Healthy Endings

I recently had an article of mine published in the Straits Times, Singapore’s national (only) newspaper. I decided to catch onto the fact that there were several letters in the forum talking about how marriage was the bedrock of stability and society and anything that made ending it easier was bad for society and so on and so on. I decided to argue that the problem wasn’t so much the ease of divorce but the ease of marriage that was the cause of societies problems. My letter can be found at https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/letters-in-print/ease-of-getting-married-may-be-the-problem.

[The premise of my letter is that instead of making divorce more difficult, one should make marriage more difficult. As thing stand, it’s ridiculously easy to get married. One merely needs to be over 21 and able to find witnesses. Everything else is a formality and I stick by the argument that nobody really values things that come easily.

My letter got a few likes, including likes from two lawyers and my favourite Pudding decided that my letter was a total waste of a good read because my premise was faulty and I should realise that society does respect marriage hence it makes it easy to get married and very difficult to get divorced (I’m on my second marriage and she’s in her second relationship).

The next day, the press decided to run another article from someone who appears tragically young, who decided to start quoting from a political lobbying group called the Institute for American Values, which argued that unhappily divorced adults were not happier unhappily married adults and that children of unhappily married adults were not better off than divorced parents. That letter can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/letters-in-print/hold-on-to-time-tested-values-amid-rapid-changes?&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=addtoany

Such articles have the benefit of making me so happy that I come from a patchwork family and have been continuing the task of adding more patchworks. I think too many people miss the point of marriage or get stuck in a some ideal of what it should be.

I’m either the best person or the worst person to talk about this but I believe that marriage is about partnership. It’s about two people who can’t live without each other despite known all the awful things about the other. A married couple should have shared ideals and goals thus having something to keep the individuals together despite the differences that individuals bring to the table and yes, physically attraction should also be part of the game.

My marriage to Gina failed from day one because we didn’t have shared goals. There was nothing in the union to bring and keep us together. OK, that’s not quite true – the sex was fantastic and part of the reason why I allowed her to blackmail me into signing the paper was the fact that I didn’t want to lose a regular sex partner. She on the other hand wanted me to buy a flat quickly and to “settle down.” She was so happy when I got a job in the civil service (teacher), which I couldn’t run from fast enough. The idea of “this is the rest of your life,” sent shudders down my spine. In the words of the late Old Rogue, “She had fire-place written all over her.” I think she got violent when it was clear that I didn’t share her goals.

My marriage to Huong is working out better. Despite our many differences, there are things that keep us together. She’s someone who is more than a quick shag in the bush and hence we struggle to build a home and family and find unity in the struggle of building that.

Marriage is a partnership which should ideally bring out the best in both parties. One always thinks of the saying, “Behind every good man is a woman,” and my mother actually says that her marriage to my Dad made her a more confident person.

I don’t dispute the fact that a stable marriage is the best breeding ground for socially well-adjusted people. The African-American Community in the USA has provided us with plenty of statistics linking criminal behavior to dysfunctional families.

What I do dispute is the notion that a happy, well adjusted family means the biological parents remain together and I disagree with the notion that children become worse off when their parents separate. My sister once said that she felt offended when the discussion came to difficult people being the way they were because they had parents who separated – we weren’t arseholes and our parents had separated (many times as a matter of fact.)

I look my situation and I believe that while a part me wishes my parents marriage worked out, I don’t believe I’m any worse off because it didn’t work out. If anything, I got lucky in that respect and it’s probably in later life, when I got married and divorced for me to appreciate them. My parent’s marriage failed but they didn’t fail me (even if they might disagree whenever I fuck up).

Why do I say that? I believe that my parents had the chance to do what they did for me because when their marriage reached the stage where it was clear they couldn’t live together, they had a chance for clean break. The marriage ended and both of them could move on.

