just rambling

First Book: Divercity Singapore

Divercity Singapore: A cartoon history of immigration is a new book that tells the Singapore story through the people who have helped transform this island from a fishing community to a modern metropolis — immigrants. I’ve been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to write and research this book with cartoonist Morgan Chua, and with the support of my publisher/editor Cherian George. It’s now available at most local bookstores for a retail price of S$10.90. Click here to find out more about the book!

Going deeper and beyond multiculturalism

“Inter-culturalism assumes an openess that encourages an interplay of different culture presences in an environment where mutual respect governs the power dynamics… Multi-culturalism is recognising cultural differences, but it stops at there, recognising difference, full stop.”

Alvin Tan, The Necessary Stage

Despite the lip service to integration among the different ethnic groups, Singapore’s policy of multiculturalism has always been one that keeps them apart. As pointed out by The Necessary Stage’s Alvin Tan in the recent Work-Life seminar, there is a limitation to the government’s definition of the word. Instead, he proposed “inter-culturalism”, where the different communities actually interact in a manner that create a new culture based. Two examples of these communities amongst us are the Eurasians and the Peranakans, of which Alvin belongs to.

The late Kuo Pao Kun also had a beautiful quote on multiculturalism:

“Multiculturally the deeper you go, you actually find these recesses are connected. The deeper you go, the more connected you are. The shallower you become, they more separated they are. Or put it another way, the higher you reach into the respective cultures, the more you see all the branches and leaves touching each other. But the stalk, the stem, the trunk are very separated.

This is where our level of art is — they are separated. But if you go deeper, the roots touch. You go higher, the branches touch, the leaves touch. And of course, the cross-pollination is done up there. And you absorb the same nutrients, deep underneath. And this is the beauty of multiculturalism.”

I do feel that Singapore is at a stage where we should confidently try go deeper and encourage more spontaneous inter-mingling between our communities instead of being so formulaic about it. The recent expansion of the Ethnic Integration Policy in public housing estates to include permanent residents only serves to maintain the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others (CMIO) racial structure that has defined Singapore thus far. In fact, another recent change in law to allow Singaporeans who marry foreigners to choose their race also shows how problematic and inflexible the CMIO model is today.

Rather than try to regulate some magic formula of ethnicity that creates a Singaporean, we should just encourage interaction amongst all groups. It is more important to have respect and tolerance for one another than to know the composition of Singapore.

my paper’s redesign: a failure of the bilingual policy

When my paper started in June 2006, it was an all-Chinese daily. A year later, it revamped as a bilingual freesheet divided into an English section and Chinese section. On Monday, the paper was revamped again, and taglined as “The Best of Both Worlds” and no long “my life, my thoughts, my say”.The evolution of this three-year old paper seems to mirror the failure of the bilingual policy that MM Lee confessed to last week.

Before this revamp, the paper was equally divided between the two languages, with each fronting a cover. The English section opened from right to left and the Chinese section began from the back page, which interestingly followed how Chinese books are traditionally read, from left to right. In this new design, the Chinese section is now a separate insert while a new Business section takes over the back page.

This seems to reflect the reality of the Singapore readership. An English reader is unlikely to touch the Chinese section and vice versa, so why not make one paper more useful to two different set of readers instead?

To better appeal to English readers, my paper has also added a Business section. As English is the language of commerce here, this section is not available in Chinese. This addition helps it better fight Today, its competitor in the free-sheet business. Till now, the latter had the advantage of providing commercial news. The new design also promises to be more advertiser-friendly (like Today?). But, do we really need another newspaper covering business too?

Today's back page

my paper's back page

Commercially it might make sense, but I’m not sure if it provides diversity or even distinguishes it from the market.

The only distinguishing fact of my paper now is its billingual content. Isn’t that why it now calls itself “The Best Of Both Worlds”?  Not, if you read its revamp advertisements closely. The paper is really trying to bring together “More Business news accentuated with Lifestyle features”.

In fact, how billingual is this paper? It really is two papers in different languages put together. For select stories, there is a Helpdesk, a section attached to provide the translation of words in both languages but do readers really use it? The paper may claim to have had an increased in readership, but it doesn’t say if it’s because of the paper’s bilingual content. Plus, the latest design of the paper — moving the Chinese section to be an insert — further reinforces this idea of two separate papers.

Observing how Chinese has been gradually moved from the paper’s mainstay to become a novelty factor is an indictment of how billingualism has failed here. And, if it’s true that my paper went bilingual upon MM Lee’s suggestion, then it is just a manifestation of the failure of this policy.

Singapore Citizenship: A National Credit Card?

Photo by Chong Zi Liang

A short op-ed I wrote for the Enquirer who kindly provided me tickets to attend the NTU Student Union’s Ministerial Forum 2009. Read it here.

Future Journalists?

After talking with so many about the future of journalism, we turned the focus on ourselves and had a frank discussion about our own futures in this industry.

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This story is part of a series, Where are we going: The future of newspapers in Singapore

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