Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus

5 The End of Identity?

5 5 THE END OF THE END OF IDENTITY? IDENTITY? Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh China-born Singapore citizen Feng Tian Wei’s Olympic table tennis bronze medal in 2012 sparked an outcry. Many Singaporeans expressed the view that they feel no sense of pride about the country’s first individual Olympic medal in four decades. What then does it mean to be a “true” Singaporean?1 Yet the issue is not so much that Ms Feng has failed to integrate into Singapore. It is that many people who grew up in Singapore have failed to integrate into Ms Feng’s Singapore—the Singapore of the future. They cling to a romantic notion of national identity that is now passé. For better or worse, the era of Singaporean national identity, the one that our founding fathers tried to establish, is fading. From Birth, an Artificial Nation In many countries, national identity develops from a common tribal base, whether stemming from ethnicity, as in Japan, or religion, as in Pakistan. In some other countries, national identity is nurtured through a shared values system, for example, freedom and opportunity in the United States. On 9 August 1965, Singapore had neither. “Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence . Singapore had independence thrust upon it,” says Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, in his memoirs. “How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and several other parts of Asia?” As Mr Lee says, most modern states are the products of a drive to self-determination from a nation of people. Singapore’s genesis occurred in reverse: a state was born, and then a nation had to be artificially created. Singapore hence tried to establish a polyglot tribal base as well as a shared values system. The polyglot Singapore tribe comprises Chinese, Indians, and Malays, who speak English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, and worship at temples, mosques, and churches. Other dialects (e.g., Hindi) and religions (e.g., Zoroastrianism) that might belong to these three main groups in their homelands were occasionally tolerated, but sometimes, as in the case of Chinese dialects, actively suppressed. Meanwhile, almost every other person from outside this polyglot tribe was welcomed into the new Singapore of 1965, but was stuck with the rather uncharitable, amorphous label of “Others”. When Singaporeans first receive an identity card, which states one’s ethnicity, at age 12, we huddle and swap them around with our friends, poking fun at unflattering photographs and pontificating about exactly where young Mr/Ms “Others” is from. The message to “Others” has always been clear: please stay, but do remember that you are different from us. In other words, in Singapore the notion of a polyglot tribe evolved based on the so-called “CMIO” (Chinese-Malay-India-Others) model. By its very definition, the “C”, “M”, and “I” are part of the core, and the “O” on the outside. According to Ang and Stratton, “Singapore invests enormously in the official validation of the three separate reified Chinese, Malaya, and Indian cultures (the “Others” category, often designated as “Eurasian”, is generally ignored), as it is through these three “Asian 60 THE END OF IDENTITY? high cultures” that Singapore aims to forge its unique and quintessential multiracial Asianness.”2 To be clear, the government conceived the CMIO model as an administrative tool of governance, not as a pillar of an idealised Singaporean identity. Indeed, Singapore has always attempted to promote a broad multiculturalism—or “multiracialism”, as it has been called. However, given the CMIO classification’s sustained adoption in numerous spheres of everyday life, it has become indelibly linked to notions of what it means to be Singaporean. Sociologist Chua Beng Huat has argued, “One can examine any sphere of cultural endeavour, from theatre to television drama to everyday handling of items like food and clothes, and discover the encoding of the CMIO scheme.”3 Defining a Singaporean: Poetry, Pragmatism, and Patois Singapore also ingrained a common set of values in people: hard work, tolerance, the importance of meritocracy, and the belief in pragmatism both in day-to-day behaviour and national policies. These values were born out of the sense of crisis and vulnerability that first emerged during that period, and were seen as appropriate responses to ensure the survival of the nation. Moreover, the ideals of multiculturalism and meritocracy, in particular , must be viewed in...