Category: Rant

I hate my dad’s side of the family. I’m spending almost all my time with them during my stay in Johor Bahru out of obligation. They’re too conservative, too strict, and way too narrow-minded. I grew up in Canada. It’s pretty obvious I’m an unconservative girl. I have tats. I show a lot of skin sometimes. I say what I mean and feel. But when I’m with them, I have to hide and suppress everything to avoid being labeled the bad kid. Because if I’m the bad kid, not only do I get the rap, but my mother will get the blame. They bully her. “She didn’t teach her kids better”. It’s messed up.

I’ve been meeting up with extended family today and people keep telling me what to do.

“Put food on your grandma’s dish.”

I had an auntie tell me this multiple times when my grandma clearly said she didn’t want anymore food. People don’t mean what they say in this family. “No” means “yes” and it’s very fucking frustrating and confusing. My uncle once told me a story about the time he went to London for his law studies. He told me how he was offered tea and when he refused it he was very shocked that he didn’t get any. Tough shit.

“Thank your auntie.”

I fucking thanked her at the beginning of the meal for covering it. How many times do I have to bend over for everyone? What am I, a kid? I’m in my mid-twenties for god sake. I know what I’m fucking doing. Why is everyone treating me like I’m six? I fucking hate people telling what to do. I feel like there is no consideration and respect for me as a being. Fuck. On a side note, sometimes I hate people paying for my meals because if I don’t show the right visible emotional responses, people assume I don’t appreciate the gesture because “thanks” is not enough. People expect too much out of me.

Speaking of which, expectations of me are really fucking stupid. I’ve discussed this with a few Asian friends and it doesn’t seem like a thing within their families, but for mine, at least on my dad’s side, if you’re the youngest person at the table, you’re expected to pour tea for everyone, running around like a fucking dog during the meal and refilling anything that isn’t full. I realized this silent expectation the year before the last. I don’t even drink Chinese tea, okay? But when the second youngest (he’s in his late forties) realized I wasn’t doing my job, he took on the tea bitch role. It was a sad sight. It’s degrading and pitiful. I refuse to be anyone’s tea-pouring slave no matter how much shit they talk about me behind my back. At a later dinner, someone mentioned how times have changed, being a stupid melodramatic fuck complaining about a time when young people  would pour tea. FUUCK YOU.

Another thing that bothers me is that people make too many assumptions of me.

Can you imagine how much criticism I get when I tell people I don’t eat rice? “Ho mia, ah”. They all call me spoil. Either that or they just assumed and tell each other that I’m just scared of gaining weight, right in front of me. That’s something else I hate about the family. At meals, I’m basically sitting there, listening to people talk about me to each other. Not with me. It’s messed. I’m like a child and simply there, along for the ride. No one seems interested in getting to know who I am. They just want to hear about how I haven’t failed in life as a member of the family.

“Oh, you don’t have a boyfriend? It’s because you’re too skinny. You have to eat more rice to look healthy. ”

FUCK.

Day’s still going on. Maybe I’ll have a couple more things to add in a bit. But fuck, I had to get this down and out.

I really don’t like to overgeneralize. I really don’t. But having been back during this time of year, three years in a row now, there are things that consistently bother me about the city I call my second home. It’s really difficult for me to reconcile a lot of social cultural differences in general and the things I’ll be talking about are enough to make it difficult for me to take the big step of living in Singapore and assimilating myself in the city for a good amount of time. I’ve had my fellow Singaporean friends confirm that these were all fair frustrations but of course, these are just based off of my own experiences so take it with a grain of salt and compare it with your own judgements. But let’s get started. Where does beautiful Singapore fall short?

Singaporeans are always late.

