The slow train vs the fast train: looking at Tan's story

In my last post, I briefly mentioned a person I came into contact with during my time in the army and I felt I didn't talk enough about him as he was an interesting character. There was this guy I shall refer to as MSG Tan or just 'Tan' for short in my unit, MSG refers to his rank: master sergeant. So in my post, I talked about how I deliberately addressed him as 'sir' instead of 'master' or 'master sergeant' in spite of the fact that he wasn't an officer - well not yet anyway. I'm sure that in due course, he would be promoted to the rank of a 3rd warrant officer (but that's not a real officer per se, more a second-class type of officer in the system to reward older soldiers like Tan) and that's when the soldiers would have to address him as 'sir' then. In this post, let's talk a bit more about Tan since I got to know him for a while as we were in the same unit. I was inspired to share this story because my nephew has just started his national service (NS) and this made me think about my own experiences during my NS. Allow me to tell you a bit more about Tan, he came from a poor working class family and he was the eldest of three children. His mother was too ill to work and his father was a low-income labourer, when it was time for him to enlist in the army to serve his national service, he felt obliged to "sign on" - this is in fact an option open to all Singaporean males who have to serve national service. Instead of serving the minimum of two years, Tan had a longer contract with the army (this can vary but typically they are for five years.) People like Tan are known as 'regulars', as opposed to conscripts - regulars are doing the same job as the conscripts but are paid a lot more than conscripts and that is the main motivation for them to pick this path if they really needed the money. 

There's one aspect of the rank system that you have to understand and excuse me if you're already familiar with this. So allow me to use an analogy: there is a high-speed rail like that links the cities of Taipei in the north to Kaohsiung in the south, enabling you to travel the 350 km in as little as 1.5 hours. on the express train which makes very few stops. When I was making that trip in 2018, my client warned me that there were two different trains and that I had to get the high speed rail. The slow train takes between 4.5 to 6 hours to make that same journey, depending on how many stops in makes.  The slower, older train is used by those who are making shorter, more local journeys like from Chiayi to Tainan - it is also somewhat cheaper so if you're not in a hurry, then you can save some money. There are separate two career paths in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) the same way there is a fast and slow train between Taipei and Kaohsiung. If you are an officer, you are effectively on the fast train: you will climb the ranks a lot more quickly and be paid a lot more. However, officers need to have at least A levels or a polytechnic diploma and hence people like Tan could never go down that path, so instead they go down the 'specialist' path - the slow train. Another quirk is that a specialist like MSG Tan is of lower rank than a 19 year old who has just completed officer cadet school (OCS) with the rank of 2LT (2nd Lieutenant). So this has nothing to do with age or how long you have served, this two-speed rank system means that if you get on the fast train, you will then zip past all the older soldiers who are still on the slow train. Thus that must be incredibly frustrating for Tan to be in that situation - being stuck on the slower train and watching all the faster trains overtake them. 

I suppose a logical question would be if Tan was not happy taking the slow train, couldn't he switch trains? After all, if you made the mistake of departing Taipei on the southbound slow train, you could still cut your losses by switching to the fast train at the first stop (either at Taoyuan or Hsinchu). In his case, let's try to work out a route for him: it would mean completing his contract, going back to school to get a poly diploma or A levels (as a private candidate), then reapplying to re-enter the system by convincing someone very high up in the system to let him go to OCS. Therein lies the problem for Tan as there is little precedent for someone to switch from the slow to the fast train like that. The SAF only allows the soldiers who are more highly educated to attend OCS; so it's not that your A levels or poly diploma is somehow relevant or useful to what you learn at OCS, it's just that they want intelligent people to become officers and using one's education is a rather blunt way to sort the smarter soldiers from the dumb ones. It is just a box ticking exercise and your selection for OCS is mostly based on your performance during your BMT (basic military training). However, as Tan had neither A levels or a poly diploma, he was excluded from this selection altogether and even if he did try to put that right, he might still get rejected by the process as most officers eventually become graduates. Realistically Tan would need a respectable degree from a good university like NUS before he can convince the decision makers at the SAF that he is worthy of OCS. In rare cases, there have been some exceptions to the rule but the vast majority of those admitted into OCS have either A levels or a poly diploma. Without even O levels - there was just no way Tan could have gone to OCS. 

