Q&A: How do I see Singapore?

I have to thank my reader Yoda for this question, which he left in response to my article on how the world sees Singapore. He asked, "Limpeh, how do you see Singapore?"

That's a great question - after all, I had merely compiled the views of others without actually adding any value judgement on my part. My perspective is of course going to be very different - after all, I grew up in Singapore. Primary school, secondary school, JC followed my NS - the route I took in the first 21 years of my life is pretty typical of any Singaporean boy from Ang Mo Kio. It was only upon ORD in 1997 that I left Singapore for my studies abroad and chose to continue working abroad, acquiring British citizenship in the process. I did return to Singapore for a short stint to work as a foreign talent in 2011 (hence the name of my blog) and have been blogging about Singapore actively ever since. I am offering a "compare and contrast" perspective with my blog: the Singapore of my childhood vs the Singapore of today and of course life in Singapore vs life in Europe. Given how this is such a big topic, I shall just focus on five key issues which I want to talk about in response to Yoda's question.

Xenophobia and Blaming Foreigners

This irks the hell out of me I swear. I am so angry, frustrated and horrified at the way Singaporeans have turned incredibly xenophobic and racist over the last 10 years - particularly towards Filipinos and Indians. This took me by shock, it was not what I expected at all. You see, when I was a child, I saw how my father struggled to communicate with the Indians - he couldn't speak English and didn't share a language in common with them. It often resulted in a mish-mash of pasar Malay and Singlish and the conversation couldn't progress much further beyond buying something at a shop - trying to create friendships in the absence of a common language proved impossible. When it came to my generation, aha - we were all taught English at school, so I had no problems communicating with all my classmates regardless of their ethnicity and so it was very different indeed making friends when we all had a common language. I believed as a child (oh how naive I was!) that racism in Singapore would be eradicated within my generation and we would be the proud generation to show our parents how we could all get along happily.

I have been proven wrong. The amount of racism and xenophobia in Singapore today is shocking and downright distasteful. This stems from a very big mistake on the part of Singaporeans - let me break it down for you.

1. Singapore is overcrowded already.
2. The government wants to increase the population to 6.9 million despite the overcrowding.
3. Who do you blame? The foreigners or the PAP?

For crying out aloud, you don't need a phD in political science from Oxford to figure this one out, aiyoh. It's so freaking simple - blame the PAP, the PAP are the bad guys, it is the PAP who are at fault. Easy right? Apparently not, because most Singaporeans still cannot bring themselves to blame the PAP and instead choose to blame the foreigners who have come to Singapore to work. Duh. Who let in these foreigners in the first place? If the PAP didn't throw open the doors and rolled out the red carpet, would these people be able to come to Singapore in the first place? What is wrong with you Singaporeans - instead of being so freaking racist and xenophobic, why can't you blame the PAP who created this mess in the first place? Why are you so bloody stupid?

That's right - Singaporeans who are xenophobic are fucking stupid, because the cause of the problem is so obvious. I have been told that there is an element of 当局者迷，旁观者清 in my judgement, after all, I don't live in Singapore - I am not experiencing first hand all these foreigners changing the face of Singapore, I am not competing with them for jobs, I am not taking the MRT with them etc. So whilst it is true that I am not having to personally deal with the consequences of overcrowding in Singapore, being nasty and xenophobic towards foreigners isn't going to solve the problem either. You want to solve the problem? You should've voted for the opposition at the last election - waiting until 2016 is far too late as many more foreigners would've settled in Singapore between now and the 2016 elections. That's right Singaporeans - you don't want overcrowding, yet you voted for this - by that token, that makes 60.14% of you fucking stupid. I refer you to the interview with Ris Low below - she clearly doesn't want any more foreigners in Singapore and feels that Singapore is already overcrowded, yet she still votes PAP who wants to increase the population to 6.9 million. Cue face to palm - how fucking stupid is she? Good grief. Alamak.

As I have worked in many different places - from Dubai to Prague to Istanbul to London to Singapore - I am sad to say that the most racist and xenophobic of all these places is Singapore. Shame on you! I am disappointed, frustrated and saddened by what has happened to the country of my birth because I had expected better of Singapore. I had expected Singaporeans who claim to be intelligent to use their freaking brains and vote out the PAP instead of turning into such xenophobic racists. To be fair, this problem of blaming foreigners for all the problems instead of blaming the government happens here as well in the UK and you can have a look at this video for some insight into the problem here. I find her Romanian accent quite sexy actually and she does make a good point!

Singaporeans lie to themselves, 骗自己

Singaporeans are also an extremely insecure lot of people - it is evident why when you look at what is happening to the country. However, instead of dealing with the problem by engaging the government, they go into this incredible frenzy of denial and tell themselves all kinds of crazy lies to convince themselves that they are fine. None of this can fool me, as I know the Singaporean situation only too well and I actually feel sorry for the Singaporeans who react to this insecurity by telling themselves lie after lie. Like, who are you trying to kid? Yourself? 你想欺骗谁？欺骗自己?

