rather unnecessary piece of detail, right? Well, the thing is a lot of the Christians in Singapore find it hard to question the flaws in the system, even when in this case, the doctor's son was suffering quite awful bullying as a result. Christians have this habit of claiming that things happen because God made it so and God has a plan - that can lead to a loving father trying to justify the abuse his son is receiving in the army and leading to inaction. If this doctor tried to step up and intervene, in order to stop the bullying, for him, that'll be interrupting God's plans for his son and challenging God directly, so he just prays about it and allows the bullying to go on. It is freaking scary when you see seemingly intelligent, respectable and nice people like this doctor condone some of the most awful aspects of bullying that goes on in the SAF, because he just wants to believe that things are fine the way they are and he doesn't need to do anything about the situation. He was probably worried that intervening might be seen by his peers as a lack of faith - that he didn't trust God enough to protect his son in the army, that his faith was being tested and coupled with the fact that many people in the church were encouraging him to 'pray about it' rather than take matters into his own hands, he did nothing (well apart from praying) - I have no idea how the hell this doctor's son survived his NS ordeal but he certainly wasn't happy about his father's stance. Therefore people like that are a major factor why this toxic mix of jealousy and bullying persists today.

This doctor's son was being picked on because he came from a wealthy, English speaking family and that was enough to make him a target for bullying. Unfortunately, the son in question wasn't smart enough to realize what was going on - instead, he retreated into his shell, barely daring to speak and caving in to the bullies. So he would come to church and tell everyone how God was testing his faith by making him suffer through all these horrible things the bullies were doing to him in camp and to my shock, not a single adult there said, "there's something seriously wrong here, if God had a plan, this bullshit travesty we call the SAF most certainly is not it - we need to stop this before someone gets killed. Let's make an official complaint now." Having served NS myself, I had to be very careful - I was English-speaking because I was well-educated, it was more a function of the schools I went to rather than the fact that I was rich per se. My family was very much working class - we weren't so poor we were starving, but we were not rich either, not by a long way. There was the assumption that the rich kids were English-speaking and went to the good schools, whilst the poorer kids were spoke their parents' Asian mother tongues and tended to end up in neighbourhood schools. I risked being mistaken to be a rich kid, so I learnt pretty quickly to speak only in Mandarin or Hokkien and when I needed to speak English, it had to be the kind of broken English of an uneducated man would come up with - much like this auntie in this viral video.

So what would happen to a super rich kid like Kevin Kwan in the SAF, if he had served NS? Well, the best case scenario would be that he would have suffered, a rich kid like him would have lived in a big house with plenty of servants, having to adjust to the kind of hardship we all had to go through would have been demanding at least for the first few months and after that, well it would depend on how quickly he learns to adapt. I don't know him personally, it is anyone's guess how well he would have adapted - but if he had left Singapore at the age of 11, then adjusting back to life during NS would have surely been difficult. Would he have been bullied? Perhaps, a lot of it will depend on whom he would have encountered (it's all hypothetical at this stage since he never served NS) but it would have been very likely. Furthermore, how can I put this delicately: he's not exactly thin, is he? Oh all that fast food in America. In some of the photos, he clearly has a double chin and does appear to be overweight. Not that there is that much of a social stigma about obesity in Singapore, but given how physically demanding some of the training could be, an overweight kid would have definitely suffered a lot more than someone who was quite fit. My unit used to make us do a morning run of approximately 5 km - I actually began to enjoy it as it was a break from the usual tedious work we had to do afterwards, but some of the fatter guys really hated the run because there was a sergeant-major who would shout at them, "I've got all day - I don't care if you have to walk the rest of the way, but you're going to finish it like everyone else! You all need to lose a lot of weight!"

