Top Quotes: “This Is What Inequality Looks Like” — You Yenn Teo
“The older ones tend to be in a cluster of three to five adjacent blocks, while the newer ones are single blocks among ‘regular,’ owner-occupied flats. In the older clusters, in particular, there is a feeling of being in a rental neighborhood. While it is not obvious to someone just passing by, it is known to residents who live in the general area which blocks are rental blocks. Tensions sometimes exist between owner-occupied blocks and rental blocks, particularly when it comes to the use of shared spaces like playgrounds and open courts.
If one is not paying attention, it is not immediately obvious when a block of flats is made up mostly or entirely of rental units. But once you start paying attention, there are a few clues observable from street level.
First, doors. The way to tell a block of rental flats is to look at the space between front doors. Rental flats are either so-called 1-room or 2-room HDB flats. This means they have either no separate bedroom or one bedroom respectively. 1-room flats have a living area, a kitchen, a bathroom; they have no separate bedroom; they are roughly 35 square meters. 2-room flats have a living area, a kitchen, a bathroom, and one bedroom; they are about 45 square meters. For comparison, HDB 4-room flats — the modal type of housing in Singapore — are double the size at 90 square meters. Each rental flat is thus relatively narrow and the doors in close proximity. Looking at the facade of a HDB rental block, one is struck by the high density of units.”
“Compared to non-rental neighborhoods, one sees police cars and policemen in rental neighborhoods more frequently. Residents also tell me that there are always police as well as narcotics officers around. Signboards and posters in rental neighborhoods are also constant reminders of the dangers lurking and the proximity of one’s everyday life to serious problems.”
“I had by then been taking photos of rental neighborhoods and had noticed the strong sense of negativity in the signage in rental areas. Her observation immediately brought to mind this contrast between rental neighborhoods and owner-occupied neighborhoods:
On one side: don’t (borrow from loan sharks). On the other: do (climb the stairs to good health!). On one hand: an ominous picture. On the other: an image of well-being. Residents in owner-occupied blocks do sometimes see loan shark posters on their lift doors as well, so these posters are not targeted only at rental flat residents. However, in my three years of fieldwork, I do not recall seeing anything other than “1–800-X-AH-LONG” as I waited for the lift to visit residents at rental blocks. In these neighborhoods, there was next to none of the cheerful virtuousness my friend from the UK observed.
Insert a kid coming home from school every day and taking these lifts. Imagine yourself as this child. To grow up in a low-income rental flat is to be immersed daily in an environment dominated by negatives.”
“The lack of bedrooms mean that living rooms generally double up as sleeping areas. Many families maintain just a few pieces of furniture in the living areas because floor space is needed for sleep. Some people use tilam (mattresses) that can be folded and put away in the day and laid out at night; others use mats or sleep on the floor directly without any soft covering. In some cases, people have sofas that become beds at night. Very rarely do families have full-sized dining tables that seat the entire family at the same time. Where people have dining tables, these are big enough for just two or three at a time; quite frequently, they use folding tables. Where space is limited, being able to move things out of the way is important.
The furnishings people have reflect the excesses of Singapore society — some people with limited income have quite nice furniture because well-to-do Singaporeans throw out nice things that are still in reasonably good condition. In these cramped flats, then, I sometimes saw beautiful wood-carved chairs, fancy bed frames, and sofas that were clearly well-made before they were weather-worn.”
“The lack of space can lead to some teenagers staying away from home, and relationships becoming tensed and fraught.”
“When I was doing my fieldwork, visiting families in their homes, I was often surprised by what I experienced. The poor air circulation in some corridors of the older blocks created a claustrophobic, stifling atmosphere. When I was inside flats and if doors slammed shut as the wind blew, I would get the feeling of being trapped inside small and dark flats. In 2013, the haze hit Singapore with a vengeance — air quality was poor and it became our everyday reality to walk around with the smell of smoke in our nostrils and eyes stinging. I recall the sharp contrasts between the comfort of my air-conditioned office and the homes I visited. I was also surprised to meet people who have poor nutrition, who talk about how they sometimes ran out of money for food, of people who make choices about eating fewer meals so that their children could eat more.”
“The main form of childcare parents from low-income households can secure are in government-linked childcare centers. It is here that state subsidies make fees low enough to afford. On the whole, this option is a great deal more accessible now compared to a decade ago. Yet, several challenges remain. First, to qualify for full subsidies, mothers have to be employed. This is a circular problem: without help with childcare, women are not able to find time to secure stable employment; without stable employment, they are not able to secure enrollment in childcare centers. Second, there are issues with location. While the total number of childcare spaces in Singapore exceed demand, these are not always located where parents need them to be. For low-income parents, enrollment in childcare centers within walking distance of their homes is crucial. For one thing, they need to save on costs of transportation. But a less obvious reason, at least to middle-class eyes, is that proximity allows for other people — neighbors, older kids — to help pick younger children up while parents are still at work.