To my mother’s credit, she only brought decent men into our lives. Both stepdads, Lee and Thomas loved Tara and I like their own. The patchwork family, particularly with the American family, somehow gelled. I think I’m the only person in my social group who gets invited to an ex-step-nephew’s wedding. Biology was never an issue with my stepdads, who took their role of being instant dad’s quite seriously.

My mother also worked hard to ensure that I kept my relationship with my father healthy. I’ll never tire of mentioning the fact that she would push me to write letters (pre-internet) to my Dad. I’d protest but she’d push on and guess what, I have a somewhat normal relationship with my father.

I also credit my Dad for ensuring that the financial support would always be there for both me and Max, despite whatever differences he had with his ex-wives. Both of Max and I have never really starved and both of us are educated men because my dad ensured that the funds were there. My final year of university coincided with one of his darkest points financially and he told me, “You will finish university even if I have to beg, borrow or steal the money.”

With my family background, I cannot argue that biology is essential in making the family unit work and it’s quite clear that I am a beneficiary of someone who benefited from a situation that most people would call disastrous. I can appreciate that I’m lucky in the sense that I had the right elements – namely the adult figures in my life at the time happened to be decent enough people who found a way of working things out for my benefit. Not everybody gets that lucky in the genetic lottery the way I do.

Decent people who make bad situations work are hard to find and I guess you can that the statistics hold – children of divorce parents get fucked up.

So, what about the guys who stay together for the kids or worse – to preserve their legacy. I think of a friend of mine who is a naturalized citizen who built up a successful business. This chap married a woman who extracted a heavy price from him – her family have moved into his flat, she’s slowly but surely taken over operational control of the business and her friends are forced upon him. The man is so happy with his family life that he’s out drinking every night and he spends his waking hours plotting how to avoid going home. The kid is left to the grandmother’s (a heavy gambler) care because both parents are officially “too busy” for him. The kid is growing up materially well off but I’m not sure how fun it is growing up in a household where dad does everything possible to avoid mum and gang.

I don’t think it’s respecting marriage to keep unhappy people together. Yes, nobody goes into marriage hopping it would end but we have to accept that people do fall out of love and letting people have a clean break is actually good for everyone. I think decent people who become anything but decent when they are around their significant others because that significant other is a source of pure misery.

You don’t respect an institution or protect minors by forcing miserable people to stay in a situation that is increasing their misery. You help them find a clean break that works out in everyone’s interest.

The People You Snub.

One of the biggest fights that Gina and I had in our turbulent marriage was the fact that she always felt that my parents and the people around me snubbed her. It didn’t help that at the time, I was living with my father who lived in a swish condominium opposite the Shangri-La Valley Wing (a place often inhabited by VIPS like former Chinese President Zhang Xi Min) and she lived with her family in a Housing Development Board Flat in the North of Singapore. I remember going out with her on an occasion and not wanting to follow her home and she lashed out at me, yelling, “Is it because I live in an HDB flat.” Another of her out burst was against my family’s group of friends, who consisted mainly of prominent members of the advertising community – she felt they were weird and at one stage stressed that her father’s business associates were just as rich as the well to do executives my father knew.

In fairness to my ex-wife, my friends and family really did think I was married to trailer park trash. In fairness to my family and friends, they disliked her for reasons other than the ones she felt. My Dad said, “It’s not about snobbery – her father could probably drown me in his cash,” and in fairness to my Dad he is actually quite comfortable with Huong aka the Ruthless Half, who has a better claim to come from the gutter than Gina ever did i.e. Vietnamese village girl who barely speaks English, as opposed to Gina who did go to a recognized university of sorts.

While my ex-wife and family didn’t get each other right, I bring up the topic of how she perceived by family because it highlights one of the major issues of our time – namely the cultural and communication gaps between people. We often assume that culture gaps are about things like race and religion. The talking heads of the West often enjoy talking about how you’ll get a clash of “civilizations” or about the “North-South” divide and the struggle between light and dark-skinned people. While these are valid discussion points, I believe the biggest cultural misunderstandings and conflicts happen between “social” classes in the same place. Trump was elected by White Skinned people from rural Pennsylvania who lost touch with white skinned people in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. I live in Singapore am living on the bridge of being in the world of corporate restructuring and waiting tables.

