Singapore

Ya, the streets are not as safe as you might assume. Not even your houses. Even with such prison systems in place shit still happens.


I got molested by some karang-guni man at my front door while my family was at the store room (we were moving things to the front door from the store room for him to take). I was very young, I had no concept of "molestation" in my mind. I did not say anything to anyone and carried on as though nothing had happened.


I'll get back to the molestation in a moment. Let me talk about some other things that have been on my mind for a long while.


I feel that this incident of sexual abuse had to do with a widespread disdain that native Singaporeans feel for immigrants (my family migrated to Singapore in the early 90s), coming to "their" country and taking "their" jobs and whatnot.

I say this because my family would often experience harassment by Singaporeans. They would come to our apartment and peek in through the blinds and tell us to "walk down our stairs softer" because some child of theirs was trying to sleep, this too right in the morning at 8 am when most people are getting ready for work or school. I understand your poor child is trying to sleep but you should have the decency to knock at our door and speak to us in a civilized manner instead of invading our privacy and peeking  in through our closed window blinds. We stopped keeping our outward facing windows open shortly after these incidents.

At shopping centers like North Point (we lived in the Yishun/Khatib area) we would be harassed by people claiming that they had been waiting for a parking lot that we were occupying. It is a PUBLIC parking lot and there is no reservation system whatsoever. Find another spot. It is first come first served, like so many other systems in Singapore. It is so strange that this concept is explained to immigrants yet Singaporeans believe that they should have the authority to demand special treatment if they are in a losing position relative to immigrants.
At school, I would call my mother on the payphone and for this I would again get harassed by other students. I never saw this happen with anyone other than immigrants. Sure I have some level of bias being an immigrant myself, I acknowledge that. Many situations like these would occur at Ahmad Ibrahim Primary School over and over with the other immigrants like me. In one case a girl about my age would get her pencil case repeatedly stolen and she would be goaded into tears by the Malay boys of the class. Repeatedly this would happen without respite for the poor girl. Some people would call this “teasing”, I would disagree.

In another case at the same school, we had a reading-buddy system in place where students proficient at English would coach the weaker students through reading of storybooks borrowed from the school library. On one occasion, the students were noisier than usual and so the prefects decided to round all of us up and paraded us in front of the rest of the school. What is worse is that a certain prefect decided that I personally was somehow responsible for the behaviour of all of the noisy students. He placed me right at the front of this group in full view of everyone and had the vice-principal of the school mention me by name, admonishing me in front of the whole school. My partner had not been talking to me, we were doing what we had been assigned: reading the book. What sort of educators are you if you don’t even check your facts and resort to such actions with zero consideration for what the child goes through in such situations? I tried to talk to the vice-principal after all this had happened since I felt a very strong sense of injustice. I was told she did not want to see me. I dropped it shortly after but I have never forgotten this injustice done to me. When I was in primary 4 I was in class 4/2. I did well on my final exams but got transferred to the class 5/6 instead 5/2 like others who did similarly to me. My parents and the teacher of the class all went to inquire with the principal only to get the response that “it was her decision and that if we objected I should change school”. She took someone who had proved the ability to excel, earning their place and forced him into a class where he would not be challenged intellectually. The effect: dullness.  For this I have Mrs. Chan Kwai Foong to thank. I have more things to say about this school but I will stop here.

In North View Secondary School I was the only immigrant in the class for the first two years. Things were quiet for the first two years but they got back to their usual state when more immigrants joined us, largely from China. No longer just childish pranks, the Singaporeans got more vile. They were called “chinaman” behind their backs, had their physical appearance mocked, their pronunciation mocked (from Singaporeans who could speak “Singlish” at best). Fights broke out often, the Singaporeans with their NCC and NPCC affiliations would all logically team up with the outsiders on the other end. Tensions were high those years. Pornographic magazines and “Hentai” would be brought into the class and blame placed upon the foreigners when discovered.

(The students would not even spare the teachers. I remember a dear teacher trying to teach and was not even able to get a classroom to listen to him because everyone was too busy talking to listen to him pleading for them to keep quiet. Just a side note, nothing to do with the point I am trying to make)

The point I am trying to make is that if I experienced such incidences of harassment by the Singaporeans and witnessed them behaving towards immigrants in such terrible ways, am I very far off when I think that the karang-guni man who did this to me did so in his attempt to “fight back” against an immigrant family by harming their son? Am I incorrect when I conclude that he shared the views expressed by the Singaporeans through their behaviour? That he shared these views strongly enough to take action?


