Away From The Toxic Playground

Of course I'm talking about Singapore, lah!

After giving much thought to the content of my very first post after a 2 year hiatus from writing anything else besides internal emails and shopping lists, I've decided to talk about the answer to a question that I've been asked by several people: What has changed?

I have changed.

FROM TOXIC PLAYGROUND TO TOXIC REALITY

To be sure, no one remains definitively the same from moment to moment, or year to year for you skeptics out there. Imagine an emotionally high-strung person (such as myself), we swing from mood to mood in a single morning, and emotions, which drive decision-making, create the multiple realities that we experience in a single day. I might be calmly drinking my coffee and having breakfast with Ju thinking what a blissful time I am having despite being a weekday single Mum (more on this below); 15 minutes later I am sitting in my car stuck in a gridlock between my apartment and Ju's school (it is a 4 minute drive) cursing the Brussels traffic system, the gold standard of Belgian  government inefficiency. 

Chateau de la Hulpe, Autumn 2014

When people in Kuala Lumpur sympathise with me for having moved here from Brussels, I inform them wryly -- to looks of astonishment and disbelief -- that life in Malaysia is not much worse than that in Belgium. The same uncontrollable traffic snarls, the same ISIS types lurking in the vicinity, in fact the weather here is preferable and with the lower cost of living I get more bang for my buck. 

Daniel thinks that when your expectations are not matched by reality, your subjective judgment of how good a place is to live in fares more poorly. This is especially true for Brussels, a place most people mistakenly imagine as a First World city. Being included in the same continent as Germany, I am sorry to say, does not help foreign visitors at all when it comes to first impressions. The phrases "rude shock", and "utter disappointment" sum up one's experience more aptly, particularly if one has to live there. In fact I have never seen my former boss show more emotion than his sighs of resignation when he is talking about the Belgian state. In fact my boss had about a total of 6 facial expressions and 4 of them were of resignation with how things were run over there. Oh, one is eye-rolling, we did a lot of that in Brussels. No wonder Singapore is warmly labelled "Asia for Beginners" by Western visitors. The opposite logic holds true for Singapore and Southeast Asia. 

But this isn't a smackdown of Brussels, I've done enough of that on Facebook and with friends over the last almost 2 years living there. Away from the toxic playground of Singapore (also poorly-nicknamed "Disneyland with the death penalty"), I was able to think about ideas I had long taken for granted living in one place for over 30 years. Living in Brussels then Kuala Lumpur, I was forced to examine my ethnocentric views* and most important of all, take stock of my own flaws. 

I changed in small and monumental ways. I had to make changes to my beliefs, and then to my behaviour, which were really adaptive responses to the external stimuli that I was experiencing and the challenges that threw me off kilter. It was not only about the places we were in. It was about the choices we made and the attitudes we chose to use in making our choices. Singapore feels toxic because of the many taken-for-granted axioms that its citizens go around with about the country, which can be summed up in the following adjectives: convenient, safe, orderly, efficient, predictable, comfortable. Away from these safety nets and devoid of familiar friends and family, one has to evolve a new set of mechanisms with which to manage the tasks of daily life. You never really get to grow in your thoughts and beliefs because they are hardly ever challenged in the uber-comfort zone that's Singapore.

SLOWING DOWN

I realised that the biggest gain I had made away from the sanctuary of a well-planned state was to Slow Down. This was as much an adaptive response (because it is necessary when everything shuts down on a Sunday, your entire staff are out the door at 5 sharp every day, and the check-out counters at every Carrefour are designed for the patience of people aged 50 and over) as it was a personal choice.

I slowed down when it came to Getting Things Done. First discovery -- I could be as efficient as I wanted, finish as much as I could, but I couldn't get anyone else to work on my time schedule or fit themselves into my deadlines. Getting things done depends entirely on the 10 or so people you rely on to finish the damn task. Second discovery -- it's not about how quickly you get it done, it's how many mistakes you avoided. We love being the fastest and the first in Singapore don't we? But when things seriously cock up, thumbs get stuck up asses and fingers pointed more quickly than it took to build the Marina Bay Sands. I had to really push out the Big Picture Ending in many cases in order to  zoom into the tiny details we all hate to "waste time" over. I had to oversee and check on the people who were helping me (in other words "supervise") just to prevent little preventable errors. It could be a matter of minutes scanning through a quotation and finding a small detail in calculation (that blew up into a long and costly battle 2 months later); or reading a 5 page contract for a line that would come back to bite you. It would be easy blaming the staff for not doing their due diligence, an excuse we like to trot out, but as we also say, it was my neck on the chopping block. 