I’m something of an oddity in both worlds and I guess that gives me an insight into both. The funny thing is both worlds are very similar. People in both want the same thing – namely to earn enough money to build a decent enough life for themselves. Yet, they’re incredibly unable to understand the struggles of the other. While collar people for example, cannot understand why I would ever want to work a blue-collar job and the well-meaning ones often feel they have an obligation to rescue me from the dregs of being a blue-collar worker. 

I can appreciate my well-wishers. Blue-collar work is financially unrewarding for the hours that you have to work. In my blue-collar existence, I earn the princely sum of $10 an hour and I’ve worked there for six-years. My co-workers are barely paid S$2,000 a month and they easily work eight hours a day and six days a week, including public holidays (which is actually the busiest time to be in a restaurant). The mathematics aren’t exactly in favour of the worker.

Having said that, I don’t understand why people feel that I need to be “rescued” from my blue-collar existence. Just because the financial rewards are lesser, it doesn’t mean that the existence is without benefits. One of the benefits of being in a blue-collar existence, for example, is that you have tend to have peace of mind. When the restaurant shuts, I’m not obliged to think about the place until the next time I enter the place. By contrast, in my existence in corporate restructuring, there’s always the nagging feeling that I have to jump at a moment notice because of this or that.

White-collar people also have a tendency to forget that life exists beyond their own and the worst part is that they forget that life is often fluid and the way of the white-collar worker isn’t the only way. Which brings me back to the point that Gina once made – her father’s friends, aka the small time Chinese businessmen were as wealthy as the high flying multinational executives that my parents knew. She’s right.

The executive class often overlooks the fact that knowledge isn’t always from books and more importantly, the key to success boils down to guts. My former father-in-law sold eggs for a living and somehow managed to put two kids through to university in a country that doesn’t subsidize much. Think about it – the old man had to sell a commodity where the margins are calculated in cents and its easy to get undercut by the big boys and somehow, he managed to put his kids through to school. I stress this point because how many of us can gather this type of money by doing that?

People from the rougher side of life have knack of looking at things that matter. I give the example of Zen, my favourite flesh ball from the rough streets of Geylang (Singapore’s red-light district). Somehow, flesh ball has a way of measuring people up pretty accurately. How does she get this ability? She’s probably been screwed more than enough times than most to have learnt the hard way. I take the example of Huong, who looked at a girl I had brought to a function – she said, “That girl only wants money from you.” She could pick this up from one glance. Interestingly the young lady in question said the same thing on my other half but qualified it as, “I’ve done my research and it’s proven that Vietnamese girls only want you for money.”

They also network much better and as my father said to Huong on his first meeting – “You are from a third world country where people still help each other. “I look at the communities formed by the foreigners from the poorer parts of Asia and I notice that people help each other and that’s how they manage to thrive.

Somehow, my white-collar friends can never understand how people without a degree can obtain money. It’s such a pity that they have this blind spot because if they were only able to look at the things that matter, they’d find a way of prospering for themselves too.

I remember going to see the fancy high-priced lawyers we were working on in a case. The client was an old Chinese businessman who could not speak English and who operated out of a hole in one of the streets that needed to be cleaned up. The client threw cheques at the lawyers. It occurred to me that it wasn’t the guys in the suites throwing the money……………..I believe this is something many young professionals need to understand about the way the world works.

When the Boys Don't Come Home/

The issue of safety of our national servicemen is once again in the news thanks to the death of Private Dave Lee Huan Xuan. Private Lee, a young Guardsman (the second toughest group in the Singapore Army after the Commandos) had completed an 8km fast march and had to be treated for signs of heat stroke. He was pronounced dead on Monday 30 April 2018, a mere four months after his enlistment in January of this year.

The family is understandably upset and they want answers. The SAF is once again in a situation where it has to answer for the life of a young man.

