This is going to come across so gross: "ToDaY iN mY pSyCh ApPoInTmEnT". But yes, today in my psych appointment we got to talking about what, for a long time, was the worst day of the year for me: August 9th, Singapore's National Day.
This is going to be hard to explain to people who don't know anything about Singapore's history, or its national mentality. Very simply put, Singapore was under British colonial rule after WWII for a long time, and as a means of gaining independence, it formed one nation with its neighbour, Malaya, which incorporated the "Si" of Singapore to become "Malaysia". This is known as The Merger. Not a year later, The Merger disintegrated: Malaysia essentially kicked Singapore out of its nation, due to a high proportion of its population being Chinese. (Malaysia prioritised, and still prioritises ethnic Malays.) This left Singapore in a huge predicament, because the island has close to zero natural resources, and depended on Malaysia for as much. To this day, there is a giant pipe across the Straits that pumps water from Malaysia to Singapore. So the (new) nation was devastated. Lee Kwan Yew, now the Prime Minister, cried in the press conference. No one knew how Singapore would survive.
I hated national day every year. Apart from the NDP, every school has a half-day where students just sit in the school hall and sing National Day songs and the national anthem (which we had to sing every day anyway). You'd think kids would be very grudging, but no, you underestimate the intelligence and the power of LKY, LHL (Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew's son, who very conveniently was voted in as Prime Minister after his father), and the rest of the PAP. The school hall would be an EMOTIONAL place. Lots of students would cry. Even I would feel waves of pride at some time. The narrative created by the PAP to induce this response can be summed up by the introductory lyrics of the 1987 National Day song:
This sentiment runs in every one of these songs, and absolutely crushed me. I didn't belong in Singapore. I was Australian, I wasn't born in Singapore, I was white, I ate white-people food at home. And I was made aware of this every day, when I'd be stared at in my public school uniform on the train home, and when classmates called me blonde (I have brown hair), and when kids would gawk at me in Chinese class, and when I stuck out in assembly, taller than everyone else by a head. I didn't belong. So singing about Singapore being "home" where "I know I belong" was a fucking slap in the face. This is not "my country", this is not "my flag".
But - it was "my life", "my family", "my friends". So fucking what was it? Very childishly, I used to modify the lyrics under my breath, with extremely witty lines such as "This is NOT my home, truly, this is NOT where I must be".
[Edit: I found one of my obmxious parodies!
]
As you can probably already begin to tell, National Day was the synecdoche of my entire life. And as I grew older and older, I became more and more self-conscious. I didn't want to sing those songs - I couldn't; I felt like my classmates would stare at me, especially since they knew how much I hated Singapore (I know now that this hatred was just transmuted resentment towards being different). But I knew that if I didn't sing, my classmates would get angry, as they did when I expressed my hatred for their country. "Singapore does so much for you, you benefit from its education system, you live here, we let you in, how dare you be so ungrateful." (Sheena Hung once said that she wanted to punch me in the face for this reason, in Sec 1.) So I was essentially stuck with half-mumbling the songs, feeling horrible, crumbling as everyone around me sung at the top of their lungs, some even crying.
In IP1 (year 9), on the bus ride home after National Day, I wrote this poem on my phone. It's called "In This Hall", but used to be called "National Day":
In this hall
The sea of red and white
Matches their mouths
Loud and proud
Singing songs
Of self-praise and immodesty
Triumphing the day
They were all in tears
Rejoicing in their security
Their sense of belonging
As if to spite my lack
Celebrating loudly
But celebrating nothing
No great victory
No endured hardships
No joyous moment
Just a cut
A snip
A segregation
That left them, floating
Like a speck of dust
In a sea of blue
I have never felt so different
So confused
So jealous
So alone
I have never felt so garish
So multicoloured
So green
So blue
In this sea of red and white
I hug my knees
And hide my head
To stop the celebratory noise
To stop them seeing my tears
To block the pain
And to hide my proud
Misintentioned
Rebellious
Glow of green and gold
It actually won something in the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Prize back in Australia in year 11, but the judge obviously didn't know what it was about - it didn't come with this handy little blog post. I remember they wrote something about the "clear sense of rebellion", which is a nice lack of closure.
I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but on the 13th of August 2012, 4 days after National Day, I began the diet that mutated into anorexia.
So this discomfort is what we my psych and I ended up talking about today - I think we started talking about it because I was talking about the absolute wave of confusing emotions that came with being back in Singapore for 24 hours, on the way from Japan to Sydney. (I still might write about that).
