To be Singaporean in Oxford is to exist in an odd space combining fierce national pride in some instances with second-hand embarrassment in others. We lament that taps in Oxford cannot dispense the potable, lukewarm water that ones in Singapore do, and that, unlike Singapore’s MRT, the Tube in London is a Wi-Fi black hole. The first time I went to Oxford Street in London, and the shops started closing at 6pm, I was flabbergasted: in Singapore, they close nearer to midnight.
But our material plenty belies a poverty of liberties. At the same time as we celebrate all these things, we find it hard to explain to our international schoolmates that, yes, sodomy is illegal in Singapore; that we sentence people to death for drug trafficking; that two years’ conscription for males is a fact of life in a country that has never been in any sort of war; and that our government recently arrested and charged a 16-year-old boy for uploading a profane YouTube video. And it belies how shackled we are by internalised inferiority with regard to race.
When I went back to Singapore for the summer, a friend invited me to participate in focus group discussions for some government statutory boards. The fee for each participant would be S$50 (£23) – but Caucasians, she told me, get S$75 as a matter of course. When I asked why, she ventured that the private companies that conduct such surveys “value Caucasians’ opinions more.” This example, though no doubt extreme, is symptomatic of attitudes towards race in Singapore.
Unlike most Asians in Oxford, Singaporeans speak English as their first language. It is a part of our culture that speaking English well denotes educational and social superiority. The problem is that it also often entails doing it in a Western, and preferably American accent. We are more self-conscious about accents in Singapore than perhaps anywhere else. Part of the reason for that is that, since we can to some extent alter our accents, or ‘code-switch,’ depending on our surroundings, the accents we adopt reflect more our personal choices and values than our origins.
It is a delicate balance that the Singaporean Oxonian straddles: speak authentically but possibly unclearly, or imitate as best we can the neutral ‘British’ accent that we perceive? There are no easy answers. Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, famously spoke thus of his experience reading law at Cambridge in the 1940s.
“In Singapore, you didn’t come across the white man so much. He was in a superior position. But there you are [in Britain] in a superior position meeting white men and white women in an inferior position, socially… They have to serve you and so on in the shops. And I saw no reason why they should be governing me; they’re not superior. I decided when I got back, I was going to put an end to this.”
He obviously did not believe the white man to be superior to him, and left Britain determined to secure independence for the then-colony. Yet he spoke in stilted Queen’s English during his student days, and retained its twang for the rest of his life.
