Megan shames Jo! No less in the New York Times...
And
Paul Krugman was right.
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A Sudden Coronavirus Surge Brought Out Singapore’s Dark Side
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But despite all the threats,
through collective complacency or failure of imagination, the government was blindsided by a vulnerability it might have easily anticipated. In April, a dramatic surge of infections among poorly paid foreign workers crushed Singapore’s sense of invulnerability. The city is built and maintained by an army of laborers who come from other Asian countries — Bangladesh, India, China. They can be lodged as many as 20 men to a single room; one toilet is legally considered enough for 15 people. Last year, some of the dormitories suffered a measles outbreak. Migrant-worker housing has been connected with illness ever since the British colonial rulers called tuberculosis “a disease of the town-dwelling Chinese” because it raged among the “lowly paid migrants living en masse in congested and insanitary dwellings in the municipal area,” Loh and Hsu write.
In other words, the notion that packed worker lodgings could weaken public health was neither new nor surprising.
And yet the city reeled at the dizzying reports of illness emerging from the worker dormitories — hundreds of people, sometimes 1,000 or more, tested positive day after day. It was as if the entire city had fallen so completely into the habit of regarding the laborers as some other kind of person that the basic fact of our corporeal interconnectedness never occurred to anybody.
Workers’ rights advocates had tried to raise the alarm earlier, but their warnings went ignored. Now these perpetually marginalized workers have, at last, grabbed the city’s attention. A strict citywide lockdown was enforced and has been extended and tightened as the government scrambles to curb the outbreak in the dormitories.
All schools, most businesses and even some doctors’ offices are closed; masks are mandatory; shopping is permitted only for absolute necessities like food or medicine. At this writing, nearly all of the new cases are concentrated in the dormitories, whose residents are shut away as they undergo systematic screenings. As of May 19, Singapore counted a total of 28,794 confirmed cases and 22 deaths. The daily toll of new cases was down to 451; 450 of them were among migrant workers. The lockdown is now scheduled to lift in early June; it’s not clear what this will mean for the ailing corps of migrant laborers. Singapore is now, more than ever, divided into two cities, two populations: the foreign workers in dormitories, and the rest of us.
This sort of arrangement can be justified ethically only with a geographic bifurcation: The worker is earning money he could never dream of back home.
We are not supposed to think about his life here; we are supposed to think about his life there. The cheerful certainty of money flowing into that other life makes all of this degradation excusable, even beneficial. But that’s a thought exercise. The virus works in flesh and blood, and it has destroyed the fantasy of a disconnected labor pool.
Now we live in a reduced version of the city. The two faces of the state, caretaker and authoritarian, are intertwined and omnipresent. Through the government’s fliers and text messages and speeches, I’ve been extorted, scolded, cheered up, menaced, coddled, invited to conspire against my fellow residents and reminded, all the while, that it’s for my own good. “Report safe distancing infringements on OneService app,” said a WhatsApp message I got from the Singaporean government. “Provide specific details, location, photos.” A notice tacked to our condominium bulletin board and titled, simply, “Penalty” detailed the prison terms, heavy fines and court prosecutions we could get for breaking the pandemic rules. “Failure to comply will result in firm action by Enforcement Officers,” the paper warned. “Enforcement officers may conduct a sudden inspection at any condominium.”
One afternoon, government representatives with cardboard boxes arrived in the pavilion overlooking the swimming pool. We stood in a long, winding line to receive our free masks, one for each resident, presenting our ID cards to be scanned. With a strange mix of gratitude and chagrin, thinking of the American nurses and doctors who sometimes lacked the equipment to protect themselves, I accepted our reusable masks from Singapore’s ultraorganized state bureaucracy. This was repeated at housing blocks and community centers around the city. Once they were satisfied that everyone had a mask, the failure to wear one was declared a crime.
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When I first came to Singapore, a European friend who already lived here told me I would love this place. I would see that Asia was surging to the head of the global order; I would be filled with new ideas and insights. The West, she said, was “back in the mirror as they drive away.” Her words have rattled in my mind ever since. Singapore projects an image of urban harmony that is inspiring, even utopian. But with the distractions and rhythms of normal life suspended,
the hardest truths of the city have been exposed: The unflinching approach to importing people for hard, cheap labor and the willingness to diminish individual rights in a flood of collective good. We always knew those things were the subtext; now they shape our daily lives. I have lost the impassive perspective of an outsider. I’m a neighbor who might catch the virus or infect others; a person who has been sheltered by the state and ensnared by its rules; a resident who should ask after the fate of the sick men who build this city and whether their living conditions will finally, now, be improved.
I know this won’t last. The city will eventually revert to a more familiar form. But this version of Singapore will stay burned in my memory, a city of dreams laid bare.