Koblenz, Spring 2014

I slowed down to live life. No, there were not that many roses to smell (nor time to smell them) on the dirty, dog-poo littered streets of Brussels, but Europeans are generally happier in large-scale surveys compared to us islanders, and there's a good reason for it. Besides forming the new habit of sorting my trash (I actually found it therapeutic to sort my garbage into the 3 trashcans in my kitchen) and rushing for shopping on Saturday before the supermarkets closed, we learnt to use those sacred weekends to do something other than retail shopping and eating at new restaurants. It was enjoyable to simply bask under a rare spring sun on the grass of the Bois de la Cambre (they let their dogs shit everywhere except the park) while Ju cycled along the Sunday car-free lanes that wind through the expansive park in the middle of the city. We could spend a slow morning at one of the outdoor markets, meandering through the stalls buying our supply of French saucissons (dried sausages), olives and my favourite fresh chicken innards, or an afternoon at Brussels' popular Tram Museum riding a vintage tram through the woods of Terveuren. 

Brugges, Autumn 2014

Oh yes, Europe can be an inefficient mess with most  of the bureaucracy (wait till you hear how I dealt with my export taxes on my car), but it doesn't cost much to be happy, if your idea of happiness is the simple joy of watching your kid build a sandcastle, eat an ice cream or take walks through old cobblestone streets and sip wine in the evenings as the sun set at bedtime in summer. Since we had no babysitter, we took Ju with us everywhere. Ju at 3 and a half years could sit quietly at a restaurant through dinner without much drama. 

I slowed down most of all in the way I viewed the world and its inhabitants. I had been cussing and swearing in frustration while driving my entire adult life. After moving to Belgium and Malaysia, I wondered why on earth I had found it necessary to complain about Singapore roads and traffic. There IS NO TRAFFIC in Singapore. What you would call a jam is a minor congestion in KL or Brussels. While the proportion of idiots driving in KL is certainly larger than that in Singapore (by simple fact that there is no pricing control on automobiles or prohibitive road-use taxes in Malaysia), the level of road courtesy here is miles apart from that found in Singapore. In fact I would go so far as to say you should not expect any sort of courtesy from Singapore drivers. It's as if the rat race which they view as symbolic of their lives permeates the manner in which they react to those who jostle with them on the roads. Malaysians are terribly patient about things they cannot change: rush hour congestion, people cutting into their queue and taxi-drivers who mostly drive as if they are drunk or high on drugs. I had to learn the same. There is no other way to live without going insane in KL. 

MAKING CHOICES

The biggest change I had to make was to decide what kind of mother and employee I wanted to be. Daniel had taken a job that moved him to Hamburg so I was home alone with Ju on weekdays while Daniel would visit us on weekends from Germany. Even with a part-time nanny who looked after Ju after school till I got home, it was never lost on me how I was juggling two roles by myself and how heavy this responsibility was. While every one of my Singaporean colleagues (who were childless) worked past 7 or 8pm, I left at 6pm, 6.30pm latest every day to go home to my son. In Singapore, I hardly ever worked late even with Daniel around all the time, but in Brussels I was Ju's only constant parent most days and I simply could not arrange my son around my workload, which was in fact endless. I often drove three hours with Ju on weekends over the border to Germany so he could spend time with the grandparents or Daniel when he was in the western areas of Stuttgart or Freiburg. Planning our family meetings became as normal as planning my calendar of work events. It was not normal, and the toll only showed itself when Daniel was offered a posting to Malaysia. 

And so here I am now, fast forwarding to the present. I no longer work for my previous company, a choice I didn't make without pretty heavy soul searching. The time away in Brussels gave me an insight into changing the way I used to think and behave, about time, about parenting, about what quality of life means. And the time now in Kuala Lumpur has given me a much-needed pause to reflect upon the direction of my future: how my thoughts have changed, how I choose and decide on a daily basis, be it my behaviour, my emotions or my health. It is ironic that you feel your responsibility most acutely only when you have ultimate freedom with which to use your time each day. 

Hamburg, Summer 2014

You will have  probably noticed that I have dealt quite effectively with my decision to quit my job. My current vocation? On Sabbatical. One of the most toxic parts of life as a Singaporean is the norm that one needs to label how one spends her hours between 9 and 5. I certainly do not Stay At Home even though I am only called "Mum" now rather than "Boss". After all that I have gone through, I can safely say that the people who couldn't understand my decision and who asked me the rather condescending "are you just going to be a full time mum?" might never see a perspective beyond their prescribed roles within their organization or chosen profession. 

Finally, I could describe my life now as something akin to recovery in a mental health spa retreat. While Ju is in school, I am doing the things that fulfil only the needs of my own physical and mental health: swimming, reading, playing the piano, thinking. Yes, it sounds like a luxury only the moderately well-off might afford, but it's not true.  Daniel and most Type A personalities, even many of the Type Bs, who likely only see the inside of a swimming pool while on holiday in Bali would find my life now quite aversive ("but, but...what do you DO with your time?!"). 

We all have to do the same things with our limited time -- learn something new and be a better person (oops, if you disagreed with that, then just skip to the end of the paragraph). Making a living, carving out your career, bringing up your children or taking care of your parents,  finding self-fulfilment, these are choices that are laced with preferences, mostly culture bound to where you grew up and formed most of your identity. At their most fundamental, they mean nothing more than or as much as the next person's choice. How toxic you wish each aspect of life to be depends on the importance you place on a choice. I guess Singapore is about as toxic as the next city, the next country. We each create the reality that we are a part of and the meaning that's in it. It wasn't easy digging myself out of my old attitudes and changing my view of the world. 

