Notes From an Even Smaller Island Read online

  This, however, is where filial piety comes into play and it makes me feel just a little nauseous. You see, when parents get to a certain age, it becomes payback time. Their children must begin to look after them financially. Not just because it feels like the right thing to do but because it is a Singaporean custom. In fact, my friend swears that filial piety is a government law. I was sceptical about this. How could such a law be enforced? But I was quite stunned to discover that my friend was right.

  In 1995, the Maintenance of Parents Act came into force and a tribunal was set up the following year by the Ministry of Community Development. The act helps parents who are over sixty and unable to support themselves claim maintenance from their children. In other words, elderly parents can sue their children, take them to court and demand that they look after them financially. I had hoped that very few people would need to take advantage of this ingenious piece of legislation but between June 1996 and December 1999, 541 applications were made to the tribunal, of which 404 were ordered to pay maintenance. This may not be a gigantic figure but am I alone in feeling saddened by the news that a court order was needed to remind over 400 citizens that they should be looking after their parents? I cannot help wondering how many more cases there would be if more ill-treated parents took their complaints up with the tribunal. In a society that is obsessed with ‘saving face’, I am certain that some families keep quiet.

  Consequently, it is extremely common, especially when you consider property prices in Singapore, for parents to live with their children’s family as they get older, which I believe shows remarkable tolerance on both sides. If my mother and I were to live together again we would, quite simply, kill each other.

  I would get up to leave and I would hear her croaky voice ask, ‘Where are you going now?’

  ‘I’m going to visit friends. They’ve just bought a new car.’

  ‘You treat this place like a bloody hotel.’

  ‘Mum, it’s my house.’

  ‘You wander in whenever you feel like it. You don’t tell me where you’ve been. I sit here night after night, worrying myself sick, not that you’d care though.’

  ‘Mum, I’m 45 years old. When I go out, it’s to collect my children from school.’

  ‘Never mind all that, you’re still leaving your towels on the bedroom floor.’

  It would be a nightmare and I am sure my mother would agree. But the Singaporeans I know who are married and still live with their parents or parents-in-law bear their hardship with considerable goodwill.

  In fact, it appears to be a very amicable relationship. While my friends are out at work, the mother will mop the floors and more often than not prepare meals for them when they return. Of course, I am sure the family picture of idyllic bliss that I have painted is not wholly accurate but I also know that a similar picture in England would have more colourful language.

  ‘Mum,’ I would begin tentatively, ‘you seem to have more time on your hands since you’ve moved in with us. Could you help with the housework occasionally?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  End of conversation. Generally speaking, though, this system works for the majority of Singaporeans so where does the nausea that I mentioned earlier come into it? Well, just humour me for a few moments. Can you recall clearly the last time you ate at a greasy burger establishment? Who served you?

  Had I asked myself this question before I came to Singapore, the answer would have been a skinny teenage boy wearing a uniform that was made to measure for somebody else. Between serving customers, he would join his other teenage colleagues out back in a ‘dipping your head into the deep fryer’ contest to determine the greasiest head of hair. Incidentally, I always seemed to be served by the contest winner. Having purchased my food, I would then have to avoid ‘greasy head’s’ twin brother knocking me flat on my face with his lethal combination of a big mop and a tiny brain. Lying on the floor covered in French fries and smelling of detergent, ‘greasy head floor cleaner’ would always say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘Why? Because I’m only 6 foot 4 inches tall, you dopey prick,’ I would respond. By which time he had already disappeared to take part in the deep fryer semi-finals.

  After spending five years in Singapore, the imagery has changed. Instead of the young teenager, you are served by an elderly person, who shuffles slowly to get your order. It was a massive culture shock for me to be served by someone who was older than my grandparents when I first arrived here. I felt so sorry for them as they plodded over to get my order. It made me feel so guilty that I felt as though I should go around the counter and collect the meal myself.

  On the plus side, they certainly exude less grease than their Western counterparts and that in itself is a reason to be grateful. But we know the sad reality. When you step into a packed burger bar in Orchard Road and spot three queues of roughly equal size, with two staffed by elderly employees, which line do you pick? In this hectic metropolis obsessed with speed and efficiency, it just would not be practical to be served by some doddering old lady, would it? Particularly when it is obvious that the slimy prick next to her with the artificial smile is just dying to take more orders to demonstrate his robotic speed and his multitasking skills. When I am not in a hurry, I find myself drawn to the elderly employees out of some sort of moral compunction. However, this is Singapore and how often are we not in a hurry?

