READ: A former Channel NewsAsia reporter on feeling restricted as a journalist in Singapore
Reporter
Photo: Pixabay
Being a journalist in Singapore isn't so different from being a jiu-jitsu practitioner, as many news correspondents here would agree (not so much us though — we'd rather poke fun at food bloggers and investigate why menfolk here had disappearing dicks).
Former Channel NewsAsia reporter and presenter Joanne Leow is all too familiar with the art of deflecting blows, getting pinned down, and learning how to take on giants during her time in the industry.
Now a professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, Leow's memories of being a journalist in highly-policed Singapore hasn't strayed far from her mind. In a poetic essay filled with anecdotes from her time facing hostile editors, chasing stories, interviewing Lee Kuan Yew himself, and generally feeling trapped in Singapore, she intersperses her story with parallels of learning jiu-jitsu. Read her rather excellent piece published on online magazine Catapult here, and check out some highlights below:
On living in a police state:
"No system can be total. No hold can last forever; there are always gaps. Even in the confines of our small island state, there are pockets of possible resistance.
But more and more I wonder if these gaps, these hatches, are simply safety valves permitted by the state as it carefully regulates its mechanisms, its organisms.
A poem here, a play there, a piece of rogue performance art, a snatch of conversation in a coffee shop, in a taxicab, a bit of digital chatter, a sliver of code. Or, even, the pleasures of eating well or the fleeting nostalgia for a demolished library, contained in a leftover brick sold at the new library’s gift shop."
On her first encounter with Lee Kuan Yew:
"We are supposed to be deferential and quiet. To not complain about the temperature of the room—set at a chilly 18°C to allow his mind to function efficiently in spite of the tropical heat. My lives, my vitae, laid out before him, just one of a series of stacked manila folders. He would not have walked into this meeting without preparation, without his personal assistant who is always a military attaché, interchangeable men who are always then put out to pasture in foreign missions or put forward for elections as members of parliament.
My orderly progression through the educational ranks seems to please him; he notes with relish that my credentials have slotted me into the correct position in his hierarchy of things. That I have taken his well-known admonishments to study in both in the United States and in China seriously, that I have not broken my bonds or the Official Secrets Act, that I am working assiduously with the national broadcaster to ensure that his government’s press releases are transmitted accurately to the general populace, that I have learned to cross my ts and dot my is and line my eyes with kohl just so. I am a powdered, rouged, sleekly groomed cog in his giant machine."
On a grave mistake made on air:
"Once, on air, my co-host makes an inappropriate political joke. I feel his skin redden beside me as he realizes the magnitude of his gaffe. I remember my own performance, my quizzical turn to the camera, as if trying to cover his out of place body with my own. We are so vulnerable in that studio space, the three automated cameras moving up and down their hydraulically powered stands, each a black glassy eye that reflects our foundation-caked faces. For a moment there he had laid bare the mechanisms of power, how the man and his family were connected to the money, in this, the most incorruptible of states.
“Do you want to get us all fired? Don’t ever do that again!”
The head editor screams from her desk just outside the clear panes of the studio wall. Apologizing profusely, my co-host unbuttons his suit, his skin clammy from the shock of the truth. I hum in wordless sympathy. I open my compact. I powder my nose and check my lipstick."
