mr brown points towards two one first-hand account and an opinion piece of an interesting incident at a recent Ministerial forum at NTU, where Vivian Balakrishnan was asked the most hilarious question.
ON TUESDAY night, a young man blurted out to 900 of his fellow students that something about marriage was bothering him… The sight of a man holding hands with a woman of a different skin colour makes his skin crawl, he stuttered.
His nightmare scenario: Should such interracial couples marry, they would dilute racial purity.
‘As the world becomes more globalised, we will see more of such interracial couples. And when people become more mixed, fewer people will belong to a certain race.
‘Won’t we lose our traditions and cultures?‘ was his poser to the minister, who was the guest of honour.
And as usual, it’s answer time from the Wannabe Lawyer. It still amazes me that many people who lack any semblance of intelligence still manage to make it into university in Singapore. Doesn’t say much about our system of filtering the wheat from the chaff.
We shall put aside the problems associated with the definition of of race for now, and focus on ‘culture’.
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First, let us get one thing straight. ‘Race‘ and ‘culture‘ are not the same thing. Malays, Indians and Chinese in Singapore have more in common with one another than with their ethnic counterparts from other parts of the world.
How culturally similar is the average Singaporean Chinese person compared to an average American-born Chinese person? Australian-born Chinese? Chinese national?
‘Culture‘ is not a monolithic ‘thing’ hanging over our heads, enforcing strict adherence from every single person of a given ethnicity. Even within a single ethinicity in a single country, there can be a huge diversity of differences in ‘culture’. On top of that, ‘culture’ is not a static object. It is a living, growing and everchanging ‘thing’, embodied by the people who live in the ‘culture’, adopt the ‘culture’, and change it when it is remixed with new and different ‘cultures’.
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There are Singaporean Chinese who don’t watch TCS8, others who don’t watch TCS5. Some only tune in to English radio stations, and others, only Mandarin. Then there are the subcultures, the skaters, the wakeboarders, sports fanatics, the stoners, the Far East kids, the KTV kids, Geylang chiongsters, the arty-farty-high-culture whores, the Zouk wine-bar poseurs, the ‘elite’ (who they are, we all know), the working underclass, the family-values people, the we-are-conservative-Chinese-people-but-dunno-a-fucking-thing- about-Chinese-history people… etc.
I don’t think I need to raise examples of how the differences amongst the Chinese diaspora over the world are even more prominent. That should be self-evident.
The fact of the matter is, while ethnicity is AN influence on ‘culture’, it is not the SOLE factor in influencing ‘culture’. It is not even a SUBSTANTIAL factor. It would be pretty obvious that CLASS plays a more significant role in determining one’s cultural values.
The brutal truth is that a Chinese kid living in a 2-room HDB flat studying in the Normal-Technical stream at a neighbourhood secondary school, and a Chinese kid living in a Holland Village bungalow studying at one of the top 3 secondary schools, have as much in common culturally as a Yanomamo tribesman living in the Amazon basin and a New York City yuppie.
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An on the subject of race.
Racial purity is a fiction. There is no such thing as a ‘pure’ Chinese race, or any other ‘race’ for that matter.
The Han Chinese, as a ‘pure’ ethnic group, had long since ceased to exist, being submerged with the bloodlines of other ethnic groups living in Mainland China (such as the Xiongnu, Xianbei and Qiang).
Even more importantly, the Chinese identity was never anchored around the concept of ‘race’. To the Chinese intellectuals of antiquity, to be Chinese was to accept the culture and the civilisation that they had to offer.
I cite my own paper here:
China was superior to her neighbours because Chinese culture was superior. Even barbarians can become civilised and transformed into Chinese if they adopt Chinese ways (Ebrey, 2003: 179).
And this is precisely why we must strenuously debunk any conception of humanity that is framed in the context of race. Even the thinkers of ages past recognise that the concept of ‘race’ is an amorphous and arbitrary one, what more of us, the enlightened(snigger) and progressive(chuckle) people of modern Singapore?
