Missed the people; hardly the life,the country

What about Singapore do you miss most when you’re overseas?

It’s a question we have asked many of our interviewees while working on this project. I decided to turn the question to fellow project mate Gracia Chiang, who spent 5 months in San Diego, USA for an exchange program under NTU. “I missed my family and friends. So I didn’t really miss the life in Singapore much,” she told me. “But it was mainly the place I used to go, and the company of my friends and family.” Here is a 5-minute podcast of the conversation we had.

Reflecting on it later, I think I share the same sentiments. I truly missed my family and friends when I was on exchange too. It didn’t help that I was the only Singaporean exchange student in Missouri. I’m not sure if I can put a finger to why I didn’t really miss Singapore. I know I’m Singaporean, but I’m not sure what I can hold on to that makes me Singaporean.

It’s a problem 56-year-old Josephine Chia feels very strongly too. She suggested that it’s because we younger Singaporeans have lost our sense of belonging and identity. “I see young people as in between worlds,” she tells me at an interview. “You’re in between the Asian and Western world, you’re not true Asian, but you’re not true Western. That is the problem.”

Her words are not surprising, and I think they correctly reflect the current situation today. What are we?

What’s different between us – the younger generation – and Josephine is that she can say that she’s Singaporean with real conviction. The irony of it all, she is a British citizen. Having left Singapore some 20 years ago to follow her husband back to England, she had to renounce her Singapore citizenship. But all the while in England, she’s never lost her “Singaporea-ness”, the peranakan says. She keeps them locked not only in her mind, but also in the award-winning books that she writes.

“I find that when I write, my life in Singapore comes out,” she says. “And I think your childhood days or even up to the teenage years are the important ones you will remember, no matter where you are in the world.”

I’m not sure if my childhood reminds me that I’m Singapore. I guess for people like her, in that generation, feel more so because they were truly the part of Singapore’s nation-building generation. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that I am part of nation building. No one told me so, and I wasn’t brought up to think so.

Josephine also gives talks about colonial Singapore to Britons in schools and public libraries.
“They love listening to the old traditions which I said I would more than like to talk about because I think they form part of your culture. So if I say to you now, what does it mean to be a Singaporean? Food courts?” she said. “I think that should come from the learning of your own culture whether you are Chinese or Malay, that there are certain cultural things that you should know from young, so it’s part of you, so that even if you live in the United States for the next 100 years, you will still feel that you are Singaporean.”

Is that our fault that we don’t feel Singaporean through and through, I asked.

Josephine caught me on my defense mode and quickly said: “No no, (but) if I return I will have to tell the government we must start something to make Singaporeans feel more Singaporean, then you have an identity, a very strong identity.”

Yes, I think what we lack is an identity. That oneness that we can pin point and say that we’re proud of and we therefore want to contribute to this one thing. For now, it seems, this “thing” seems absent.