Hard

“It’s hard to severe ties with Singapore,” said Amy (Above right), at her first meeting with R.O.S.S., which stands for Returned Overseas Singaporeans. It’s her third time trying to resettle back in Singapore, after being away for more than 10 years in Australia and the U.S.. She said she failed the first two times because there were too many little things that she just “couldn’t stand it”. She didn’t want to give us further details. This time has been her longest back home, some two years have passed and she says she’s slowly getting adjusted back home.

After a long wait, we finally get to meet the people from R.O.S.S.. It’s an informal group set up by San Choo and Don. They hope this will be a platform to gather Singaporeans who have away for a while to share their experiences and to also help each other with issues settling back in Singapore.It was rather overwhelming trying to interview the various people, each with their very interesting and unique stories, while also being conscious that we were not hijacking their social time with the group. Some of them have such complex personalities and stories that it was truly difficult to even try and grasps their thoughts and ideas. Michael was one of them. More on him later.

There was a common observation we made though: the majority reason these people came back seemed to be because of family. Either to fulfill family obligations, or to be just closer to mum and dad. “Don’t want to live to regret” not being with them as you see them age, Amy said. Michael too, came back to be with his father in his twilight years. Bernadette, who has just started work at CGH and is among the 39 doctors who returned to Singapore, too said she returned largely because of her parents.

As I left the place, I thought to myself: So what’s making these people stay then and how then are they adjusting back to life here?

S’pore, a country built for others?

Not quite sure what the question is from reading the CNA report. Is it a question of not being able to cope with a prospering society or if Singapore is shaping itself for the foreigners? Here’s an extract of the report which has the question asked by the NUS student to PM Lee at a ministerial forum yesterday.

And this has led to the country attracting a lot of foreign talent.

But, is Singapore becoming a place for the wealthy? asked one law undergraduate asked during the dialogue.

“Singapore seems to be built not for us but for foreigners. Sincerely, I am afraid that as a middle income person, I am not able to make that jump in social, economic class. My question is this, is this land, Singapore, a place for the rich?” asked the student.

Mr Lee replied that Singapore cannot be a place for the rich, because if that was the case, the government would lose the elections.

“Singapore has to be a place where the majority of Singaporeans, a vast majority of Singaporeans, will enjoy a high quality of life and be able to have jobs where you can earn well and do well for yourself,” he said.

“You may not be able to do as well as the top most successful banker, lawyer or property developer. But you do well for yourself, your career. You have good schools for your children, good healthcare for your parents, good leisure for your family, good opportunities for your future, that’s for everybody,” Mr Lee added.

“To have a society where everybody is equal, that’s a recipe for poverty, it doesn’t work. There will be inequalities in society but we must make sure that the majority of people have a good standard of living and improving standards from year to year,” he said.

What magnet could attract the Pol-ish back?

German magazine Spiegel reporting that Poland’s offering better work conditions and wages to stop it’s brain drain too.

Poland Tries to Woo Its Young Back Home

Young Polish workers have flocked in the hundreds of thousands to the UK, Ireland and Sweden to find work since Poland’s EU entry in 2004. Now Poland is faced with a serious lack of skilled workers and Warsaw wants to entice them back home.

One of Poland’s biggest exports since joining the European Union has been its own people. But now Warsaw has decided the brain drain needs to be reversed and the government has launched a campaign to entice the migrants to come back home.In one of the biggest exoduses in post-war Europe, between 1.2 and 2 million of Poland’s 38 million people have opted to leave home and seek their fortunes (more…) in the booming economies of the United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as Sweden. These three countries were the only EU member states to welcome the new Eastern European workforce with open arms in 2004, and it has paid off. The host nations estimate the labor injection has helped to keep inflation and wages in check and further boosted the economy. But while many of the young Poles are enjoying their new lives so much they want to put down roots, their native Poland has now decided it needs them back.

Doctors coming home

Something’s working out somewhere!
From the Straits Times on 21 Sep 2007

MORE foreign-trained doctors are flocking to Singapore, now that their medical degrees are recognised here.

Last year, it attracted 190 such doctors, including 39 Singaporeans returning here to work. This is a third more than the 138 who came here to work in 2005.

What’s home?

It’s a question we’ve been asking ourselves since the start of the project. I found one person’s perspective here. Well written. Can’t seem to figure out who the author is though. Here’s an excerpt of it:

To me what really endures is the opposite of national pride, what my friend Yakov referred endearing too as “local or neighborhood” pride – it’s the small diorama of everyday life which all of us are so familiar with. The little people who we come across day in and day out – the prata man who just knows I just like it crispy & crusty. The tea aunty who always makes it a point to ladle an extra scoop of sugar because she knows I have a sweet tooth. The girl next door who always manages a friendly smile because she knows that will make my day. The distant memory of my youth during NS, when I looked into the face of a boy officer who I just knew was as scared as me. We were lost and flailing yet, we were in it together, through thick and thin – and that was all that really mattered – it’s the small stuff that always sticks to me whenever I conjure the word “home”: what I call the “neighborhood pride” stuff where one person just rubs against another and it leaves enough residue to say, I am as much a part of you are a part of me and all that just adds up to make up a place where a man nurtures his sense of place and belonging to a community –that I guess is home, for me at least.

