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#teo you yenn
sawasawako · 7 months
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An aspect of the script of meritocracy that is rarely commented on but widely accepted is therefore this: the system aspires to fair competition, but the outcomes of competition are inevitably unequal positions in terms of academic credentials, professions, income, and wealth. In other words, although no political leader anywhere would emphasize this in the terms I'm about to, dreams about 'meritocracy' have never been about and do not pretend to lead to equal outcomes. Inequality, in fact, is a logical outcome of meritocracy. What the education system does when it selects, sorts, and hierarchizes, and when it gives its stamp of approval to those 'at the top,' is that it renders those who succeed through the system as legitimately deserving.[9] Left implicit is that those at the bottom have failed to be deserving.
– Teo You Yenn, This Is What Inequality Looks Like
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dillasannotation · 1 year
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Dignity is like clean air. You do not notice its absence unless it is short supply. You do not realize how much you need it, how important it is to you, until you don’t have it.”
Teo You Yenn - This Is What Inequality Looks Like
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If family is, as we are so often reminded, a basic unit of society, we must remember that it is not merely a functional, economic unit. Parent-child relationships are not just transactions: I feed you, you stay alive, one day you feed me so I stay alive. Relationship-building and trust-building are important life-activities happening in the inside of families. And these life-activities require time of a particular sort - time for leisure, time for play, time for rest. Self-help parenting books abound with this wisdom: communicate, spend time together on fun things, build trust, and these relationships will endure throughout one's life.
This is what Inequality Looks Like, Teo You Yenn
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sawasawako-archived · 4 years
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... ‘the poor’ are not outside of systems, nor exceptions to dominant trends. Their circumstances are key components of shared social realities; their lives and livelihoods exist in direct relationship to those who are wealthier; their constraints reveal the logics of the broader social landscape and political economy.
To study poverty without inequality leads to tendencies to misrecognize structural issues for individual failings. On the other hand, to study inequality without poverty, particularly through focus only on trends and numbers, is to allow for research devoid of humanity insofar as we merely cite phenomenon without naming the injustices enacted on real persons... Ultimately, contronting poverty and inequality means confronting questions of ethics and morality—questions about what it means to be deserving... what a society is... what the greater good can, or should, entail.
This Is What Inequality Looks Like, Teo You Yenn
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loveandknowledge · 5 years
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What is dignity? It is a sense of being valued, a feeling of being respected, a sensation of esteem, of self-worth. How and from where does one get it? In everyday life.
My dignity, for example, is propped up by the many times people address me as "Prof" in any given day - either over email or in person. I feel respected and valued because my job title and salary signal that my efforts matter and I deserve to be rewarded for them. No one threatens to deduct my pay because I miss a day of work. Not once have I been shouted at while in the workplace. As I move through the day, from my home to my office to the classroom to a meeting room to a supermarket or a petrol station, I am visible: people make eye contact with me, they smile, they say hello, they thank me, they bid me farewell. As I stand at a cashier, the worker greets me hello and after I pay she thanks me; my response to her is up to me but it is part of her job to treat me like I matter.
Dignity is like clean air. You do not notice its absence unless it is in short supply. You do not realize how much you need it, how important it is to you, until you don't have it. Professors, bankers, lawyers, doctors, policy makers, ministers, CEOs - there are differences amongst this list, but a key thing we have in common is that our dignity needs are amply and consistently met, so much so that it requires explicit effort to be conscious of dignity as a need that every human being has. When one lives life as a low-income person, every single day is made up of micro instances of rudeness and disrespect. Every day is a struggle with (in)dignity.
- 'This is What Inequality Looks Like' by Teo You Yenn
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huitingreads · 3 years
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“The ‘now what’ question is a continual challenge, not a static endpoint. It means to open up creativity, exploration, ongoing efforts from multiple places. To do all that, we have to keep reading, keep listening, keep reflecting, keep learning.”