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And finally, to the faux-conservative who’s whose skin crawls at the sight of different coloured people in love, I have a simple message for you.
Happy skin-crawling.
mrbrown: Dr Vivian Balakrishnan asked about inter-racial couples at forum
the tutorial room: Of Racial Bigots and Singaporeans
polyethylene: viva le vivian!
China Studies: Culture and Empire Essay 01[PDF]
China Studies: Culture and Empire Essay 02[PDF]
10 Comments
You license your essays?!
“the faux-conservative who?s skin crawls” - Whose.
The trouble with condemning heretics is that heretical views will be driven underground to fester.
Agagooga:
I didn’t know you’re a grammar nazi.
And anyway, no one’s talking about censorship here. I support free speech, no matter how loony, remember?
I support free speech so that I can lay the smackdown on morons like that when they crawl out of the woodwork.
Sadly, it still gels with the convenient fiction of a “Malay-Muslim” community that is so cherished by the Singapore government. As if Chinese people, for example, cannot be Muslim.
Aye to clarify, that guy’s a media whore. he told our NTU reporters he assumed channelU would be there and hence the extravaganza.
And he’s downright weird la. Though the King of Kings (some pageant shit for all the hall/school/blah kings), he never failed to amaze people with his silly antics.
Once he went up to this acquaintance of mine and went, “I think you’re good-looking, and good looking people are worthy to be friends with. Let’s be friends.”
And not to mention the massive rumours about him shitting into the washing machine/laundry (cos someone removed his clothes from it) going around.
P.S. I spoke to Bala too!
Nice post on the concepts of culture and race. Indeed sociologists are very picky over how they define culture and also question the concept of “race” Ngiao people huh hehe
And mine wasnt a first hand account. I only read the ST article and was then prompted to share my experience.
Cheers!
pea:
So we can safely assume that he’s a himbo?
not himbo but just plain weird i guess :\ sometimes even creepy!
An interesting post but I think you could broaden it out a bit more by giving some context to the way you use specific terms. Race is a good example because you seem to move between using race in a biological context and in a sociological context.
I would agree with your assertion on culture not being a monolith but then your comparison of the two students almost treats culture as such. I would expect that their experience of contemporary culture would differ but they perhaps share other areas of culture (language, festivities, music, art etc.). This would be along the lines of the paragraph in which you described the shared cultural experiences of the Malay, Indian and Chinese people in Singapore.
I would generally disagree with the idea that race is not significant in culture. Taking a sociological definition of race, there are many ‘races’ out there who have a culture markedly defined by their ‘racial’ heritage. Perhaps, in a Singaporean context though this is correct. I’m not Singaporean so I’m taking a different experience into this discussion.
ciotog:
well, you could say I am discounting a biological basis for race altogether.
As such, my personal references to ‘race’ are exclusively sociological in nature, and the only times when I do refer to ‘race’ in a biological context is when I am criticising that very usage.
Let us consider this thought experiment. Think of a ‘racial’ group, any one of your choice, which has distinctive cutural practices traceable to their ‘racial’ heritage. And then, let us take a newborn baby of that ‘race’, and raise the child in a family of a completely different ‘race’.
What would the result be? Granted, the very first flaw in this experiment is that if the child grows up in a society where every other person treats him or her differently because he or she looks substantially different, then the child will surely feel dislocated from that society.
But imagine for a moment now, that any physical differences are minimal. Would the child retain the cultural characteristics of his or her own ‘race’? Or would he or she grow up with the cultural characteristics of the adoptive parents?
I still argue that ‘race’ is a pure social construct. ‘Race’ is irrelevant if the environment is changed i.e. do black kids in the US have more in common culturally with black kids in Africa or with white kids in the USA?
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[...] qualities existing in the same person. I have already debunked the myth of racial purity here, I don’t think I need to repeat arguments already made. And this p [...]