Pregnancy Week 38: Missing the Rallies

I waited 5 years to be part of the hype and excitment of election campaign rallies, and what happens? I am 37 weeks pregnant and ready to pop this baby out any time. I could not hoist myself off the couch, much less lumber to the Workers' Party rallies which I have been dying to attend for months.

And so it shall be, that I will have to just sit it out on my couch checking in on The Online Citizen for my updates and Facebook to exchange views with other interested members of our voting community. It has not been any less riveting or pulsating, for the online buzz seems to have multiplied a hundred-fold since the heady (but still censored) days of 2006.

Serangoon stadium, 2006

That's my friend Channi holding up the WP placard which I painstakingly made a few hours before the scene you see here in the picture. Over on the left, you would see my arm waving the "WP ROCKS" -- my tribute to LKY's dismissive opinion of the Opposition parties (that they were riff raff and "all that jazz").

There is something about youth that other age groups lack: a kind of invigorating verve, a wicked disregard or a streak of passion. The PAPies and the conservative stuffed shirts would say youth have too much time on their hands and so are given to such manic pastimes, it's immaturity at worst, rebellion at best.

On the contrary, youth have always (if history is correct) been the force of change, the harbinger of revolution. Today's youth are even savvier, more intelligent and thanks to the PAP government's policy ideology, more wired into the information age than ever before. Information is no longer sacred to any party and the SPREAD and reach of information has reached such wildfire frequency and proportions that unless you do a complete crackdown like the PRC or Egypt during their recent revolution, you cannot control anything that goes public.
This election will be electrifying not only because of the scandalous twists and foot-in-the-mouth turns. This election will be one with the highest stakes because the state-of-play is no longer under the control of the PAP which is still resorting to their outdated strategy of Dumbspeakisms and scare-tactics. Two factors are scaring them enough to shit bricks, in my opinion.

One: the Opposition parties have risen to the occasion and changed the gameplay. They are not only more organised and have fielded more capable, credible and charismatic candidates (pardon the alliteration), they have coordinated themselves to minimize 3-corner fights and above all, to mount a serious attack on the GRCs, which have been the PAP's weapon of defeating them. In sum, the opponents have become more strategic and the PAP has to now respond either with a cleverer strategy (which I don't yet see) or resort to some mudslinging (which we have seen already) and scare-mongering (also not new). Interestingly, retaliation and rebuttals have been swift and effective (see Wijeysingha v. Balakrishnan episode and WP v George Yeo's Aljunied remarks).

Two: There is a whole new generation of voters who have just come-of-age. These are the twenty-somethings who are plugged in and have no trouble getting information from sources other than the television and Straits Times. That should say enough. Add to the fact that this battle is now being waged very much in cyberspace, the Opposition parties have now given over 2 million voters the chance to exercise a choice this time -- a choice that has always been denied them the past 30 years. The fact that the electorate that will cast their vote this time is going to be the MAJORITY of the populace is in itself a watershed. That means no matter the outcome, the voteshare that the PAP will win (or lose) is going to be a national referendum on the people's confidence in them. Anything below 60% is going to be a national and global embarrassment.

I am on tenterhooks, I certainly am. There is so much at stake, and so many gameplays already in motion. People are stoked up, issues are being discussed for the first time out in the open and all kinds of propaganda and Dumbspeak is flying around. Once in 5 years, Singapore comes alive (and I don't mean in the F1 or National Day Parade way) but this time, I am confident, we will be making real political progress. We will either send the PAP back to Parliament with all 87 seats or we will lose a few ministers and shake up the decades-long stronghold they have had on absolute power.

Either outcome, the country will not wake up on 8 May feeling the same again.

"The Poor" are the new black

You can't imagine how tiresome it has been to read and hear the new candidates from the Papies repeat tirelessly their "interest in helping the poor".  It's been even more annoying having to read and hear the older stalwarts of the party extol each candidate's virtues, of which one is inevitably that he/she has a "humble background".

