Copyright © 2009 Soy-n-Joy®
Singapore: Some of Its Cultural Challenges in the Eyes of a Tourist. As Told by a Chinese American.
Not long ago, I was speaking with a new local friend in Beijing. Given my lack of regular practice, I spoke to her in not the most fluent Mandarin (officially known as Putonghua in Mainland China). To my surprise, she said, "Your Putonghua is very good, much better than many Chinese from Hong Kong or Singapore." I was surprised because she grouped Chinese Singaporeans in the same Putonghua-fluency category as the Chinese from Hong Kong, who were generally speaking a Cantonese-accented version of Putonghua that many Beijing residents had difficulty understanding fully. My prior expectation is, that because Mandarin is widely taught in Singapore schools and widely spoken in the island state, Chinese Singaporeans are very good at Mandarin, particularly the spoken language, which they use everyday. And because English is the most widely-used among the four official languages there, I can assume general English proficiency in Singapore. Now that I was visiting Singapore, I finally came to understand what my friend in Beijing was talking about. The kind of Mandarin that people spoke in Singapore was difficult to understand, perhaps because of a general fusion with other Chinese dialects habitually spoken in Singapore. The same thing happened to the kind of English that Singaporeans spoke. It was also difficult to understand completely because there were infusions of non-English colloquialism that Singaporeans were brought up with but that were alien to native English speakers. If external native speakers carry the gold standards of the spoken languages, then there is a lot for Singaporeans to think about regarding Singapore's language education. When you are using common languages to communicate, learn from, and do business with the rest of the world, you must sharpen your language skills. And the standard of those skills is not internally prescribed, but externally defined.
As a tourist, I love to wander around on foot a lot. That way I get to experience things like the locals do, but with a visitor's curiosity. I was certainly impressed by the modern showcase of Orchard Road, right in the heart of Singapore. Singaporeans are generally very law-abiding, reflecting the educational success of the Singaporean system. When it came to crossing Orchard Road, or any other main road in Singapore, I found it impossible to do so without going up through a pedestrian overpass or down through a pedestrian underpass. The explicit purpose, of course, is to speed up vehicular flow, to minimize air pollution, and to avoid the chaos and accidents arising from pedestrians competing against the swarming traffic. But the signs directing pedestrians, particularly at entrances to and exits from underpasses where people could lose their sense of terrestrial bearings, were far from being user-friendly. Either the signs were inconspicuous, or the directions were difficult to read or sometimes even confusing. Unless you were a seasoned local, a visitor (whether foreign or a local not familiar with the area) could easily lose his/her way in that environment.
Wherever I visit, if there are reliable and user-friendly systems of public transportation, such as mass transit and buses, I shall try to make use of them and experience things like locals do, rather than relying on taxis all the time. And I expect Singapore, noted for its modern efficiency, should be one of my favorite places for getting around relatively effortlessly and hassle-free. I must say that Singapore has met my high expectations most of the time, save for one incident. I was coming back to town by bus from a full-day visit to the Jurong Bird Park. It was a very enjoyable visit and a comfortable bus ride. But when I was getting off the bus, I was stopped and grabbed in the arm by a man who looked like an official of some kind. He asked me, "Why didn't you 'beep' your card?", referring to the bus card that most locals use for getting around in public transportation: when they get on the bus, they swipe or 'beep' their cards to initiate the journeys, and when they get off, they swipe or 'beep' again to end the journeys, and the fares will be deducted from the cards according to the distances they have traveled. Now because I paid cash upon boarding the bus like most tourists did, and did not use a bus card like most locals, I had no card to swipe or 'beep' when I disembarked. The official would not let go of me. I asked, "What are you doing to me?" And he repeated his question. I said, "What?" Then he asked another question, "Are you a PR?" Again I asked, "What do you mean?" He said, "Permanent resident?" I said, "No." And he said, "Are you a tourist?" I said, "Yes." He then said, "Oh...," and finally let go of me, without a word of apology. Then I realized that he mistook me for someone trying to take advantage of the system without swiping or 'beeping' my bus card. But apparently he mistook me to be one of the new permanent residents from Mainland China who wanted to take a free ride, and he was rude in his demeanor. Many a foreign tourist before me alighted from the bus hassle-free, without swiping or 'beeping' any card, but he picked on me because I looked more like a local. Call it profiling. But the incident has surfaced some deep-seated psychology that I believe many enlightened Singaporeans should like to reflect upon.
While I was visiting, I enjoyed reading the columns in The Straits Times, the most popular English newspaper in Singapore, almost equivalent to "The Voice of Singapore," and a national icon there. Now that I was back in the States, I was trying to read the same columns again online The Straits Times, echoing my habit of reading favorite columns in The New York Times online. Unfortunately, I found out that those columns in The Straits Times were open online to subscribers only. To me, that subscription-only online readership seemed like some kind of misaligned anachronism, or putting it plainly, like shooting oneself in the foot. The mission of the online version should be to attract, develop, and maintain the goodwill of a global audience in building and sustaining the Singapore brand. By limiting the readership to a narrow audience, as The New York Times found out after a less-then-successful experiment, The Straits Times, as Singapore's de facto official paper, is undermining its own purpose and wasting much of the efforts of its talented columnists. In today's media world fiercely competitive for the precious attention and scarce time of global readers, any unnecessary barrier to access is self-defeating.
In my overall impression, Singapore is a clean, modern, and efficient city-state. However, as a visitor, I noticed not only a well-deserved sense of pride in the Singaporeans I had met, but also a certain degree of complacence arising from that pride and a rather heavy internal focus not unlike the mindset of manufacturing companies before the onset of the marketing era. To me, the mix of complacence and an internal focus raises an alert. It may not be a red flag yet, but it can deter progress because of the cultural misalignment with the overall vision and strategy. And in this era of rapid change, progress slowing down means others are catching up, even if it were a race between the hare and the tortoise.
Perhaps I was like the blind man feeling the elephant. But if the elephant could not see itself well, even the blind man's input could be relevant, especially if it could keep an open mind to solicit or receive inputs from multiple blind men feeling its different parts. Singapore could benefit a lot by listening to its customers for insight. And I happened to have gained some experience at the interactive moments of truth, having recently been a customer of the Singapore brand.
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