Singapore
I definitely want to write ~some~ post about Singapore sometime. But who is it for? Singaporeans? Americans? Everyone else? Maybe I could write to a friend, like say Malcolm, who is Canadian
sg100
a bunch of thoughts collided for me earlier
one of the reasons I’m optimistic about singapore’s long term future is that we are a small enough country that a few dozen highly motivated, strategic players can influence the culture for the better
the reason this is possible is because we are small
and the reason we are able to stay small and sovereign is that we have mandatory conscription
singapore’s NSFs provide the support to preserve its city-state integrity, which will in the long run allow it to be more nimble and strategic than bigger nation-states
hormat, NSFs.
thank you all for your service
hdb
Sometimes we’ve joked that it was a “marriage of convenience” (which is a phrase with a specific meaning in legal terms in Singapore – it’s when people enter a sham marriage with a foreigner with the intent of helping them gain citizenship. The whole thing is fascinating to investigate, but that’s not what I want to get into here.) We were dating since we were teenagers and we’ll be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary in December. Anyway. So if you’re buying public housing in Singapore – we call them HDB flats (HDB meaning ‘Housing & Development Board’, the local authority on the matter) – most people pick from one of two main options. Either you apply for a BTO (“Build to order”) flat, where you wait a few years… nobody cares about any of this.
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the view from singapore
Pictures to represent/explain singapore: people tend to think of MBS, gardens by the bay, changi jewel
no playing in playground
the view from the crossroads
some quick sketch details: i was born in singapore in 1990. i’m ethnically tamil. Singapore has been along a global shipping route for hundreds of years. One of my talking points is that global shipping and trade networks were always a sort of porto-internet. think about how ideas, religions, etc spread
singapore is sometimes described as sterile. there is some truth to this. it’s not a fun truth. the thing that often annoys/upsets me about
in between east and west
there are a few different angles
when i first started writing i used to write a lot of local content. my first 300 or so twitter followers were all basically local friends, so i would tweet in singlish (the local slang – I have a whole separate essay about how it’s been commodified). wrote about local politics
recently singapore death penalty for drugs
it makes me sad
but i don’t want this essay to be about the death penalty
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SG: write about how the PAP stifles singapore – this was because it felt like foreign people don’t get a good sense of what Singapore is really like…?
There are competing perspectives on what Singapore is like. On one hand, people describe us as sterile, boring, too-safe, too-clean, no personality. You can see how, even if there’s a grain of truth in here somewhere, it’s kind of rude. Like, I’m sorry my people aren’t sufficiently exciting and entertaining for you.
On the other hand, we get described as some sort of really efficient, wonderous place that the world can and should learn from.