http://enquirer.sg/2009/10/20/letter-to-my-pm-no-country-for-my-old-man/
Letter to my PM: No country for my old man
by Sheere Ng — October 20th, 2009, 11.10pm
Dear Mr Prime Minister,
At the Ministerial Forum a month ago, you talked about helping new citizens adjust to life in Singapore. Have you also considered the early immigrants who are having trouble adapting to this fast-moving country?
Allow me to elaborate with the story of my father:
My father’s migration to Singapore didn’t start off with a good omen. It was September, crazy weather and choppy waters at the South China Sea. He slept among boxes and crates in a cargo ship for 10 days—how long it took to get to Singapore from China’s Fujian province in 1956.
At that time, Singapore and Malaysia were colonised by the British. People could cross the causeway freely. My grandfather, who had been working in Johor Bahru as a truck driver, crossed over to the other side to reunite with his wife and seven-year-old son.
Three years later my father moved permanently to Singapore. It was 1959, the same year your father became the first Prime Minister of Singapore.
Not wanting to study, because he didn’t like to, my father quit school at 13-years-old and got a job. His first employment was at Orchard Road. My father, barely educated and Hokkien-speaking, used to work in Singapore’s retail hub!
All right, maybe retail hub to be.
As you probably know, Orchard Road was very different then. There was no Takashimaya or ION Orchard. What most would remember is Cold Storage, the first to bring ice-cream to Singapore, occupying the basement of what is Centrepoint today. The rest of the area was blanketed by mom-and-pop shops, one of which my father worked in.
Mr Prime Minister, here I’ll like to take a break from the story to ask you a question. How much did you earn for your first job? $100? $1,000? Or was it $10,000? I earned over a thousand a month as a part-time waitress.We were both lucky, sir. My poor father was paid a meager $40—exactly the amount his housing cost!
Struggling to make ends meet, he thought he could make more money as a trishaw rider. But he naively rode it like a bicycle. Once, outside the Subordinate Court, the vehicle stubbornly went onto the opposite side of the road towards a charging truck! He was thrown off a few meters all cut and bruised.
The abrupt flying experience taught him to keep his feet on the ground. So he started selling bananas by the kilos at Tanglin Halt, street-hawking style. Like everyone else in the 1960s, he laid his goods on the floor and squatted behind them.
You know sir, my father still likes to boast about how long he used to squat. If only he could read a traditional scale as well as he squats, he wouldn’t have sold the fruits at a loss!
Despite this series of unfortunate events, there was no doubt he could find a way out. As you can see sir, Singapore always had a place for him wherever he went. In return to the abundant opportunities, my father made the most of it eventually.
He soon found a job in the Coca Cola factory at River Valley Road. You might remember drinking the popular soda off a glass bottle as a young kid. For $3.50 a night, my father had to unload 22 trucks of those empty bottles.
And amid the mad rush to make a living, he still found time to practise lion dance and performed in Singapore’s second national day celebration!
At 20, my father clinched a deal with a Malaysian plantation owner to sell his vegetables at Pasir Panjang Wholesale Centre. He remained in this business for the next 40 years, up till today.
Unfortunately, as he was working tirelessly, Singapore changed—it progressed in leaps and bounds. I swear to you, Mr Prime Minister, that my father had tried to keep up with the times.
He taught himself to read and write Chinese, and acquired a pretty good knowledge in Chinese medicine I must say. But as years went by, Singapore had moved so quickly into the future that my father could no longer run shoulder to shoulder with her.
Orchard Road and Clarke Quay are now devoted to the young and the foreigners. My father can’t fit in with the fancy bars and restaurants, and god forbid, the reverse bungee jump. The places where he shed sweats of hard work have since been cleaned up and developed to be more inviting, but paradoxically, more rejecting at the same time.
Have you been to any of the malls sir? I would advice you to bring a guide if you visit one. One after another, they grew so big, so tall and so inconvenient for the aged. The escalators are a challenge to their wobbly legs (that’s 421,000 pairs assuming legs turn jelly after the age of 65), the lifts are hardly enough and the toilets are always at the next and the next and the next corner.
Outside, Singapore is like a table of mahjong tiles. Every now and then buildings are shifted, thrown in or removed. My father finds his way around through trial and error. The road signs, all in English, are practically redundant to him. And so he is damned when the roads are reconstructed, which happens ever so often.
