He Was Once a Refugee

 

One of the most interesting cross-cultural communications that Huong and I have had in the 12-years that we’ve been together has been on the issue of visas into certain places. I simply cannot understand why she’s willing to go all out to deal with the bureaucracy of getting into certain places. She’s currently trying to get into the USA and the paper work is, in my view, pointless. However, to her, dealing with the paper work is a small price one has to pay to get into the USA. For me, I always figured that with the exception of Bhutan, no place was worth going to if you had to wrestle with bureaucrats just to get in. I take France as an example. When I was in school in the 1990s, I refused to go to France. Every country in the EU allowed Singaporeans visa-free entry and I couldn’t see what the French had to offer that required a struggle with bureaucrats.

The difference in our attitude boils down to passports. I travel on a Singapore passport, which according to The Henley Passport Index for 2023 allows me to enter 193 countries without having to apply for a visa. The Singapore passport has the best of East and West. Our reputation is such that Western nations trust us enough that we’ll leave after a certain period to go back to decent paying jobs and nice homes, rathe than trying to stay illegally. We’re also Asian enough for places in Indo-China not to shake us down for visa fees when we enter. Say what you like about Singapore but I don’t have much incentive to leave. Whilst I am not rich by any means, I am earning a living in a decent enough currency and have access to decent enough facilities. If I move anywhere, its either for holiday or it’s got to be an amazing business opportunity.

Huong by contrast, travels on a Vietnamese passport, which according The Henley Passport Index for 2023, allows her to travel to 54 countries visa-free. While Vietnam has been an “up-and-coming” economy, life in rural Vietnam, where Huong was born, remains tough. Then you got to add in the fact that the Vietnamese Dong competes with the Iranian Riyal for the world’s lowest value currency on the planet, which means that even if there are jobs available, you’re going to look and feel poor compared to everyone else (I used to have that feeling with my friends in the UK when it was a three-to-one exchange rate in favour of the GBP to the SGD. No matter how many SGD I had, it always had to be divided by three for my British friends to understand). So, for Huong everywhere outside Vietnam is a place of prosperity.

I bring up the contrasting attitudes that Huong and I have towards visas because today is World Migrant and Refuge Day, which if you look at geopolitical events, has become especially significant. Think of things like the War in Ukraine, where people have been displaced and forced to flee because someone decided to grab their country.

Its also significant in Singapore. Despite being a nation that was built by migrants and people fleeing either economic deprivation or political persecution, we easily fall for the notion that “outsiders” from less developed places are out to get us. Take one of our “great” military achievements in the 1970s – turning away boats of refugees fleeing Vietnam. The only comment I got from someone who was part of this military achievement was “why didn’t these people stay and fight?” Erm, the world’s strongest military had just abandoned them and you expected them to stay and fight with?

I believe that I am not the only native-born Singaporean who has an inability to understand the need to leave your “homeland.” The general attitude that many of us have is that you couldn’t make it in your own country so you come to mine and want to rob me of my birthright. I remember a decently educated customer at the Bistrot using that precise argument to defend Donald Trump’s remarks on Mexicans being rapist.

Our position is a very privileged one. What we fail to recognize is that people like refugees fleeing economic deprivation or political persecution have a hunger to survive and thrive. What they are fleeing from is to them, so awful that they devote their energy to the host country and end up building the host country. I grew up in the UK where the “Pakis” (the generic term a lot of Brits use for South Asians. A good portion were not actually from Pakistan but Gujaratis from Africa) built corner shops and sent their kids to school and even into 10 Downing Street. The native Whites by contrast found gainful employment asking you for small change.

Then, we need to remember that the man that many in the “Anti-Refuge” and “Anti-Migrant” camp claim to worship was once a refugee. After her was born in a manger, he and his parents had to get him into Egypt as fast as they could. The reason was simple, Harrod the Great had decided to go on a child murdering spree.

https://www.amormeus.org/en/blog/106th-world-day-of-migrants-and-refugees/

 

 So, here’s the question. What would have happened to Western Civilization, which claims to be founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles had Jesus not been allowed to flee persecution? How does one claim to accept Christ as lord and savior yet at the same time see people fleeing persecution as a nuisance?