  It seems we are all so busy chasing that all-important dollar that we do not have the time to lift a used tray, walk ten paces to the nearest rubbish bin and empty it. What is the matter with us? I was with a friend once who got up to leave without taking the tray with him. I asked him why and he said, ‘That’s what they’re paid for. Let them do it.’ We were sitting three metres away from the nearest rubbish bin and I watched, dumbstruck and ashamed, as a tiny Chinese auntie walked from one end of the restaurant to the other to collect the tray. When she reached our table, she picked up the tray, wiped the table with a cloth and smiled at us. What the hell had we done to deserve such a warm smile? It crushed me. I waited on tables for ten years and hated every single minute of it. I certainly hope I do not have to do it in my sixties, spending my twilight years asking extremely obnoxious customers, ‘Upsize for you, sir?’ I have never left a tray on a table since.

  Therein lies the greatest failing of a society that has no welfare. There is no safety net. I believe in the majority of the PAP’s policies but they serve just that – the majority. Most Singaporeans live a safe, clean middle-class lifestyle that is, let’s face it, the envy of Southeast Asia and, increasingly, other parts of the world, too. Yet without any form of welfare, there will always be a small number who, through no fault of their own, slip through the net. These people may have little or no family or they might not have the appropriate skills to work in a knowledge-based economy. Pride might also prevent them from dragging their own flesh and blood to the tribunal to demand maintenance.

  The government, to its credit, is always coming up with laudable retraining schemes but the people who would benefit most from these schemes are usually preoccupied with the ‘little things’, like putting food on the table. Do not get me wrong, there is no perfect political system and no one can be completely happy with their lot. I agree with the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham and his famous notion of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. I just do not think that filial piety alone, commendable though it might be, is enough to plug the gaps.

  Besides, even if it was, there is still one final problem that I have with it that goes way beyond nausea. Having already mentioned that it becomes payback time for parents when they get old and need to be looked after by their children, the stage is then set for the gut-wrenching sequel ‘Payback II – After Death’.

  The plot is ever so simple. The main protagonist is the ageing head of the family, who is looked after by all her sons and daughters. During an intense emotional scene, which requires great method acting from the supporting cast, the old wom
an dies happily, knowing that she had a caring, loyal family. Then the flimsy twist comes. The old woman left behind a pot of money in the form of her apartment, which is now worth a small fortune. It is a flimsy twist because it is always the same. The old woman always dies and she always leaves her apartment behind because no matter how many paper houses she might have burned on this Earth, she cannot physically take her home with her. Then shock horror, all the affectionate relatives suddenly become green-eyed bastards who put up with her for all those years in the belief that she would leave the box of concrete to them.

  So the audience, in other words the Straits Times readers, is introduced to a plethora of secondary characters who, until this point, had only been spotted buying the old lady the odd meal. Now they come to the fore and cry, ‘She promised to leave me the apartment because she loved me the most and she wanted it to stay in the family. However, I really intend to sell the flat when the market peaks for an enormous fat profit. Then I can upgrade to those new condominiums being built on the coast and my shallow, unfulfilled life will finally be complete.’ The plot thickens quicker than cold curry when not one but several characters come forward and recite similar well-rehearsed speeches.

  At this point, the cynical members of the audience are already questioning the so-called moral values of filial piety. It now seems that the system works like this. You provide your child with the best education because that will improve his and, therefore, your standard of living later on. You then retire and live off your children if they have succeeded in life or, failing that, you take a part-time job mopping toilet floors. Finally, the children that you raised, whether they were successful or not, will all fight for your apartment when you die.

  For those who think I am being overtly cynical, just read through the Straits Times. On any given day, you are bound to come across a financial or property wrangle between different generations of the same family. They are usually despicable affairs, with both sides washing each other’s dirty linen in public in a pathetic bid to be awarded those shares or that luxurious condominium.

  In 1998, for example, Janie Low took her father and her brother to the High Court and ordered them to buy over her shares in the family-owned food distribution company. She won the case when the judge discovered that as director, the father had, among other things, abused the company accounts for personal gain by charging holiday expenses to the company. Hence, the judge sided with Madam Low and ordered her father to buy her shares at a non-discounted rate, which, I am sure, left her an extremely wealthy woman. By this stage, however, there was not much the public did not know about her personal life and her relationship with her father.

  Then there was the famous Jumabhoy case, which was so ghastly and dragged on for so long that no one really wants the whole thing regurgitated here. Suffice to say, the Jumabhoys are a prominent Indian family in Singapore. The family’s elderly patriarch, Rajabali Jumabhoy, who died two months short of his 101st birthday, sued his eldest son, Ameerali, and two grandsons for allegedly cutting out other family members in running property and hotel group Scotts Holdings. The case went on for years and the family name was dragged through the mud. It was eventually resolved in 1999 when the court ruled against Rajabali’s claims. He died shortly after and certain prominent family members are still not talking to each other. Call me naive but I would rather plod along with my middle of the road income than put my family through such a farcical soap opera.

  Such high-powered family struggles are by no means exclusive to Singapore. The United States is famous for them. Indeed, if the Jumabhoys had been American, they would have appeared on Oprah Winfrey at least twice and Jerry Springer would have told them to ‘put aside their money troubles and bind together through the power of love’.