Whatever is good about Singapore hides a very ugly side of it that is carefully hidden and ignored. I found such opulence and such depravity all in one city. Singapore really does have it all. We had 5-10 computers placed in every classroom in Ahmad Ibrahim. The number of times these computers were used: 0. Those machines were not cheap.
The citizens are largely oblivious and in many cases complicit in childish behavior, perhaps from a sense of self-entitlement. Racial harmony, dangers of drugs, non-cruelty to animals and other such things are taught in schools in such a high-handed manner when the basic concept of equality is so painfully ignored.


I return to the molestation, its effects and my experience as a victim of this abuse.
I slowly became very detached from everyone around me including my immediate family as a direct result of the experiences I detailed above and the incident of sexual abuse. I experienced "silent treatment" from my classmates and teachers. It started with a girl who was in my class telling my best friend at the time to stop talking to me, which he gradually did. I thought it was very odd that someone would do such a thing. I mentioned it to nobody thinking she may have been making a crude joke of some sort. I experienced this cycle of beginning to communicate with someone only to find that they would cease communicating with me many times over.
Slowly, I withdrew from socialising with my classmates other than a select few who I felt I could get along with. In general, I found it difficult to communicate with those around me. Many were well versed in Singlish but spoke poor English. When I spoke English they would find it hard to understand me. I gave up trying to communicate altogether. (I remember a North View teacher Mrs. Teng commenting about how we were ignorant of basic English components (verbs, adjectives, nouns etc.) No surprise.)

That’s not to say that nobody reached out to me, tried to communicate with me to see why I was behaving this way.
Those who reached out to me were a small subset of the students. We never got to the root of the problem however. I would stay aloof. You see, I had buried the incident of sexual abuse so deep down that I did not remember it until 2012. The incident itself occurred between 1997 & 2000. The teachers, those who most had the power to do something, never initiated one-to-one conversation with me. To try and help me, nobody noticed that a horrible atrocity had happened to me. My guess is that they just assumed that I did not care about school. Maybe I covered it up really well.

Why was I withdrawing from my classmates? I experienced such emotional and mental conflict that even daily interaction was getting strenuous. I could not focus on my studies because of all the internal strain I was going through, with the strain just increasing day by day. I withdrew from my family and friends. Maybe it was just easier for everyone to assume I was “dumb” or “didn’t care” rather than to attempt communication to figure out what was going on with me. It was easier for them to think “anti-social” than to think “sexually abused”. I walked around feeling, like many sexual abuse victims do, guilty for some unnamed crime. The punishment I would receive from teachers seemed to reinforce the guilty feeling. So much of the punishment was meted out without communication, without explanation. Like I was somehow supposed to figure out what I had done wrong, rather than to be explicitly told it so that I could improve and be given the chance to speak my mind, in the process becoming aware of my history so corrective steps could be taken. One teacher sentenced me to an hour of detention for smiling when his lecture was over. After becoming withdrawn, without being able to speak, I could not even express myself properly after a certain point. I decided it was just easier to keep quiet and try to minimize the internal conflict than to attempt any sort of verbalisation.

I would lash out at my parents and my sister regularly. I decided to stop going to social occasions and outings organized by my parents and their friends. I chose instead to play Counter-Strike on the computer. It was an easy way to escape from the torment I had to go through every day. My grades slipped and I cared less and less about school every day.

I lived with my family but I had very few conversations with any of my family members. In speaking to my current counsellors, I have likened my experience to being in a prison – a mental and emotional prison. There were few who tried to understand why I was this way. For these people I am so thankful, though they were as helpless as I was. Maybe those who I thought had the power to change my situation may not have been as empowered as I thought they would be.

I felt dirty all the time. I would take showers and never use any soap, never use shampoo. I felt so dirty I thought that I could never be “clean” so I gave up trying to be clean. I felt like I was being treated as the perpetrator of a crime rather than a victim, as you suggested blurgtheamoeba. I did not approach the police in my case but I recall situations where my parents did approach the police in some situations but only to receive a very unhelpful response. Maybe as I grew older I internalised the idea of helplessness and pushed my memory of the sexual abuse even further down.

My parents eventually decided that our family would migrate somewhere else and get a fresh start, try to leave all the negativity of that place behind and look for something better.


Maybe the pigs aren’t just those in blue.