I’ve somehow found myself in an interesting position of getting to be the only Singaporean in a room full of foreigners and strangers talking about Singapore. I’ve been in this position several times, and I mostly feel like most people miss most of the point most of the time.
In my experience, most Singaporeans are too busy living their lives or arguing with each other to spend a lot of time on the often-fruitless, often-futile task of trying to make sure that we’re not misunderstood by outsiders.
So… what could my contribution be? How do I put together a picture of my country, my complicated, complex, lovable, annoying, beautiful, frustrating country?
No single person can do it justice, but I’d like to try.
1. Twitter thread about Singapore
2. “We know that even if we let the tape roll, there is no way an editor would approve this footage. There is too much glee here, giddiness almost, which would be wholly inappropriate for the late night bulletin.” – Journalism and Jiujitsu, by Joanne Leow
3. “Lee Kuan Yew was stung by this sharp critique of the education policy. He saw it as an attack on hard work and the heavy emphasis on examinations. The next day, he demanded her head. He wanted her sacked.” – this is a quote from OB Markers, the memoir of former Straits Times editor Cheong Yip Seng. It led me to look up Mary’s column, which I’ve reproduced here. It went viral, and Mary Lee herself penned some thoughts reflecting on it all. “…it recalled the blow an all-powerful politician and his knuckle-duster bureaucrats struck on my life.”
4. Lots of people ask me for book recommendations to “make sense of Singapore”. Currently, the top of my list is The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, by Sonny Liew.
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singapore, mythologized: I’ve said this a few times now but it’s endlessly strange to me how much people all over the world talk about Singapore without talking to Singaporeans. As a Singaporean myself I have complicated, conflicting feelings about my country. I want to be patriotic, I want to love and celebrate it, I want to see my country do well. But I also have criticisms. I started out as a blogger writing criticisms. But I never wanted to be defeatist. I do think Singapore has tremendous potential still.
I’ve seen it described as “Asian Wakanda”, which again is weird because Wakanda is fictional, but Singapore actually exists
Hero worship of Lee Kuan Yew, mostly reminds me of the worship of technologists like Steve Jobs. People talk about Singapore like it’s a company or a corporation and I don’t think this is an accident. it’s practically be design. the political consciousness of the people was deliberately repressed. it remains to be seen if this was a trade-off worth making. some argue that it’s obviously yes, some argue that it’s obviously no, i think it’s still being negotiated in real time.
what else is there to say about singapore. i used to write so much about it locally. i could see the writing on the wall way back in ~2011 that the PAP having a supermajority has some costs and consequences…
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2024jul13: a thing that’s challenging for me when talking about Singapore is
1. I’m optimistic about its future and I want to see it flourish
2. there’s a bunch of simplistic marketing/PR that people have bought into
3. at some level criticising that PR feels like looking a gift horse in the mouth
4. but ultimately things have to based on truth, right?
i’ve been internally conflicted really hard about something that i’ve been trying to write about all this but i keep getting stuck, maybe i’ll just ramble a bit in a thread here. so like. i’m singaporean. born and raised. i love my country and i want it to do well. part of singapore’s success is, to some degree, reliant on external perceptions of singapore. singapore has had a bunch of great PR done for it over the years, but not all of it is entirely accurate or honest. i’m conflicted about the degree to which i should point out the inaccuracies, and the degree to which i should talk about criticisms of singapore. because this place isn’t the magical asian wakanda some people seem to think it is. it also isn’t the authoritarian hellhole some people think it is either.
^ we should just open with this. can i get people to consider that singapore isn’t straightforwardly one thing or another? no, it wasn’t a fishing village 50 years ago, people tend to misquote LKY on that– he was referring to a specific part of Singapore, not all of it. it makes for a cooler narrative but there’s a cost to that. it also makes singapore more monolithic and fragile
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(2020apr29) I have been thinking a lot lately about the long-term future (2100s) and well-being of my country, Singapore. The most important factor is people: the quality of people, and how they are organized, how they relate to each other
Broadly I think we need… 1. some of the best people in the world to come here and want to make it their home for the long haul 2. to nourish and train our own best citizens 3. to stop/reduce losing good people 4. To improve the network of overseas Singaporeans
This is a very large challenge/project, effectively an infinite game. It is, however, a significantly smaller infinite game than trying to fix behemoths like America or China or India. Singapore is small. A dozen people can make a tremendous, outsized difference that reverberates
There are a million things that need doing. But the most critical thing in my view, from my limited perspective, is narrative alignment. A grand project begins with a vision before it becomes a reality. We have a bit of a vision deficit at the moment. I think we can fix that.
Singapore has always been blessed with fantastic positioning – literally. We are an island-city state along one of the busiest shipping routes in the world. We have been for hundreds of years. This has profound implications that few Singaporeans think about day to day
Singapore is a Southeast Asian country – and Southeast Asia, having experienced centuries of trade and intermingling before the Internet, is a vision of the future. People of many different ethnicities and religions live here in relative harmony
There are lots of things great about 🇸🇬, but it’s not quite “Golden Age” great. Why not? The short answer is trauma. Singapore is still recovering from the aftermath and aftershocks of WW2. If it is “sterile”, it’s because the national trauma makes it so
But we’re making progress. We have made a lot of progress in my lifetime alone. I have witnessed Singaporean art and culture burst through the cracks in the concrete, in fits & starts. It’s up to my generation to heal. And I sincerely believe we can do it
To state it explicitly: I believe we can bring forth a Golden Age in SG in my lifetime. We have the economic prerequisites. What we need to fix are relatively minor-ish deficits of courage, imagination, playfulness, social capital. It’s a small country. 100 people can change it
I used to blog extensively about SG politics and society in the early 2010s. I took a long break from that to focus on myself, to address my own weaknesses and failings. To get perspective. I think I have enough now that it’s time I start writing about it again
I will be deliberate in avoiding rewriting other people’s commentary. I have a very specific goal in mind – it will need time, work and exposure to become precise in conveyance. I will be challenging everybody to raise their standards, look to the horizon and do better. We can
This is just a high-level overview. The devil is always in the details. We have to have some real and uncomfortable conversations about “sensitive” matters. We will have to adapt and evolve our culture (and really, our very national identity) in order to flourish in the future.
It’s audacious, even naive. But you could say the same about Lee Kuan Yew and friends in 1965. It will serve us well to consider what we’ve inherited from them: not just a high GDP per capita… but courage, conviction, clarity of thought and decisiveness of action
For me, my first and immediate order of business is to write a series of blogposts- fleshing out this thread itself. Next I will be writing about the obstacles to 1-2-3-4 at the start of the thread and how we are to surmount them. I will incorporate feedback & criticisms