Singaporeans seem to have a different sense of time than North Americans. I’m often really shocked to hear that a 30-minute trip by train or car is “damn far” or “too long”. I live in Toronto, Canada and it’s very normal for people to travel one hour or more to get to work, meet up with a friend, get to the downtown core, etc. Topographically, Singapore’s a small country. I mean real small. For comparison, Toronto, a single city, is 630.2 km², while the whole country of Singapore is 719.1 km². Canada’s size? 9.985 million km². Canada’s the second largest country in the world by area, so I guess I might be comparing extremes here. Anyways, while we’re used to the trek, they are not and it will often be an excuse not to show.

If SGer’s are not complaining about the distance, they’re late. If I meet up with ten people, nine out of ten of them will be late. I’m not exaggerating. And I’m not just talking about ten, fifteen minutes. I’m talking about an hour+ here sometimes. I find that Singaporeans leave just enough time to do things, arrive to places and when meeting up with me, there isn’t any exception. They don’t seem to account for slow-downs and when they’re late it seems so much easier for them to blame it on circumstances that seem out of their control. I got held up a work. I didn’t know traffic would be like that. The MRT broke down. What bugs the hell out of me is when someone leaves once I’ve mentioned I’ve reached the destination at the intended time and that has happened to me on multiple occasions. Do I just have shitty friends? Regardless, I’ve stopped taking meeting schedules so seriously when I’m in Singapore. I think the Singaporean culture of being late comes from habit and mentality. Singapore as a city and Singaporeans pride themselves on efficiency (so kiasu) and they loathe wasted time and energy (so kanchiong) but it always seems to be at the other person’s expense, which leads me to my next point:

Singaporean service sucks.

Singaporeans seem value and prioritize efficiency at the cost of hospitality and it drives me absolutely insane. I was at Ya Kun Kaya Toast ordering breakfast with a friend. It was my first meal upon arriving, actually. “What do you want?” the cashier asks in Chinese, devoid of any sort of facial expression. My friend orders soft-boiled eggs, kaya toast and a Milo dinosaur for me, a set of distinctly Singaporean food items to set the vibe for my arrival. The cashier tells us the total. I held my money out almost right as she said it. Even though she was very aware that I was ready to pay, she did not acknowledge me and she went on to preoccupy herself with something else. She might have been shifting around plates on the counter, I’m not sure. But I stood there, hand out with money in my hand, waiting for her to collect it while she just watched me from her peripheral for an uncomfortably long time. She could have at least told me she’d take a moment. After she finally took my money and the transaction was done and over with, I made quite a fuss about it to my friend as we walked away and the impression I got from him was that I was being a little overbearing. “But it’s efficient”, he says.

A similar incident occurred at a Toast Box. The total came up to be $10.40. I gave her a fifty dollar bill. Just a second later, I informed the cashier I had 40 cents that I could give her. She made no gesture or acknowledgement that she had heard me say anything at all, not even giving me any sort of eye contact. She appeared to be rummaging for change for the initial amount I gave her so I said it again. Still no facial expression nor acknowledgement. But when she handed me back the change, I could see that she did in fact hear me as she accounted for the 40 cents that I hadn’t yet given her. I complained to my friend that the least she could do was say “OK” or nod at me. He responded by saying that he knew she heard it by her body language and that Singaporeans don’t have energy to waste on small things.

Small things? Efficiency should not be at the cost of service. I think I’ve been conditioned to expect a certain kind of service structure that North American establishments provide. Being greeted before being served, being told that someone would be a moment when they needed it, the culture of service with a smile, etc. I think I’ve been especially spoiled working as a restaurant evaluator in the past. I remember timing how long it took a server to refill my water or to note whether to not they greeted with eye contact and a smile within the first minute… Regardless, I’m entitled to have my own opinion and I think local service staff in Singapore are generally indifferent and rude. To be fair, I think my statement applies to very specific cases. Usually hotels, upscale dining, or basically anything that you would very obviously expect great service from, do pretty well. I’m mostly just complain about the service from casual and fast-food dining. In Singapore, it is common for you to see a 10% service charge on your bill and you are required to pay it regardless of whether or not you’ve received shitty service.

