The Binding Tie: Chinese Intergenerational Relations in Modern Singapore

Notes

notes prologue 1. Hokkien is the largest Chinese dialect group in Singapore. Dialect belonging , however, is officially determined by paternal descent and does not reveal to what extent the person actually speaks the dialect. 2. The Protestant congregations, on the other hand, encourage isolated conversion of young people. introduction: challenges to family ties 1. It is of interest that visitors from China often express the opposite perception , that Chinese culture in Singapore is more traditional than in China itself. This perception is by no means inadequate since many religious practices that were wiped out in the early communist era have lingered on in Chinese communities overseas. Another factor at play is Singapore’s heritage of an immigrant society. The detachment from a “homeland” appears to transport cultural practices to an explicit level precisely because they are not taken for granted anymore, which spurs more conscious efforts to “keep” traditions alive in the new country. 2. Meanwhile, Singapore’s total population (i.e., residents and nonresidents) amounted to almost 4.5 million in 2006 (Singapore Department of Statistics). 3. The strong influence of the PAP government is reflected in their effective implementation of new policies and legislation. It is necessary to emphasize that some of the policies and/or legislation discussed in this study might subsequently have been changed or even been discarded. 4. Mead (1970) makes a distinction between intergenerational relations in three different types of cultures. A postfigurative culture, typical of nonindustrial and small-scale societies, is characterized by slow social change and a senioritybased structure. A cofigurative culture, by contrast, emerges with rapid social change and movement causing intergenerational discontinuities. Since the experience of the young generation is fundamentally different from that of their forebears, they primarily learn from, and identify with, their peers instead of older members of society. In Mead’s view, however, a cofigurative culture is not sustainable and has to be replaced with a prefigurative culture, where young people acquire authority to guide the elders. In a prefigurative culture the generational divide is bridged by the acceptance on the part of adults to learn from children. 5. The term “sandwich generation” should not be confused with “sandwich class.” In Hong Kong sandwich class has been used with reference to residents who are not earning enough to live comfortably, but not poor enough to qualify for state subsidies. 6. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, though they did not agree on all accounts, saw the social contract as a voluntary agreement between the state and the people (Boucher and Kelly 1994). 7. Confucius lived around 551 B.C.–479 B.C. Confucianism became established as state ideology in China in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.), and even up to the early twentieth century, a basic Chinese education consisted by and large of Confucian teachings, such as the Classic of Filial Piety, the Juvenile Instruction and the Twenty-Four Filials. 8. I shall make no attempt to analyze the conceptual and practical difference between contracts in the West and in China, although it is clear that they are not wholly equivalent (see Cohen 2005, 252–257). 9. Gates (1987) also briefly notes the occurrence of such contracts in her ethnographic accounts of money offerings and funeral rituals in Taiwan. In addition to burning huge amounts of spirit money, the rituals include burning duplicate copies of a contract between the deceased and the treasury officer of the netherworld (ibid., 268). 10. It should be noted that family division contracts still exist in China. Despite the fact that sons’ and daughters’ equal rights to inheritance, as well as equal responsibility for aged parents, is legally recognized by the modern Communist state, daughters are usually excluded from family division contracts. Still, daughters bear a substantial portion of the burden of parental support (Miller 2004). 11. In an informative study of Chinese social relationships, Mayfair Yang (1995) illuminates how the significance of guanxi (personal connections) has intensified in the People’s Republic of China over the past decades as it became a means for people to defuse the regulations and restrictions imposed by the redistributive economy of the socialist regime. Singapore is not a socialist state, and, unlike mainland Chinese, Singaporean Chinese seldom talk about guanxi. Nevertheless, social relationships, including intergenerational relations, are in practice very much governed by sentiments of indebtedness and repayment. 12. Mauss himself, to be fair, recognized that gift relations to some degree linger on in modern capitalist societies, even if they do not...