War is Old Men Talking, and Young Men Dying

 

Blogger stats showed that I had a few hits on a piece that I wrote in 2020 about the Tragedy of Exercise Swift Lion all those years ago. If I had to look at defining moments in life, this was probably one of the main ones of my youth. It was scary because the reality of dying hit home. When you’re in your 20s, you don’t think of dying. It’s something that is reserved for old people. Then, suddenly your friend dies for doing the same job you’re expected to do and the reality that you could be next hits home.

So, when the incident first broke out, the immediate reaction was trying to find a way of not being next. Top brass was telling us all sorts of statistically plausible things about how it was faulty fuze but the problem was being fixed but we weren’t listening. Statistics lose their effect when you have to attend the funerals of your friends who did the same thing you were supposed to do.

Fear gave way to sadness and then life moved on. We tell ourselves that Ronnie and Yin Tit would have wanted it for the rest of us. We all went onto the do the usual things like start families and careers and the usual comments on social media about remembrance have gotten fewer as time has gone by.

Ronnie and Yin Tit were good guys. Young boys who were sent out on a training exercise as they should have been. Ronnie, the kindest of souls worked hard to ensure everything would run smoothly. You’re talking about a guy whose boss had to threaten him with a charge in order to get him to take a break. Yet, unknown to them, they’d be blown to bits because a few bureaucrats in the defense establishment couldn’t take ownership of their jobs and what you call greedy American capitalism and shoddy Chinese workmanship got blamed. Nobody got fired let alone charged in court. Two young lives were taken and the defense establishment continued to grab an increasing amount of tax payer money. As mentioned in that piece – I don’t get it.

During my last trip to the doctor, I was told that there’s “wear-and-tear” in my knee, which is “normal” for my age. Yes, I am hitting the half-century mark next year. Aging can get tough, especially when the body starts telling you that it has limits.

However, I’m lucky to look at 50. Ronnie by comparison is forever 21 and Yin Tit is forever 18. I’ve adopted a kid who is turning 24 in November and my 27-year-old intern likes to ask me if I’d accept him as my son-in-law (my answer to him has been that I don’t need to worry about him more than I already do). I’m doing and experiencing things that neither Ronnie or Yin Tit never got a chance to do.

So, what does that mean? Well, I guess the main answer is that while aging is rough, the alternative is inevitably worse. Then, there’s always the discussion on how exactly do you want to age and what does that mean for the younger folk as you get older.

Well, let’s start with the truism about combat. War is, as they often say, a case for old men to talk a lot and for young men to die.

 

So, as I get older, I got to ask myself, do I want the young guys around me to do my dirty work and pay for it with their lives. I realise that I don’t have the capacity to ask the kids to die for my sake.

It doesn’t mean that I won’t get involved in violent situations. As I explained to someone, I am in a line of work where you need to consider the possibility that the other guy may not act within expected limits. However, its something I would get involved in myself, knowing the realities and consequences. If I ever get involved in such situations, the consequences are on me. I’m not about to get some kid who has a bright future to do my dirty work.

Thanks to the intern, I am perpetually asking myself what type of old person I need to be. I know I’ve been down on the young guys in Singapore and he’s usually my main example. I’ve told him that I’ve been sorely tempted to inflict a certain level of violence onto him so that he understands that the world is nasty and until he learns the value of hard work and shows that he has some fire in the belly, he’s going to be nothing more than a worm. Yes, he is by his own definition a “Mummy’s boy” and the type that makes me want to drill some sense of reality into him by force if necessary.

Sure, he does irk me from time-to-time. However, a lot of it is going to be on me if he remains a worm. Yet, at the end of the day, I believe I have an obligation to get him to use his youth and not to rob him of it. I don’t ask him to do anything I wouldn’t do. So, when I ask him to do “dirty work,” its because I’m doing it and need spare hands. My hope is that I become the old guy who inspires him to out do me. I will not be the old guy who sits in the comfort of a sofa and gets him fired up and ready to die for me. If I become that person, I’m no better than the bureaucrats who could only cover themselves when Ronnie and Yin Tit got blown away.

