Toodles, Singapore

[sirius_luva]

Warning: strong language in gif captions.

[this entire conversation took place in Tamil] I was helping my grandmother make muruku last week and, when talking about something funny I'd done as a child, she said, "You had good brains and you knew how to use them when you were a kid." I teasingly responded, "When I was a kid? So I don't have good

Comments

[vnfan]

This is one of those areas where I see such a distinct East/West difference. In the West, we're still deeply entrenched in the idea of spending your uni years studying what interests you. We often do it at the expense of studying for something we can actually make economic gains from. Now, if we just realised that and enjoyed the hell out of our uni degrees before heading off to 'real life' then that would be fine. But somehow, we've gone from looking at enjoyable uni degrees as nice additions to our mental arsenal to looking at them as what we expect from grown up life. Yes, many people find ways to make their 'useless' uni degrees somewhat applicable. I guess that's why we're still doing it, but overall, we're so enamoured with this idea that our humanities studies will make us highly employable that we're in utter shock when we graduate and have no 'real' marketplace skills. (Of course we do, actually, but we have to constantly translate those skills into marketable language for potential employers.) Worse is to realise that we might have to accept some sort of mundane job to support ourselves, when we expected to be a noted, award winning...something.

Asians seem, by and large, to view all education from about primary 4 onwards as ONLY for utilitarian purposes. Out of my homeroom class of 32 students, only 7 of them were allowed to purchase fiction books via our Scholastic flyers. The rest were told to not even bring them home as reading fiction spoiled their minds and made them useless for university studies. Even worse, here in Macau a lot of kids are not even planning on going to university. The croupiers union at the casinos has such a strong presence that the wage is very high and the casinos are not allowed to hire non-residents for the positions. They plan on getting into the casino jobs to make a decent living wage there. I've heard them say that if the casino industry collapses, then they'll go back to uni later. Which, of course, they won't because then they'll have kids and elderly parents, etc.

I think that you made the best possible move for yourself. I think that NUS and permanent life in Singapore would have been too stifling for you. Perhaps there will be a sea change in culture there that would let you be there and be yourself, but I'm glad you're living somewhere that lets you be you.

[sirius_luva]

I guess both extremes have their downfalls, and I think dreaming big and being forced to accept a mundane reality is in a way worse than never expecting anything more than that mundane reality (as Singaporeans so often do). :(

You're right about education being for utilitarian purposes in Asia; I'm not sure about Macau, but in Singapore, the education system itself is less about learning for knowledge's sake and more about rote learning of answers in order to get good marks on exams in order to get into the top schools in order to get into a good solid respectable course in a good uni in the house that Jack built, you see how it goes. That's been my personal experience (and that of my friends), it's what I've heard family members and family friends (most of my family and their friends are teachers) bemoan, and it's actually a fairly common criticism, not that much has been done to change it.

D: Not allowed to purchase fiction books? That is awful. Hmm, that might also be a cultural thing, because many Indian (both Singaporean Indian and India-Indian) parents who want their child to get a good education are very in favour of books and the child reading a lot at a young age, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, because they know it improves language skills and imparts general knowledge. They might slack off when the child is older, letting him/her read or not as he/she wishes, but we get given a lot of books when we're young and if we continue reading when we get older, it's seen as a good habit as long as it doesn't detract from actual schoolwork and being productive. My grandmother - who admittedly fought for her right to receive an education, and who was shunned in her birth village and couldn't get a husband there because she was educated and had a teaching job, so she was actually revolutionary for her own time - still extols the virtues of reading a lot and keeping the mind active, whereas some of my best friends' parents think reading too much is a waste of time.

That is an awful state of affairs in Macau, though. :/

Thank you. Yeah, I was already feeling stifled there and while it was getting better as I grew to appreciate some things about Singapore and met other people in the geek subculture (and it's definitely a subculture, not as mainstream as it is here), I knew it wouldn't be enough and that I wouldn't truly enjoy NUS. Perth is far from perfect, but it's easier to be myself here (although I really miss Singaporean food). :)