A 'State of Emergency'

Jeremy Tiang weaved a beautiful story in 'State of Emergency' (2017). Of a family living through the turbulent times of Malaya and Malaysia/Singapore through the Konfrontasi, Communist insurgency, Hock Lee bus riots, Operation Coldstore and Operation Spectrum. The larger backdrop of Cold War tensions loomed. The story (fiction) offers a different perspective from the voices of each character.

It's a brilliant piece of writing that has been thoroughly researched. The story suggests that it doesn't take any side except to offer a human viewpoint to the history. If this story is so sensitive to the extent that the National Arts Council (NAC) withdrew its funding for the book after reading the first draft, then let us readers be reminded of, ________. Fill in your own thoughts, please. It's almost understandable that our government is touchy about it. Other governments might have an even greater reaction.

I enjoyed the book very much. It's a stark reminder that if our country might again be forced into an ideological war if we aren't careful. Identity politics at play. It's a bit like religion, which is now increasingly bandied about when it comes to deciding social policies. (Please see the ongoing drama that is America, then we have the complicated conflict between Palestine and Israel; and the Daesh.) The paths and peoples of Communism and Democracy have shifted so much since the so-called end of the Second Malayan Emergency in 1990, and the not so-so-long-ago Operation Spectrum in 1987.

Singapore and her residents enjoy hard-won peace. But I'll never take the government rhetoric as gospel truth. I was never the 'good' kid at catechism class anyway. My education, thankfully, has not been conducted under an authoritarian dictatorship. There was space to quietly question and dig out publicly available facts, and review historical presentations. I'm not completely ungrateful for economic progress, but surely, we can always do better.

The extract below is set some time in 1963. But the attitude towards foreign workers still exists today. I've heard it out of the mouths of adults at acquaintances' parties (funerals, kids' birthdays, housewarming, etc). Shocking, isn't it? In the 1950s and 1960s, your non-Capitalist sympathies and causes label you as Marxist. A potential Communist. Now, it will label one as a 'bleeding heart liberal'. How times have changed.

"You think Singapore has always been like thus," he went on, as if she had not spoken. "We used to be poor. In one generation we have improved so much. Look at our airport. Look at our housing. They've just opened the new MRT network. When you get out, you'll be able to ride on it, and think how far we've come. Why are you attacking our progress? Why do you want to throw all this away?" 

He seemed genuinely angry. She carefully put her coffee, now cold, barely touched, on the edge of the desk. "I couldn't see suffering and not do anything about it." 

"You think these people are suffering?" His face was an ugly sneer. "Foreign workers. They come and tell you all kinds of sob stories. You think they don't laugh at you behind your back for believing them? And then you fight for all kinds of rights for them. What rights do they deserve? They're already lucky that we let them in here, we pay them more than they could ever earn in their own country."