The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are; it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. - Rocky Balboa

 

Around two days ago, I put up a post on the criteria I used when trying to figure out if I would like a person or not. These criteria I used are not hard and fast rules. I’ve gotten along well enough with people who don’t fit into the my “box” (yes, I know I often complain we try to put people into boxes), but by and large, most of the people that I get along with and want to deal with on a personal and professional basis tend to have at least one of the following:

Firstly, there should be an appreciation of a contact sport and one should preferably have played a contact sport at some stage in life. The sport can be a combat sport like boxing, MMA or kickboxing or it can be a team sport like ruby union and league as well as the American and Australian version of football;

Secondly, if one comes from a country where there is compulsory military service, one should preferably have served in a combat vocation. If one comes from a country where there are professional standing armies, I tend give instant respect to the guys who did a spell in the military. I think of one of my American friends who was touted as being “Mr. Cisco” but what made a difference to me was the fact that he once served in the US Navy.

Finally, I want to know if a guy has spent time doing any form of menial work like waiting tables, farm work or worked in a construction site or shipyard.

As a matter of disclosure, I played rugby at house level during my first four years at Churcher’s College. I also served as a 155mm Gun Howitzer Commander during national service and as is well known, I waited tables in a Bistrot in my late thirties and carried on even though I was working a corporate job by day until Covid put an end to this side gig.

So, you could say that what I’m doing is looking for people who are similar to me. I guess it is human nature to want to be with people similar to you. While there’s probably an element of truth in there, I’m looking to be around people of a certain character. I will be the first to admit that I’m not always the best judge of character. My abilities to judge people accurately have come with time. I’ve found that while I may not necessarily have an instinctive flair for reading people, I can figure something out about a person from their experiences.

I, for example, click with people who like contact sports because I know they’ve taken a few knocks before and they’ve managed to get up and continue. I take the difference between soccer and rugby as the example. In soccer, you’ll see the guy rolling on the floor and screaming in pain when someone taps him. In rugby the foul usually involves an attempt to incapacitate the guy. There’s a lot more money in soccer than in rugby (both league and union) and so I guess its all about trying to gain every advantage you have, even if you need to blow things up a bit. In rugby its about getting the ball across to score that try. To make it in a contact sport, you need to take a few knocks in life and then get up and play again.

One of the best explanations of how this relates to life is seen in the movie Rocky Balboa, where the aged Rocky ticks his son off for being a complaining wimp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgU_aepGd0

 

 Likewise, the same is pretty much true of people who have served in combat roles. It’s about understanding that your life does depend on working with the guy next to you. Its about understanding that no individual is above the “purpose.” A 155 howitzer for example, will simply not function if it was down to a single operator.

Now, this is not to say that individuality is not important. I take myself as an example. I have an ego and my greatest pride has always been the things I did as a one-man-operator. I take pride in the fact that the job was done by Tang Li from Singapore with no multi-national backing as opposed to be Tang Li part of the Webber Shandwick team.

However, as much as I believe in the power of individuality, I also understand that you need to be both dependable and to depend on people to get the mission through. Yes, I was a lone PR operator for many years but I was also working alongside people doing design, social media marketing advertising and so on. We had to work together to achieve the common objective. There is a reason why, nearly two and a half decades after leaving national service, my proverbial “BFFs” are my military buddies.

I value people who have done manual work because it actually gives you an understanding of the value of work. I think it was best explained by an American who had volunteered his son for national service and found, to his horror, that the SAF hired Bangladeshi workers to do area cleaning for recruits. He said, “If those boys had to clean up after themselves, they would look at the Bangladeshi worker in a different way.”

