From ‘In a sea of foreigners’, 10 July 2011, article by Sumiko Tan, Sunday Times
…I was at the Kylie Minogue concert and one thought struck me: ‘These expats sure know how to hang loose and have fun’. It’s a common sight at concerts. Save for pockets of more demonstrative Singaporeans, it’ll be foreigners who look as if they’re really having a good time.
…At the Kylie gig, I was seated in a row of about eight people. They must have been Singaporeans because we all remained seated throughout. The most energetic thing they did was to wave the light stick, and even then feebly and self-consciously. Surrounding us, though, were hundred of foreigners – I am guessing Australians, Britons and Americans – who were partying away. For a moment, I felt like a stranger in my own country.
…This feeling of dislocation surfaced again when I was shopping in Orchard Road… It’s the same at all my weekend haunts, whether it’s Ngee Ann City, Great World City or Little India or a suburban mall. I just feel outnumbered by foreigners. Singapore has changed.
Maybe the foreign fans attending the Kylie concert REALLY LOVE Kylie so much that they had to make a party out of it. Perhaps they were drunk, or they could just be tourists who paid good money to follow their idol on tour. And why ‘Americans, Australians or Britons’? What about Canadians, Spaniards or even the French? Do Americans even listen to Kylie? In her more than 20 years of showbiz, she has had only TWO top ten US Billboard hits (Locomotion, Can’t Get You Out of my Head). Sumiko’s selective observation doesn’t say much about EXPATS being fun loving in general, especially since there are supposedly more than a million foreigners lurking among us. I’m sure they’re those who’d prefer to stay at home and watch TV or walk the dog, instead of hanging around Clarke Quay watching EPL, fooling around with local women or joining conga lines outside Ion Orchard. So in her midst of appearing victimised by this deluge of foreigners into our beloved homeland, Sumiko has inadvertently committed the sin of double-stereotyping here. One, foreigners are party animals who know how to enjoy life and get lots of sex. And two, Singaporeans are boring as hell.
But the general impression that I get from her piece is how ‘Tell me something I don’t already know’ it all is. There’s nothing surprising about bumping into foreigners in major shopping malls, which are ‘tourist attractions’ after all, or at enclaves like Holland Village where expats reside, doing something most locals wouldn’t dream of doing: Sitting out in the hot sun people-watching. Suburban malls still maintain a distinctive local, though not entirely palatable, flavour. Personally, the only time when I would feel out of place in this country, when the infiltration is omnipresent, would be something as mundane as taking the MRT, which Sumiko fails to mention here. If nothing is done to curb the influx, it’ll reach a point where MRT commuters would evolve their own separate pidgin language just to survive in train carriages, in addition to developing adaptive skills of slinking past giant backpacks, filtering out harsh body odours or dodging pickaxes and other construction tools which workers bring on board. Feeling out of place is fine as long as our alien population behaves. The problem which Sumiko hints at but doesn’t expand further, is foreigners who screw things up; beating up taxi drivers, cheating at casinos, spray painting MRT trains, leaving their mess about or letting their kids piss into dustbins mistaking them for pissing wells back in their godforsaken village.
Filed under: 2011, Concerts, Foreign workers, Fun and games, Music/music videos, Orchard Road, Shopping malls, Tourists Tagged: | ang mor, discrimination, expats, Foreign workers, music, stereotyping, sumiko tan, Tourists