  In Singapore, it is the little cases that sadden me, such as families going to the smaller courts to contest the will of their late father to try to get his old HDB apartment. These incidents occur all the time. When I was renting a room from Saudita, my Indian landlady, she had an Indian friend come and stay with her. She was pathetically frail, at least seventy-five years old and looked as though a strong wind might blow her over. For some strange reason, she was remarkably kind to us. Whenever she went shopping, she would always return with some bananas and insist that we took them. Now I would be lying if I said that I was close to the woman. To this day, I still do not know her name but one Sunday morning, she unfolded a tragic story that will haunt me forever.

  Leaving to go over to the local shop, we asked her if she needed anything and she burst into tears. It was obvious that the poor woman desperately needed to confide in someone other than a woman who thought it was acceptable to publicly bare her breasts. So she chose us, which if nothing else, must give an indication of how desperate she was. Like most elderly Singaporeans, she was not well-educated but she and her late husband had worked hard through the years and scraped together enough money to buy a small three-roomed HDB flat. Now a widow, she told us that the flat was hers, lock, stock and barrel. That is when the vultures descended.

  Her son and daughter-in-law moved into the flat and kicked her into the smallest bedroom. She did not object. Being a practical woman, she knew she was not going to live forever and the flat would be theirs eventually anyway. Then the problems started. Her daughter-in-law regarded her as no more than an irritant, an obstacle to her owning her own little castle. The arguments started when her daughter-in-law began to dictate the running of the house: when and what its occupants ate, who cleaned the house and so on. Initially, the husband acted as peacemaker. Eventually, he became incensed by his mother’s so-called constant nagging. At this stage, the cynical side of me began to think that I had only heard one side of the story. Then she showed us the bruises and I started to get a prickling sensation that ran up and down my spine. Her puny legs were blackened with dark purple bruises and her upper arms displayed similar marks. She started crying heavily and became almost incoherent. Things had come to a head and her daughter-in-law had beaten her up in her own living room while her husband, the victim’s son and heir, watched. The daughter-in-law then threw the old woman out of her own house and onto the street shouting charming things like, ‘If you come back here, we’ll kill you.’ The husband then decided to reveal, for the record, his true feelings on the subject when he got up to assist his wife in the task of kicking his mother out. This happened about a week before she told us the story and the bruises were still there. Since then, the old lady had made just one telephone call to the house, only to be told to ‘fuck off’ by her son, the person she had raised and clothed.

  All of which begs the eternal question: why? Why did she not call the police and have the two greedy fuckers thrown out? Why did she not call the media and have the pair publicly disgraced? Why did she not allow Saudita to remove their limbs? In short, why did she allow them to live rent free in her property while she slept on a mangy old sofa every night, confiding her troubles to two virtual strangers? I asked her all these questions and more, to which she replied, ‘He’s my son.’ What could we say to this? We just cuddled her and left.

  That is the major problem I have with filial piety. It relies a little too much on people. Having no welfare means there will always be those who slip through the net and end up serving warm burgers or cleaning toilet floors for ungrateful customers. A chillingly relevant incident occurred outside the Tribunal for the Maintenance of Parents office in 2000. A 56-year-old woman, Chua Bian Neo, was stabbed to death in front of her 89-year-old wheelchair-bound father. She had just attended a hearing at the tribunal with her father to help the old man claim financial aid. The killer was her brother, the very person that she allegedly intended to take to court to get him to help pay a monthly sum for her father’s maintenance. It seems that the brother was unhappy with this arrangement so he stabbed his older sister in the back as his disabled father looked on helplessly.

  Such incidents are extremely rare in Singapore and I do not want to give the wr
ong impression of what really is one of the safest countries in the world, but it does highlight one of the fundamental weaknesses of filial piety. Although there is a parliamentary act in place, some people still do not feel obliged to look after their parents. Even the ones that do can sometimes leave you questioning their motives. In a country that is obsessed with property and financial status, there are those who fall victim to greedy, parasitic children. That is why I get just a tad pissed off when I hear the term filial piety. For most people, it conjures up positive images of children supporting their parents in times of need. For me, it reminds me of a frail, weeping old lady showing me the bruises on her legs. And it breaks my heart.

  Chapter Four

  If there is one thing that I will always express the deepest gratitude for, it is the simple fact that Singaporeans who work in fast-food chains do not sell their own food. If they did, it would take them a lifetime to serve each customer. You see, Singaporeans of all ages, but particularly the elderly, love their grub and like nothing more than to give you the odd morsel of home-cooked food. I can just imagine it.

  ‘Can I have a hamburger, please?’ I would begin innocently.

  ‘Certainly, and how about one or two of the curry puffs that I’ve just made.’

  ‘No, I just want a hamburger, thanks.’