The converse of this, is that I get turned off when people treat service staff badly or start turning their noses at construction workers. I was brought up to treat everyone with respect and when I see someone talking down to someone like the service staff, maids and construction worker, that automatically triggers alarm bells about that person. No matter how rich that person is or how powerful, only those from the gutter “talk down” to people and that applies whether you have a million cash in the bank.

At the end the day, all we have is our character. Money, position and power and even good looks fade. So, I try to surround myself with people with some shred of character. I think of my kids first serious boyfriend. He was the manager in a bar she worked at. Had served as an army regular for six-years in Provost unit. Looked like he could handle himself in fight. He was the only “mummy’s boy” worth considering human – he looked after his mother and didn’t expect her to protect him from life’s realities. I respected that he looked like he could handle himself in a fight and we worked together in the same restaurant, the entire crew kept telling me how fortunate I was to have him as my “son-in-law.” I just wish my kid knew how to treasure the guy.  

We Need Young Men – Not Mummy’s Boys.

 

A few years ago, one of my aunts made a point that Singapore is a weird place. She explained to me that aging is different in Singapore. In the rest of the world, young people are usually idealistic and are brimming with ideas as to how they can make the world a better place. However, once they start work, the reality of paying bills sets in and they get more conservative as they get older. In Singapore, the youth tend to be career focused and money minded and then, as they get older, they realise that money isn’t everything and they’re either more idealistic or perhaps resentful of the rat-race.

In a way, I’m a classic example of this. As a student in the UK, I took pride in the fact that I worked as an intern for that most capitalistic of institutions – Citibank, whilst contemporaries were busy railing against the evils of capitalism and arguing that whilst may not have liked Mao’s methods, you had to admire the man’s ideals. That was me in my 20s.

Today, as I approach the half century mark, I tend to look at intangible costs of my actions. Yes, money is important but I do ask if my actions will cost me in other areas like my ability to sleep. Age has taught me that what is legal is not necessarily moral.

So, I am the living example of Singapore’s aging in reverse. However, I do ask myself if I’m just a freak of nature. Are our younger people as depressingly conservative and mainstream as I once was?

As a matter of disclosure, I am a father of a young lady (age 24). I also become something of a “father-figure” to an intern (age 27). One could argue that my views on our youth are clouded by the two “kids” I have in my immediate vicinity.

With the girl, let’s just say that I thought I would worry about boys. Instead, I had much of the reverse when she discovered her phone and a host of apps that allowed her to stay indoors. I actually breathed a sigh of relief when she had a boyfriend (former regular who served in Provost Unit and now works as a bar manager).

I guess you could say a father of a daughter just gets protective of his little girl. Being a “dad” figure to a boy is a little more challenging in that you feel that you have to shape him into something resembling a man. My young man proceeded to announce that I had my work cut out for me, when he declared me the “real man.” I’m sure he meant that as a compliment but its, unnatural when a guy whose t-levels are still high calls a man whose t-levels should be in decline a “real man.”

To be fair to him, he’s not the only one. I’ve met young men who are proud to call themselves “mummy’s boys.” Ya, I’m close to my mum too but is calling yourself a “mummy’s boy” something to be proud of, especially when it means Mummy has literally cleaned up after you all your life. I think of an American guy who got his son into the SAF and observed that Pulau Tekong, was filled with Bangladeshi workers hired to clean up after the boys being trained to “protect” us.

National service is supposed to turn boys into men. However, if you have a situation where the boys don’t need to clean up ourselves, you got to ask what type of men are we producing? I’m close to my mother but I don’t call myself a “mummy’s boy,” because my mother would vomit and go into cardiac arrest if she had to do the heavy lifting in life for me. However, that’s exactly what we’re producing, a generation of “Mummy’s Boys,” instead of “Young Men.” Young men have dynamism and drive. They want to change the world and some even do. Mummy’s boys are basically useless they only function as Mummy requires.

This point hit home to me around two weeks back when I had to go on a day trip with an 84-year-old lady, who needed wheelchair assistance. While the lady pushing her on the Singapore end did a commendable job, she herself looked frail and should have been doing something else.