"Humble" and "poor" are the new black, people. It's the new name-tag that you find pinned to every statement the new candidates are making.

It is as if wearing these tags makes them somehow more appealing, more acceptable as representatives of the sizeable majority of the populace. The implied logic is two-fold: first, that these candidates are a testament to a successful meritocracy (their social and income mobility vis-a-vis their parents' is evidence of a system - education by and large - that works and should not be changed); second, that they are can appropriately understand the needs and "connect" with the general population they seek to represent.

I don't know about you, but I personally find these logix dubious.

First, how do the Papies define "the poor"? It's as if "the poor" is some inconvenient-but-large infestation problem that needs to be tended to every 4 or 5 years. You don't hear about "the poor" on a normal day when the stock market is being obsessed over, housing policies are being meticuloulsy disassembled and reassembled, and economic growth figures are screaming out of every headline and news segment. "The poor" has no face, they are some random figures that complain about inflation and cost of living and housing yet when the opposition party candidate gives a face to this "poor", he is accused of using anecdotal evidence and tugging on emotional heartstrings.

I don't know any "poor" person who isn't emotional about his or her poverty. Take the guy who gate-crashed a private birthday party 2 weeks ago and threw all the catered food on the floor because he couldn't stand that there was all this food lying there when all he had had that day was "a bowl of instant noodles." No, being poor is not something academic, or a theoretical concept of incomes to pooh-pooh minimum wage. It's being hungry, having kids who you know cannot  afford optimal nutrition or even the extra tutoring needed to pass the crazy Mathematics syllabus that their more well-off peers in the more well-off schools can.

Second, how do the Papies define "humble background"? When over 80% of the population resides in HDB (public) housing, it's a no-brainer to describe your candidates as having "grown up in a HDB flat". Hell, I grew up in a HDB flat but I wouldn't call myself having known poverty or having come from a humble background. Well, you say, their parents had relatively "humble" jobs and were not university graduates, goodness, some of them even had to WORK at their parents' "humble" businesses - one was a seamstress and another ran a food stall. So having started out like most Singaporeans at the average (or below average, I don't know, because this was never spelt out) income strata, these candidates can relate to the current strata of working class Singaporeans despite the fact that they are a clear tiny minority that got scholarships to ivy-league universities and then proceeded to enter the upper-middle class right after graduation.

I am puzzled. I make about the median income, my non-graduate parents lived in HDB until I was 15 and I now can afford to live in private housing and drive a Toyota. But I would NEVER claim to have had a "humble background" (since 90% of my parents' generation had similar backgrounds) and I would NEVER claim to know what it is like to be "poor". Truth is, I have NEVER been poor.

I define being "poor" as not having access to basic medical care, nutrition, education and most importantly, the ENVIRONMENT in which to get a quality education (one which the Papies constantly boast of) and opportunities so that I can replicate my parents' success. So I do not know poverty, I have never known poverty and I cannot claim to know who "the poor" are and the plight they face every day.

I do know that there are people who get basic medical care, food, a roof over their heads, education but lack the very environmental conditions to get a job to afford to purchase public housing, much less do better than their parents. These are the youth whose parents are mired in a poverty trap; they are the people above 40 and 60 who have either been laid-off or suffer wage stagnation because they have poorer education qualifications; they are the people who live on less than $1500 a month and have to stretch that to pay for food and utilities and a mortgage (or rent) to support a household of 5, 6 or more.

No, I don't know what poverty means even though I hear about them, read about them, and I sometimes deal with them in the course of my work. And if these Papie candidates grew up basically the same way that I did (with our "humble HDB-dweller-parents-who-didn't-make-a-lot-background"), what on earth qualifies them to be the best people to understand, serve and fight for "the poor"?

Knocking on doors and writing letters for "the poor" during Meet-The-People Sessions?
Oh, if the above were true, then PM Lee must retract his statement that there isn't enough "talent" to fill Singapore's leadership ranks, because many, many people can and have done just that.