Teo You Yenn, This is What Inequality Looks Like
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bdgthinks · 4 years
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The Two Sides of “The Two Sides of Singapore, As Seen By A Food Delivery Rider”, As Seen By A Food Delivery Rider
https://medium.com/@bdgthinksShort pre-amble: Just as how the original Rice article is just the opinion of one writer, what I’m writing below is likewise, just the opinion of mine alone. Also, my opinions are based on my experience working with Deliveroo while Yusuf worked for Grab Food so there may be some differences between the pay structure, zone distances and other company-specific policies.
I was clicking past Instagram stories yesterday afternoon, about to take a nap, when I saw a friend share this recently posted Rice Media article. Part photo journal, part commentary on the gig economy, Singapore’s class divide, and how income inequality is growing more apparent as we adapt to the ever-evolving Covid-19 situation? Sign me the hell up. 
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All images courtesy of Ricemedia.co, Yusuf Abdol Hamid, or myself
20 minutes, a few raised eyebrows, and many heated texts later – I reluctantly abandoned my plans to nap because I read some many things in this article (which I highly recommend you read first before reading on!) that I disagree with profoundly. 
Before I start, I want to offer my appreciation to Yusuf (the narrator), Boon Ping (the editor/author), and Rice Media for publishing this piece that will help many understand the oft-overlooked issue of social/income inequality in an engaging and accessible manner. My misgivings towards some of Yusuf’s opinions notwithstanding, the general sentiment towards this article is extremely positive and has done what I believe every great article should do, provoke thought and inspire critical thinking towards the status quo! 
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A smattering of positive feedback to the original article 
What I appreciated most about the article is encapsulated by joce_zhang’s comment, that it’s an important reminder to be kinder to people – regardless. 
 However, I couldn’t help but find it slightly troubling that Yusuf and Boon Ping (the editor) seemed to have oversimplified these issues and reduced the stakeholders to caricatures: the rich as the Monopoly Man; and the tireless ‘seen by many as a dead-end job’ delivery couriers as a Dickensian orphan, counting pennies and agonizing over whether they ‘deserve’ a Zinger. 
I worry that one unintended consequence of this article is that some ways social inequality is highlighted may lead to reinforcement of the divide rather than dissolution. 
During my Summer holidays in 2018, I became attracted to the idea of working part-time as a food courier cyclist as in my mind I saw it as being paid to just cycle and listen to podcasts. Since then, I’ve been an on-off Deliveroo cyclist during the shorter holidays or whenever I needed a little bit of extra pocket money. 
In past the two years, I’ve earned exactly $4081.63 from making deliveries (inclusive of bonuses) and dividing it by a conservative $15/h rate, I’ve worked for around 272 hours or about 700 deliveries. split about 60/40 between private properties and HDB flats.
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And I guess it’s also partly because of my different experience working in food couriering the past two years that made me feel so much discontent while reading Yusuf’s article. In these 400-odd deliveries to private residences (or heck, in any of my deliveries), I don’t recall having once been treated unnecessarily rudely, aggressively or dismissively by any of the stakeholders I interact with in the job – restaurant servers and managers, condo security management and customers alike. 
What I have experienced actually are customers that have tipped me for my efforts - especially ones who live in fairly inaccessible areas, and (during this circuit breaker period) offered me a snack or a cold drink to drop off their deliveries; security guards who ask me how my day was and if I’ve had my lunch or dinner; and restaurant staff who invite me to have a seat in the restaurant while I wait for my order. 
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Some treats from kind customers 
Even when I had made a mess of the customer’s order from their order roiling around during a bumpy 15-minute bike ride (entirely my fault of course!), I’ve never heard anything more than an entirely deserved ‘tsk’ at the disappointment of having half of their pho soup ending up in the plastic bag instead of the bowl – and even then these tsk’s are far and few between! 
And it is (again, solely from my own personal experience) where I felt that Yusuf could have been cherry-picking the worst examples from his own experience to make a point. While service industry personnel are no doubt severely underappreciated and that should be improved as a whole, I feel that such blatant incidents are the exception rather than the rule. 
