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.