I told her that I always wanted to stay home from school on National Day (though that never would happen, because you just don't skip school in Singapore.) And she asked me why I didn't ask my parents or talk to them about it, and I said they would have gotten angry, because at that age I was constantly antagonising Singapore and talking about how I wanted to go back to Australia, a country I barely even knew. I admitted that I wasn't very mature about it, which led to them being defensive and angry, so I couldn't really blame them for not listening. And then she said something REVOLUTIONARY to me: they're your parents, they're adults, you were as young as 9. They should have been able to see what was really going on, they should have thought about the psychological impact of putting you in an environment where you stuck out and didn't belong every single day, they should have thought about how National Day might affect me. And that's completely true. I'd just never thought about it that way. And now I'm fucking angry, because how much of my life could have and could still be easier if they'd just fucking thought about me as a human, and actually thought about what they were doing to me, for two seconds? I cannot conceive of having had emotional support in my childhood, where I didn't have to figure everything out for myself, and I am beginning to realise how unjust that is.
The second revolutionary thing - my psych does this thing where she makes me close my eyes and put myself back in traumatic and upsetting memories from my childhood and imagine her there, in the situation, talking it out with my parents or whoever and making younger me realise I'm not alone and that it's not my fault. And she made me do this here - we imagined that I was in primary school, and it was National Day, and she told my teachers to look out for me, maybe take me out of the assembly, and acknowledge how it must be difficult for me at that moment, and she told be it was okay to feel uncomfortable (I feel like such a prat saying this). And that made me realise - yeah! Primary school teachers are meant to look out for their students - especially since we had one teacher who taught us every subject and was with us the entire school day. Why didn't anyone think about me? Well, that is very solipsistic. And I was a very unique situation - there's no manual for when you get a white kid in your class suddenly. It probably didn't even cross their mind that it might be difficult for me. Besides, we must realise that these teachers, too, went through these National Day parades and felt the same patriotism, and probably couldn't empathise with my situation even if I had made it known.
"Re-writing" bad memories as I do with my psych is meant to re-wire neural connections associated with childhood experience, and I'm sure it works. I've noticed it working for other bad situations we've talked about. But now that I've realised that no one helped little me when they should have, I just feel really hurt and cheated. Why was no one there for me? I cried a lot. I'm on the verge of crying just writing it. I kind of want to bring it up to my parents, but I know they're just going to get angry and defensive. My mum would just use the "I had four children with disabilities to raise by myself" argument, even though this is factually incorrect. And my dad is already so defensive about it - whenever we bring up ANYTHING about being a white kid in Singapore, he goes "Yep. I'm a horrible father, I ruined your life, I tortured you by putting you in a beautiful safe educationally-excellent country where you lived a privileged life. You're a victim." Note: he says this completely unprompted without us even saying anything bad, which I guess shows that it's an actually guilt in the back of his mind. So nothing's changed.
This is really depressing, so I'll end with some of the more light-hearted aspects of National Day. After 2010, the songs started to be really try-hard "hip", much to the mockery of youths. The crown to this day sits on a song that technically wasn't even a national day song, but a patriotic song for the 2010 Youth Olympic Games:
Kids would ironically do the little arm-dance all the time: "Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, HEY!! / Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, HO!!". (Suprisingly, no "hoe" jokes. I don't think that word was big back then.)
And finally, a here's a Singaporean song that's actually good. It's a parody song by Hossan Leong, using the melody of "We Didn't Start The Fire":
I loved this song. I still do. I show it to people all the time. It's funny and critical and satirises Singapore while still honouring its history and way of life. So much better than the jingoistic songs that, to this day, I can recite off the top of my head.
The weirdest thing? When I'm distressed, I'll go back and listen to the very songs that caused me such distress, and they will be soothing, just as soothing as listening to my old school hymns.
This is going to be hard to explain to people who don't know anything about Singapore's history, or its national mentality. Very simply put, Singapore was under British colonial rule after WWII for a long time, and as a means of gaining independence, it formed one nation with its neighbour, Malaya, which incorporated the "Si" of Singapore to become "Malaysia". This is known as The Merger. Not a year later, The Merger disintegrated: Malaysia essentially kicked Singapore out of its nation, due to a high proportion of its population being Chinese. (Malaysia prioritised, and still prioritises ethnic Malays.) This left Singapore in a huge predicament, because the island has close to zero natural resources, and depended on Malaysia for as much. To this day, there is a giant pipe across the Straits that pumps water from Malaysia to Singapore. So the (new) nation was devastated. Lee Kwan Yew, now the Prime Minister, cried in the press conference. No one knew how Singapore would survive.
Now I must note here that the account i have given you is the one I learnt about in social studies classes and history classes in Singapore. Already from reading the wikipedia article on the topic, I'm noticing some information that I was very conveniently never taught in these classes. So take my word with a pinch of salt - because Singapore is very very good at creating what can most politely be described as national identity and/or solidarity. The more cynical might call it propaganda, and this case is most strongly evidenced by the phenomenon that is National Day, where it celebrates all that it's achieved against the odds.
