Who Married Down?

 

Around 12-years ago, I made the decision to get married to a Vietnamese girl that I was seeing on an off-and-on basis. It was a decision that went against what “conventional’ Singapore expected of someone like me but at the same time, its proven to be one of the most educational experiences of my life.

Let’s start with the “controversy.” I am a Singapore Chinese Graduate working in a professional service. I belong to the segment of Singapore society that is expected to stick to its own kind (same ethnic, educational and professional background). The only sort of exception to this would be to marry an “Ang Moh” (white) girl. As far as “respectable” Singapore society is concerned, only “blue collar losers” marry girls from poorer parts of Asia and get screwed for it. I’ve get reminded of this fact when some of the “cultured” people online have decided to comment on my pieces.

I won’t pretend that my marriage with Huong has been smooth sailing. We are from different worlds and we’ve had our fights. However, whatever quarrels we may have had, we’ve always found a way back to each other and we’ve been doing so for the last 12-years. Give me a chance to go back to that moment when I decided to get married to her and the answer will always be the same.

One of the things about her that keeps me going back to her is the fact that she’s smart. Whatever she may lack in formal education, she more than makes up for it in street-smarts. She won’t be able to tell you about Shakespeare or Bach but she’s also not going to fall for a horseracing scam because some worm looked pretty and flattered her (if anything, she’d feed the worm to the fish). I’ve known far better educated women (professional qualifications from nothing less than NUS) and years of work experience as a working professional who have fallen for the most obvious scams, which is something she would NEVER fall for.

I also find her determination for get ahead very sexy. Her most recent venture was to take part in a Beauty Contest. Put her heart and soul into it and ended up wining the Singapore version of this contest. I was really happy for her win and ironically in her moment of glory, I became part of the support staff. One of the jokes being that after years of writing press releases and putting people in the media, I ended up as the husband of a woman who had a press release written about her and got my media appearance as her husband:

 

While I was really happy (to the point of thanking the Almighty in public) with her Singapore win, I thought her moment would end there. If you study the history of beauty contest, you’ll note that Asian girls don’t strike it on the global stage. World Beauty contest tend to be won by South Americans and World Modelling contest won by Eastern Europeans. However, since she was supposed to go, Kiddo and I prayed for her and did our part to support her ambitions. Well, guess what? I woke up to the following video:

 

 She actually pulled it off and won her contest on the global stage. OK, I am biased for her and I am sure that there will be plenty of voices about how this was not a mainstream beauty contest and its something minute on the scale of things.

However, let’s put things into perspective. This is a girl from a Vietnamese “Home Town,” which translates into a rural village in the middle of nowhere. She’s not the most educated person and yet, at the age of 42, this girl from a Vietnamese village has made her mark on a global platform.

Think about it for the moment. How many of us with our superior education and world-wide connectivity in Singapore have ever dreamt of doing anything on the global stage? I actually blame Lee Kuan Yew, our political rock-star for this. I remember watching videos of him talking about how Singapore simply didn’t have the economies of scale to do things big and somehow everyone believed him. Joseph Schooling and the late Sim Wong Hoo aside, how many Singaporeans do anything outside Singapore? Sure, we have a few how become senior corporate leaders in the Asia-Pacific region of a multinational. However, doing things on a global scale is a different matter. Among my family contacts, I can only think of Tham Khai Meng, former Global Creative Head at Ogilvy & Mather.

For me personally, I don’t think as “big” as she does. Sure, I think of things outside Singapore, like India or the Middle East or even Africa. I like the fact people from the US and Europe read my blog. However, I’ve not dared to “compete” on a global stage, which she has. People look at me and her and think that I might have “married down,” because she’s less educated and from Vietnam. However, if you look at what she’s dared to achieve and what I’ve dared, you got to question – who really married down?