Is the melting pot bubbling over a bit?

The article by Rohit Brijnath, Label Pains, in Ex-Pat Files, Sunday Times 25 October 2009,
was an optimistic comment on living in a multicultural society, a viewpoint that Singaporeans
may well need to take a second look at. Having returned to Singapore after close to 20 years
abroad, I’ve read with interest articles of a similar nature celebrating Singapore’s multiethnic
harmony these past few months. As part of the series, there was a comment by playwright,
Haresh Sharma, which effectively set out the position for those of us who haven’t fitted
comfortably into the ascriptive ethnic profiling of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others, but
nevertheless are as Singaporean as raintrees, Old Chang Kee curry puffs and school trips to
MacRitchie reservoir.
Brijnath suggests that prejudice is not in our DNA but is acquired. There are evolutionary
biologists who say different, that prejudice is a primitive mechanism designed to safeguard
the tribe from outsiders. What makes human beings different is our ability to reflect on our
elemental impulses and alter our behaviour to match changing needs, new circumstances, and
the evolving environment while still preserving the instinct to safeguard the group. While
prejudice may not necessarily be learned behaviour, the ability to adapt is equally written into
our bones and allows us to manage the external environment in ways that are increasingly
sedate and peaceful. This is a good definition of civilisation.
Singapore, as a society and a nation, has always been open to visitors from the four corners of
the earth. My own ancestry is part Sinhalese, part west coast Irish, part French (via
Pondicherry), part Dutch (via South Africa), part Malay, part Tamil, part Macau Chinese, all
thrown together in the same tasty-smelling melting pot that gave the world Curry Devil and
Vindaloo, Kristang and Breudher cake, Jingly Nona and the Joget. As relatively new
immigrants to Singapore (my mother’s parents moved here from Kuala Lumpur in the thirties
and my father’s family in the fifties), the fast pace of Singapore’s development in the
decolonising years made us into Singaporeans very quickly. My father, Eugene
Wijeysingha’s, recently published For a Better Age: Musings of a Teacher recalls his gradual
Singaporeanisation during his university years. The pains and the glories of developing
Singapore were our pain and glory too: I remember stories of my French-descent
grandmother having to pull the end of her sari over her head and face to mask her European
features during the Maria Hertogh riots in the fifties. I also remember my parents being part
of the pledge contingent at a National Day parade.
With a patrimony as convoluted as ours, it was probably inevitable that our Singaporean-ness
would adopt and assimilate elements of habit born here. To my mother and her cousins, their
Eurasian grandparents were Ah Kong and Popo, the result of having black and white amahs.
Christmas, celebrated with midmight mass and a toast with wine and cake, would be greeted
the next morning with kiribath, Sri Lankan coconut rice. The singsong cadences of Kristang,
the Portuguese patois from Malacca, peppered some of our households, while my
grandmother and father would lapse into Sinhala, if the matter being discussed was one you
needed to keep from the kids.
In the Singapore of 2009, these differences are celebrated and books now abound, written by
people who don’t quite fit into the standard ethnic groups. The Eurasian Association is going
from strength to strength and the Peranakan Museum is a belated salute to one of our most
enduring, colourful and, in fact, truly Southeast Asian communities. But it has not always had
to be as self-conscious as this.
For reasons that have had their worth at specific times in our policy history, culture, religion
and community were oftentimes pushed into externally-defined groupings and formats that
did not necessarily reflect the situation on the ground. Alongside, there were concerted efforts
to craft a composite Singaporeanness, even down to developing a national dress. And as
citizens of a newly-independent nation, we often wondered about the wisdom of these
engineering activities that appeared to put too much emphasis on what separated us, while
striving to bring us together. Race, culture, religion, community rarely played a part in the
everyday Singapore prior to these eugenic activities. Speaking about renting, my mother’s
family rented their home from a Chinese landlord for the best part of fifty years. I count three
Chinese, several Londoners, a Norwegian, some Philipinos, and an Arab amongst my aunts
and cousins. We would just as easily eat kuay pie tee as nasi lemak or thosai for breakfast and
might easily have weathered racist comments from members of the family when discussing
current events. Living in multicultural Singapore is not necessarily without its navigational
hazards!
Taking stock, we may do well to look again at our population and immigration policies.
There is talk from time to time, coffee shop gossip if you like, about the wisdom of such large
intakes of foreign workers into Singapore. Even among the Chinese community, there is well,
disquiet, about the policy of immigrating mainland Chinese who do not speak English, not to
mention those Singaporeans who do not speak Mandarin but are addressed in this language
by mainland Chinese workers at restaurants and gas stations. Necessarily, these population
movements cause comment, although no direct hostility, still a moment of pride for our
typical Singaporean live-and-let-live attitude.
But might not these ways of doing things be sowing difficulties for the future. The
Singaporean Indian and Malay communities may not be large enough, or inclined enough, to
raise the tempo of the issues, but I have often wondered why, alongside our professed
muilticulturalism, there seems to be little attempt to reflect our ethnic diversity in media
imagery or even in information and signage. Yesterday, I visited the zoo; it is of course one
of those things that makes me viscerally proud to be Singaporea. But I noticed that the signs
tended to be in English, Malay, Chinese and, wait for it, Japanese. The last I checked,
Japanese was not an official language of the country.
Have we looked to Europe, and particularly the United Kingdom, where I spent the last
seventeen years? A hastily-cobbled together immigration policy after World War Two
brought great swathes of immigrants from the Commonwealth to the shores of Britain to
work the buses, sweep the streets, drive the trains, and later staff the schools and welfare
agencies. Today, fuelled by resentment thrown up from the perception of not getting a square
deal, the ethnic English are having to grapple with Nick Griffin, a white supremacist
politician whose party is gaining ground in the polls, and across the Channel, the French with
Jean-Marie le Pen, whose French equivalent already occupies a serious slice of the national
life. Spain, Portugal and some of Eastern Europe are also grappling with their own versions
of the problem.
I welcome our historic openness to the world. Not only does it bring in talent, innovation and
hard work, but at a level closer to the bar stool and the dinner party, I’m daily enriched by my
engagement with people from Southeast Asia, India and Bangladesh, Europe and their
descendants in north America and Australia. I learn more, I hear more, I see more and so, I
think and feel more. And I am a living, breathing product of our ability to assimilate and
improve the melting pot. But might we not wish to look carefully at the experience of other
societies so that the traditions of tolerance and assimilation, the traditions that have given us
multilingual prime ministers and multiethnic presidents, Chinese children growing up
speaking with an Indian accent and Indians growing up playing with gasing and chap-teh, a
Chindian Phua Chu Kang - indeed the very concept of Chindian - may not, in future years,
even generations, raise such serious issues as to herald Singaporeans-only political parties,
repatriation policies, the shops and graveyards of individual communities vandalised,
ghettoisation, ethnic gangs prowling the streets, and leaders thrown up merely because they
give voice to the frustrations of one or other community. No farfetched millennial movie this,
but the experience of those who have a half century migration headstart on us.