Committment to volunteer work or your job (as in Puthucheary who defended his medical practice as a form of national service) is not committment to the welfare of "the poor". Start talking about "the poor" as real people, and start spelling out what you think is causing them to be "poor" and "poorer" and start saying what you believe can be done to alleviate the conditions of "the poor".

Confessions of an unconvinced voter

Something has been bothering me now that election season is upon the Land of Dumbspeak once again, and it is not the baby squirming uncannily every time I stuff myself with durian. Like anyone who has been keeping up with the blogosphere, local media and online political chatter, I have been gossiping and trading opinions with my coworkers and friends about the goings-on on the political front now that the polls are around the corner. However, it bothers me that politics has been conflated with governance -- or in the dumspeakism of the PAP, "good and strong government". Democracy, a concept not well-understood in our part of the world because, frankly, we don't talk about it much, has also been bandied about by pundits, opposers of the PAP and commentators with I think very little real comprehension by most of the populace.

Has the PAP really got a good grasp of the diversity of the populace? After all, the PM just said on live TV on the programme "Question Time With the PM" that the "PAP is not seeking to represent all sectors of soceiety" -- he claimed that that is what the NCMPs are in Parliament for.

Wow, that was totally underwhelming an answer for a leader whose justification for total parliamentary dominance by his party is the premise that this party alone could more than adequately "do a good job". That was the other riposte to the question of whether it was fair to penalise voters in Hougang and Potong Pasir who had sent two non-PAP MPs to parliament. The PM countered that if voters did not vote the PAP MPs if they "have been doing a good job" and instead vote the opposition party in, then "what's the point of doing a good job at all?"  My retort: how would you measure and assess how "good" a job the guy is doing? Shouldn't that assessment be made by the voter who goes to the polls?
As I listened to the questions posed and the answers given, I found myself frowning at the same tired Dumbspeak premised on very faulty logic -- such as the apology for the difficulty in discovering and enticing "talented" and "capable" people from the private sector to join politics: people are reluctant to risk "failing" at politics if they are successful in their careers. My retort: this argument assumes that it is in most people's nature (I don't know about non Singaporeans) to be risk-averse and second, that politics is being compared to another career choice rather than a form of service to the nation, a higher calling if you like. Laughable, if you recall that the senior PAP stalwarts repeating incessantly that "commitment" to service is one of the golden criteria necessary for their newest slate of talented candidates.

My second retort: maybe the PAP finds may indeed be risk-averse, perhaps the promise of a high salary (I would say $15,000 for an MP is high, wouldn't you?) and prospect of a nice pension is a justifiable mitigator of such risks, but even if you accept this premise, how would you explain the fact that many members of Opposition parties have joined and remained in politics in spite of the LACK of success they have met with? They cannot be in it for the money (some are bankrupt) and they couldn't possibly all be crazy. Could it be that there are actually people who do this not because they want to "succeed" in the banal sense of economic gain but because they actually have a PASSION for leading and a committment -- yes, the very quality the PAP purports lies within their newest batch of untested interns -- to service? I could be wrong.

Now, I ask a question of myself and of my fellow Singaporeans. Do we know the difference between politics, the democratic process and governance? Political debate has been confined during many rounds of elections to a defence of policies centering on bread-and-butter issues like cost of living, transportation and housing. This is not to say they aren't relevant, but these are issues of governance. The incumbents would defend their work as "good governance" by defending these policies against the opposing parties' criticisms while the democratic process has been until now largely untouched. This time people are asking questions about the process, questioning if there is enough "space" for real debate in Parliament, criticising what they call "group think". I am heartened by this, it's a lot more than what we've seen in the last two elections, both of which I had had the privilege to vote in.