Singapore really prides itself on multiculturalism but it’s not true multiculturalism.

Singapore often prides itself as a multicultural nation and as a city that is often said to set an example of multiculturalism at work for the world. According to Wiki, as of 2017, “Singapore is a multiracial and multicultural country with ethnic Chinese (76.2% of the citizen population), indigenous Malays (15.0%), and ethnic Indians (7.4%) making up the majority of the population.” There are also major recognized racial groups like Eurasians and angmoh (Caucasian) ex-pats that are becoming increasingly common. Singapore furthermore has four national languages: English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. When you hear passenger announcements on the MRT or see pedestrian signs within the city, you will often hear and see all four languages being used. While Singapore is multicultural with a capital M, it isn’t truly multicultural in the way Toronto is. Singapore is very clique-y and it feels like there is a huge social gap between ethnic groups. You can definitely feel racial tensions and some sort of racially superiority complex going on when you’re there, with angmoh or perhaps the Chinese being on top and the migrant Malays being on the bottom. The kiasu mentality has made the typical Singaporean believe that blue-collar jobs are beneath them; to work in the service or construction industry is to be at the bottom of the rung, so menial labour jobs are often left to darker, migrant workers like Malays, Sri Lankens, Filipinos, Bangladeshis, etc. It’s shocking that these racial gaps exist within the younger generations. One thing that I noticed is that for a “multicultural” nation, there isn’t a lot of interracial dating going on between certain groups. While angmohs are on top of the dating chain, you will rarely see interracial dating between Chinese and Malays, although both are the largest ethnic groups. The Chinese will hang with the Chinese, the Malay with the Malays, the Indians with the Indians, and they all kind of stick to using their native tongue so it reinforces the division between them all.

Canada, like Singapore, prides itself on multiculturalism. According to StatsCan, one in every five people are foreign-born. Back home in Toronto, I can definitely feel a strong social intermingling of different ethnic groups and I think a strong reason for that is that we don’t have four national languages. Isn’t that ironic? The fact that everyone uses English, one common language to communicate, really promotes a sort of unity between everyone. And though we have existing stereotypes about ethinic groups and jobs that we giggle about (Indians in taxi cabs, Koreans in dry-cleaning shops, etc.), we have a fair distribution of people from different backgrounds doing every job. Could you imagine if it was only blacks doing construction menial labour?

I read an interesting article on the concept of multiculturalism here. It makes a really interesting point that using multiculturalism as a national identity is very “unbecoming of a self-professed global city”. If we think about it, multiculturalism should be a sort of baseline that every city should reach. It’s like professing that you’re LGBT-friendly — who shouldn’t be LGBT friendly? 

Singaporeans are close-minded.

This one probably gets to me the most. It’s really hard for me not to be self-conscious when I’m in Singapore. I’m told that because of the tattoos and coloured hair, I’m automatically assumed to be a degenerate and possibly an ah lian (There isn’t a North American equivalent but a bimbo comes close enough). In other words, Singaporeans will automatically assume that I am uneducated, unsophisticated and ignorant all based on the way I choose to dress and present myself. Singaporeans are expected to dress, act and speak in a certain way and once you break that image, people don’t seem to know how to take it. My cousin once said to me looking at my tattoos: “Why so man?” Tattoos are strangely understood to be a very masculine thing.

