Learning about governance from Balinese traffic (repost)

I spent my second last study break in university relating governance to my short trip at Bali and would like to share with all of you what I’ve written: https://offbeatperspectives.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/learning-about-governance-from-balinese-traffic/

Would love for feedback, different points of view; or to just talk about things mentioned in the post. Would be back here writing about my revelations this year soon.

To Singapore with love:

Only paper flowers are afraid of the rain. We are not afraid of the noble rain of criticism because with it will flourish the magnificent garden of music. — Konstantin Dankevich 

Guangzhou, China

Couple of days before my travel, I found new music for my playlist – Princess Chelsea. I was listening to one of hers titled Overseas (check out a live version of this song here!). Perhaps some parts of the song resonate with what we generally deem as vacation, like:

We skimp we save we go overseas
We pimp we slave so we get what we need
When we get there we try very hard to believe
That it’s better

Guangzhou, China, is my first travel outside Southeast Asia. It’s a place very similar to home. You get the crowds in metro stations. Nearing the plane touchdown, you see miniatures of many, many high-rise buildings. Multiple expressways that crisscross above one another. City lights in the evening. Traffic police. Malls. It doesn’t lack toilets anywhere as well.

Middle class woes

“The middle class’ missing slice of the pie” [Source]

During my internship last summer, a lady called in to ask about subsidies. She raised a point about middle-income families not being able afford tuition programs and not being able to qualify for subsidy schemes as well. This, later I realized she was referring to the sandwiched class – “… this group of Singaporeans do not qualify for the support schemes meant for low-income households. Yet, they often experience middle-class anxiety: Worried about present needs and what the future holds for the next generation [Source]”.

The poor are cushioned by the great deal of assistance made available to them by the government and non-profit organizations. No doubt the rich would have plenty of capital to invest in themselves. What about the middle-class?

The end of summer break; afterthoughts from 30 pages of Hard Choices

Summer break has ended and the new term started about a week ago. Sociology is growing on me since I entered university. It is nice to have finally found something you’re interested to learn about. My good friend is a keen “advocate” of the sociology-related statements she make – you can read about the various posts she’d written here in our shared blog; she had also introduced me to documentaries on unorthodox topics we don’t usually discuss openly among our friends or even academics. She’s always full of zest to go out there and seek out for varied opinions; to hear from different people, from the minorities. There’re alot of things I gathered in my own thoughts from reading what she’d written and seeing the things she do, why and how she does it. I supposed the environment does play an extremely important role in influencing our preferences than our own instincts or any innate senses we have. I hope I’ll still feel as keen to never stop learning about new things related to this area of study after I finished school. And perhaps find new areas of interest to look forward to in everyday life.

Tonight, I started reading a book I was told to buy for a module I’m currently taking. It’s titled “Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus“. It wasn’t one of the prescribed readings for any nearing lecture sessions. I had wanted to know: what are academics going to say about the policies this time?

Vietnam

The rooster’s crow sounded in my ears the first morning I woke in Vietnam. 6:28/29AM. It reverberated on like an alarm with an erred snooze button. As if it came from the room opposite of ours; the sound coming from a smart device rather than a real rooster I didn’t get to spot from my room’s window view. In the subsequent mornings when I assumed I could rise to these sounds that are finely-tuned so naturally at 6:30 dawn time,

Here’s to the end of freshman year and more travels!

I started summer break about a week ago. This term’s finals drained me for real. I’m beginning to get really sick of studying… of rote learning. Memorizing for exams or for any other purposes usually delights me more than the assessments that require you to wreck your brains out doing critical thinking. But not now. Getting a bad grade for a critical thinking course doesn’t bother me anymore, that I can’t catch up with the rest and I’m on my own pace of… figuring something out!

This semester passed really quickly. I’m over being a freshman! I didn’t get to really know more people than I’d have expected myself to take the initiative to do so. I thought this awkward front of mine would get me to converse more comfortably with other people because that’d mean I’m being real and not hiding anything behind a cool and calm facade. I’m always being told off by my parents for not acting like peers of my age or even a couple of years younger than I am. Whenever I try to explain to them about this denial mode I’m in, the topic gets slapped down like a buzzing fly. Then I’d try to comfort myself that there’re the people whom I’ve seen on the television and in their personal life being all quirky and weird (probably because it’s expected of them)… and yet, it’s still possible for them to win in life with that sort of childish-like attitude. It’s OK to get overwhelmed and enthusiastic about things, like… karaoke, right?