I believe that understanding the different segments of society -- the aged, the middle class, the young professionals, the working class, the youth, the business sector -- and how they judge good governance would tell you a lot about how people will vote this time around, now that many more voters will get the rare opportunity to go to the polls and exercise that "democratic" right and that a larger proportion of the electorate would actually be discerning and intelligent (read: they won't vote out of fear or ignorance, a feature of those born before 1965).  It would mean the difference between those who will cast a vote in protest (anyone but the incumbent party), or according to their self-interest (which party promises to represent and promote my interests), or on principle (who would do the best job of governing).

I myself am curious as to how I am going to vote this time around, why, because I care. I care about the state of my country, its citizens (particularly the lower strata since they are more vulnerable to bad governance and policies) and the people who are installed in power to run the country. I care about these things on any normal day, just ask my friends who have had to listen to me defend our death penalty, welfare policies against those in their Western, "liberal" home countries.

I work for the government, so I can say I serve the people and I am not necessarily pro- or against the PAP. I believe in understanding an issue as well as possible before vilifying any policy and if I think something does not stand up to critical scrutiny, I call it like it is, a spade is a spade. I am also not someone with a chip on my shoulder, in fact I have said in earlier posts how satisfied I am with my life, so I do not speak from a position of relative deprivation or resentment against the establishment. I have a job I can't complain much about, a husband who's a decent catch and under 35 (sorry, couldn't resist that jab at you-know-who), a baby on the way and no major psychological problems afflicting me.

I am however, waiting to be convinced that the incumbents are the best bet for good governance and fair play. The reason is because good governance is hard to come by, and equitable distribution as well as social justice is how I assess good governance. I would ask myself if it is fair that the population has to pay such a high price (read: salary) for so-called "good governance". I would elaborate on this more in another post. But for the other factor, that of fair play in the democratic process, I have yet to experience a Parliament that is not ridiculously skewed towards dominance of one party. I remain unconvinced that this is the best model simply because the status quo is the "best" we can get. One cannot validly dismiss the abilities of the other parties to deliver should they get a shot at governance, this would be crystal-ball gazing, and very arrogant gazing to boot. So the arguments have thus far been underwhelmingly trite and completely unconvincing.

As Jack Neo put it succinctly, I Not Stupid. You've got to do better.

Project Baby Week 35: Pain Pain Pain

On Sunday I felt a squeezing contraction in my lower pelvis. It felt like a ring of pain and gave me a lower back ache which was really strange because I had just had my 1 hour pre-natal massage. The squeezing continued after our ramen lunch and I winced all the way home and through the next half hour or so. I timed the intervals and it was an irregular 13 minutes apart.

Then just as suddenly as it began, the pain vanished.

I was bemused. Baby had been making quite a few movements during this time, and I wondered if he was okay in there. The pain was not unlike severe period cramps and I felt the baby making some dropping movements. It is hard to describe but it was clear to me that something was going on. The next day, I inspected my belly and to my amazement it looked like the baby had gone down a few centimetres. I hollered at Daniel to have a look, and he also agreed that the belly had dropped a little lower.  On top of that, I now had a constant ache in my pelvis, the part between my hip bones which I am still experiencing. It feels like I am wearing underwear 3 sizes too small for me with the elastic cutting into my skin. Walking is a literal pain.

With a little research, I realized that the pelvic pain is likely from the baby dropping lower into my pelvis. This could explain the contractions I had on Sunday, which was probably the uterus squeezing him downward. It's amazing. I am now living with a constant low-grade pain but it's rather worth it to know that Baby's on his way.

Sylvia Lim's Parliament Speech on Ministers' Salaries in 2007

Bravo.

There were some very good arguments in her speech, she also rebutted some of the senior Papies' justifications of their high salaries. I will post a summary later.

Project Baby Week 34 & 1 Day: It's a Partnership

Meet Dion Krause, firstborn son of our friends, Andreas and Loping. He was born in early March and is a perfect image of cuteness and poop. Daniel got to practise on him directly after prenatal class and found it much more satisfying than holding and burping a doll.