Singaporeans seem to live in a sort of bubble. Society dictates how you should behave, how you should not behave, and there is a shared aversion for things that do not conform to the norm. From young, children are taught how to progress in life and everything is mapped out: study hard, get good grades, get into university, get a job, save CPF, get married, buy a HDB flat, have a family and you teach that same cycle to your children. Sure, this all sounds very normal being raised in an Asian household but there are key details that make things significantly different. So CPF, or Central Provident Fund, is the Singaporean government’s way of taking care of its citizens. It is a mandatory social security savings scheme, which takes a percentage of your monthly salary (37% if you’re under 35 for an idea) which goes into an account that can only be accessed when you’re 55. In other words, you’re forced into having a retirement savings plan. End of story. Sure, it’s almost like a non-screw-up program and it’s great for some people but the fact of the matter is, Singaporeans can’t even choose when to spend their money and, a scarier reality, how they want to live their lives. Because Singaporeans don’t have the luxury of choice, they can’t afford the risk of disrupting this seamingless failproof bluemap. CPF’s not the only thing that robs its citizens choice. Another good example is a limitation on owning property: You cannot purchase an HDB flat as Singaporean single (not married) until you are 35.

Factors like these really set limitations on one’s lifestyle. Growing up in the Western world, I feel like I have the luxury of choice. I can choose to save or spend my money, I can choose to buy property, but ultimately, I can choose how I want to live my life and pursue a lifestyle that works for me. As a result, I have a wider perspective for what I want for myself, not only for my living preferences but also in understanding myself as a person, allowing me to further learn and grow. If I had been born in Singapore, I think things would be much different. I wouldn’t be so open-minded, so transient, so free to express myself. I’d be instantly tied down, another cog in an insular society, where the only obvious option would be to conform.

Singaporean girlfriends are batshit crazy. 

I’m not joking. This is a very serious point I have to make. I have to say, it’s really difficult making friends in Singapore because there will always be a batshit crazy girlfriend that will stir things up and cause some unnecessary drama. I have to have secret meet-ups with guy friends because they’ve been forbidden to hang out or speak to me. I have multiple crazy SG girlfriends stalking me while I’m in town or on social media in general. (Hi, Felicia). I have to play coy so I don’t set any alarms off that I’m a man-eating succubus from the West. Let me share some super short stories:

I watched a proposal video of a friend’s brother who lovingly said to his wife-to-be: “I’ll never to take another photo with another girl ever again”.

I was in a photo with six guy friends that we had taken during Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. One of the guy’s girlfriends saw the picture and asked him, “Where are her friends? Why is she hanging out with you guys?”

I hung out with a guy who told me not message him about us hanging out because he wasn’t allowed to hang out with girls and his girlfriend read all his messages.

So yes, I have to say: Singaporean girlfriends are just insecure as fuck. I’m speaking generally, of course. 🙂

Alcohol is damn expensive.

My friend Toast pointed out that I missed this point so I’m adding this one after I’ve posted. One thing I love to do is seek out the best cocktail bars that a city has to offer but in Singapore, it’s a very, very expensive activity. Cocktails are on average $20-25 each and a beer’s around $15, unless you’re drinking in a hawker centre where it’ll be around $6.50 or so. Alcohol is heavily taxed and it makes drinking a luxury, I’d say. I had been a little more controlled this trip around, training for the Standard Chartered Marathon but I can’t say it’s been easy to go through a night without emptying out my wallet.

So, those are my main issues with a city I still very much love… and I’m actually back in Singapore on the 9th. Anyone want to hang out and not be late?

Fuck. So, I’m in Hanoi and I’m accidentally hopped up on caffeine right now. For those of you that need context, I’m caffeine-sensitive and having a cup of tea keeps me up all through the night, even if I have it during the morning. Tonight, I had a whole fucking pot. Right now, I feel hot, twitchy and panicked right now because I know I’m not going to be able to sleep for a very, very long time.

So in Vietnam, they do this thing where they mix tea leaves with caffeine in teas that are not normally caffeinated. I was on a junk ship that was serving lemongrass tea to its guests. Now, because of my condition, I am very familiar with which teas are caffeine-free: mint tea, camomile tea, rooibos tea, ginger tea, to name a few and lemongrass tea is one of them too. But when I took a sip, I could taste the flavour of tea leaves. I think it was black tea. I asked the staff to confirm and they informed me that yes, their lemongrass tea had Lipton tea mixed into it. I dodged a bullet. But only once.