In any case, that switch simply isn't possible for Tan for a very practical reason: money. So for someone like Tan to go to university, let's say he takes two years to complete his A levels and then studies an engineering course at NUS which takes four years, that's 2 + 4 = 6 years of being a student. He just can't afford that: not only is he helping to support his parents and younger siblings, Tan is also married with two children of his own. There are a lot of family members dependent on him and asking him for money all the time; if he ever went a month without earning any money, they would all be in serious trouble! So never mind taking a month off, to take six years off to get that degree in engineering at NUS is simply out of the question when he is supporting his extended family. By this token, Tan had simply accepted the fact that he is stuck on the slow train, whilst he worked with officers who have enjoyed the benefits of having taken the faster train. Tan is a typical working class man of his age, he came from a poor family and he dropped out of school before even doing his O levels - this resulted in him taking on a working class job, so there was little chance of people like him ever getting on the fast train. What I do find unusual about Tan's story is his circumstances: during my NS, I mixed with people of all kinds of social backgrounds. Some were on the fast train in life, whilst others were not just on the slow train - they had fallen off the wagon and were walking along the railway track. In the civilian world, these people would never cross paths but in the SAF they are working together in the same unit so it is a bizarre but interesting social experiment. 

Thus when it comes to looking at 'regulars' in the SAF (ie. those who choose to make a career in the military by signing a 5-year contract), there are effectively two career paths: the fast train and the slow train. The fast train is for those who can make it to OCS and they are then offered a contract which is actually fairly lucrative - the aim of the SAF is to attract talent who will otherwise go into the private sector and do well-paid jobs, so these regular officers are on contracts that will match what they would otherwise earn in the private sector and in a rich country like Singapore that's a lot of money. I have a former classmate who picked that career path for a very practical reason: he was in Tan's position but the big difference was that he was a brilliant student - so he signed on as a regular after he made it to OCS, got the SAF to pay for his degree and went on to enjoy a very lucrative contract that allowed him to help support his extended family who badly needed that money. Then you have the slow train for people like Tan - the reasoning is, well you're not that educated, you're never going to get a degree and become a lawyer, banker or doctor anyway. Instead people like Tan are probably going to end up in poorly-paid working class jobs so the SAF is only going to have to match those salaries, so that is why Tan is on the slow train, his contract is much less attractive compared to those on the fast train. Organizations like the SAF are never top heavy - there are very few generals and admirals at the top of the food chain whilst there are plenty at the bottom of that pyramid-shaped hierarchy. Hence, this system was designed to maintain this pyramid shaped hierarchy by keeping people like Tan close to the bottom of the food chain since there is so little room at the top. 

So at this point you may think, if Tan was offered a ticket on the slow train, why did he say yes to that then if what he really want is a ticket on the fast train? Well, Tan was never going to get on that fast train in the first place - the alternative for Tan was to simply endure a period of poverty by serving NS as a conscript (who are paid very little, even less back in those days), then find a poorly paid working class job after that. That alternative is not attractive at all, so faced with that choice, Tan chose the best option available to him, or you might view it as 'the least bad' option. Thus from that point of view, his decision to get on that slow train was completely rational - you could even argue that he made a good choice. It was a safe bet, he badly needed money to support his family and this was the only way he could start earning decent money for his family at once instead of waiting to finish NS as a conscript. I feel bad for him actually because my parents were quite happy to support me whilst I served NS - most Singaporean parents are quite happy to extend that privilege to their sons and that is how the SAF has gotten away with paying their conscripts so little over the years. This is only possible because the whole operation is effectively subsidized by the parents who are willing to give their sons some pocket money whilst they are serving NS. Unfortunately, Tan didn't have that privilege that most of his peers had. Thus people like Tan find it very hard to attain any kind of real social mobility because of the poor choices his parents made. So whilst most of his peers received money from their parents, his parents were asking Tan for money, that played a major factor in him getting on the slow train. Of course this isn't Tan's fault at all; in fact by that token, I feel sorry for him. 