Hence the best case scenario would have been Kwan putting up with the hardship for two years, the worst case scenario is that he has to put up with constant, quite extreme bullying on top of all that. Now why would somebody want to see the rich, fat kid suffer? Well, this mentality is more than just about jealousy, the fact that Kwan had a very privileged upbringing and had gone on to find great success. Often, some naive people try to cling on to the notion that life is fair and they need to see the rich, fat kid suffer like everyone else during NS to be reminded that the system will subject rich kids to the same kind of suffering as everyone else, during this period when your parents' wealth doesn't matter. Furthermore, it's not even as if it is some kind of utopia where everyone is equal - quite the contrary! The only thing that matters in the military is your rank so you can have the kid from the poorest family in Singapore, whose parents are barely literate but if he has a higher rank than the rich kid, then he can order the rich kid to polish his boots if that's what he wants and then berate the rich kid if the boots aren't shiny enough. Yes, the rules outside the military camp, in the civilian world doesn't apply in the SAF. Some Singaporeans may believe that this experience may lead to greater social cohesion, others just want to see the rich fat kids suffer. Now tell me you didn't laugh at the fat kid falling in the video.

But would a Singaporean guy deliberately do something to 'bully' Kwan if given the chance? Well he did get plenty of abuse online, but would someone go as far as to throw paint of his car or even punch him in the face (the same way Amos Yee got attacked in public)? I doubt it - but would they be happy if they knew that someone else attacked him? Oh you bet they will. It's like when Kim Kardashian got robbed in Paris in 2016, many of the people who disliked her heard the news and thought, "serves her right." It is natural to feel a sense of glee, of schadenfreude when bad things happen to people you don't like. Now in this case, nothing bad happened to Kwan - he had effectively dodged NS and is not facing the consequences, as long as he never sets foot in Singapore again. And guess what? It doesn't really bother him - he didn't even show up for the Singapore premiere of the movie Crazy Rich Asians. So thus the people who dislike him for whatever reason are indeed getting irked that nothing bad has happened to him, the same way people who disliked Kim Kardashian felt glee when something bad did happen to her. So this begs the question: there are plenty of rich people from Singapore, there are plenty of rich people in Singapore, it is one of the richest country in the world. Why single Kwan out when there are so many other rich people in Singapore you can hate if the root of the problem is the stark wealth inequality situation in Singapore then? Why not blame the government for having created this situation?

I think the answer is obvious: the subject of his book and subsequently the movie celebrates the kind of wealth that perhaps only the top 1% of Singaporeans may enjoy - I'm not even sure Kwan himself is as rich as the people depicted in the book (probably not, after all, this is fiction) but if you were to look at some of the interviews and the clips he is featured in on Youtube, he certainly is keen to identify himself with that crowd who are so crazy rich, all they do is spend their wealth rather than work. Is there an element of 打肿脸充胖子 here? Perhaps, just because you write about crazy rich people doesn't necessarily mean you're one of them. Heck, I've written posts about porn stars and high class escorts before on my blog - does that make me a porn star too? I wish, let me be the first to admit that I'm not good looking enough to be a porn star but it doesn't stop me taking an interest in their lives and writing about them. It is clear that Kwan is drawing a of flak because the book basically ignored the lives of ordinary, average Singaporeans who just get by and are not crazy rich at all. Perhaps there's a projection of their own insecurities when they see a movie like that and think, "why didn't you write a story about ordinary Singaporeans? What is wrong with us? Are you looking down on ordinary people who live in Ang Mo Kio or Toa Payoh? You think we low class izzit?" How Kwan feels about ordinary Singaporeans is neither here nor there - he's not actually said anything about them, but somehow they want to project all their insecurities onto him and bemoan the fact that Kwan wasn't forced to taste their poverty and hardship during NS.

