Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own.
COMMENT
When Charlotte Ashton and her husband moved to Singapore, a friend posted a link on her Facebook wall to a survey revealing Singaporeans to be one of the least positive people in the world. “Good luck in misery city!” he said.
Ashton’s experience in Singapore has now gone on to be a viral op-ed on the BBC’s website entitled “Does Singapore deserve its ‘miserable’ tag?“. Singaporeans are passing it from one social media profile to another, arguing over how awful it really is to live in Singapore. Some have leapt on the piece as an opportunity to once again rehash complaints about the city, while others insist that Ashton has made it all up.
I don’t doubt Ashton’s account of crouching on the floor of an MRT train with no one to help her. Nor do I have any interest in participating in any discussion about whether her pregnancy was showing at the time (and even less interest in commenting on how “chio” she might be), thus justifying the lack of concern. It was bad that no one helped a woman who was visibly ill, or at least offered her a seat. Someone should have.
Yet the article remains unfortunately superficial throughout. Ashton is of course entitled to share her experience, but there is much more to be looked at in an examination of Singapore as “misery city”. As someone who has spent the majority of her life here – and admittedly spent quite a lot of that time complaining or criticising this place – reading it left me with a sinking sense that the complexity, nuance and depth of this country had been neglected in favour of a quick-and-easy read.
Seyward Darby recently wrote an excellent article on why the media needs to stop referring to things in terms of ranks. She focused mainly on the reporting of LGBT issues and/or women’s rights issues – who hasn’t seen the “Uganda is the worst place to be gay” or “Afghanistan is the worst place to be a woman” articles? – but her points can also be applied to other forms of ranking.
“First, saying a country is the worst for a particular group of people assumes that pretty much everyone in that group has the same lived experiences,” she writes. “Problem being, people’s circumstances, as we know, vary widely based on factors like income, education, ethnicity, and whether they live in rural or urban areas. … In short, it is dehumanizing and ultimately unproductive when the media conflate people’s experiences under national banners of “good” or “bad.””
It highlights my problem with the media scrambling to report on Singapore in terms of our ranking in the world. We’re portrayed as the “least positive”, the “most expensive”, the “most emotionless”, on and on and on as one survey or another is trotted out to plague journalists’ email inbox with media releases.
(Note: I myself have fallen victim to such reporting, doing fast-writes of such press releases for international publications eager for bite-sized nuggets of information on a country their readers probably know little about.)
But such framing tells us little about what it’s actually like to live in Singapore, in the same way that Ashton’s anecdotal experience sheds little light on this city. What’s the use of wasting our energies arguing if we’re the most miserable or not, when there are real problems to be addressed?
I don’t think Ashton’s wrong; there is a compassion deficit in Singapore. Yet this is not something that can be measured merely in the number of times someone gives up their seat on the MRT, awful though some people on public transport might be.
The compassion deficit should also be discussed in relation to more structural or institutionalised issues.
For example, Singapore’s abhorrence of anything that might sound remotely like “welfare” needs to be looked at. Underneath it lies assumptions about poverty, class and even race that demonstrate a worrying lack of empathy, compassion or even sympathy for others in situations different from one’s own.
Our stubborn mantra of “meritocracy” has not helped, either. It is why we would blame homeless families – incidentally, many of them probably camp near the “free public BBQ pits of Singapore’s beautifully-kept parks” Ashton so loves – for being homeless, rather than see poverty as an issue that needs to be addressed at a structural level.
Like any other country or city, Singapore cannot be simply described in labels that gloss over the diversity of experiences present on this small island. These labels, and the anecdotal accounts that feed into them, rarely offer any real insight into the complexity of our lives, nor do they help us better understand the issues that we face here.
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