My point is: the world isn’t binary. Heck, even up to a year ago I was still echoing Yusuf’s entire argument and ranting rather colorfully about the injustice and discrimination of it all. Who are YOU to tell me which lift I can and cannot use? 
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In the pursuit of delivering a commentary on some really important social issues, I feel that it fell short by over-emphasizing the ludicrousness of the elite and failing to consider the many other factors that contributes to this problem. 
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For one, I thought that the annoyance projected to security guards seeing themselves as ‘a barrier between the riff-raff and their diamond-encrusted residents’ was a bit uncalled for – painting a picture of the fearsome guard – in employ of the up-in-the-air bourgeois hiding in their ivory tower, assailing an innocent courier who had the audacity to think that he had the right to take the same elevator as the residents? 
But then… when we consider that most lift lobbies are a good distance from the security guard posts where the guards are stationed, it doesn’t seem so unreasonable for a guard to have to raise his voice to get his point across, right? 
Being fortunate enough to live in a condo myself, I’ve sometimes felt unease in the duality that security guards experience every single day: faithful bastions in keeping residents safe, spending their days patrolling the lush, landscaped gardens and expansive feature infinity pools, but never once stepping foot into the houses they loyally guard.
And at the end of the day, clocking out to return home to an environment I assume is much less luxurious. 
So why then, do Yusuf and Boon Ping deign to foster an us vs them divide, arbitrarily placing one occupation on one side of the line and another on the opposite?
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How about the incredulousness towards the guy who orders a stupid $11 Dal.komm latte every day, or the Grange Road resident who only orders a single scoop of Haagen-Dazs ice cream? 
Like I said, caricatures that highlight and reinforce the rich-poor divide.
Cherry-picking prevents the reader from seeing the single cups of coffee that I’ve delivered from Common Man Coffee Roasters to Tenteram Peak, the eight egg tarts from Whampoa Hawker Center to Toa Payoh. Or my dad, who lives a one-minute walk from the hawker center but still chooses to order through Grabfood because he paid for a subscription service that offers 50 free deliveries for just $10? 
All these customers lived in HDB units. 
As a courier, there’s nothing I appreciate more than collecting an order to find out I’m being paid $5 to cycle one block away, or reaching the restaurant to find out that a customer only ordered an easy-to-transport wrap instead of say, twelve packets of chicken rice – I’m getting paid the same amount anyway. 
So yes, they’re paying our salary, so thank you. 
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Juxtaposition is also good and all for making a point, but is it truly accurate and representative? 
The word exclusive is used a lot by Yusuf - but are those who live in a smelly HDB with the pee smell in the corridor exclusively nice, and the expat who lives in the Ardmore Park condo with the super high ceiling exclusively mean? Is it wrong to live (or aspire to live) in an exclusive private property? These are questions to be stimulated, not answers to be given. 
There’s so much to pick apart, but my goal isn’t to say: I’m Right, You’re Wrong, it’s just that say that There Are Two Sides to Everything. 
A brief aside on ‘fulfillment’ 
While I love my part-time job – paying me upwards of $20 an hour to keep fit and listen to podcasts, I’m entirely cognizant that while I’m privileged that it’s a side-hustle, a side-gig, a part-time job to me; it’s also a livelihood to tens of thousands of hardworking people out there. 
Where I could turn off the app and head home when I decided I’ve earned enough in the week to eat at a new restaurant I’ve been eyeing or if it was too hot in the afternoon, most other people working my job can’t – if not, the lights may not turn on the next day. 
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In a comment to an earlier draft of this piece, a friend shared that it’s a privilege to be able to separate your social identities. I think it’s also a privilege to have the choice of perspective. We exercise when we’re healthy, as a hobby, or a passion. Deliverymen don’t see it that way. There is no ‘good to do’, there is only ‘must do’. 
At the end of the day when the world starts to recover from Covid-19, you’re going to start getting photo and videography gigs and transition back to the white-collar world. 