Coming from a batch of National Servicemen that lost two of its members in a tragedy some 21-years ago, I feel obliged to comment on the death of every young national serviceman because it says many things about our society just as it did all those years ago when we lost Ronnie and Yin Tit.

Based on the available information, it seems that this case is a tragic mishap. Even in the dark days of the late 1990s, it was always standard practice for every trainee on every fast or route march to consume water. It was always standard practice to ensure that was the trainees got plenty of rest the night before and it was, even then, standard practice to ensure that such marches did not take place during the hottest time of the day. Given the increased knowledge in medical science and the pressure on the SAF to ensure safety of its soldiers, I believe that the safety procedures should have become even more stringent.

The commanders need to answer one basic question – did they adhere to basic safety procedures. If the answer is no, then the chain of command needs to answer for it. The organization needs to show that it did everything humanly possible to ensure that Private Lee was fit enough to on this march.

As with the case of Private Dominique Sarron Lee, who passed away coincidentally on the 9^th of March 2014, the parents have the internet. Unlike Ronnie’s parents, the parents of Private Dominique Lee and Private Dave Lee have a venue to demand the adequacy of justice. What do I mean by that?

Back when Swift Lion took place in 1997, the Ministry’s first action was to convene a “Committee of Enquiry,” which was chaired by Tan Ghee Paw (who would be PUB Chairman when I was working at BANG PR on the PUB account). The job of the Committee is to look into the facts and to find out what happened. If you look at the news article into the death of Private Lee ( https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/national-serviceman-19-dies-after-heat-stroke) – you will note that this is standard practice.

The question is, what happens after the Committee has done its job? In Ronnie and Yin Tit’s case, the answer was bugger shit all. In the reservist trainings that I went to after the incident, we were always told – “Oh live firing is perfectly safe – we found out that DSO (Defence Science Organisation) had bought a faulty fuze from Island Ordnance Systems (http://www.islandordnance.com/cat.asp?sessid=31756635) , an American Company that outsourced the manufacturing of the fuze that killed Ronnie and Yin Tit to the Chinese. The action taken can be summed up as “we’ve now found a new supplier so everything is OK.

Human beings have short memories. We allowed the families of our fallen comrades to get over their grief. Time healed the wounds and that was that.

I don’t know about you but I have difficulty with that and reading reports like the report on Private Dominique Sarron Lee’s death (https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2016/04/18/pte-dominique-sarron-lees-brother-decries-inadequate-punishment/) makes me all that more cynical about the system.

I don’t blame the SAF for existing. Singapore does need an armed force to deter potential aggressors. I don’t dispute the fact that we need the national service system because we don’t have the manpower to field a large full-time army. I even see the non-military benefits of having national service – I wrote my dissertation on the subject.

Having said that, the SAF must remember that it is a “people’s force.” Like the rest of the government, the military exist to serve the people and not the other way around. Commanders are responsible for the safety of their men and I believe in what the Great American General George Patten says – “My job isn’t to make sure my boys die for their country – I’m there to make the other son of a bitch die for theirs.”

A military commander is given greater privileges than his men (the military remains mostly men) and so should his responsibilities. Holding back someone’s career and pay for being negligent over training standards will never feel acceptable. Telling us that it was all bad commercial practice isn’t enough.

We’re not mercenaries. We don’t fight for out country because the pay is good. I remember my battery commander, Captain Lam Sheau Kai (Now General Lam, Commander Combat Support Service) asking us if we’d be willing to continue the mission right after the news of Ronnie and Yin Tit’s passing. Our reply was simple – it this was war, we’d continue no questions asked – but it wasn’t – it was a training fuck up and we didn’t see why we should be happy (we were also asked if we would follow orders – our reply was that there was no question about us following orders – the question was whether we would be happy about it.)

As humans, its easy to die to protect those you love or for the ideals that you can believe in. Asking someone to give you his or her life when your track record suggests you have your material gains at heart is another matter all together