SINGAPORE: A recent Facebook post from a Singaporean man appears to have resonated with many on the platform, based on how many people have responded to it.
In it, Sam Choo, who is an online bookstore owner, posted a cartoon of a Singaporean man at work surrounded by people speaking in a foreign language. The man has a sad look on his face, and the question “Do I still belong here?” is written on top of the cartoon.
Mr Choo wrote on February 15 (Sunday) about having worked in a big bank in the past and seeing in one department “row after row of desks” with workers who all came from the same country.
“It’s like a foreign village planted into the room,” he added.
He wrote that he had just read, the day before, a post from another Singaporean office worker who also said that most of his colleagues were foreigners. These workers spoke the same language and had their own inside jokes and favourite lunch spots.
The man heard conversations he couldn’t fully understand and heard jokes he couldn’t fully get, but he would smile anyway, although he felt like a minority in what was, in actuality, his own turf.
“When you sit in your own office and feel like the outsider, something shifts quietly inside your identity. It is just a subtle dislocation. Like the furniture in your house has been rearranged and you are still trying to find the light switch in the dark,” added Mr Choo.
He also touched on other incidents, such as the shops in a nearby mall all coming from a certain country and the assistant in one shop who couldn’t speak English, which made the transaction awkward.
“In your workplace, do you ever feel like a guest in your own country? Some of us carry a quiet ache that is hard to explain,” he wrote, explaining that the issue isn’t about hating anyone or rejecting change, but “the feeling of being slightly displaced in a place you once knew so well.”
These incidents have caused him, and perhaps others, to ask whether Singapore is still their home or whether they’re becoming a minority in their own land.
He ended his post with writing, “Maybe all I am really saying is this. I just want to feel at home.”
Mr Choo’s post has gotten a whole range of comments, from people who say that they’ve felt this way in Singapore all their lives, to others who underlined that having a high migrant population is necessary for economic prosperity, to those who said that this problem is not new in the city-state, although it’s worse than it used to be.
Others, meanwhile, encouraged Singaporeans to embrace the changes in society and accept that things are no longer the way they used to be. /TISG
Read also: ‘It’s not the job of Singaporeans to stop speaking Singlish so foreigners can understand’