As for the security guard and domestic helper at Ardmore Park, the server at the Grange Road Haagen-Dazs, and the tens of thousands of for-hire drivers and delivery couriers? There’s no ‘back to normal’ – this is their normal. 
In a discussion post on Yusuf’s article, a redditor referenced Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
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In the blue-collar normal, where every day is a struggle to meet the needs of financial safety and security, maybe fulfilment isn’t really an aspiration for most. In an article calling for empathy, I feel the quality slightly lacking in my reading. 
A few months back I began my education into inequality in Singapore with Teo You Yenn’s seminal This Is What Inequality Looks Like. In it, the title of one of her essays especially stood out to me: Dignity Is Like Clean Air. She describes, like Yusuf does, that many blue-collar workers in the service industry always feel invisible, that people don’t respect them, that it makes them feel small. I’d like to add on to** Dignity Is Like Clean Air** with the caveat: Segregation Is Not Necessarily Dirty. 
Going back to the ‘fucked up service lifts at the back for the smelly people, the non-residents and stuff’, how about we just call a spade a spade?
In restaurants, servers and chefs who have their meals there usually sit at tables near the kitchen (or even in the kitchen itself). 
In airplanes, consumers have the choice to pay a much higher premium for more leg room and a more gourmet selection of food. In fancy hotels, bellboys and concierge staff have to wear stiff suits – there’s usually a dress code for guests to enter certain areas. 
So, is it really that unfair, for someone who’s had the means to pay for the privilege of living in luxury, to not really want to share a lift with someone who might smell unpleasant from having spent hours cycling under the hot sun? 
The service lift provides the same functionality – no one’s saying that couriers are ‘lesser people’, we’re not being asked to walk up the stairs while the ‘masters’ take the magic moving box. It wasn’t created to separate the ‘undesirables’ from the ‘desirables’ like a pre-Rosa Parks bus, and it’ll be unhealthy to think of it as such – even worse to let it fester. 
To package my views into a neatly categorized box – When I’m Brandon the Deliveryman, it’s perfectly fine for a guard to request for me to take the service lift, but when I’m Brandon the Guest attending a dinner party at the same condo, no one is stopping me from taking the resident lift right? 
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Different day, Different fit, Same me 
I still think that it’s incredibly fucked up that some employers make their helpers take a separate lift though. 
But in delivering the core message – is it more helpful to frame your reflection as ‘why do some people treat their subordinates with such contempt and how can we as society hope to change it’, or to just resent the fact that ‘rich people like that la’ – and laugh and pretend we’re friends. 
I guess what I’m most frustrated with about the article is that it had the potential to be so much more. It occasionally flirts with the possibility of going deeper into one issue or the other but ultimately ends up being a reflection of one privileged dude’s brief foray into an industry that many of us often take for granted. 
And because there are so many issues at play, people often fall into the trap of distilling extremely complicated issues into dangerous sweeping statements, which eventually does very little for the problem in question. 
Another frustration I often have towards the discourse towards social issues is that they often fail to carry a call-to-action. Okay, I’ve checked my privilege, I’ve understood that my successes in life is partly a byproduct of the wealthy family I was fortunate to being born into – now what? 
A good rule of thumb that I’ve been trying to implement into my life recently is to think about the net positive or net negative an action has onto society. And hence: 
To the fortunate: While it is important to understand your privilege and not take things for granted, you also don’t have to be ashamed of it. Every dollar you spend goes into the economy and is earned by someone else. So, what can you do to influence a net positive? 
Be kind to everyone, be kind to everyone, be kind to everyone. 
If you can, have the moral courage to call out undesirable behavior – especially if it’s someone close to you. But if you can’t – it’s okay too. Start with yourself. The world could do with less ‘you should do more’ and more ‘thank you for what you did’. 
This is not exclusive to tipping service staff or offering couriers a cold drink (although it is always really welcome!). Offer a kind word to anyone you interact with. Ask the office or school janitor if they’ve had their meal yet, wish your security guard a good morning/good evening when you pass them by, clear your tray when you’re at a fast food restaurant and smile and thank the servers if you pass them by. 
