HarmonyWorks!

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking at the HarmonyWorks! youth conference organized by OnePeople.sg. The text of my talk (which I more or less followed) is given below.

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The question that headlines this conference is, “How will you embrace diversity?”. You may not have noticed, so I will point out to you that I am white, but married to a wonderful Chinese woman. I am therefore pleased to say that I embrace diversity every night! In addition, my parents-in-law live above us, and we have supper together most evenings. My daughter is, of course, a Chinese-Caucasian mix.

That is already a good start toward multiculturalism, but I would also point out that I have two sons from a previous marriage who are a blend of me (very white) and their mother (very Indian).

I guess I inherited a liking for ethnic diversity from my parents. Although they are both white, my mother is a French-Italian Catholic, and my father is an Irish-English Protestant. That makes a real mess of my own heritage, and my poor children are therefore French-Italian-Irish-English-Indian-Chinese-Catholic-Protestant-Buddhist-Hindus.

So my own case exemplifies the largely multi-cultural nature of Canadian society. But it would be a mistake to say that Canada has got cultural integration all worked out. For example, in my parents’ day, it was not looked upon favourably for a Catholic to marry a Protestant. My mother remembers being told as a child not to play with Protestant children or else she would go to Hell.

Given that my mother was exposed to this kind of sentiment, it is all the more remarkable that she grew up to be a genuinely good person with a fervent belief that all people are equal and fundamentally good. The first lesson she delivered to me on this subject was when I, as a small boy, came home one day saying that a store owner had cheated me. However, I didn’t use the word “cheated”. Instead, I used a word that referred to the store owner’s ethnic group. I was about 7; I had no idea that this word referred to an ethnic group, and therefore actually meant that people from this ethnic group are cheats. All I knew was that this word, which was common in my neighbourhood, meant “cheated”. And so I used it.

Now, my mother has a very expressive face. Mother’s do have expressive faces, don’t they? I think if a woman does not start with an expressive face, she acquires one during pregnancy. How else would she be able to torture her children with the merest glance? Now, the facial expression of my mother’s I always liked the least was horror. But that is the expression I brought to her face that day. I learned very quickly and emphatically that I was never to use that word again in that way. It was only some years later that I understood what lay behind that word: feelings of superiority, hatred, bigotry, cruelty and ignorance.

Thirty years later I was raising my own children, and I guess I had some sense that as a society Canada had moved on, and it was very unlikely that I would hear my own boy say something similarly horrifying to me. I was wrong. Lo and behold, my young son was playing with his friend one day and, to my shock, insulted him by saying, “Oh you’re so gay!” After I picked up my jaw from where it had fallen, I took the occasion to drill into my son's head that the word “gay” was not an insult and was not to be used in that manner.

There are other ways I have seen that cultural tensions are alive and well in Canada, some of them I find simply perplexing, while others are tragic. This is well demonstrated by the attitudes to marriage of many ethnic communities in Canada.

Take the young, modern, highly educated woman I know who was born and raised in Canada surrounded by cultures from all over the globe. But her parents were Greek, and she grew up in one of the typical Greek neighbourhoods that are dotted across the country. Despite all her education and all her exposure – at least superficially – to other cultures, she is adamant that she will never marry outside the Greek community. Or take another young woman whose parents are from Hong Kong: she likewise is dead serious that she will only marry another Asian.

Another example concerns one of my graduate students and her fiance. She was a beautiful, kind and charming white woman of Hungarian descent, and he was a handsome man from an Asian community. Both of them were born and raised in Canada. They fell in love and got engaged, but never married. Why? His mother was bitterly opposed to her son marrying a woman who was not from their ethnic community, and put unrelenting pressure on the son to break off the engagement. And so, although he loved his fiance very much, he broke off the engagement to please his mother. Now I’m not here to say the young man was wrong or right. But I am pointing out that the level of racial integration that we seem to see in Canada is, to some extent, illusory.

My last example is a tragic one, this time from the Canadian province of British Columbia, near Vancouver. A young woman with Asian parents but born and raised in Canada fell in love with a young white man. Not long after they started living together, her father stabbed her to death. Such murders have the twisted name “honour killings” and there have been 12 of them in Canada since 2002. We see here the fierce emotions and sometimes deadly consequences brought about by a clash of cultures and cultural values.

