A Singaporean In Australia

12 March 2015

It is your friend who you can hear coming, driving my black vios with exhaust loudly, arriving on the scene with window wind down and one hand outside, other hand holding the sterling wheel...

As suggested, lets talk about the decision making process and how Satki Yoda left the comfort of my 10 year COE black vios for the unknowns and dangers of Australia with its "high taxes", "racist people shouting at you" (sarcasm for the less sarcasm-inclined) and of course, the satki black vios that costs 10 times less and you can drive forever (only that now that it costs $10k, its not so satki anymore and won't make a Singaporean girl wet) 

I previously blogged a bit about my educational past in my previous post so i won't rehash it too much, CNY is over anyway and I don't have to hao lian to any relatives who suddenly want to talk to me now I have a job anymore - link here: 

http://asingaporeanson.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/a-young-singaporean-sons-journey.html

Instead, i think what might be interesting is the thought process I went through. Every migrant, potential migrant, and even someone who thinks of migrating but ends up not migrating has their own unique circumstances, and their own thought process. Whether logical, rational or not, is not for us to judge. Emotions play a huge part as well, and as much as we have been raised in Singapore to think economically rationally, till this day all sorts of people use our emotions to change the way people think. 

The story begins in Pulau Tekong. As you would know, the saying goes, "NS for sinkies, jobs for FT". Unfortunately at the tender age of 20, having graduated from satki streetsmart polytechnic, despite the more urgent needs of where to go on friday night after book out and how many shots i could drink, I already had the rebelliousness and, perhaps some would say, foresight, to feel that something wasn't right. I had a pretty decent GPA in poly despite all the partying, but I couldn't even get a sniff of the local elite unis. Meanwhile, my poly friends who were on-par with me snagged places in the local unis and praised the system to the sky, saying it was only fair (sound familiar)? The only correlation i could see that was different from myself was that they were either more well-connected than I was, or they were not Singaporean. 

We all know the story, and throughout the 2 years of NS, as a driver, seeing drivers getting thrown into Detention Barracks for the smallest offences and getting stains on their records because of their liability and bad luck to be born Singaporean, and dealing with half-brain Enciks with the IQ of a plant (I was going to say Ah Meng but realised that was quite an insult to the species - they are actually quite intelligent if you know your biology), all this while getting rejected with a slap from the local universities every time while your fellow foreign friends live it up in university, seeing them on Facebook, starting their careers, it built up an irrational anger and sense of injustice within me. Call me entitled, but this anger, when used constructively, made me work like hell when I came to university (and train like hell at becoming the best beer drinker in the Singapore club). 

In the end, the hard work and good grades paid off, I got a cushy office job and drive a satki black vios now blah blah blah. The anger is still there, a sense of injustice I get from what might have been if, in crass terms, I didn't have parents rich enough to pay for my overseas education. Sometimes I think, well I shouldn't hold on to the past, but on the other hand it is always harder for someone to understand and feel injustice from a position of privilege and I feel that given our relatively comfortable positions, we should criticize and seek to improve Singapore, and speak even louder, as the accusations that we are just feeling "sour grapes" doesn't hold anymore. 

So there - the anger and injustice can result in a lot of posts on EDMW Hardwarezone forum, but if you use it constructively, it can also result in a very motivated person who works damn hard.