Even the Singaporean chasing the most cookie cutter of marriage-to-BTO-to-babies lifestyle yearns for accessible and thriving third spaces. But this yearning is eclipsed by their yearning for accessible tuition centres.
In Singapore, race is paradoxically supremely important and yet unintelligible, marginal, and invisible in our daily discourse.
All of this explains why it’s not that surprising that half of the Singaporeans surveyed by IPS don’t have a close friend of another race.
The awful stereotypes described by the satirical post by the Punjabi Singaporean above — “when mothers used to tell their children that we are out to catch them” and “when they cover their noses as soon as we stood near them” — are impossible to effectively call out in a society that simultaneously believes that race doesn’t matter and that actually, racial difference is one of the most dangerous threats to social cohesion in Singapore.