I promise you - these little acts of kindness will go a much longer way received than it takes you to give them. 
To our everyday heroes: Your intrinsic self worth is by no means defined by how an asshole treats you. You are so, so, so much more important.
You are somebody, you are somebody, you are somebody. 
In this essay, my intention is to extend the net positive that Yusuf and Rice has already generated while minimizing the net negatives it may unintentionally create by framing the issue as ‘us vs them’. 
I hope that it will be seen as an addendum to Yusuf’s original piece instead of a correction. To build up on the important issues that **each and every one of us **should acknowledge and then go one step further to see how we can resolve them. I hope that reading this has provoked more questions than it gives answers. I hope that we don’t see the world as black-and-white but how things can move to a more palatable shade of grey. 
Of course, my thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions here could be (and probably are) wildly ignorant and myopic, and I still have so much more to learn. So please confront me, dispute me and tell me where I’m wrong and what I don’t know. 
If I have to leave you with just one takeaway, I hope everyone remembers to be kinder to people – regardless.
(You can also find me at https://medium.com/@bdgthinks!)
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Independent Reading Books for the year.
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
State of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang
Hard at Work: Life in Singapore by Teo You Yenn
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rafaelafranzen · 5 years
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FOURTEEN PEOPLE I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW BETTER
(Saw this posted by @drawlight and thought it’d be a fun diversion to fill out!)
ONE / name: Faye. In certain spaces online, Tea. Professionally, Lyra. None of these are the name on my birth certificate. 
TWO / birthday: September 22
THREE / zodiac sign: Virgo, just on the cusp of Libra. I’m also ethnically Chinese and my Chinese zodiac animal is the dog! 
FOUR / height: 5′ 4″
FIVE / hobbies: I’m a serial hobby hopper - a small smattering of things that have stayed more or less constant: writing, reading, gaming, attending theatre productions, knitting, and cooking. Less frequently: rockclimbing, kayaking, hiking. Odds and ends I slip in and out of: fossil and mineral collecting, bookbinding and trying to avoid buying more fountain pen or horological paraphernalia. 
SIX / favourite colour: Blue. Particularly teal, if a big ol flash of the colour in my hair is anything to go by. 
SEVEN / favourite book: Currently Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman for genre fiction, Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither by Sara Baume for literary fiction, and This Is What Inequality Looks Like by Teo You Yenn for non-fiction. 
EIGHT / last song I listened to: Have A Nice Day - World Order. They’re a Japanese techno band that are most well known for their incredibly tightly choreographed robotic synchronized dance music videos. 
NINE / last film I watched: I don’t watch film in the cinema much? Must have been nearly 6 months ago, that. The last film I saw on my blu-ray was Daybreakers, a Vampire sci-fi noir film I was drawing on for fanfic reference before I got into Good Omens. 
The last three plays I saw are more indicative of my interests in entertainment - Come From Away, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and A Comedy About A Bank Robbery.
TEN / inspiration for muse: Not quite sure how to answer this one.
ELEVEN / dream job: Literary Festival Director/Creative Producer or Literary Agent. Really in essence a content curator of some sort, so I can be in a position to lift new work up and introduce folks to the best and underappreciated of the amazing creative stuff produced out there every day. 
TWELVE / meaning behind your URL: The words come from a character name from a manga (Claymore) and a Swedish surname, because I was on a real kick for Swedish surnames when I was a teenager and discovered Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. 
Essentially it’s the name of an OC which subsequently became my fursona (yes, I’m part of the furry fandom and I’m not ashamed of it. Wrote my graduating thesis on the social benefits the fandom brings and everything. But I tend to keep my furry bullshit over on twitter). I’ve since truncated her name to Faye Franzen but kept the full url here as I didn’t want to break all my sidebar links.
THIRTEEN / top 3 ships: Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Merlahad (Kingsman), and Danbeau (Captain Marvel)
FOURTEEN / lipstick or lip balm: I don’t use either. I live in the tropics and my lips are already adequately moisturized by humidity. 