Importantly, even with childcare, employment is still hard to maintain because care gaps — either daily or cyclical — persist. Daily gaps appear insofar as center hours may not coincide with work hours. Dropping children off is not usually a problem, but picking them up by the time centers close (typically 7pm) is challenging. For people doing night shifts, childcare centers certainly do not fully address needs of care. Weekends, too, pose challenges. I met parents who have to leave young children at home on their own when they go to work; this creates enormous anxieties and they are unable to fully focus at work.”
“One woman, for example, told me about filming her child being sick and hospitalized because she felt she needed this video evidence to ask for a few weeks off. The absurdity of this is apparent when I think about the many times my child has been sick and I took time off without the slightest pause. That I might have to first prove I wasn’t lying is beyond contemplation.”
“Most of these kids appear to be of regular intelligence and do not have learning disabilities, but they are labeled ‘slow’ from a young age. In speaking to an Allied Educator whose job it is to work with kids with learning disabilities, I learnt that it takes some time for her to figure out which kids have disabilities. Why? Because most of the kids who come to her attention are ‘behind’ simply because they have not had as much exposure to school materials and not because they are unable to learn in neuro-typical ways. In other words, given time and exposure, they are no less capable of learning than most other children. They lack exposure for a variety of reasons: they have less preschool education; their parents do not speak English (or the type of English required in schools); there is limited reading at home; and they do not have extra coaching by tuition teachers.
In other words, the main reason they ‘fall behind’ can be traced to their relative class disadvantages. Turn our view around and we see that, given the ubiquity of enrichment centers and tutors, some kids — because of class advantages — are advantaged in a system where early exposure and precocity are rewarded. The kids who are able to run forward the moment the gates are open are neither more ‘meritorious’ nor more deserving.
Why do I call this an irrational outcome? If we think of schools as places of learning, if ‘equality of opportunity’ is upheld as our education system’s mantra, and if the purpose of mass education is to train as many capable individuals as we can who will grow up to be contributing members of our society, then kids who have insufficient exposure outside of school should have sufficient exposure within it and sufficient time to even out the advantages/disadvantages resulting from class differences.”
“People who leave marriages via divorce are required to sell their flats. Children who are born of unmarried women receive less support; until changes announced in April 2016, unmarried women could not even access government-paid maternity leave. Unmarried women and their children still cannot form ‘family nucleus’ to apply for public housing. Support for healthcare costs are subject to means tests which take into account the income and savings of the patient as well as other members of her/his family. Elderly persons who have no income receive support only after they are able to prove that they do not have adult children who can support them.”
“One group that is on the rise and in this category of absolute exclusion is ‘foreign wives.’ These are women who have married low-income citizen men and who are not citizens or permanent residents. The immigration policies in Singapore are such that people with low educational credentials are unlikely to be successful in their applications for permanent residence or citizenship. Social workers are seeing a rise in the number of these foreign wives in the neighborhoods they work in. There is little to nothing they can do for them. To offer them any aid, social workers have to find ways to make connections to Singaporeans; either their spouses or in some cases their citizen children can be the applicants for aid. In cases where they are estranged from spouses or without (citizen) children, however, there is very little social workers can do. Some of them find ways to bring them food rations or donations in kind, but that is often the best they can do. These are women they feel bad for, and do try to help, but who ultimately cannot enter into their systems.”
“In 2017, the Development Finance International and Oxfam released a report on a new measure they developed called the ‘Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index.’ In it, they look at 152 countries’ commitment to reducing income and wealth inequalities. The ‘commitment’ is operationalized by looking at social spending (on health, education, and social protection); taxation (structure and incidence); and the protection of labor rights, because each of these have redistributive effects. The report is insightful for capturing what most measures of inequality do not: what countries are actually doing to deal with the problem of growing inequality, as opposed to where they are at now in terms of inequality measures. This is key for two related reasons: inequality measures capture where countries are at at any given point in time without necessarily signaling where they may be headed. This tends toward overlooking trends in wealthier states that have had high levels of commitment to redistribution but which have moved away from this in recent decades (e.g. the United Kingdom) and less wealthy states that continue to have high rates of inequality but which are making significant efforts toward redistribution (e.g. Namibia). Second, then, the index is potentially a tool through which citizens can hold states accountable for actions they are or are not taking toward improving on equality measures.
Sweden, unsurprisingly, was on top of the list, signaling it had the highest level of commitment to reducing inequality. A striking thing happened when the report was released, shocking in its contrast to what happens when news breaks of Singapore (the country, or specific institutions in it) being ranked highly in any global index. The Guardian published an article featuring Sweden. In it, political leaders from various parties talked about how worried they are that inequality is increasing and how much harder they have to work to reduce inequality. I had to read it twice to make sure I was not misinterpreting its main thrust.”
