A Tale of Two Cities

“I was not allowed to fly, so I had to cancel the trip back home”, she said with a tinge of disappointment in her voice.

“Why were you not allowed to fly?”, I asked, though I half knew the truth. It would be better to hear it straight from her before I jumped to any conclusions.

She smiled and did not reply, and me being me, felt the urge to remove the elephant from the room.

“Is it coz of this?”, I questioned while using my hands to carve out a belly bump in the air, though on hindsight it was perhaps not necessary given pointing to my beer belly would have been enough.

She quietly acknowledged.

Then there was no stopping me. I dug around to find out more details. Here was a woman who was not married and not in a serious relationship who was about to have a kid (not mine). A week earlier I had came across an article about single mothers in Korea who were discriminated against and shunted by the whole family, a situation I would quite associate with all Asian countries including Singapore. I worried my friend was going to go through the whole thing though she was a German in Germany.

“So how are you feeling about all this? Stressed?”

“No. I am very happy to be having a kid”

“Huh what?”

She was happy. Though she loved kids, doctors had earlier ruled out her chance of having any due to some medical issues (lesson learnt: take everything doctors say with a pinch of salt) and she was plainly overjoyed that she was going to be having a kid, whether there was a man by her side or not. Her parents shared her joy too, all the more surprising given they were a generation older.

It was a bit of a culture shock. I had often heard in the West of the large incidences of single mothers and couple getting married a few kids later, which was considered sacrilegious to the Asian conception of marriage and the institution of family. However, here It did not matter as much. What mattered was not how people or society judged you, but how you judged yourself.

This I feel is the real sign of a developed country. While in Singapore we often like to laud ourselves as being a very economically advanced nation, I have always felt we were backward in our thinking (though this has been changing for the better), mainly because we made everyone else’s business our business. The person who sat on the reserved seat, the couple who showed affection in public, all had to be taken a photo of and shamed online. If you were single, you had to get married. If you were in a job that meant you had to settle for a HDB over a condominium, you were not ambitious enough. And if you thought Singapore was bad, India was even more interesting, a place where relatives and outsiders, whose own lives were a total mess, wanted to control and judge every aspect of yours. Often this lead to lives that became unnecessarily stressful and ultimately meaningless.

I guess what I am trying to say can be very simply summarized in a sentence and perhaps even used as a future benchmark by economists to judge the development of a country, a sentence that goes

‘Live, and let live”.