National Day is nothing like Australia Day, where you might go to a party or a barbecue and get piss drunk and go "AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE OI OI OI". (Actually, Australia Day isn't really a day for celebration, but there's a lot of information on that elsewhere.) National Day in Singapore is hyped up for months beforehand. Frequently, you'll hear screaming jets overhead while going about your daily activities. "What's that?" you'll ask whoever you're with, and then, you both remember: oh, yes, they're getting ready for National Day. It's really quite macabre, in the same way every house in Singapore has a bomb shelter - the pride of its military, and vigilance for attack, is temporally ubiquitous. (That reminds me: as part of the mandatory two-year national service all boys must attend at age 18, the men will be called for re-training every year, and when you turn on the TV or the radio, or pick up the phone, you'll hear and see public service announcements ordering particular commandos to report for duty.) Everyone puts up Singapore flags outside their balconies, and you can be arrested for putting up another country's flag or putting the Singapore flag up the wrong way or wearing the flag - though these laws apply all year round, of course. Posters go up showing children and families of all of Singapore's four "races": Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian, wishing you a happy national day. The annual new National Day song will come out, much to everyone's anticipation, and you'll begin to sing previous years' National Day songs. There are crowd favourites, like Home, and Singapore Town:
These are already a little creepily propaganda-like: "because in Singapore, Singapore you'll find happiness for everyone!" But then there are the songs that are more overtly jingoistic, and their release coincide with the specific years in which Singapore was threatened by the prospect of war:
As you can see from that video, National Day involves an elaborate parade. Every year. It's called the NDP, and every Primary 5 (Year 5, when you're eleven) is entitled and in fact required to attend the parade with their school. Many, many people also go voluntarily, and tickets are VERY hard to come by. Even the tickets for NDP rehearsal are highly sought after. I get it - it's a parade! Albeit a very militaristic parade; it's not your American Thanksgiving kind of parade. I went in P5, of course - it was wet and rainy and I hated it.
I hated national day every year. Apart from the NDP, every school has a half-day where students just sit in the school hall and sing National Day songs and the national anthem (which we had to sing every day anyway). You'd think kids would be very grudging, but no, you underestimate the intelligence and the power of LKY, LHL (Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew's son, who very conveniently was voted in as Prime Minister after his father), and the rest of the PAP. The school hall would be an EMOTIONAL place. Lots of students would cry. Even I would feel waves of pride at some time. The narrative created by the PAP to induce this response can be summed up by the introductory lyrics of the 1987 National Day song:
There was a time when people said
That Singapore won't make it, but we did
There was a time when troubles seemed too much
For us to take, but we did
We built a nation, strong and free, reaching out together
For peace and harmony
I'd also like to focus on the first chorus:
This is my country, this is my flag
This is my future, this is my life
This is my family, these are my friends
We are Singapore, Singaporeans
This sentiment runs in every one of these songs, and absolutely crushed me. I didn't belong in Singapore. I was Australian, I wasn't born in Singapore, I was white, I ate white-people food at home. And I was made aware of this every day, when I'd be stared at in my public school uniform on the train home, and when classmates called me blonde (I have brown hair), and when kids would gawk at me in Chinese class, and when I stuck out in assembly, taller than everyone else by a head. I didn't belong. So singing about Singapore being "home" where "I know I belong" was a fucking slap in the face. This is not "my country", this is not "my flag".
But - it was "my life", "my family", "my friends". So fucking what was it? Very childishly, I used to modify the lyrics under my breath, with extremely witty lines such as "This is NOT my home, truly, this is NOT where I must be".
[Edit: I found one of my obmxious parodies!
As you can probably already begin to tell, National Day was the synecdoche of my entire life. And as I grew older and older, I became more and more self-conscious. I didn't want to sing those songs - I couldn't; I felt like my classmates would stare at me, especially since they knew how much I hated Singapore (I know now that this hatred was just transmuted resentment towards being different). But I knew that if I didn't sing, my classmates would get angry, as they did when I expressed my hatred for their country. "Singapore does so much for you, you benefit from its education system, you live here, we let you in, how dare you be so ungrateful." (Sheena Hung once said that she wanted to punch me in the face for this reason, in Sec 1.) So I was essentially stuck with half-mumbling the songs, feeling horrible, crumbling as everyone around me sung at the top of their lungs, some even crying.
