What Aren’t We Getting?

 

I had a row with someone that I have grown to care very deeply for on Friday night. She took offense at the fact that I had glanced away from her and noticed someone else, whom she deemed not as good looking and thus her inferior. She felt insulted and disrespected and, in her efforts, to rub salt into the wound, she made the point that I had disrespected her on a “bus,” when she could have been with guys who drove Ferrari’s and Lamborghinis. She then made the point that I had been married to a Vietnamese girl, which at that point, I made the point that she had disrespected me previously with people I deemed inferior (graduates who work in offices) and she stormed off.

We haven’t spoken since and without her presence, everything around me feels so much heavier. However, if I look back at that conversation, the one thing that really seems to make me feel that things were off was when she talked about my ex. The thinking was simple – married to an inferior person therefore must be inferior.

I’m not going to pretend that my 13-years with Huong were easy. A lot of our moments were challenging and it’s not that we didn’t try. I’m not going to defend those 13-years we had. What I do take issue with is the innate sense of superiority that many graduate Singaporeans, specifically the local Chinese have when it comes people from third world countries. In a way, its especially prevalent amongst women who feel that the girls from these places are “luring” men and “conning” them.

To be fair this isn’t a complex restricted to Singapore’s Chinese majority. Ethnic majorities around the world tend to struggle when ethnic minorities climb up. I guess it’s a natural thing for people for the “top dog” in any society to feel uncomfortable when the underdogs start barking at their heels. Yet, for all the discomfort that this may cause, the stupidest thing that anyone can do is to dismiss people as being inferior based on their place of birth, education, ethnicity, religion and so on.

Yes, it’s a fact that a lot of girls from China and Vietnam do end up in the vice-trade. A lot of girls from the Philippines and Indonesia work as maids. However, just because someone works as a prostitute or a maid, it doesn’t mean that they are inferior to you, either in a “intelligent/ capable” sense or even in the “moral” sense of the word.

What exactly makes us “superior?” If I look at myself and Huong, I was only “superior” because I was born in Singapore. I had the good fortune to be born into a family that had the fortune to send me school in England. I have a degree and I speak at English. I have been in “professional services” all my working life and even my lowest, I didn’t really have do anything menial. Sure, I worked as a waiter, which was physical hard at times but not really a pain. If you look who I’ve worked for, most normal people would be surprised, I’m far from being a millionaire.

Yet, for all my advantages, I’ve come nowhere close to Huong, a girl from a Vietnamese home town (read – Village Girl), with no educational qualifications to her name, barely speaks anything other than Vietnamese who moved herself to Singapore and now to the USA. She didn’t just bring herself up. She brought two nieces and extension her family up along with her. This village girl ended up at the UN Headquarters in New York, which in Singapore is usually reserved for our Ambassador to the UN.

 

 From rural Vietnam to…..

So, when I look at things in this perspective, I don’t think I can call myself the “superior” one and if anything, she probably ended up “down” when she ended up with me.

What made her “successful,” despite lacking education, or the “social breeding” that we in the “professional class” deem so necessary to work as a street sweeper these days. The simple answer is this, this girl had the willingness to be uncomfortable and to change her path when things weren’t working. Things were not working in Vietnam, she moved to Singapore. Things were getting tough in Singapore, so she moved to the USA.

She also knows how to read people and to work within her community. Relationships are important to her because, well at the end of the day relationships are the key to survival. Will always remember how she grilled a female colleague of mine (Singaporean Graduate Chinese with professional qualifications) whom I used to hang out with. The next day this colleague gave me an earful about how she had done her research and believed Vietnamese girls were only after money. Funnily enough, Huong took one look at her and said the same thing. Her conclusion was “dirty girl – thinks you have a lot of money; I’m not letting her get one cent from us.” (my former colleague had commented on the size of her ring and said something about how I must have bought it for her)

Too many of us in professional middle class get caught up with the fact that we are professional and middle class. It’s as if our qualifications make us special. We like to brag about how stressed out we are at the office but stay in said job because it’s the only way we know of how to make a living. We think that our possessions define us and so we keep at our sad little lives because we’re too scared to do anything that endangers our ownership of possessions and therefore status.

My marriage to her wasn’t the easiest but it was the most educational. Being around her taught me more about reality than over 20-years of school and university. Thanks to her, I learnt how life works. It’s because of her that I am able to exist outside pigeon hole of the Professional Middle-Class world. I took manual labour because I was not afraid of looking low and I needed to have an income. These things I got when I started the marriage and having the mindset and willingness to do certain things my contemporaries won’t do is lesson more valuable than money and I will continue to argue that I will always go back and make the same decision to get together with her.