When the
Oaf in the White House got himself elected two years ago, many people said it
was because he appealed to a sense of “Empowerment” to a group that is supposed
to be the top of the proverbial food tree – the white man. The Donald spent an
entire campaign taking cheap pot shots at the groups that do work such as
Mexicans, women and the disabled and the so-called masses lapped it up.
Finally, here was someone who was speaking about the suffering of the “real”
people and not giving a damn about the so called “political correctness” that
had caused so much suffering to the “real” people.
As awful
as the Donald is, I allowed to be a form of amusement. I actually felt that
somehow, we in Singapore, are little bit better. Sure, the different races take
a few pot shots at each other but when push comes to shove, we are all Singaporeans.
I think of the curry incident, where Singapore Chinese joined their Indian brethren,
after a family of China-born migrants made complaints about the cooking of
curry.
My faith
in “my” people was a little shaken today when I read the comments of a post by
a Singaporean of Indian decent who had a very nasty encounter with a woman who
didn’t think twice about going down the racist route. The posting can be found
at:
The story
is disturbing in itself. At the very least, the woman in question should have
been shot for being stupid. When you work in customer service, you don’t go out
of your way to insult people because you never know who is going to be your
next customer.
Leaving
aside the nature of the post, what I found particularly disturbing, was the
comments that people left behind. OK, there was some optimism in as much as the
majority of comments were sympathetic to the guy who posted the post.
However,
there was a small minority who didn’t get the point. One even went as far as to
call the poster, “Just a driver
trying to blow shit up,” and then said his experience wasn’t “racism.”
Another chap described the incident as “The tone might be inappropriate, but
expecting everyone to be PC in everything? Really?” – That was
incidentally from someone who couldn’t understand why people with dark complexions
get upset when their darkness is used against them, because white, yellow and
brown people apparently don’t get upset when their whiteness, yellowness and brownness
is brought up.
When I posted
something about how I’d have sacked the woman in question, someone actually posted
that I would never make it into management because I didn’t protect the staff from
“an allegation becos of doing her duty.”
While those
posting were thankfully in the minority, I find myself asking, are we, the
majority (I am ethnically Chinese, which means I’m part of the majority of
Singapore’s population), forgetting that just because someone is of a different
ethnicity or culture, it doesn’t mean that their complaints are not valid.
I question
whether the Chinese Singaporean is starting to feel the same pressures that the
White American was supposed to be feeling – namely, the fact that you’re no
longer the dominant species?
I do see
inter-communal tensions. Since I deal mainly with Indians, I see it most in the
Indian communities, where our local Singaporeans have woken up to find
themselves competing with people from India who happen to be as well educated
or if not more so than they are. Hence, you get the local Indians complaining
about the “snooty” expat Indians with “fake” qualifications and you get the
other side, which basically thinks the majority of our local Indians live in
two-room HDB flats.
I also see
it in the Chinese Community, where the term “Chinaman” refers to the roughest
and crudest of people. Our local Chinese girls are also finding it harder to
compete with better looking and more stylish women from the Mainland. I
remember one of my female acquaintances verbally expressing the idea that every
girl from China was an AIDS factory. I also had a girl friend from China who thought
that Singaporean Chinese girls were not pretty because they came from the wrong
part of China (roughly translated – We, China girls are from Beijing and Shanghai,
so we are pretty – Singapore girls are from Guangzhou and Fujian – so less
pretty. My Aunt’s only reply was “OH FUCK OFF.”)
However, I’ve
not seen much tension between the races. While there are jokes amongst the
Chinese about the Indians being “black,” but by and large, inter-racial
relations in Singapore are pretty good. So, I’m kind of surprised that there
are people who are expressing sentiments that can be summed up as “Ohh stop whining,
you’re lucky to be in our society.”
Seriously,
Singaporean Chinese are in no danger of being displaced on the top of the
socio-economic food tree in Singapore. All you have to do is to look at the higher
echelons of any government organization (especially the military), and you’ll
realise that the Singaporean Chinese is not in any danger of being shut out of
the plum jobs. Having said that, I guess you could have said the same thing
about the White American man. Obama was only half a black man who ran the
country through a cabinet that was predominantly of Caucasian decent and
somehow, it seemed that the White man felt left out and disempowered enough to
vote for Trump and his bashing of people who do work.
I’ve had
Singaporean friends tell me that they can’t hack it in Singapore because its
getting expensive and the foreigners are to blame. I’ve heard the same thing
from Europeans and Americans. The world is becoming different and old socio-economic
patterns are changing and while I believe that this is something that should be
celebrated, it will leave people disenfranchised.
In places
like Detroit, you had a car industry that kept working class white people in
decent paying jobs. Then, the car manufacturing went to places like Japan, then
China and dare I say the robots are also moving in. For the working class white
man, it can be very unsettling when the thing that gave you a good living goes
elsewhere.
Likewise,
in Singapore, the average Singaporean had a perfect niche between East and West.
As one Singaporean British Airways Steward said, “They used to hire us because
we spoke English and Mandarin. Now, the PR Chinese are learning English, so the
airline hires them instead.”
As painful
as it is, this disruption is a good thing. It forces one to use ones’ wits and
think of different ways of survival. You got to think of doing things better
when you don’t have the advantage of incumbency.
I don’t see
why the Singaporean Chinese needs to feel threatened in his homeland. We just
need to accept that things are changing and we got to find new ways of doing
things. You can’t fight it and we have to acknowledge that our friends from
ethnic minorities have their special value too if we want to progress in a
changing world. If you can’t recognize someone because “ALL Of YOUR ARE SO BLACK,”
then you might want to consider migration – to Mars.
No comments
Post a Comment