 

 Guess what, on the Vietnamese side, the guy pushing the wheelchair, was a relatively young man who, whilst not shredded looked like he had strength for the job.

 

 Funnily enough, this wasn’t a one off. One the flight out of Ho Chi Minh City, it was a young guy who did the pushing of the wheel chair. In fact, he ended up pushing several wheelchairs.

 

 Who met us on the Singapore side? One of Singapore’s proverbial “auntie's.” In fairness to the aunty pushing the wheelchair, she did a good job of it. However, it was noticeable that she was not young and sprightly. The only young and sprightly young man in the wheelchair pushing team at our world class airport was clearly from India.

 

 

 

This isn’t limited to wheelchair pushing. Go to any random hawker centre and you’ll see all the young and sprightly people sitting down or doing the light work. It’s inevitably the oldest and physically the frailest person around doing the heavy lifting.

Perhaps I’m just strange but there has to be something fundamentally wrong when those of declining strength do the heavy lifting whilst those who should be at the peak of their physical strength can’t lift a piece of paper without going into cardiac arrest. I think of the times my boss has sent me down hills to check on abandoned assets but refused to let the 20-year-olds near the same place.

Mummy’s mean well. Who wants their kid to be hurt? Who doesn’t want their kid to have a comfortable job in an office? However, when you prevent young men from doing any form of lifting, you stunt their growth. You have boys who cannot handle anything, whether is mental, psychological or even physical (You're talking to the 49-year old who does the heavy lifting because the kids in the office would go into cardiac arrest if you asked them to lift anything heavier than a paper clip.) 

You need to hire Barrow Boys to do the basics in life. Are you surprised that Mummy’s boys don’t reproduce, because every girl they look at needs to be Mummy? We need to have young men to drive society and young women to hold it together. We don’t need a group of Mummy’s boys who go into cardiac arrest when they are required to push buttons on a washing machine.  

 

Problems with the Inner Bitch

 

I’ve spent a good portion of my working life in the media, both as a creator and seller of stories on the PR end or writing them from the publication side. In those years, I’ve realized that as far as media is concerned, there’s one uncomfortable truth – personalities sell. This truth is regardless of the topic and thanks to social media, we’re becoming even more personality obsessed. There was a time when “celebrity” was restricted to the world of entertainment. These days everyone is a celebrity.

Let’s face the basic fact – it’s far easier and therefore fun to talk about personalities. The Trump era in American and by extension World politics was the prime example. Everything was focused on the personality in the White House. Say what you like about the man but he had a way of getting people to talk about him, whether it was good or bad. Everyone in the media by extension everywhere else talked about him. Political discourse inevitably went around his orange tan or whether you thought his bluster was actually based on anything. Nobody actually seemed to care to discuss the policies he was proposing.

We, as a species, are bitchy. As mentioned, I spent half my working life in and around media. So, yes, I’m guilty of gossiping and even writing about people (I’m not important enough for Ng Yat Chung to care about what I’ve written about him). Funnily enough, being a bitch isn’t limited to the media. In Singapore, professional circles are so small that personalities end up getting discussed at all sorts of “professional” gatherings. This bitchiness is so prevalent that I’d actually worry if people were not saying things about me behind my back – it would be a sign that I was totally irrelevant.

Whilst its second nature to “civilized people” to “bitch” about each other, there’s a slight problem with this. The easy topic is actually the most distracting. It’s so easy to talk about people that the people you are “bitching” about become the main thing that you think about. Then, when all you think about is the people you are bitching about, you lose interest in doing anything else in between the hum drum of ordinary life.

There has, as far as I know, never been a study on the correlation between bitchiness and the collapse of civilizations. However, there would be case for it. The Millenia of Chinese Imperial Courts filled with eunuchs, for example was probably so bitchy with everyone in court bitching about each other than nobody realized that society had stagnated or that the “White Devils” asking to trade actually had far more advanced technologies that could damage everyone else.

So, if we can’t talk about each other, what else can we talk about? Well, I did something vaguely intelligent last week and made an appointment to catch up with my former battalion Rece officer this week.