Are all Singaporeans happy with the current situation?

One of the most common lies Singaporeans continually tell themselves is that Asians who move to countries in the West like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc are being treated as second class citizens by racist white people. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, when so many Singaporeans keep telling themselves and each other the same lie, it soon begins to sound like it may actually be true. Did the government deliberately spread this lie? Allow me to use an old fable (I believe it is a Russian folk tale) to illustrate this point.

Once upon a time, there lived a farmer who reared chickens on his farm. Unfortunately, the folk from the town would sneak into his farm in the middle of his night to steal the chickens and eggs. This poor farmer couldn't afford expensive fences and locks for his chicken coop, the chickens were not that profitable to begin with - so he came up with an ingenious plan. Early one morning, he slaughtered a chicken and smeared the chicken blood all over his body, clothes and face. He then staggered into town shouting, "Help! Help! Somebody help me!"

The farmer had a cunning plan to fool the people in town.

The people saw the farmer covered in blood and were shocked, they asked him what had happened. The farmer told them, "I woke up early this morning to hear a sound in the chicken coop, thinking it was a thief I went out there to catch the thief. Instead, I saw a huge wolf that was bigger than me. It had already eaten two chickens and it was still hungry, when it saw me - it attacked me and I fought hard with it. I am lucky to be alive - that wolf is dangerous! He nearly killed me, it was terrifying!" The story of the farmer who was attacked by the huge wolf spread through the town as the people started exaggerating the story, "I saw the farmer and he was covered with blood!" "The farmer said there were two wolves and they had killed all his chicken!" Ah the way rumours and gossip take on a life of their own. Pretty soon, the word has spread around the town of the wolf's attack and no one dared to steal the farmer's chickens again because they were all afraid of being attacked by the huge wolf.

Has this been a lie that has been spread by the government? Or are they simply falling into the sour grapes trap, to convince themselves that life in the West isn't than in Singapore? It is probably more the latter to be honest, after all, the government may censor the media in Singapore but in this day and age when one is free to look at news sources from all over the world on the internet, there is no excuse for ignorance or this 'sour grapes' mentality about life in the West. When will Singaporeans wake up to the fact that they are second class citizens in their own country? Why do they keep believing in the big fat lie about the racist bogeyman in the West whilst ignoring the fact that they are discriminated in their very own country? How can they be this oblivious (and/or stupid)?

Modern Singlish vs 80s Singlish

I have commented on this a lot in my previous posts and I hate the way Singlish is evolving. You see, I am 36 (turning 37 in April) - I am old, I am from a different generation. I grew up speaking Hokkien and Malay along with Mandarin and English in Singapore - many younger Singaporeans are unable to speak Hokkien and unless they are Malay, they are unlikely to speak any Malay at all. I have been told that my kind of Singlish is very dated - it belongs to the older generation who can't speak English properly and had to resort to using loanwords from Hokkien and Malay when they simply didn't know how to use the appropriate term in English to express themselves. Whilst this has indeed been the origins of Singlish, it meant that younger Singaporeans who can't speak Hokkien and/or Malay struggle to understand the loanwords I use in my Singlish. And are these youngsters more Singaporean than me? Go figure.

It makes me sad that Singlish has become a lot more bland over the last 20 years because it has gone from being an extremely rich patois of local languages to simply bad English when you strip out the Hokkien and Malay loanwords. After all, you're simply left with English words in a sentence arranged according to Chinese grammar and spoken with a strong accent - is that Singlish? Is that Singaporean English? Or is that just bad English? Maybe I am showing my age (so sue me, I am old) but I do miss the kind of Singlish from the 80s that I grew up with - it was far richer, more interesting and colourful. By the same token, it is necessary to differentiate standard English from Singlish.

English is my first language and after having spent half my life in the UK, I speak standard English with my Angmor friends. I think it's hilarious when my nephew calls it "Angmor English" - because English is from England (duh - it does what it says on the tin) so when I am in England, I simply speak English; but when I visit Singapore, I encounter "Singaporean English" and "Singlish" - what Singaporeans speak is a local form of English. And good grief, they are so oblivious to the fact that they are speaking Singlish all the time. Let me explain:

Too many Singaporeans think that Singlish means using words like aiyoh, alamak, lah, meh, malu, tolong, tahan, boleh, bodoh, goondu, paiseh, bagus etc - ie. non-English Asian loanwords. But good grief, so many older Singaporeans (okay, not being ageist here as my nephew does the same thing and he's 10) make English sentences according to Chinese grammar and they speak it with a very strong Chinese/Singaporean accent.