I got a 12-weeks internship at MSF, which is great news for me (!) but not an extremely impressive piece to my family who sees it as one of the vacation jobs I took up. It’s some place I’d like to explore very much before… either feeling all determined about what I’d want to do after school OR being thrown back into the maze to look for an alternative that interests me. I really hope this works out! The thing is, I cringe alittle interacting with people, asking appropriate questions to get to know them better, forging relationships and all that. I did consider that maybe working with people on a job  like this (social worker, counselor) would be the least suitable. Perhaps if I want to help people, I was told that I could fix things and work something out that requires as minimal contact with human beings as possible. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll see interaction on the job differently. My previous working experience did overcome my fear of phone calls and hearing my own voice in a recording and perhaps over a mic (hoping that’s the case)?

3 days ago this week, I went to Batam island in Indonesia, with my Dad and Granny. Some interesting sights I feel obliged to share about this trip: people in coffee shops clapped for attention (sometimes it gets alittle confusing when there’re performers on stage), smoking in malls and hotel lobbies, people love their food fried (yes?) which is delightful to my palate ^^ and I’ve talked about this particular incident so many times to people around me but they didn’t think it was true at all – I saw a rat ran across on top of a ceiling pipe in a mall. It had steady scurries, that appears very cartoony to me because you don’t see that in real-life. Where could it be scurrying to? One of those square tunnels connected to the fans, like the ones in Toy Story?

Dad brought us to meet some of his friends there and they guided us around the vicinity. From that, I made a new friend along the way – a friend whom I didn’t talked to her much because I tried to think that it was due to a language barrier we had. I would not want to sound creepy to talk about her in a post like this but since it’s in a good way and there’s no identity revealed, I suppose I could talk about it. She drove us around and at that point, Dad was in a disbelief because he’d never been drove around by a 19-year-old, perhaps 20 now (which is no astonishment to people these days). He’d been astonished because I don’t have a driving license and I’d never talked to him about plans of getting one. Yes sure, I’d be getting a driving license anyway at some point of my life even though I have no intention to do so because it’s unusual to not know how to drive? I was like the child in this crowd. I couldn’t assimilate in their conversations. I’d been looking around the place to distract myself by observing my surroundings. There’d be a lot to talk about to say that she’s the kind of child every parent would be proud of. For me, even as someone who envies her (which I don’t mean trying to be like her), I think she is really nice, polite, accepting and there’s little-no pretentiousness in her being nice to her mother, even outside of us meeting them. The way I’ve been treating my parents isn’t something I’m very proud of and maybe alittle ashamed of. Some of it is attributed to the expectations they have of me and others attributed to my attitude towards them when they ask something of me and how much care and concern I’ve showed to them.

Travelling is something people can love it to death doing it even when they don’t do it very often. It only takes 1 trip out of your country to fall in love with this. You don’t need to go very far. It’s seeing everything around you with a fresh pair of eyes. The grass is always greener on the other side. As a tourist, you’re open to everything. For instance, you’re accepting towards a culture as backward in comparison to modernity and probably residing in a rundown cabin or a straw hut with water streaming through the broken roof on rainy days in a couple of days before leaving the place back home. Being a citizen of the place exudes a different outlook, even as a new resident who just moved in to become a citizen. I’ve always, always wondered how other people abroad see Singapore when they come over. I never understood why they’d travel ten over hours to somewhere expensive where they’d spend so much on things and especially experiences that aren’t that fancy and novel. City life and skyscrapers aren’t uncommon sightings. My impression is… Europe for architecture and the arts, USA for Hollywood, Asia (as a whole) for exotic food, culture (?), nature. It’ll take awhile for me to form impressions from the media, books and hopefully travels, on other parts of the world! I’ve said this before: I want to be able to explore my home country with the eyes of a tourist. Someday, I would like to travel to another country, reside there for awhile, maybe 3 months or longer, and then come back here. I want to learn a new language, which means conversing with it among the local people there in a decent amount! I want to feel homesick for once and regain a newfound novelty (probably not the best word to use after “newfound”) and curiosity one could only get when they’re travelling.

I dug up an old private post for a quote from a book I read, Tuscan Holiday, which I think it is perfectly-timed to share in a post like this one.

And I thought again about how travel – how being in an unfamiliar place , surrounded by unfamiliar faces and languages not your own – changes so much about a person at the moment and, sometimes, forever after.

It’s that travel is both disconcerting and liberating, if done outside of the tightly controlled, slightly anemic tradition of planned tours. You experience a sense of dislocation, a heightened-awareness of possible lives other than the one you are currently living; you live in anticipation of something unpredictable about to happen, something you both fear and desire.

The Passing

The passing of Mr. Lee left a void in the hearts of many Singaporeans. He has an admirable personality – I meant him as a person on his own. Not so much about the part on being a nation-builder. I know little about history (beyond what’s taught to me in school and through museum trips) to write about his contribution in the building of modern Singapore. His passing made me think about a lot of things. I’ve tried to imagine myself (and even many of us) in his circumstances. What is the possibility of any of us thriving in that sort of situation? How is it possible for anyone to feel so strongly about his values and beliefs to pursue success that isn’t guaranteed?