His problems with language also interfered with his efforts to participate in my school life. I used to dance and emcee many concerts in secondary school, but my father only attended once. He was so bored out of his skull he never showed up for any more, until I graduated from college this July.
Just as I had expected, the ceremony, held entirely in English, made him feel out of place. When the graduating class was invited to rise from our seats to thank our parents with a round of applause, my father wasn’t aware of its significance.
I had asked the valedictorian to say a few words in Mandarin, but he rejected my request. He said it would be discriminating against the minority groups. I understood the sensitivity of the issue but it left me with a bitter taste.
Please do not be offended sir, but I feel that the valedictorian’s approach bore an uncanny resemblance to how your government handles many issues, especially pertaining to race, language and religion.
Many a times you stay put at the traffic junction to avoid causing any accident.
For instance, if we have to put up street signs in the Chinese language, we have to do so in Malay and Tamil too. So if there’s not enough space for all four, we just make do with a sign only in the English language.
But we’re not moving forward either sir.
Individually these issues may seem trivial to you, but together they conspire to reject and exclude my father, and those alike.
Please do not point my father to the parks and community centres (or even house him in Johor Bahru). Are these the only things that Singapore can offer to her pre-independence population? Do you really want to herd them into places out of convenience, and compel them to hang out with people they don’t know and may not want to interact with?
Or if you sir think this will require too much work and money, we could wait till everyone in that generation kicks the bucket. Let’s assume the youngest of that generation is 50-years-old and the average life expectancy is 80, it’s impossible to ignore their needs for 30 years, don’t you think sir?
Moreover, at the lightning speed at which Singapore is progressing, I doubt this will be a problem contained within one generation. We too will have our time of failing eyesight and restless legs, which cannot be made exception by any amount of education or technology.
But what I can do with these privileges given to my generation is to write you this personal letter, Mr Prime Minister, hoping you would understand what Singapore is becoming to my father, and eventually you and I.
If you like this story, please consider making a donation to help further the Enquirer's cause.
==================
For local news from non-local mainstream media, visit http://singaporenewsalternative.blogspot.com
.
Letter to my PM: No country for my old man
by Sheere Ng — October 20th, 2009, 11.10pm
Dear Mr Prime Minister,
At the Ministerial Forum a month ago, you talked about helping new citizens adjust to life in Singapore. Have you also considered the early immigrants who are having trouble adapting to this fast-moving country?
Allow me to elaborate with the story of my father:
My father’s migration to Singapore didn’t start off with a good omen. It was September, crazy weather and choppy waters at the South China Sea. He slept among boxes and crates in a cargo ship for 10 days—how long it took to get to Singapore from China’s Fujian province in 1956.
At that time, Singapore and Malaysia were colonised by the British. People could cross the causeway freely. My grandfather, who had been working in Johor Bahru as a truck driver, crossed over to the other side to reunite with his wife and seven-year-old son.
Three years later my father moved permanently to Singapore. It was 1959, the same year your father became the first Prime Minister of Singapore.
Not wanting to study, because he didn’t like to, my father quit school at 13-years-old and got a job. His first employment was at Orchard Road. My father, barely educated and Hokkien-speaking, used to work in Singapore’s retail hub!
All right, maybe retail hub to be.
As you probably know, Orchard Road was very different then. There was no Takashimaya or ION Orchard. What most would remember is Cold Storage, the first to bring ice-cream to Singapore, occupying the basement of what is Centrepoint today. The rest of the area was blanketed by mom-and-pop shops, one of which my father worked in.
Mr Prime Minister, here I’ll like to take a break from the story to ask you a question. How much did you earn for your first job? $100? $1,000? Or was it $10,000? I earned over a thousand a month as a part-time waitress.We were both lucky, sir. My poor father was paid a meager $40—exactly the amount his housing cost!
Struggling to make ends meet, he thought he could make more money as a trishaw rider. But he naively rode it like a bicycle. Once, outside the Subordinate Court, the vehicle stubbornly went onto the opposite side of the road towards a charging truck! He was thrown off a few meters all cut and bruised.