Here are the proud parents, deftly giving Dion a diaper change in 5 minutes, in the middle of a carpark in Little India to boot. It was our first time out to dinner with a 1-month old baby, and it was quite an eye-opener. Our friends are typically European (or Western, whichever way you like to call it): they see no problem in taking a tiny newborn out to the mall or to public places. Whereas for me (call me Asian or kiasi, or crazy) the thought of a mall teeming with germ-infested people fills me with horror, not to mention a baby shrieking in a restaurant.  It's not just the hassle of having to take turns to eat or having Daniel cut my food up while I juggle the baby, I am patently aware of the social code governing acceptable behaviour in restaurants which does not include a couple with a yelling baby. Luckily Dion only yelled for 5 to 10 minutes before a pacifier and Loping's reassuring rocking soothed him. She, of course, had to eat her lamb shank with one hand, but thank goodness for the tenderly-cooked lamb and a helpful Andreas.

Then it was off to the pub at the nearby arts college. There was a band playing and it must have been as noisy as any pub could've been, but Dion slept like, well, a baby after he had his feed. We were impressed. Women certainly were made for multi-tasking.

This is me barely stuffed into my old bikini. 

As for me, I surely hope that I will be as adept at multitasking and keeping my cool as our friends. Two pairs of hands (and heads) are better than one, and raising babies as a partnership really has its merits, especially when you are bleeding like a stuck pig the first two weeks and being milked like a cow 24/7. Even though Daniel and I cannot get along in the kitchen or agree on the chores, or even how we're going to deal with some aspects of raising this baby, I think we will be fine.  In for a penny, in for a pound.

Project Baby Week 34: The Labour Prep

We are into our 34th week of pregnancy and boy, are things moving along.  I am as big as a house, and moving from point A to B feels like a major event that includes grunting, groaning and very slow steps.  Baby's head has moved lower towards my cervix and it's definitely past the placenta, as the Doc showed us on the screen. The good news is this makes it easier to have a natural birth. Bad news is it's irritating my bladder so I have to walk gingerly so as not to have an accidental leak.

We've been attending prenatal classes religiously. Daniel even cancelled his football game with ze Germans today, of course, only after getting a heavy lecture from me about his priorities. On a scale of 1 to 10 on squeamishness vs. machismo, I would rate him 1.5. The look of appallation on his face during last week's birth video was priceless. He looked like he was going to pass out right there.  I have to forget about him cutting the cord after all. He is still thinking of how to get out of being in the delivery room, but the only way out is if I need an emergency C-section, and I am having none of that.

I've done some research, reading online and talking to my friends who have been through this ordeal. The one thing I can be certain about labour - when it eventually comes - is that no two women will experience it the same way.  I'll have to be prepared for a plethora of scenarios, from dilation issues to amniotic fluid issues (if the baby defecates inside before I've dilated enough for him to be delivered, I'll need a c-section).  But I am convinced that there are some things I CAN do to help myself have a smooth labour.

Most people I've spoken to who have had uncomplicated natural births did some kind of physical exercise during pregnancy, this included my Mum who got me out in 2 hours without pain relief. So I've started swimming in our pool and I found it really helps with my aches and pains. Plus it's really nice to be able to be on my stomach after over 2 months of sleeping on my side. I'm mentally prepared for all the things that could "go wrong" - you might say knowing too much just adds to the stress and fear. On the contrary, the more I know about the process and what could happen, the calmer I feel about going through it. The prenatal class on the labour process was really a big help in that they give you information about everything from the drugs you could have for pain management to what happens during a C-section (gory video included).

It also helps when you have a partner who's willing to be there with you all the way. I am sure I would be a complete basket case if I had to do this alone. Daniel will take 2 weeks off work to be with me and Julien when he is born and then stay home 3 days a week after that till Julien is a month old. Now all we need is a good contingency plan for if I go into labour in the office!