Mr. Lee had an amazing set of credentials at that time, where he could have stayed in UK and still go on to pursue an extraordinary career. His life would have been a bed of roses if he doesn’t return here. He could also struggle alittle to open a law firm and still pursue the principles he stand for. What is the probability of securing the reign of a state versus earning big bucks in a multinational corporation? Upon securing the reign, what are the odds of success in clearing up the ruins and building it up from scratch?

Many of us have so naturally regarded him as a watchful guardian despite his old age and deteriorating health. Of how he could step down from the PM’s position or even exit the Board and yet, his presence will give us reassurance that all is well. I’ve never met him or speak to him. A part of me feels missing at this point, especially now in addition to the mourning going on around the country. It feels alittle regretful because I’ve always seen him as like any politician imprinted in books, TV, Internet and everyday life until his passing, a wake-up call, and now I can’t see him so much like a politician as before anymore.

A part of me wants to get out of here and move somewhere else, then I’ll be a much happier person. The other part of me wants to repay the debts I’ve owed to the State. Debts that they don’t require me to repay in black-and-white. Debts that is mostly financial assistance in the form of school fee subsidies, bursaries, pocket money and miscellaneous deductions in childcare services and spending on groceries in the past when I was younger. I can’t do much in the political realm of the state. Perhaps in Social Service where I plan to explore at this moment.

Meanwhile, I can’t vision myself residing in another place for a long, long time. No matter where I go, I will be back here somehow, as a citizen and never as a tourist. Presumably, I won’t want to be an idle citizen. Maybe I’d want to do my part but I don’t know how, for now.

Malaysia!

Finally a considerable amount of data network to do some blogging!

I’ve spent about a week here in Ipoh, Malaysia. Mom’s birthplace. I’ve not seen my grandma and grandpa, uncles and aunts, as well as the new cousins for 10 years now. They speak so much Cantonese that sometimes, watching them talk feels like watching a Hong Kong drama series. I understand alittle bit but I can’t speak the dialect in full sentences. I’m the only one who can’t speak the local dialect there and at times, it makes me feel guilty to have others to translate it just for me. And dining table conversations… Awkward.

But I’m glad that I’m starting to familiarize myself with the new cousins. There is a huge age gap though, about 5 years and more.

Personal thoughts on Poor Thing.

Photo Courtesy of: The Necessary Stage’s facebook

Cass and I caught a local play, titled Poor Thing, on Sunday, yesterday. The production was presented by The Necessary Stage, a theatre company located in Singapore. The playwright of this production is Haresh Sharma (who is the writer of the play I studied for Literature subject I took in school a few years back!) and the director is Alvin Tan. The production is rated R18 – for mature theme and coarse language (just plenty of those).

Out of the many Singaporean-based theatrical plays/musicals we’ve googled, we have decided on this one! There weren’t much information revealed in the synopsis of this play and the sequence of events/scenes that follows. But it certainly did turn out to be more interesting than what I’ve expected. The audience were shown a prologue video before they enter the setting of the play.

Synopsis 
The road rage incident spans across an one-hour scene, involving 4 characters, namely – Alisha, Jevon, Jerome and Sharifah. Jerome and Alisha – as the rich couple who were on their way back home after the company’s dinner and dance. It was a remote and dark road, so Jevon was driving the car at a really slow speed. The car behind them was driven by Sharifah, who just recently got her driving license. She was driving Jerome back to his camp.

being appreciative.

Recently, I came across a video of a girl who talks about how she isn’t proud to be a citizen of her home country and it’s only then I realized that so many of us, the young people in this country, aren’t happy (or even grateful) for what we already have.

We complain about the lack of opportunities we could have if we aren’t raised in Singapore, but is it really true that it’s ultimately impossible to achieve them even if we work hard enough? Or are we just trying to use the system as an excuse for our lack of conviction and efforts to look for those opportunities and grab hold onto them? Do we really prefer to be elsewhere, only then can we achieve our dreams? It’s sort of becoming a revolution for us to already think about migrating, to rather be a second-class citizen of another country, than to spend the rest of their lives in Singapore. While the people in other countries are migrating here to become citizens. What’s wrong with this world now?

Probably it’s true that people who have less tend to be more thankful. They cherish what they already have. All of us have demands, but they probably work for it more than they talk about it aloud. The luxury of having the means to blow it up on media. They are still more happy with what they already have than fretting over what they don’t have. Do they blame circumstances as much as we do?

What does it mean to be grateful? Is it by not speaking up on how defective the circumstances are? Or is gratitude just that warm, fuzzy feeling you get in your heart? Is it by witnessing how unfortunate others are as compared to yourself, only then you’ll feel grateful?

It’s half-past three, my eyes are burning – explains why this post ended abruptly.