Of course, becoming an officer in the SAF isn't the only way to get on the fast train to social mobility, you can simply excel in your studies, go to university as a scholar then get a great job. That's basically what I did - I came from a poor working class family like Tan but fortunately, my parents did a better job than his when it came to supporting my education. How does Tan handle the fact that he is working with people who are on the fast train then? Well, allow me to compare this to a totally different situation to illustrate how this normally works out in the real world. Let's take a trip to a remote corner of China in rural Yunnan province, near the border with Myanmar. The people who live in that area are mostly farmers and it is a very poor part of China; so whilst the people living there may be aware that there are rich people living in big cities like Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai; they are so far away from those rich people that they're unlikely to ever cross paths with them. Even when these rich Chinese visit Yunnan on their holidays, they tend to stick to the most popular tourist attractions which are a lot more accessible than these remote mountainous areas. Whilst the farmers in these parts of Yunnan are very poor, they are physically isolated from rich people and it is unlikely for a rich tourist from the big city to ever turn up in their villages. By that token, all their friends and families are equally poor - this means that a typical poor farmer in rural Yunnan will never be in Tan's position, where he is forced to work alongside people who are far richer than him. The farmer isn't reminded of the inequality as his friends and neighbours are all poor. 

So if we were to look at Tan's case in detail, you could say that it made sense for him to sign on as a regular in the SAF within that context - his family needed money urgently, it was literally the only option on the table for him to get that money for his family and not only was it the right thing to do, you could even say that it was a noble sacrifice. He had put the needs of the rest of his family first without considering the consequences - he could have said, "I'm not going to get on that slow train and do such working class jobs for the rest of my life, I am going to complete my further education before starting to work and you have to be reasonable with me: at 18, I am still a teenager. I don't want to mess up my future and I have to do what is right for me." So even if it was the right choice and a noble one, it still doesn't mean that the outcome was a great one or that Tan would be satisfied with it. The key issue for Tan is that he is surrounded by people who are on the fast train and that does affect the way he interacts with us. Take myself for example: when I was working alongside Tan, I was of lower rank to him, as a regular he was paid a lot more than me but I was so young then; I was going to go to university then get on that fast train and eventually earn a lot more than him when I was his age. I don't think Tan was totally oblivious to that fact, he simply chose to ignore it and I was careful never to remind him of it. But imagine if you were at a birthday party, all the other kids got a slice of birthday cake but they ran out of cake and you were given a biscuit instead, how would you feel? Not that there's anything wrong with the biscuit, but it would be natural to compare and feel that the situation was inherently unfair - how has Tan dealt with the fact that life has been so unfair?

I suppose Tan's position really isn't that unusual - recently when I was in Panama, I stayed at a rather nice hotel for the conference and the staff there were paid very little, whilst the guests were mostly rich foreign tourists. I remember this afternoon when I was at the pool, this rich couple sat down by the pool and asked a waitress from the pool restaurant to help take a photo. This waitress then made some polite conversation with the tourists, I wasn't intending on eavesdropping but they were right next to me so I could hear exactly what they were saying. The waitress was asking them if they had visited some of Panama's most famous tourist attractions and if they had intended to simply stay in Panama City or if they were going to travel around the country. I imagined that the staff were trained to use this kind of questions to show interest in the guests' holiday plans to make them feel special - the rich tourists told the waitress that they were going one of the most expensive restaurants in Panama City and the waitress reacted as if she was very happy that the tourists were going to have a wonderful dinner. At which point I smirked, did the tourists think that this waitress was ever going to afford dinner at that restaurant? And did they actually believe that this waitress was genuinely happy for them or is this just her putting on an act as part of her job? These rich tourists weren't going to take that waitress out for dinner there. But such is the very superficial interaction that rich and poor people have in the context of a luxury hotel in Panama. Yes people on the fast and slow train may cross paths, they may even have some kind of social interaction as I witnessed by the poolside at the hotel, but that just left me wondering how that waitress felt serving such rich people everyday when she was paid very little? Life has been incredibly unfair to her - how does she deal with that?

At the hotel, the interactions like the one I witnessed at the poolside were brief and superficial. I had to face Tan on a daily basis in the knowledge that whilst he was on superior rank in the army, he was still stuck on that slow train whilst as I had already secured my scholarship at that point, I was definitely on the fast train. Well, in my previous post, I mentioned that I made sure I treated Tan with the respect he craved but wasn't getting. We were never close enough for him to confide in me how he felt, instead I had two sources of information about him: I had access to his records in the unit's office and I was not supposed to have done this, but I actually read the records of everyone in my unit because I knew I had to somehow get along with them whether I liked them or not, thus having that information could be very useful in this process. Of course, I was also very observant: I remember when I had to take notes for a meeting and because we had a number of Malay and Indian soldiers present, the meeting had to take place in English. One of the younger officers wanted to make sure that Tan understood everything so he translated part of the agenda into Mandarin for Tan's benefit - we all knew that Tan's English was rather limited but this wasn't even a deliberate gesture to ridicule or humiliate Tan, yet I could see that he was quite upset that the younger officer felt the need to explain himself in Mandarin at that point, based on the assumption that Tan wouldn't understand English like everyone else present at that meeting - that stinging mix of shame, embarrassment and resentment written on his face and that left Tan in a rather foul mood all day. 