Ours was a very unusual friendship. We meet in the armskote room at 23SA. I was the Orderly Sargent (COS) on duty trying to get the arms cleared. He was the battalion Duty Officer (DO). He had gone through the US Military Academy at West Point and graduated seventh in his class. I, by contrast, should have failed my specialist course, had they been allowed to fail me. The caliber of personalities was very clear and I got a dressing down. Never raised his voice but the battery (Company equivalent in an Artillery Unit) duty officer, who had cleared the arms previously, was summoned and everyone in battery line was exceedingly sympathetic the next day.

We didn’t really keep in touch. He had his career in the army and I went onto ORD, go to university and start my freelancing journey. However, he left the army and got in touch with me. Our friendship started to develop in the post-phase of his career because, while we didn’t meet often, our meetings were and remain sessions for discussing issues that matter to us and bouncing ideas as what we can do. Our coffee session at the Tower Club was no exception:

 

 With Mr. Christopher Lo at the Tower Club

In the years since the military, I’ve understood that it wasn’t just the rank that made him my superior. It was the level of conversation that he brought to me that made him my superior. People and personalities were never the main focus of our discussions. What makes the discussions I have with him different to the people I deal with in the course of my professional life is that personalities are never the main topic. Our main topic is ideas.

So, yes, talking about personalities can be a lot of fun. If anything, it becomes the focus on life when you work in an organization that becomes the centre of your life. Offices, be they bureaucratic or corporate are hives of discussions on personality. Hence, they are grossly unproductive.

However, once you get people away from their little holes, you get them to think of things beyond the personalities. You get them to think and talk about ideas that excite them. As my favourite data analytics entrepreneur states – Innovation doesn’t happen in big companies. The big companies have to buy small ones to get innovation. Silicon Valley works because people get together to talk about and get excited by ideas. In a bureaucracy, people get turned on by talking about other people whom they can either build up or trash according to their convenience – hence such organizations do not grow. Clearly it is best to look for the people who want to talk about ideas that excite them rather than the personalities.

We Can Help Each Other

 I’ll be the first to admit that I am often quite critical of “my people.” As a rule of thumb, I don’t have much sympathy for the local, middle-class graduate Chinese, whom often comes across as self-entitled. You’re talking about a group that constantly complains about how “Indian” nationals are “stealing” jobs in the professional sector that they believe a degree entitles them to, yet they would have no hesitation in spitting on the maids who clean their homes or the construction workers who build them.

We’re the group of people who complain that the “foreigners,” are “helping each other,” because to us that’s not normal – screwing our own is. The worst offenders are the young professional class. I think of the time that I was upset that Singapore takes violence seriously because I really wanted to go up to a young PMET in Asia-Square and headbutt him in the nose until he went blind. This excuse of a human being thought it was fun to squish some sweets that the cleaning lady wanted to take home for her grandkids. The only thing that happened to him was his equally pathetic girlfriend told him off and he looked a little sheepish. She should have broken a bottle across his skull thus freeing herself from the possible crime of producing excuses of humans as children.

Because I take this stance, I don’t make myself popular in some parts of cyberspace. I get accused of being “pro-Indian” and “anti-Chinese” and if there’s nothing to have a go at me for, they go at me for marrying Vietnamese. Apparently, I am moving Singapore manhood downwards. Not sure how they figured that one out – at least the Vietnamese take care of their elderly and vulnerable whilst we screw over our old folks so that we can give whatever we have to people from “advanced” countries earning double what we do.

Having said what I just said, I recently experienced something that proves what I’ve said to be wrong. I discovered Singaporeans who are willing to go out of their way to help their own. I am speaking as someone who is beneficiary of such kindness.

It started with the return of gout. Had an attack in my left knee, which started on a Saturday night and got worse on a Sunday. By early morning, the pain was so bad that I have problems putting on my trousers. It was clear that I needed medical attention and so I thought I would make my way to the polyclinic.

