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301 NavigatingTransnationalism: Immigration and Reconfigured Ethnicity ERIC C.THOMPSON AND ZHANG JUAN Tonkichi restaurant is situated on the fourth floor of Isetan, a Singapore branch of one of Japan’s largest international department stores. The facade evokes a Tokyo storefront with a wood-tile overhang above the entrance, red-dyed drapes screening the door, and a brightly lit window display of delicately arranged plastic sushi rolls and bowls of plastic ramen noodles . At midday on a Sunday, the restaurant is crowded with young families. The patrons order from a menu in English and Japanese. At various tables, customers converse with one another in Japanese and English, as well as Chinese and other languages. While waiting for their meals, some customers browse through one of several local Japanese-language newspapers available at the entrance. On a clear day, patrons of Tonkichi sitting by the long window opposite the entrance can look down over a bright, bustling intersection. Four stories down and catty-corner across the road, groups of women picnic in a large open green space adjacent to the Orchard Mass Rapid Transit station. The women share a variety of home-cooked Filipino dishes and snacks purchased from the nearby Lucky Plaza shopping mall. They laugh and joke with each other in Tagalog, Ilocano, and other Filipino dialects. Some call up friends on their mobile phones, inviting them to join the picnic at the Gulong-Gulong, the Filipino term they use to refer to this large grassy “rolling-rolling” patch of land. The dressed-up women are busy taking pictures of each other or recording videos of impromptu singing performances. Others play cards, with small bills furtively changing hands. While the vast majority of picnickers are women, a few men courteously accompany the groups and keep them entertained. Those who do not seem to have found any company hang out around the periphery of the field. Tonkichi restaurant and the Gulong-Gulong are located opposite each other across the intersection of Scotts Road and Orchard Road, at the heart of Singapore’s internationally renowned shopping district. They exemplify the spatiality and contours of Singapore’s evolving transnational ethnic landscape. The emergence of this new social landscape 26 302 ERIC C.THOMPSON AND ZHANG JUAN illustrates the interactions between the state’s governance guided by a neoliberal logic and migrant desires and practices in search of livelihoods. Neoliberal governance, as a form of state management, emphasises optimisation and flexibility; it is a way in which a state adjusts political and social spaces in response to the order of global capital.1 The Singaporean state has exemplified this kind of neoliberal governance since the 1990s, when the “survival” of the nation subtly shifted focus from ethnic harmony to economic excellence as the future of the nation became deeply intertwined with the processes of globalisation, and the competitiveness of the nation came to rely on the marketability of its inhabitants. In this essay, we consider two distinct but closely related features of Singapore in the last decade of the 20th century and early years of the 21st century. Both are related to the flow of migrants into and through the national territory and port city of Singapore. The first issue we discuss is the implications of these migrant flows for the governance of Singapore, which is simultaneously a nation-state and a transnational municipality. Second, we consider the implications of recent migration at a social level, in the reconfiguration of ethnic diversity in Singapore. While the first issue is primarily one of governance and the latter sociological, in practice each is bound up with the other. Governance, especially policies on immigration and citizenship, plays a large role in shaping the migrant flows that reconfigure Singaporean society, while a reconfigured society, especially in the context of transnational globalisation, requires the state to negotiate the competing demands of national and transnational populations. During the 1990s, Singapore grew from a population of three million to four million, despite having what the government construed as an alarmingly low, below-replacementlevel birth rate. By the turn of the century, nearly a fifth of the population was neither citizens nor permanent residents. During Goh Chok Tong’s years as prime minister, given the realities of globalisation, his administration had to balance the concerns of the nation with the practices of transnational municipal governance. Singapore’s status as a“global city” Sunday picnic near Lucky Plaza, 1998 [18.191.223.123] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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