Just less than an hour ago, I was eating at a restaurant and I ordered myself a camomile tea. It’s always been a safe choice for me. They brought me a pot, with a side of honey and a packet of sugar. I didn’t really think much about it and I drank it with my meal as always. It wasn’t until the last cup where I realized that it didn’t taste like a regular camomile tea. Actually, it tasted like green tea. I panicked and looked at the tab on the tea bag. It said “camomile tea” and there was some Vietnamese on it that probably said the same thing. I reassured myself that I was fine and took a couple more sips  But I went back to the same thought… it really tastes like green tea… I open the pot to look at the tea bag and what do you know, the camomile was mixed with green tea leaves. WHAT THE FUCK? There was even more green tea than there was camomile. WHAT THE FUCK!

Whatever. It’ll pass. I just have to see how long it will take for this to pass through my system. Maybe I’ll go for a run. I was wondering if taking melatonin would counteract or negate the caffeine but experiences vary and are very dissimilar on the forums I’m reading. Fucking hell… someone just please knock me out… 

You know what really sucks? Eating something you don’t enjoy eating, alone. And that’s what I did tonight. I don’t think I hate ramen but it definitely wouldn’t be something I’d pick for a meal if I had the choice. Ramen, bahn mi (also most other cold cut sandwiches), and traditional Chinese food are all at the very bottom of my list for choice of meal. But I was with a couple and I let them have the pick. I never like to choose the restaurant when I’m among friends. I usually feel a lot of pressure to pick something that people are happy with and think I have an easier time adapting to others than the other way around. So ramen it was.

It started off like a typical night but my friends were clearly stressed with some work-related issues that went on today. We were at Ramen Koika, downtown Vancouver. Though I don’t really enjoy eating ramen, I do my best to pick something that will soften the blow. I ordered the Asari Miso Ramen. The picture looked pretty good. It had a shit-ton of clams and had an option to made spicy so it was an easy choice for me. The couple was with, both ordered black garlic ramen.

Noodles came. One of the reasons I don’t enjoy eating ramen is because I have a lot of trouble handling hot (temperature) foods and I usually have to wait a long time for it to cool down before I can start eating it. So I started to eat all the clams first and it took me a while to realized that they fucked up my ramen. They forgot to make it spicy. They had no issue replacing it but they were going to take some time to make me a new one.

“But I ate all the clams already”

“That’s okay.”

I felt a little small victory that I would be able to eat another full serving of clams. By the time the new bowl came, my friends had pretty much finished theirs. One of them continued talking to me but it appeared that there was a bit of tension between the two of them. A bit more time in, they began to argue. It was very awkward for me. I didn’t do much but look down at my full bowl and poke my noodles around. At some time, I broke one of the awkward moments of silence and encouraged my friends to go home and sleep things off because they were clearly stressed. They were going to drop me home initially but I thought it better that they didn’t have to wait around for me and they could sort things out amongst themselves sooner rather than later. They agreed and went home. 

So there I was. Me, and a bowl of ramen. After my friends had left, every bite I took just got more and more unenjoyable. It’s not like I haven’t had ramen before. I’ve had ramen with friends plenty of times. When they suggest it, I don’t even bat an eye. I guess I’m okay eating something I don’t enjoy as long as the company I’m with is enjoying it. This, however, was the very first time I was alone, stuck with food that I ordered, that I really didn’t enjoy eating. I don’t even know why I continued eating as much as I did. I got to about to the half-way point and then I asked for the rest to be packed up. I don’t even know what I’m going to do with the leftovers tomorrow morning. I think what made eating my ramen even more depressing was that One More Light by Linkin Park was playing. That, and it costed me $18 after tax and tip. Bleh. Get me some French food or something.