The first person who showed me kindness was the Grab (Southeast Asia’s answer to Uber). The man went out of his way to create space in the car so that I could get in and out with minimal pain. When he reached the polyclinic, he tried to get me as close as possible to the door so I would minimize the need to move the leg that was in pain.

 

 The pain was bad and I had to just deal with it. To say that sitting in a wheelchair was uncomfortable was an understatement.

 

The second act of kindness came when I took another Grab ride back my aunt’s home, where I could rest. This Grab driver saw that I was having trouble walking and when I got to my aunt’s, he parked his car and helped me hobble up the unit (my aunty lives on the 22^nd floor). This was something he didn’t need to do but he took it upon himself to help me past the moment when I had ceased to be his customer.

 

So, it’s a relief for me to experience kindness from “my people” when I needed it. It made me feel a bit more optimistic about being Singaporean and Chinese. I mean, these guys were earning less than $20 from me and yet they still went out of their way to help me after their contractual obligation to me ran out. When you experience this type of thing, you get the sense that not all of us are “a***holes” and you start to think that if you have enough guys like this, it is possible to make a more decent society.

Consigned to Fire of Wall

 

I have, as any of my friends who follow me on social media can testify to, a new hobby. I’ve discovered TikTok videos and I’ve been trying my hand at making little videos out of my phone camera pictures. It’s fun in that you can play around with sound effects and as they say, a picture often speaks a thousand words.

Most of my videos are short, silly and meant to be ego boosting. Main topics have centered around food and drink (You got to do something with all the food photos that have become part and parcel of any meal), family and since the Legal-Half entered her contest, I’ve put up lots of shots of her moments of glory.

One area that middle-aged obese men shouldn’t put up are exercise videos. However, I started putting up my sprinting clips along with pictures of my spiking heart-rate. I usually use “action-movie” sound tracks to give it a bit of a “ra-ra” feel. However, last night’s video was different. Decided to use one of my favourite tracks from classical music – the Confutatis section from Mozart’s Requiem. Always loved this piece since I saw Amadeus as a kid and you could sense that the guy was trying to sum up his life in that final piece of music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEejafVSMaU

 

 Given that I live in Asia, one might also say that I’ve been tempting fate by publishing my photo with a piece meant for the dead. However, I guess if one were to look at things from a philosophical point of view, one could argue that life and death are part of the same coin and while you can’t control how you were born, you do have a certain amount of control over how you leave. Then there’s the key difference in that when you’re not likely to remember being born but you’re likely to be able to sum up your life before you die. Which in a way, is what the confutatis section is about, where the composer (Mozart) sees the damned being consigned to burn in hell and begs for salvation:

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/confutatis-maledictis-requiem-mass-d-minor-confutatis-maledictis-requiem-mass-d-minor.html

 

 Which then begs the question as to how a requiem for the dead has relevance to the activity of sprinting. My argument in the TikTok video that I posted is that its about feeling alive. I’m a middle-aged obese man just getting buy. Sure, I’m functioning well enough to type this out but if you think about well enough, how much of modern living is really about being alive. How many of us genuinely have a passion for what we do? We survive but are we really alive? I mean for me, the sensation of having my heart accelerate in those 20 seconds of actual sprinting is probably livelier than my entire day:

https://www.tiktok.com/@tang.li0/video/7275384786665950471?lang=en

Then there’s the nature of the run itself. Most of us who went through national service tend to run to keep the weight down. After all the 2.4km run is the one stable of the Individual Physical Proficiency Test (IPPT) that all of us have to go through. However, I got fat along the way and was advised to avoid running or I would bust my knees. So, I walk often and I like to walk far in nature – anything to get me away from a desk and being a bureaucrat.

However, I started sprinting because I needed to get someone out of my system and found that I enjoyed those 20-seconds spurts of full-blown activity. Its lead me to question the nature life, where everyone talks about how life is marathon and you’ve got to have the endurance. However, after staying in the same place for nearly a decade, I wonder if life necessarily needs to be a marathon. Could it be a series of sprints instead? My best moments in terms of my work were “sprints” – short projects like visit of Crown Prince Sultan (MBS’s uncle) to Singapore in 2006, the IIT Alumni event in 2012 and the IIM event in 2013.