So why, with so many different cultures living side by side, does Canada produce people and communities which have much stronger ties to the cultures of their ancestral homelands than to Canada itself. The problem with Canada is that successive governments have stressed the acceptance of immigrants while ignoring the integration of those same people. The product, instead of an easy mixing of different ethnic groups, is a mosaic of “ghettoes”. There are Italian neighbourhoods, Jewish neighborhoods, Greek, Indian, Haitian, Jamaican, Chinese, black, English and French neighbourhoods, etc. As a result, people do not mingle as much as they could, and the values of the motherland or fatherland tend to be propagated, and the emotional ties are to the local cultural community. In fact, immigrants may become even more tenaciously attached to their traditional values and customs in a new country because they feel threatened by the large sea of alternative cultures around them and in which they are a minority.

This brings me to the wonderful, inspiring success story of a small island-country in South-East Asia by the name of Singapore. Now, I am not naïve. I know that there have been terrible, even bloody, confrontations over race and religion in this region in the past. And we only have to look at some of our neighbouring countries to realize that peace between ethnic and religious groups continues to be a highly fragile entity in this part of the world. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Singapore has managed to achieve a robust and lasting peace between its different communities.

Now I am not an expert on Singapore, but let me tell you what I think are measures taken to achieve racial harmony that border on genius:

● The first and by far the most important is the integration of communities at the level of HDB housing estates. The vast majority of Singaporeans live in HDB flats. The government controls who buys or rents such flats, and has imposed a quota of different ethnic groups living in such public housing on a block by block basis. The policy is known as EIP, the Ethnic Integration Policy. The EIP ensures that you cannot have enclaves of largely Malay, or largely Indian or largely Chinese inhabitants. This has three brilliant consequences: Each ethnic community becomes and remains accustomed to the others; and what becomes familiar is no longer threatening. Second, if tensions rise, or if someone wishes to cause trouble, they cannot do mischief to the neighbourhoods of the “other” communities, because those ethnically defined neighbourhoods don’t exist. The third brilliant consequence is that in the same wet market right beside my home, I can eat roti pratha for breakfast, nasi lemak for lunch and fried dumplings with hot-and-sour soup for supper. Life is good!

● Singapore has also done very well in establishing religious harmony, largely by insisting that devotees practice their religion in private, refrain from proselytizing and, above all, never denegrate another person’s religion. This has worked very well so far, and I find it curious that it has. For example, Singapore has an extraordinarily large number of evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christians are very serious about their religion, and something they take seriously is Jesus’ instruction to “make disciples of all nations”. So, on the one hand, Christians have it from Jesus that they are to encourage people to convert to Christianity, and on the other hand they have it from the government that they should practice their religion in private. These instructions are in direct contradiction, but so far, at least, Singapore’s Christians seem to have worked out a compromise. The success of Singapore’s compromises are nowhere better seen than on South Bridge Road in Chinatown. Where else in the world could you line up, one after another, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple, the Masjid Jamae mosque and then, just a little further down on North Bridge, Saint Andrew’s Cathedral.

While Singapore has had extraordinary success in achieving an enviable degree of racial harmony, improvements are necessary. How do we know this?

● In August of 2008, as part of the Straits Times reflections on patriotism, a Malay-Singaporean journalist by the name of Nur Dianah Suhaimi published a beautiful, articulate and poignant article in which she expressed her feeling that to be a Malay in Singapore is to be a second-class citizen, or, as she put it, the least favourite child. She wrote movingly of the issues facing Malays in Singapore, including deep-rooted prejudices and stereotypes. Clearly, if Nur Dianah Suhaimi is speaking for the majority of Malays in Singapore, then the country has work to do to better integrate the Malay community. I would love to read the views of someone from the Indian community on the matter.

Well, in closing, I thought I might reflect on a couple of my experiences of Singaporean culture.

● "Have you had your lunch? Chi bao le ma?" That’s how you can tell a cultured people – how they treat the important things in life, like food. The French wish someone well at the start of the meal – bon apetit. Singaporeans wish them well at the end. What do Canadians say? “Pass the salt.”

● Funnily, this same kind of courtesy doesn’t seem to be extended by Singaporean drivers to pedestrians. I’m not defending jay walkers, but thinking of places like car parks where pedestrains must necessarily share the same “road” as drivers. In such places, there are no zebra-stripe crossings and pedestrans are obliged to cross “roads” to get from A to B. It is here that Singaporean drivers seem to be ruled by the law of the jungle that goes something like, “I am in a big powerful car that can crush you flat, so I have the right of way. I drive. You wait.” To mitigate this unfortunate bullying, I suggest that every time a driver forces a pedestrian to wait for them to cruise on by, they should lower their windows and call out, “Have you had your lunch?”