I am a Asian, Catholic, Chinese, a Singaporean, ACS boy who hails for the South and I live in a street where old people still call me “Ah Tee” and still expect me paint their rusty gates for $1 and a glass of Ribena, while they spend the evenings reminiscing about the past – and I am proud to belong to all these small little fragments of memories which really don’t add up too much – only they are very much part my identity as they are part of who I am before, now and probably tomorrow.

Craving out a place one called “home” is a way of making sense of where we are in relation to the broader community: a means of even validating the condition of what it means to be human: to the people we have known, to the events which have shaped our lives, and to shared memory. I am reminded when a sense of belonging is absent, our humanity diminishes and this is often followed by a sense of estrangement.

Here are a couple more entries about home:

Home, Where My Singapore is

Why I wish to come back

Discovered

Here’s an article from TODAY:

S’porean diaspora gathers in cyberspace

OS Portal has 9,000 users a year after launch

Friday • August 10, 2007

Derrick A Paulo
derrick@mediacorp.com.sg

THERE are hardly any Singaporeans in the faraway city of Bogota, Colombia.

Yet, Ms Kemmy Lim, the head of secondary at Colegio Gran Bretaña, an international school, managed to contact a fellow citizen there whom she never knew.

The first time they met, after chatting on the phone and online, Ms Lim went to her new friend’s place and was served four types of Singaporean curry: Egg curry, vegetarian curry, prawn curry and fish curry.

“Who could have asked for more??!!” she blogged, and decided to be the next host.

Stories like this are being repeated in both far-flung destinations and big, cosmopolitan cities as more Singaporeans live overseas.

The ripples of connections have grown, especially recently, due to a cyber hub that is making a splash.

The Overseas Singaporean Portal (OS Portal; at www.overseassingaporean.sg) is how Ms Lim and thousands of others are being “discovered”, wherever they are.

“Guess-timates” and Pyjamas

Wished I had the time and energy to always blog after every interview. But I don’t. So Here’s a 2-in-1 post.

We had a delightful meeting with officers from the Overseas Singaporean Unit on Friday. Despite having covered parliament and other government matters before, I must admit I was a little nervous as my group and I boarded lift to the 14th floor of the Ministry of National Development building. The OSU is afterall part of the Prime Minister’s Office. Lee Hsien Loong’s office leh!

My nerves were set at ease quite immediately when we met with the two ladies. They’re awfully nice, and I’m not saying this just because I want to get in their good books. They ARE nice and were very forthcoming with sharing information, some of which aren’t even exactly very official yet. We had a list of questions for them, they answered everyone of them. Among the most pertinent question was what exactly is the role of the Overseas Singaporean Unit. Yar, we know they help to keep Singaporeans overseas connected with each other and with other Singaporeans back home, but how do they do it, and what’s a day in the life of a OSU officer like?

So here 10 interesting things we found about them. (BTW, if you think I got this from a corporate brochure, you’re wrong. They don’t even have one. There hasn’t been time to do one they say, it’s barely 2 years since they “opened shop”):

• The Overseas Singaporean Unit is a secretariat. It does more coordination work than anything else. They engage with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Manpower and such.
• It is part of the PMO’s National Population Secretariat branch.
• One of their aims is to also bridge gaps that exist between the ministries Overseas Singaporeans would have to deal with. In simpler words, they are the one-stop center for information for Singaporeans who are preparing to return. They can help to coordinate between the Ministry of Education and say Immigration Authorities too.
• They are not a consular. Rather, they’re a counselor. (Sorry for that cheesey comparison, that popped in my head during the meeting). They provide the advice to help Singaporeans relocate when there a request for it.
• They don’t actively seek out Singaporeans overseas and try to persuade (or threaten) them to return home . They merely maintain links and act as a contact point.
• They don’t have official figures of how many Singaporeans there are overseas. There are only… guesstimates, as put by one of the officers. (You can imagine, I was straining my ears real hard to catch what she said. Guessti… what?) And then she went to explain: “We only have anecdotal evidence.” Numbers are only available when Singaporeans register themselves online on the e-register of a change in address. The Singapore Day in New York was a good example. Based on whatever data they had, they had only expected 600 people to turn up. 6000 turned up instead.
• They have no affiliation with any Singaporean Clubs overseas although they maintain good links with them.
• Officers at the OSU also go on ministerial visits.
• There are only 7 staff members at the OSU.
• The Overseas Singaporean Portal is not their corporate website. Their corporate info can be found here (and it sucks isn’t very informative)

So, indeed, it was a very fruitful meeting and e-mails flew that evening itself. We were put in touch with this guy called San Choo, who actually organises activities for this club we should have known existed. It’s called R.O.S.S. – Returned Overseas Singaporeans in Singapore! The only disappointing thing came out from the meeting was that the OSU couldn’t fund us. Admittedly, we weren’t quite expecting them to be able to anyway.

