Cast by darrylyeo
Whenever I visit my extended family members, I am always reminded – for all its best-in-class safety, surveillance, and public infrastructure capabilities – just how creatively stifling and ideologically monocultural Singapore can be, and the reasons many of them chose to live, study, and work in the West. One uncle exited to Canada so his son could avoid mandatory military training (National Service – NS). Another distant cousin recently graduated from college in Australia. Meanwhile her brother recently finished NS, and, though humbled by the experience, has no motivation left to pursue higher education. My own parents exited the Singapore education system in the 90s and fully bought into the American Dream – with all the financial and administrative ups and downs that entailed – and in particular sacrificed greatly to raise me and my brother with a Silicon Valley education. I am forever grateful to them.
7 replies
Personal verdict as of today: Singapore is a great place to live if I were my grandpa’s age. But not if I were my cousins’ age.
im curious, has anyone in your family said that they wanted to venture further east? china, jap, indonesia, etc
My grandfather grew up in Indonesia. I am told our family is ethnically Fujian Chinese. My father and his sister grew up learning a bit of Japanese, and a number of us enjoy visiting Japan any chance we can. I’d say the venturing has been happening in all directions!
Your cousin’s brother anecdote is my biggest fear about NS — it’s really hard for a kid to get back into the groove of studying after two years of hiatus post high school.
Yeah, it also seems super disruptive and not too well thought out. From what I gleaned talking to him, NS is a time-based quota, and depending on the school you get into, you there may or may not be cross-dependencies for enrollment, class attendance and the service itself, so in practice the soldiers are a mixed bag of possible states and amounts of time spent toward either endeavor.
The closest I've ever come to the region is playing this Leader in Civ6 on the true earth map. I love hearing about the current culture there, thank you for sharing it!!
Heard many good things about Civilization VI, definitely on my list of games to try! Christopher Tin’s theme song is an absolute banger too.
yup! I like Civ 7 too, but I keep going back to Civ6 6, I like playing games on the true start map. Last night I played Jadwiga on the true start Europe map (because Poland) and just as I was about to pause and go to bed, Germany declared a surprise war on me. 🫣 Might have to do a restart to dodge that. 😅
oh you have to try it, everyone says the same about Civ VI and that theme song really is something else — once it gets stuck in your head there's no going back lol, hope it lives up to the hype when you finally get to it
looks like Singapore is a great place as a stepping stone for international ventures 😆
Thank you for sharing your personal insights. 27000 uci @sopha-curator
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