Standard English: "Did you turn off the lights when you left the room?"
Singaporean English: "You got close the light or not when you leave the room?"
Add the accent: "You got close de light or not when you lif de loom?"

"You got close the computer or not?"

You see, it gets to the point where it's so ridiculously far from standard English I simply have to say, "that's Singlish (that's definitely not standard English)" - and Singlish is fine. But oh no, these people insist they are speaking standard English when they come up with sentences like "You got close de light or not when you lif de loom?" For crying out aloud, my only conclusion is that everyone around them speaks like that, so they have no concept whatsoever of what standard English is. When everyone makes the same mistakes, it feels normal to speak like that. Don't get me wrong, I adore Singlish - but I also feel it is necessary to know the difference between Singlish and standard English.

Hot and sweaty

Yes, Singapore will always be a hot and sweaty place - it is a tropical country. Pardon me for stating the obvious but it is so true. I cycled home yesterday in the rain - the temperature was about +8 degrees and I cycled especially quickly because I was getting soaked. By the time I got home, I realized that I was wet from the rain on the outside and wet from my sweat on the inside. Yes, I was sweating profusely even at +8 degrees because I was cycling. Now if I can sweat like that at below 10 degrees, imagine how I would feel when it is +33 degrees in Singapore. I suppose it wouldn't bother me if I was sitting by the pool or the beach relaxing, but if you're trying to do anything that involves work or exercise, then it becomes an incredibly sweaty and sticky experience. Yucks. I don't feel particularly attractive when I am dripping with sweat, desperate for a shower. I really hate the hot weather and am most pleased with the cold winter weather in London at the moment. Did I mention that we're expecting snow on Sunday and Monday?

Yeah but they didn't mention the weather...

A disturbing, unhealthy obsession with food

This is the part that bothers me about Singaporeans both abroad and in Singapore - this unhealthy obsession with food. Don't get me wrong, I love the food in Singapore, I post my recipes on my blog and I do miss an authentic laksa, but food does rank pretty low on Marslow's hierarchy of needs. Food always crops up when discussing the topic of moving away from Singapore or living in another country, all too often you will hear Singaporeans using food as an excuse not to move away from Singapore or as a reason to return to Singapore.

Why is this so? I find it unhealthy - nay, make that downright disturbing that Singaporeans seem to be motivated by their stomachs and their taste buds rather than their brains when it comes to choosing the best place in the world for them to blossom as adults. If indeed Singapore is the best place for you to start a family and bring up children - or indeed, if Singapore is the best place for you to start up your new business and unleash your true potential as an entrepreneur, then by all means, good for you. Or even if it is quite simply where you grew up, where you feel a sense of belonging and where you regard as your home - then that sense of belonging should be based on history, memories, experiences, friends and family, rather than food per se.

What motivates you? What fuels your ambitions? What is your aim in life? 

Why are Singaporeans so obsessed with food? I suppose a simple answer is that they need a distraction from all the other crap that is going wrong with everyday life in Singapore. There is the famous story of former deputy prime minster of the UK (from 1997 - 2007) John Prescott who was a famous binge eater. Now I won't beat around the bush here - Prescott is enormous. He is so huge that calling him 'fat' is like calling the sun a bit hot or the sea a bit wet. In 2008, Prescott admitted publicly that he had an eating disorder brought on by the stress of work. When he was upset, stressed or frustrated - he would go binge eating.

"He also revealed how he would turn to sweet things and Chinese food when things became stressful. "I could sup a whole tin of Carnation condensed milk, just for the taste, stupid things like that. Marks & Spencer trifles, I still love them, one of my favourites. I can eat them for ever. Whenever I go to Mr Chu's in Hull, my favourite Chinese restaurant in the whole world ... I could eat my way through the entire menu."

I think Prescott would love visiting Singapore.

Now I am not suggesting that the entire population of Singapore has some form of eating disorder, but it does seem that like Prescott, they are seeking solace in food because of all the problems they are facing in Singapore. Eating char kway teow, laksa, rojak, satay, mee goreng, hokkien prawn mee, chicken rice, roast duck, yong tau hoo, popiah, wantan mee and ice kachang may not solve anything - but perhaps the sheer pleasure of eating such delicious food would distract you from the bullshit around you just for a while, as you focus on the orgasm happening on your taste buds. Is that why Singaporeans would much rather focus on delicious local food, rather than more distasteful local politics? Dare I say the words, population white paper and 6.9 million? Oooh, is that getting you uncomfortable already? Okay fine, here's my recipe for Ngor Hiang instead if politics is too difficult for you to handle.

So there you go, these are the five issues that come to mind when I think about Singapore. I could go on about other issues - but I think I've given you plenty of food for thought on just these five issues. How do you see Singapore? Or do you have a response to what I have said above? Feel free to leave a comment below, thanks, kum siah!

Care for a desert? Or a chat about politics?