___________________

On Thursday, we met up with Jimmy Yap, a motivational speaker cum financial planner who had been in the UK for a long long long while (he left in the 1960s on an airline I never knew existed – British Caledonian – with merely 60 pounds in his socks) but eventually came back to Singapore, and boy was he an interesting character.

One statement he said gave me the quivers. “I don’t let the environment decide your fate, you be environment.”

One for the wish list

We do have a wishlist of people whom we want to interview and it’s growing by the day. Among them include local songbird Corrinne May whom has very kindly acceded to an e-mail interview. She’s among those in the music scene that feel that opportunities in the industry are still better abroad. But Corrinne never fails to return. In fact I found myself sitting beside her one day at Coffee Bean in Holland Village and one could have never guess she’s a singer who’s made it big in the U.S..

And here’s another one from the music scene. This one’s from the fine arts side of thing. Sharon had spotted an article in the Straits Times Life! Section yesterday and found a couple of Singaporeans who are returning from overseas to help run the new School of Arts Singapore, and that we should get in touch with her. Among them is Joyce Koh, who is returning home after 20 years overseas to head the school’s music department. She’s returning because she sense certain things in the arts scene back here in Singapore “buzzing now”. Not too sure what that means though. Hope to be able to get in touch with her soon. Her credentials are very, I must say, very impressive. Read on.

Here’s an excerpt from the Straits Times,

JOYCE KOH, 39, Head of Music

WITH her severe bobbed hairstyle, all- black ensemble and a rather cat-like glance, this composer, whose work has been described as ‘abstract’ and ‘uncompromising’, seems a picture of Parisian chic.

Joyce Koh has, after all, been based in the French capital for 20 years. Last year, she was appointed the composer-in-residence at the Ecole Nationale de Musique de Montbeliard and held a similar position at Germany’s Herrenhaus Edenkoben in 2004.

A graduate of King’s College University of London, the University of York and Paris’ Institute for Research and Co-ordination of Acoustics and Music, she started out playing classical music on the piano before venturing into experimental composition.

In her own words, she enjoys ‘exploring the texture, density and perceptibility of soundscapes. I allow the environment to nourish me’.

Married to Swedish composer Per Magnus Lindborg with a four-year-old daughter, she was persuaded to make the move back to Singapore because ‘I get the sense that things are buzzing now’.

She says: ‘There is no precedence of such an arts programme. I’m very glad I will be able to contribute and hopefully inspire the young people to take risks.’

In her view, there is a need to address the study of music differently.

‘It shouldn’t be about the Western tradition only, there should be a more investigative spirit

Ice Cream Chefs

Darren and Jeremy. Two awesome Singaporeans who have imported a very novel idea – ice cream mix ins – from Down Under.
Photos first, words later.

The Chinese Teacher who never really left

Three interviews, two days in a row. Here’s highlights from the first one.

There was a sense of anticipation as we went to meet our first interviewee – Esther Goh, a chinese teacher (and my mum’s colleague) who had spent 8 years in Canada but decided to return to Singapore to teach. I had stayed with her in Canada for almost 3 weeks while in Victoria for holiday with my parents but never really got to know her as a person too well.

So the interview was refreshing and heart warming.Coming back to Singapore and staying on was quite an accident she tells us. The plan was to only be back to attend a nephew’s wedding. While meeting up with some ex-colleagues, word came around that Singapore was in dire need of Chinese teachers. She playfully applied, not knowing that it would come to pass. So she left home in Canada, closing a cafe that she had opened earlier.

“My children knew I liked teaching, so they encouraged me to go back. They said they are big already and can take care of themselves,” Esther says. Esther has been home for almost 10 years since.Quite unlike the typical RS who’s eager to share their overseas experience, Esther says she doesn’t quite talk about her time in Canada unless being asked.”I won’t go eh my Canada how good ah, how bad…,” she says. She does inject some of her stories in her lessons to make them more lively though.

“I’ve not felt that people thought of me of hao lian. I think it’s the tone that you speak to people too,” she says. “If you go like oh, I’ve from Canda, and I’m smart then of course people will think that you are arrogant.”