Tonight kind of made me open my eyes to how much I’ve kind of been spoiling myself lately when it comes to eating when I’m solo. Generally, I very much enjoy everything I choose to eat and never choose something simply out of maintenance. And I intend to keep it that way. I should never settle for less but I’m such a pushover when I’m with company.

//

People always get really shocked and appalled when I say I don’t like ramen. They just don’t get it. So let me make a case for myself and tell you my reasons:

1. As mentioned, I have trouble eating hot foods so I tend to avoid meals with things like hot soup.
2. Ramen is really heavy and I don’t like the bloated feeling after eating it.
3. It’s high-calorie.
4. I generally don’t prefer wet or moist foods. That includes things that are steamed. I rather have something with a drier texture like something that’s fried or raw veggies or something.
5. It’s messy and being a clumsy eater, I always end up staining my shirt.
6. I rather eat pasta and pasta’s not really high on my list either.
7. I generally don’t like carbs (that’s another can of worms, ain’t it?)
8. And I rather eat more meat and veggies than noodles.

There’s something that’s been on my mind lately. I don’t know if it’s just me but I feel like people have been rather mean to me lately. More often now than ever, strangers will approach me with hostility and aggression offhand when they speak to me. And when I say ‘lately’, I mean in the past year. What I think it is, is the look I’ve adopted. Maybe the tattoos, the hair and the crazy nails make me look like a bitch or something. I’m not sure. But I certainly don’t remember having this degree of antagonism in my life. Everything I wrote in my previous post still holds true; I get more interactions with strangers now with the tats and I can now further affirm that the increased interactions are both positive and negative interactions.

The thing that got me thinking about all this was something that happened to me yesterday. I was on a bus in Vancouver. I had been doing a lot of shopping this week from the Erdem x H&M collection so I had two enormous bags with me. And me, being me, I was also holding a large 15-pound box. I couldn’t handle holding everything on the moving bus so I stood by a seat and put my box down on it. The guy sitting next to my box gruffly said, “People can sit there, you know?”. I told him that I could sit down and hold the box if it made him feel any better. I think it was my attempt at be passive-aggressive. He said, “No, for old people.” To be fair, I was somewhere by the front — not the very front, but all the handicapped priority seats were empty besides one which was occupied by the old fat man scolding me. I didn’t want to argue with him so I picked up my box. It was too big for me to hold with one arm so here I was, clutching onto it, unable to use any bus handles to keep me stable. With giant bags on each shoulder, both larger than me no less, I was performing some balancing act for everyone else on that bus. When the bus stopped to let people on, a young girl, who looked similar in age to me, sat next to him. He didn’t say anything to her. I really wanted to say something to him like, “She’s not old; why didn’t you tell her off?” But I didn’t. I kind of regret it. Fortunately, someone sitting a few seats down backed me up. He asked to hold my box for me even though I declined a couple times initially. I gave up when he insisted that I was going to hurt myself. For the next few stops, I stood there, battling with my typical social anxiety in my head. I was frustrated just looking at that fat old man and the guilt I felt from a stranger helping me didn’t help. A few stops later, the seat beside the man helping me cleared up so I sat down beside him. I thanked him a million times and gestured for him to pass over the box. He refused and was happy holding it for me for the rest of the way. He told me not to worry about that man, that some people were just really inconsiderate and there wasn’t much to do about them. He said it really loud as if he wanted him to hear it. I felt a little better when he said that to me.

I’m really glad that stranger helped me. If not, I think I would have just holed myself up in my place and sulked all night. Experiences like that really get to me. They leave me stressed out and upset for the rest of the day and maybe even for a few days following. I still ask myself why that happened. What was it that caused that man to speak to me that way and not to the other girl, especially when I was clearly struggling? I felt like I was getting picked on. I can totally see people assuming that I look like a rich, spoiled Asian girl who thinks she’s entitled to everything. Is that it? Or am I just overthinking things? I guess it’s a nice thought to believe that I have some control over how people are treating me… I’ll continue about this another time…