Sunday November 7, 2004

What you see may not be what you get

By Seah Chiand Nee

A few days ago, while I was having my lunch at a crowded hawker centre, a woman appeared and asked, “Excuse me, do you still need these?”

I looked up and saw a lady in uniform, pushing a cleaning cart like a hotel maid’s, moving in to clear dishes on my table. She was in her late 50s.

Surprised by her fluency in English, I struck up a conversation with her. The retrenched office assistant and grandmother of two college girls told me she had got used to the work.

“It was embarrassing at first. I was afraid of running into former colleagues, but I then told myself I shouldn’t really, since everything has changed so much.”

Food court cleaners don’t come like her. They are mostly imported Indians and Bangladeshis, thousands of whom are still scattered all over the island, keeping it clean day and night.

Three years ago when the economy fell, their numbers dipped as out-of-work Singaporeans and senior citizens moved in to take their places.

More recently, the City Fathers reached a conclusion that it didn’t make sense to have so many unskilled foreigners here while locals, from middle-aged to elderly, were desperately looking for employment.

The solution to both problems was obviously to make the work “less” dirty, use clean uniforms and higher tech equipment and, of course, sprucing up the work image.

In the past, employers who advertised for “clerks” received poor response until they started naming them “executive assistants”.

Today’s cleaners are paid up to S$1,000 a month and gardeners S$700, which have attracted a better class of workers. Saving comes from the need for fewer workers.

I mean no disrespect about their nature of work. I am merely emphasising how much Singapore has changed. For 18 years, I have written about it in this column.

If I had run into my cleaner friend at a shopping mall while she was not on duty, I would probably have mistaken her for a sales supervisor or a schoolteacher.

I have this advice to visitors to the New Singapore: Don’t assume everything you see is what it actually is.

The taxi driver who picks you up at the airport may be a former bank manager who can talk rationally about your shares portfolio.

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself buying chestnuts or soft toys not from a seasoned vendor but a graduate in between jobs.

The smallish girl you encounter may not be a pupil progressing to a secondary school, but a medical student. I’ve been to our universities where I see younger and younger undergrads.

We have 20-something girls talking on TV about their work as uniformed part-time maids (paid by the hour) or in the high-tech garbage removal business.

The old Singapore that I grew up in no longer exists. It will probably never return.

A rapid educational and demographic transformation has convinced me never to make spot judgments about who I meet or what I see. It may turn out to be something unexpected.

This was reinforced during one of my return flights recently. I was queuing at the “Singapore or permanent residents” immigration lane when I spotted a Japanese man a few places in front of me.

Thinking he was in the wrong line, I whispered to him that the “international” counter was the next one, only to receive an icy reply that he was Singaporean.

I could have made the same mistake with a Briton, an Australian or a Latin American (a lot less of the latter though) since quite a few of them have become permanent residents here.

At least a quarter of its 4.25 million population, or more than one million, are foreigners. You can never know who is what.

Westerners, who used to live in posh, expensive areas but are now spread all over suburban Singapore, may be PRs living, marketing and shopping among middle-class locals.

Highly educated cosmopolitan Singapore is becoming like New York – to the chagrin of some young citizens who admire that city.

Firstly, it has ex-managers or retrenched executives driving taxis and engineers operating laundromats or car washes or other small-time operation for which their high education had not intended them for.

We also have more and more graduates selling fish and chips, soft toys or property and insurance.

We’re simply moving into New York’s type of free job market.

In the Big Apple, the cab driver you meet could be a doctor from India or a former state minister from Ukraine. The waiter or hotdog seller may be a part-time actor, a brilliant poet or a bankrupt businessman.

You’ll find Turkish shish-kebab vendors, Lebanese fruit-sellers or Cambodian musicians (not Singapore’s idea of talent) whose individual endeavours help the city to flourish.

Although it shares the same aspiration to become an open, international city, Singapore hasn’t quite reached this stage, but is moving towards it.

There are two similarities. Like New Yorkers, Singaporeans are well educated, with their universities producing more graduates than the society can absorb in most fields of study.

Both adopt open-door immigration policies, although the Republic regulates individual applicants much more strictly.

Is becoming New York a bad thing? The answer provides a conflicting irony among Singaporeans. They give a general resounding “No” because they admire New York’s lifestyle, personal freedom and opportunities.

But in the same breath, they find it absurd that a graduate there is required to drive a cab to earn a living, something the Americans see as a normal part of life.

While New Yorkers accept immigration as a source of their city’s vitality and affluence, Singaporeans resent it as unwelcome rivalry, a predator of jobs and opportunities.

So the next time you decide to sip wine by the piano at a food court on a Friday night (now as lively as Saturday since half the city works a five-day week) and watch the world go by, remember this: “What you see may not be what you get.”

The young man wearing Reebok trainers, bermudas and a polo shirt with a sign “Family poor” begging for alms may not be a deserving case – but a moonshiner out for extra cash.

Seah Chiang Nee is a veteran journalist and editor of the information website littlespeck.com

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