In IP1 (year 9), on the bus ride home after National Day, I wrote this poem on my phone. It's called "In This Hall", but used to be called "National Day":
In this hall
The sea of red and white
Matches their mouths
Loud and proud
Singing songs
Of self-praise and immodesty
Triumphing the day
They were all in tears
Rejoicing in their security
Their sense of belonging
As if to spite my lack
Celebrating loudly
But celebrating nothing
No great victory
No endured hardships
No joyous moment
Just a cut
A snip
A segregation
That left them, floating
Like a speck of dust
In a sea of blue
I have never felt so different
So confused
So jealous
So alone
I have never felt so garish
So multicoloured
So green
So blue
In this sea of red and white
I hug my knees
And hide my head
To stop the celebratory noise
To stop them seeing my tears
To block the pain
And to hide my proud
Misintentioned
Rebellious
Glow of green and gold
It actually won something in the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Prize back in Australia in year 11, but the judge obviously didn't know what it was about - it didn't come with this handy little blog post. I remember they wrote something about the "clear sense of rebellion", which is a nice lack of closure.
I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but on the 13th of August 2012, 4 days after National Day, I began the diet that mutated into anorexia.
So this discomfort is what we my psych and I ended up talking about today - I think we started talking about it because I was talking about the absolute wave of confusing emotions that came with being back in Singapore for 24 hours, on the way from Japan to Sydney. (I still might write about that).
I told her that I always wanted to stay home from school on National Day (though that never would happen, because you just don't skip school in Singapore.) And she asked me why I didn't ask my parents or talk to them about it, and I said they would have gotten angry, because at that age I was constantly antagonising Singapore and talking about how I wanted to go back to Australia, a country I barely even knew. I admitted that I wasn't very mature about it, which led to them being defensive and angry, so I couldn't really blame them for not listening. And then she said something REVOLUTIONARY to me: they're your parents, they're adults, you were as young as 9. They should have been able to see what was really going on, they should have thought about the psychological impact of putting you in an environment where you stuck out and didn't belong every single day, they should have thought about how National Day might affect me. And that's completely true. I'd just never thought about it that way. And now I'm fucking angry, because how much of my life could have and could still be easier if they'd just fucking thought about me as a human, and actually thought about what they were doing to me, for two seconds? I cannot conceive of having had emotional support in my childhood, where I didn't have to figure everything out for myself, and I am beginning to realise how unjust that is.
The second revolutionary thing - my psych does this thing where she makes me close my eyes and put myself back in traumatic and upsetting memories from my childhood and imagine her there, in the situation, talking it out with my parents or whoever and making younger me realise I'm not alone and that it's not my fault. And she made me do this here - we imagined that I was in primary school, and it was National Day, and she told my teachers to look out for me, maybe take me out of the assembly, and acknowledge how it must be difficult for me at that moment, and she told be it was okay to feel uncomfortable (I feel like such a prat saying this). And that made me realise - yeah! Primary school teachers are meant to look out for their students - especially since we had one teacher who taught us every subject and was with us the entire school day. Why didn't anyone think about me? Well, that is very solipsistic. And I was a very unique situation - there's no manual for when you get a white kid in your class suddenly. It probably didn't even cross their mind that it might be difficult for me. Besides, we must realise that these teachers, too, went through these National Day parades and felt the same patriotism, and probably couldn't empathise with my situation even if I had made it known.
"Re-writing" bad memories as I do with my psych is meant to re-wire neural connections associated with childhood experience, and I'm sure it works. I've noticed it working for other bad situations we've talked about. But now that I've realised that no one helped little me when they should have, I just feel really hurt and cheated. Why was no one there for me? I cried a lot. I'm on the verge of crying just writing it. I kind of want to bring it up to my parents, but I know they're just going to get angry and defensive. My mum would just use the "I had four children with disabilities to raise by myself" argument, even though this is factually incorrect. And my dad is already so defensive about it - whenever we bring up ANYTHING about being a white kid in Singapore, he goes "Yep. I'm a horrible father, I ruined your life, I tortured you by putting you in a beautiful safe educationally-excellent country where you lived a privileged life. You're a victim." Note: he says this completely unprompted without us even saying anything bad, which I guess shows that it's an actually guilt in the back of his mind. So nothing's changed.
This is really depressing, so I'll end with some of the more light-hearted aspects of National Day. After 2010, the songs started to be really try-hard "hip", much to the mockery of youths. The crown to this day sits on a song that technically wasn't even a national day song, but a patriotic song for the 2010 Youth Olympic Games:
Kids would ironically do the little arm-dance all the time: "Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, HEY!! / Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, HO!!". (Suprisingly, no "hoe" jokes. I don't think that word was big back then.)
And finally, a here's a Singaporean song that's actually good. It's a parody song by Hossan Leong, using the melody of "We Didn't Start The Fire":
I loved this song. I still do. I show it to people all the time. It's funny and critical and satirises Singapore while still honouring its history and way of life. So much better than the jingoistic songs that, to this day, I can recite off the top of my head.
The weirdest thing? When I'm distressed, I'll go back and listen to the very songs that caused me such distress, and they will be soothing, just as soothing as listening to my old school hymns.
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