All of us are effectively running from things like bills. Particularly the prospect of medical bills. If you live like you’re in a marathon, you think ahead and move at a consistent pace. If you sprint you need to look for different things. How do you pace yourself as you recover for that next bout of power. Its about knowing when the moment arrives and then giving it your all.

I go back to myself. I’m a middle-aged obese man cruising along. However, in those short bouts of giving it my all, I suddenly understand that I can be alive. The question is ultimately, do I have the courage to live the way I should live.

They’re Taking Care of Us Too

 I’ve just become the husband of a beauty queen. On Thursday, 31 August, 2023, my wife was crowned “World Madam 2023, Singapore Division.” It was a contest that she had entered a few months ago and she’s hopping that the contest will bring her to greater things.

I bring up the topic of my wife because Vietnamese girls, like girls from elsewhere don’t have the best of reputations and whenever you mention that you’re with a girl from Vietnam or China, people assume the worst. Think of the Covid Scandal when everyone got keen on banning people from Vietnam when there was an outbreak in the karaoke lounges. This was despite the fact that Vietnam had one of the better records at managing covid. By contrast, nobody  called for the banning of white Americans, despite the fact that the USA had by far and away the worst outbreaks of Covid and White Americans were the single worst demographic anywhere in the world when it came to spreading false information about the disease.

We have, as I’ve often argued, a terrible habit of underestimating people from less developed parts of the world and overestimating our and the people from developed countries. People from less developed parts of the world have one crucial advantage – they’re hungry to get things done and they’re willing to support each other out. They have the ability to build systems of support which we have clearly lost.

This was most visible in the online voting of the contest. The contest had an online poll where people could pay to vote for their favourite contestants. The winner of the poll was my wife with some 19,000 votes. The girl who came in second had 17,000 and also came from Vietnam. The next closest had 8,000 over.

How was it such that the Vietnamese girls could gather the votes, whereas the Singaporeans could not? The answer is that the Vietnamese had built communities who would support them when asked. I lived through a wife who was calling everyone she knew to pay to vote. They got the results. By contrast, the girl who came in third ended up feeling frustrated with people whom she done favours for promising to spend a dollar or two to get her the votes.

So, how do they build communities? Well, I guess you call it a system of give and take. When someone is down, there are always people to help them up and when a person is up, the community expects them to give back in someway or another. It’s a very basic principle of give and take. This is clearly not the case of the “Kiasu-Kiasi” land that we call Singapore. Helping each other seems to be anathema.

This should be an area of concern in that Singapore is an aging society. The baby-boomers are now in their 70s and can expect to live at least another decade or so. While a good portion of the boomers have the means to enjoy retirement, we still have too many cases in Singapore of true-blue Singaporeans demonstrating good old fashioned Asian-Values of pushing your aged parents to work in minimal wage jobs at McDonald’s while the kids screw their folks out of a flat.

So, who cares for this growing number of old folks? Well, its clearly not their native-born children. Rather, its maids from the Philippines and Indonesia and you can see volunteers from places like Vietnam:

 

 To my wife, looking after my 84-year-old mother-in-law is an honour. The old lady comes here every so often and we see to it that she’s well fed and gets to go around the island in a taxi. So, given that she sees to it that her own mother is looked after, she also extends it to other old folks. Go with her to any hawker centre and she’ll happily try and give to the old folk doing menial work.

Like it or not, this Vietnamese girl is helping our community whenever she does something for our old folks. She and girls like her from elsewhere are constantly building their network among themselves and with us too by looking after our elderly and vulnerable.

We should stop dismissing people from Third World countries as being useless as we sit in our ivory towers. They’re surviving conditions most of us wouldn’t wish upon our enemies. Say what you like about the “tough” school system here. That’s nothing compared to the school of hard-knocks they go through.