Life is about as meaningful as you want it to be, whether you're in Singapore, Europe, Malaysia, being gainfully employed or bumming like a low-maintenance tai-tai. 

*  *  *  *  *

*Ethnocentrism refers to the belief in the superiority of one's own culture or cultural practices and beliefs. It also describes the negative appraisal of foreign cultures against the yardstick of one's own.

Moving To Belgium

The title says it all. When I told our close friends C and G that we had something to announce, they sighed with disappointment when I disclaimed right away of any pregnancy. It's better than another baby, you guys! I protested. We're moving to Europe!

Indeed it came as a complete surprise when my company offered me the posting to Brussels, Belgium. I had previously declined an offer because Ju had been, in my opinion, too young at the time. He will be almost 2 and a half when we leave Singapore, his potty training is coming along very well and most important, Brussels is only a 3 hour drive from Dan's parents in Germany. The fact that Dan is an EU citizen and can work in Brussels sealed the deal. 

My job certainly grinds all plans for a second child to a screeching halt. I will have maternity benefits even while overseas, mind you, but it is not entirely feasible to take off for 4 months at a go for reasons that are internal to my organization and shall remain undisclosed. I shall go so far as to say that as an employee, I take my job responsibilities seriously enough that I would not put my self-interests before my work unconditionally. This decision is not entirely for fear of organizational disapproval which might affect my career prospects, though as a full time working mother, it's always on my mind. No, the reason is more pragmatic: adjusting to a completely different job in a vastly different culture (my operating language will be French) will demand all my wits and energy in the first year. There is also a young child to mind in terms of his childcare and schooling needs, as well as a household to co-manage on top of a full-time job.

So it isn't surprising that my first retort when my friends exclaim their well-wishes for our new expatriate life in Europe is not that of unfettered agreement but of cautious restraint. I'm not a complete pessimist but I have enough cynical realism to put a lid on the illusions of grandeur that some others might feel about getting an opportunity such as this. When I think of the next couple of years, I don't immediately see a life of fun away from home, or see the posting as an extended holiday. 

I consider it a great professional challenge -- working in French (a language I thought I had escaped for good after university), juggling multiple management responsibilities for the first time -- and also a personal challenge. For the first time as a working parent, I would be without constant and convenient support from family members; I will not have part-time help (which I use now) to do the chores that neither Dan or I want to do. My husband is giving up a good career in Singapore to come with me and to support our family, something that many can agree is hardly an easy decision for any male to make in any modern patriarchal society. Finally, I will have to be responsible for separating Ju from his grandparents, a decision that might not have grave implications for Ju now, but would definitely tear at my parents' heartstrings, having become used to having him in their lives. 

In making this decision to accept my posting, Dan and I had discussed at length how we would manage all of the above, and given the unhappy fact that we would have to do it in the dead of winter next January. Yet the decision came easily because of Dan's supportiveness of this step (there will be no financial disadvantage) and our proximity to his parents even if the distance is akin to driving from here to Malacca which is not far really, by European standards. Another major pull factor is the fact that Ju will not have to undergo the local school system since we intend to enrol him in the German international school there (I have written about my disapproval of our school system elsewhere in this blog). We will have to balance this advantage with the loss of formal Chinese education but this is a trade off I am willing to make. We will be keeping up OPOL (me in Chinese) with Ju and I will look for Chinese weekend class for him once he is 3 or 4. Mind you, this is not like the "TUITION" that the kids in Singapore get in order to keep up with their school lessons. It is to give Ju very basic exposure to Mandarin Chinese in a city that speaks mainly French and Dutch.

Another push factor for me is that of self actualization, something I think not all women are able to experience once they become mothers and have to make compromises in their career in favour of their role as mothers. I would like Ju to see in his own Mum, the example of a woman who is capable, strong and successful in spite of her competing demands in her family role. I would also like for him to see in his Dad the example of a man who chose an equal rather than an inferior, a man who is able and willing to sacrifice his short term self-interests (his career and financial independence) in support of his wife's opportunity and career. In short, I would like Ju to grow up in a family that sets its own rules and boundaries despite the norms of a society that limit and stereotype the roles of the man and woman. I am certainly not aiming as high as Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) expects of working women nor am I putting myself in her league, but I think Ms Sandberg's message is one that ALL women who want more for themselves than to depend on a man needs to hear and seriously contemplate.

Life isn't a walk in the park, and we should not expect it to be one! I count my blessings every day for all that I have worked for and everything that was dished to me by the stroke of luck and good fortune: a good husband and partner, a healthy and happy child and supportive parents and relatives. Oh yeah, and a good brain that works fairly well! It's all you can hold on to really, when you choose to do something that takes you out of the zone you've been so comfortable in, and I admit, I have grown too comfortable in Singapore and am ready to be jolted awake again.

I will continue to blog about this tragi-comedy called life and parenting Julien The Two Year Old Terror since I love writing. But I hope to bring a little more to the table now, as I take our journey on to Belgium. Stay tuned for more!