Note that this is a uniquely Singaporean situation: I live in the UK, we don't have NS here. It was abolished in 1963. As a result, the rich and the poor lead very separate lives: from birth, they are brought up in different neighbourhoods, go to different schools and end up working in different kinds of jobs. At no point will their paths ever cross, quite unlike the unique situation of NS, where the men from different backgrounds are made to live and work together. Is there resentment by the poor towards the rich here in the UK? Well of course there is, but it manifests itself it a very different way - through politics. The government in the UK swings back and forth between the right and the left wing: generally, those who are poorer would be left wing, so they would want the government to tax the rich and redistribute that wealth to the poor. Whereas those who are right wing would expect the government to be more supportive of big businesses by reducing taxes, so the rich will have an incentive to make more money and overall that would be lead to a more conducive environment for economic growth. Many British people do turn to politics to try to get the social change they want, whereas in Singapore, there's no choice in politics: it's just the PAP forever, to infinity. So the people  who have any kind of left-wing resentment towards the rich will find other ways to manifest their anger and frustration, such as directing it at people like Kwan who have managed to dodge the one thing that was designed to 'punish' the rich, fat kids like him.

Since I work in finance, I'll like to conclude with a cost-benefit analysis: Kwan spent 11 years of his childhood in Singapore. During those 11 years, yes he enjoyed certain benefits of being a young boy there - his parents paid local rates for his school fees, he was able to take advantage of a lot of the infrastructure that the government has invested in from defence to transport to the environment. However, despite the fact that he had a very comfortable childhood, note that this was mostly due to his parents' wealth rather than the government per se. So how big was this 'debt' he owed to the Singapore government and people for this 11 years he spent in Singapore and why are so many Singaporeans screaming that he is a villain who hasn't paid it? Well, the amount isn't huge and given the amount of publicity that his book and film have generated, the amount of increased tourist revenue as a direct result of this film would have more than repaid this small debt many, many times over.  So this is not even about repaying a debt because Kwan has done far more for the tourism sector in Singapore than any single person in the last 12 months and will be personally responsible for generating a huge amount of revenue for Singapore for at least the next six months given the success of his film. The only difference is that Kwan didn't 'repay' the Singapore government for those 11 years with a stint of NS like the rest of Singaporean men, no - he did it with 'Crazy Rich Asians' instead but that is worth far more than anyone has ever contributed through NS. It is ironic that Singaporeans are supposedly really good at mathematics, yet they just can't work this one out. Hey it's just numbers at the end of the day - do your sums people, it's just like your maths homework.

This of course, opens up another can of worms: if national service is all about serving your nation, shall we then allow rich and talented people to make their contribution to the country in other ways instead of having to serve NS in a way that Kwan has clearly done with his writing. But why stop there? Instead of having a rich kid who doesn't want to be there, why don't we just let the rich parents pay for someone to take his place? I am using the figures from the MINDEF website, let's say the soldier they hire to take the son's place is paid S$2,500 a month and over a two-year period that amounts to S$60,000. It doesn't even seem like a large amount of money for the crazy rich Singaporeans - even if we were to generously add a zero to that and make it S$600,000 to hire someone to take the place of your son serving NS, that's still a very affordable amount for the richer families in Singapore to dodge NS legally. It's not such a bad idea: you're going to get someone who is grateful for the opportunity to earn S$600,000 in a period of two years, that's a substantial amount of money for someone who is neither a graduate nor highly skilled - there'll be loads of Singaporeans who will gladly keep serving NS at S$300,000 a year if they cannot find a job that will pay them as much out there. I think this makes complete sense from a business point of view; but it'll never be approved in Singapore as too many poor people will be against it as they want to see the rich, fat boys suffer during NS and it'll just be perceived as very 'unfair'. 

So, that's it from me on this topic: so what do you think? Why is there so much hate directed towards Kwan in Singapore? What is the basis of this hatred? Is Kwan simply being the scapegoat for the Singaporean public to vent their anger on the wider issue of wealth inequality in Singapore? What can be achieved by forcing guys from rich families to serve NS then? Has Kwan done enough to repay his debt to Singapore with this film then? Would you be in favour in allowing rich families to buy their sons out of NS by paying someone $600,000 to do it on his behalf (and does that individual even need to be a Singaporean or just any mercenary you can buy at that price)? How do you feel about Kevin Kwan - so do you like or dislike him? Let me know what you think, do leave a comment below. Many thanks for reading.