It is not often
that you get two sides of an issue brought to you over the weekend. However, I
got lucky this weekend when I got a copy of my Aunty Terresa’s Book “The Interpreter’s
Daughter,” which tells the story of a maternal great grandaunt and in between
starting on my aunt’s book, I managed to watch the Bollywood biopic “Thackery,”
which tells the story of Mr. Bal Thackery, the founder of the Shiv Sena Party,
which is a well known regionalist, hard-right Hindu party based out of Mumbai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqpl_sAcQF8
While my aunt’s book is primarily about a character from my maternal family, it also delves into a certain period of Singapore’s history (yes, Singapore has history before Lee Kuan Yew and his gang took over a functioning port city). The story effectively begins with my great-great-grandfather and his migration from China to Singapore. It helps explain what the man was escaping, his journey to Singapore (in a cramped Junk where he was not allowed to go on board the deck) and his life in Singapore. A man from that era, who grew up speaking only Cantonese, ended up learning English and becoming a court interpreter. Sure, its not a great “rags-to-riches” story in as much as he never made the fortunes that gets people excited but it is nevertheless and impressive success story. Think about it – he was educated in the Chinese context, came to a foreign land, and realised he needed to go through the educational process again to survive in his new home and he did this in the early 1900s. How many of us in the 2020s are willing to go back to school again – I for one have resisted going to accounting school despite my boss’s pleas?
I like to think
that this section of my family history is not unique to me. I believe that most
of us have had ancestors who moved from the so called “motherland” of China (since
most of us are of Chinese descent) to escape poverty and built a life here.
Anyway, the key
point made in the book is the fact that back in those days, nobody migrated to
a place unless they knew people who could help them get started in the new
place. If you think about it, the complaint about foreigners “helping each
other” is not exactly new – our ancestors helped each other because this was basic
survival.
The movie
Thackery makes the same point from a different perspective. Mr. Thackery was a well-known
regionalist who felt that native Marathi’s were being screwed out of
opportunities in the state of Maharashtra and his movement had the initial aim
of fighting for the rights of Marathi’s against the ‘foreigners” who had migrated
to the state, and he believed with screwing the locals out of the jobs and
culture. There is a scene where he brings a group of thugs over to force a
cinema owner to take down the screening of the film in Hindi and replace it
with a film in Marathi.
For the record,
I detest regionalist and nationalist politics. I believe that the “us-versus-them”
rhetoric is a convenient distraction that demagogues use to make those of
simple intelligence get emotionally distracted from the actual issues that nobody
wants to talk about. Although I am far away from being a winner of the globalist
system, I refuse to believe that it is the fault of my Pinoy and Indian friends
that I have not climbed the corporate ladder.
However, whilst
I detest Mr. Thackery’s politics, I believe that he does have a few valid
points that need to be considered. One of them comes from the early part of the
movie when he says that the South Indians in Mumbai have helped each other.
When one opens a restaurant, he will see to it that other South Indians have jobs,
and he becomes a celebrated hero for succeeding. By contrast, Mr. Thackery states
that when a local Marathi succeeds, the rest of them will snipe in bitterness
and jealousy.”
Both the movie
and the book talked about a situation in the last century that seems to be
relevant today. Read through enough forums in cyberspace and you will notice
that there’s a common complaint – the people from elsewhere are helping their
own kind at the expense of Singaporeans, even if the “own kind” is less qualified
than the local.
I get that
people are upset. However, here is the question – what are we doing about the
situation other than complaining in cyberspace? A lot of people think the government
needs to clamp down on the entry of foreigners and Leong Mun Wai of the PSP
famously complained that Mr Piyush Gupta’s presence as CEO of DBS was somehow a
slap in the face of Singapore (that slap was delivered long before Mr. Gupta
took the job, when DBS proudly announced they were hiring John Olds, a White
American with even less qualifications to run a bank than Mr. Gupta).
The reality is
that the government will not do anything about the situation other than tighten
up visa requirements before an election or perhaps talk a lot about enforcing
rules on foreign labour. As things stand the government is also likely to lose
its near absolute majority for the foreseeable future. The GLC section of the
economy will prefer to hire a foreign multinational, where Singaporeans are
inevitably subordinate to London or New York than to give it to local
Singaporean entrepreneurs making the decisions in Singapore – I think of the
famous line in Jack Neo’s “I Not Stupid” – “Ang Moh’s idea is always special, I
will pay more for Ang Moh’s idea.”
The solution
for Singaporeans must be ground up instead of top down. Singaporeans need to
help each other get ahead. Singapore’s business community needs to step up in
its hiring of “local” talent and local graduates need to realise that getting a
job in a local business is good training.
We need to lose
the mindset that Singaporeans deserve less. I remember one of my Malaysian
chefs at the Bistrot telling me that I could not insist on equal pay with a
Belgium who had done the job before because he is “Ang Moh.” Every “Ang Moh”
customer was telling me otherwise, including the Belgium who had done the job
(never took the full-time job in the Bistrot). I think of the time I pitched
for a job organised by an offshoot of our National University. I was told that
I only got the chance to pitch because the Indian born member of the board
insisted on it, whilst the local born and bred chairman thought of me as
nothing more than “That Blogger.”
We can talk
about how great coming from NUS and NTU are but if our businesses do not think
much of our local graduates enough to give them the opportunities to grow. It
also works the other way, what can our local businesses do if local graduates persist
on shunning local employers in favour of foreign companies.
We cannot
complain about foreigners helping each other if we will not help each other on
our home ground. Unless our born and bred Singaporeans are willing to accept
that local born and bred Singaporeans can be as good as anyone else in the
world, we will be destined to be subordinate to people from elsewhere.
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