The abrupt flying experience taught him to keep his feet on the ground. So he started selling bananas by the kilos at Tanglin Halt, street-hawking style. Like everyone else in the 1960s, he laid his goods on the floor and squatted behind them.
You know sir, my father still likes to boast about how long he used to squat. If only he could read a traditional scale as well as he squats, he wouldn’t have sold the fruits at a loss!
Despite this series of unfortunate events, there was no doubt he could find a way out. As you can see sir, Singapore always had a place for him wherever he went. In return to the abundant opportunities, my father made the most of it eventually.
He soon found a job in the Coca Cola factory at River Valley Road. You might remember drinking the popular soda off a glass bottle as a young kid. For $3.50 a night, my father had to unload 22 trucks of those empty bottles.
And amid the mad rush to make a living, he still found time to practise lion dance and performed in Singapore’s second national day celebration!
At 20, my father clinched a deal with a Malaysian plantation owner to sell his vegetables at Pasir Panjang Wholesale Centre. He remained in this business for the next 40 years, up till today.
Unfortunately, as he was working tirelessly, Singapore changed—it progressed in leaps and bounds. I swear to you, Mr Prime Minister, that my father had tried to keep up with the times.
He taught himself to read and write Chinese, and acquired a pretty good knowledge in Chinese medicine I must say. But as years went by, Singapore had moved so quickly into the future that my father could no longer run shoulder to shoulder with her.
Orchard Road and Clarke Quay are now devoted to the young and the foreigners. My father can’t fit in with the fancy bars and restaurants, and god forbid, the reverse bungee jump. The places where he shed sweats of hard work have since been cleaned up and developed to be more inviting, but paradoxically, more rejecting at the same time.
Have you been to any of the malls sir? I would advice you to bring a guide if you visit one. One after another, they grew so big, so tall and so inconvenient for the aged. The escalators are a challenge to their wobbly legs (that’s 421,000 pairs assuming legs turn jelly after the age of 65), the lifts are hardly enough and the toilets are always at the next and the next and the next corner.
Outside, Singapore is like a table of mahjong tiles. Every now and then buildings are shifted, thrown in or removed. My father finds his way around through trial and error. The road signs, all in English, are practically redundant to him. And so he is damned when the roads are reconstructed, which happens ever so often.
His problems with language also interfered with his efforts to participate in my school life. I used to dance and emcee many concerts in secondary school, but my father only attended once. He was so bored out of his skull he never showed up for any more, until I graduated from college this July.
Just as I had expected, the ceremony, held entirely in English, made him feel out of place. When the graduating class was invited to rise from our seats to thank our parents with a round of applause, my father wasn’t aware of its significance.
I had asked the valedictorian to say a few words in Mandarin, but he rejected my request. He said it would be discriminating against the minority groups. I understood the sensitivity of the issue but it left me with a bitter taste.
Please do not be offended sir, but I feel that the valedictorian’s approach bore an uncanny resemblance to how your government handles many issues, especially pertaining to race, language and religion.
Many a times you stay put at the traffic junction to avoid causing any accident.
For instance, if we have to put up street signs in the Chinese language, we have to do so in Malay and Tamil too. So if there’s not enough space for all four, we just make do with a sign only in the English language.
But we’re not moving forward either sir.
Individually these issues may seem trivial to you, but together they conspire to reject and exclude my father, and those alike.
Please do not point my father to the parks and community centres (or even house him in Johor Bahru). Are these the only things that Singapore can offer to her pre-independence population? Do you really want to herd them into places out of convenience, and compel them to hang out with people they don’t know and may not want to interact with?
Or if you sir think this will require too much work and money, we could wait till everyone in that generation kicks the bucket. Let’s assume the youngest of that generation is 50-years-old and the average life expectancy is 80, it’s impossible to ignore their needs for 30 years, don’t you think sir?
Moreover, at the lightning speed at which Singapore is progressing, I doubt this will be a problem contained within one generation. We too will have our time of failing eyesight and restless legs, which cannot be made exception by any amount of education or technology.
But what I can do with these privileges given to my generation is to write you this personal letter, Mr Prime Minister, hoping you would understand what Singapore is becoming to my father, and eventually you and I.
If you like this story, please consider making a donation to help further the Enquirer's cause.
==================
For local news from non-local mainstream media, visit http://singaporenewsalternative.blogspot.com
.