I saw some similarities between my father and Tan - they have both mastered the art of ignoring people who are richer than them and focusing on how much better off they are compared to poorer people. I actually have an uncle who is crazy rich, my regular readers will know that my father's older brother was a super successful businessman who was a multi-millionaire and that was in sharp contrast to my father was a humble primary school teacher. Tan dealt with the others on the fast train by effectively ignoring the inconvenient truth - I remember this conversation I had with him. Tan had gone for a short holiday in Thailand with his family, so just like that waitress at the hotel in Panama, I made small talk with him by asking him if he had a nice holiday, if he enjoyed the food, what kind of activities he did with his children in Thailand. Well, he told me that it was very educational for his children because they could see just how poor people were in Thailand, how some of the people in the countryside didn't even have electricity or running water. He kept going on and on about the poverty in Thailand and I thought, wait a minute, yes whilst there are some poor people in Thailand, there are also plenty of rich people in Thailand, yet somehow you have conveniently ignored that side of the equation. It wasn't like Tan felt sorry for the poor people in Thailand living in squalid conditions, he was practically gloating over the fact that he was better off than them and that his children should be grateful for everything that he has provided for them, that they weren't like these very poor kids in Thailand growing up in such terrible conditions. It was all terribly one-sided. 

Of course, I had enough social skills not to challenge Tan. I simply agreed with him that there was a lot of poverty indeed in places like Thailand when really, if I had treated him like an equal, I would have challenged him to consider the fact that Thailand wasn't poor per se but rather a very unequal society and if the government had done a better job of redistributing the wealth from the rich to the poor, then we wouldn't see this much poverty on the streets of Thailand. But no, to be blunt, I don't think Tan was capable of having that kind of conversation - despite the fact that he was of superior rank, he wasn't my intellectual equal to have a debate like that. I wasn't looking to pick a fight with Tan, I was just trying to establish rapport with him as we had to work together. Of course, I only spoke to Tan in a mixture of Mandarin and Hokkien - I think he knew that I spoke English well but he appreciated the fact that I showed him respect by using the languages of his choice in his presence. But we have finally arrived at the punchline: I don't think people like Tan would hate those of us on the faster train, he simply wants to be treated with respect, to be treated no different so he can go on ignoring the fact that he is on the slow train. I was able to get along with him because I showed him respect - in particular, by addressing him as 'sir' despite the fact that his rank didn't require that. However, I have seen a mean streak in Tan - if he thought you were disrespecting him, he would go out of his way to make life hell for you. Trust me, you want him as a friend, not an enemy and that's why I went out of my way to show him respect, not because I liked him, but simply because I wanted to avoid trouble there. I only wanted to get Tan to like me but I reserved the right not to like him. 

We can divide the people I encountered in NS into three broad categories. Firstly, there were those who were given a first class ticket to the fast train - my nephew would be a good example of this: he has rich parents who invested very heavily in his education to make sure that he would go to university and overcome any obstacles that were in his way. Then you have those who are stuck on the slow train like Tan who came from poor families and had little or no help from their parents in terms of their education. Then you have a third category: people like me, who were supposed to be on the slow train given my very working class background but somehow managed to get on the fast train through a combination of hard work and luck. So the question I have is what would happen if my nephew met someone like Tan during his national service - would my nephew figure out how to get along with someone like Tan? Would my nephew even be aware of just how privileged he is compared to someone like Tan or would he remain totally oblivious to this stark difference? Would this lead to social conflict and if so, would my nephew learn how to resolve them himself? Should I intervene to try to help my nephew with such social skills or should I take a step back and let him figure all this out on his own? Have you ever met someone like Tan who is stuck on the slow train in life? How do you try to establish rapport and get along with someone like that? Do let me know your thoughts - leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.