Serangoon Gardens: Who's Afraid of the Dark Man?

For those who recall the debacle some weeks ago, you will know what I mean when I say Serangoon Gardens. For those who don't, it's a cosy little neighbourhood with mainly houses, tucked away in a north east corner of the island. Population of a few thousand, a hefty number of Caucasian expatriate families and the rest middle-class Singaporeans.

The government announced that they would convert an abandoned school building into a dormitory for foreign workers.

Out came the alarm bells, shrill and insistent.

A petition went around and a few thousand signatures were collected in protest against the proposed building. Congestion! Crime! Noise! Crime!
Did I already say crime?

They came from all corners of the neighbourhood, up in arms, giving their MP a barrage a excuses -- i mean reasons -- why this plan should be shelved.

I watched and read the opinions flying fast and furiously in the newspaper, and I waited to make sure that the government listened, responded and then go ahead with the plan anyway. I mean come on, these days, it requires a lot more skill to be unpredictable, but I had every confidence that the plan would go through. What I have to give the authorities credit for is how deftly they handled everything, even the most ludicrous and offensive criticisms were met by a patient, almost placating response that was near to conciliatory.

What's my opinion? At first, I considered how I would respond if my nice, middle-class housing estate were to accomodate a few hundred (I am not sure if it's a few hundred or a higher figure) People of Foreign Nationality. My first vision was that of seeing People of Another Race camping out on my neighbourhood playgrounds, maybe small groups of them squatting on the grass in the small park, a couple more arm in arm crowding at the already congested Chomp Chomp food center.

Answer: I see dark people everywhere.

And that is basically all that the Serangoon Gardens residents see. I hope you realise I am using the work "dark" facetiously, that I am really sarcastically making fun of the xenophobia that this particular neighbourhood of Singaporeans had been openly displaying online, on the national newspaper and in public.

I think before the Government arrests any more people for hurling racist remarks pertaining to Persons of Non Chinese race on their blogs, they should examine the prejudice that was blatantly displayed without proper censure and censorship in the past month. Some of the responses I noted on the Straits Times Forum included:

(1) Caging up Persons of Other Nationalities like we do to Animals or Criminals:
Someone suggested building a fence around the proposed dormitory so that the Persons of Other Nationality living inside would not be able to come outside. If you can't get rid of them, put them in a cage. That way, every one feels safer.

(2) Segregating Persons of Other Nationalities so we can Keep Our Neighbourhood Pure:
Someone suggested in an earlier letter that dormitories should be build in some outlying part of the island, but with infrastructure and facilities like shops and food outlets, making it a "town within a town". How nice to think of the convenience of the foreigners we employ to develop our post-industrial nation. I am reminded of the Native American "settlements".

(3) Imposing restrictions on the movements of Persons of Other Nationalities
Someone else called for the police to set limits on where the workers in the dormitory should be allowed to walk, which places they could patronise, in the interests of the "safety" of the elderly and children of Serangoon Gardens. All I could see after reading that was the Star of David arm band the Nazis forced the Jews to wear in Nazi Germany.

In the space of a few weeks, we had Nazi sentiments, apartheid sentiments and clearly racist and exclusionist sentiments EXPRESSED IN THE NATIONAL PAPER and nobody, not ONE SINGLE PERSON wrote in response to point this out. Personal anecdotes were flying everywhere each day about someone's car being smashed and its cashcard stolen; someone's domestic helper (we call them "maids" in Singapore) was seen interacting with a Person of Other Nationality in a clandestine fashion; urine and abandoned beer bottles greet residents living near Farrer Park each morning, a present left obviously by Persons of Other Nationalities.

Some people blame the "lack of mutual cultural understanding" on both sides, Singaporean and Foreign, for such conflicts. I disagree. We have 5000 Germans living among us, and a few hundred thousand more White People, and I see no lack of cultural understanding on the part of Singaporeans toward their fairer skinned neighbours. I haven't heard anyone complaining that we should send our British and French employment pass holders to learn the social and cultural norms of Singapore.

It's not race, it's class stupid.
Imagine putting 1000 German men in the Burghley Drive dormitory. Imagine that these 1000 German men bathe together, eat together, sleep together and every morning they get on 30 lorries and go to the various construction sites. At night they gather at the parks in their small groups to converse, drink their beer (Germans love their beer) and perhaps barbeque some bratwursts every now and then. They have no airconditioning, so it's bloody hot, and they walk around shirtless and hairy. Germans have their opinions too, and they have a sense of humour in spite of popular stereotypes, so they make a bit of noise when they get together after a long, smelly hard day under the scorching sun.

What will you do in Serangoon Gardens? Will you think the German workers are going to rob your houses, have sexual relations with your domestic helpers (we call them 'maids" in Singapore) and threaten your mother-in-law?

Singaporeans fear the Dark Man a lot more than the White Man, and it has more to do with class than colour. Because of class, they see the Dark Man everywhere, because of what the Dark Man does, Singaporeans see them in the most unflattering ways: living in squalor, living in close quarters like animals in a barn, they have no where to go to do their "leisure" activities but in the small confines of the space they are allowed to exist in. And so they are exposed like puppets on a stage. We can see them, and so we can point at them and make judgments about them.

The White Man lives among us, he works among us, he eats among us, he partakes in his leisure among us. He is free to go anywhere, he does not have to live his entire life among other White Men in Little Europe or Little America. We don't point because we think he is like us and we are like him. Nothing special. (SPGs might defer, but that is another matter) It doesn't help that in our collectively short memories, we remember the White Men being our authority figures, we remember how they strutted about in their white linen shirts in their large bungalows and dining in candlelight at the most expensive and exclusive establishments.

Because of the nobility of that class, we have always associated the White Man with the upper class, but we forget that the Yellow Man was the man in the street, the rickshaw puller, the street hawker, the construction worker. Today we all think we are White because we live almost like the middle class postcolonial and we all ASPIRE to BE that middle class postcolonial.

I think Singaporeans are a lot more racist 40 years after the "race riots" of our post-Independent years than we ever were before. We don't talk about it because we aren't allowed to. The only people who need educating are Singaporeans, not the Persons of Other Nationalities who come here to work on our construction sites. I won't say that I am completely free of prejudice, being a middle class SIngaporean myself, but at least when i have a prejudiced thought, I stop to think about it before I speak. And it is truly ironic that only when people have to co-exist side by side with what they find foreign, and in large numbers, that their prejudices rise to the fore. Xenophobia is nothing but a defensive response to perceived danger borne out of prejudiced fear.