FIFTEEN / currently reading: Kraken by China Mieville and Good Omens
SIXTEEN / work: Unemployed at the mo but applying for things in the arts/literary industry as I’m trained in arts administration/management. Sorta self employed - I’m running a kickstarter for Good Omens fanmerch that’s launching on Friday. 
SEVENTEEN / fiction: Mostly in the speculative fiction genre. None published except one story about a girl and a white dragon which got picked up as a feature in my university’s creative writing blog a few years ago. 
EIGHTEEN / fanfiction: Ficlets so far for Good Omens, some proper-length oneshots for Kingsman. 
Consider yourself tagged if you read this and feel inclined to fill it! Tag me back so I can get to know you too <3
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iambookotter · 3 years
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This is what Inequality Looks Like by Teo You Yenn
4.5/5
This is my second non-fiction of the year, and I am so glad I picked this up from @ethosbooks
Warning, this will be a looooooong review!
It is so easy to dissociate ourselves from or overlook the realities of those who fall into the low-income strata. Thanks to this series of essays that boldly expresses a portion of our society’s collective truth that is often tip-toed around or belittled, we are one step closer to hearing the voices of a group of people who are as much a part of Singapore as any one of us.
In all honesty, my interest was piqued by TIWILL because I grew up in a low-income family myself. I resonated deeply with a lot of the issues highlighted and identified with the feelings that were put forth so eloquently by the author. With a decade’s worth of experience living in a rental flat, I can personally vouch for the very real circumstances that often included bed bugs, poor living conditions, lack of personal space, inconducive environment for work and studies, and etc. Even prior to our move into a rental flat, we spent several years struggling to get by and my incredibly resilient mother braved taxing and demeaning procedures to keep the family afloat. This passage in particular from the book that really hit home for me:
“This sums up what people say when they tell me why they are reluctant to seek help after they have had prior experiences: they will ask me A to Z, all kinds of personal questions. They tell me to bring ten different documents, and then if one thing is wrong, I have to go again. I have no time to do this because I have to work, I have to pick up my kid, I have to cook, I need to do housework. My kids need me at home and I don’t want them to go astray like I did, but last time I went, the officer told there just told me to get a job. And finally, importantly, after I have done everything right and I qualify and everything, they give me a tiny bit of help, for which I am grateful, but which only helps me get out of this crisis but doesn’t prevent the next one. And then in another three months, six months, I need to go through the process all over again. This time, I need to answer questions about why I have this $50 in my bank account, what I did to improve my pay, why don’t my children want to go to Student Care. On and on the questions go.”
I especially respect the author’s excellent delivery of the contradictions that have shaped our society. I had not realised how deeply ingrained these contradictory schools of thought were in us until I read it on page and deliberated it earnestly. Furthermore, what I saw in her essays was a vicious cycle that took physical, mental and emotional sacrifices to truly break out from. Yes, there are several avenues available for those who need it. But to get that help, one has to keep reliving the same painful circumstances they are trying to overcome while repeatedly being forced to associate being defeated with needing help. Why is seeking assistance only acceptable when one has supposedly ‘failed in life’? If you have a broken thumb, would you not visit a doctor just because it is not as a bad as a broken hand?
Another aspect of the author’s writing that I admired was her openness to acknowledging the questions that would surely be raised when a person tries to disrupt a narrative that an entire nation has become comfortable with. She gracefully highlighted that while there are admittedly people who are much worse off in other parts of the world, the purpose of TIWILL was to look at the struggles of Singaporeans in the context of Singapore. It is easy for people to belittle another’s problems because they had overcome the circumstances and succeeded in life, or by just chalking it up to delinquent behaviour/poor attitude/a lack of motivation to help oneself. Is it not unfair to take the complexity of years of difficulties, tragedies, and pain and prematurely compress it into a behavioural issue simply because humanising their circumstances might force us to confront uncomfortable truths? Another quote that hit the nail on the head with regards to this is as follows:
“Stories about people living in 2017-Singapore inhabiting what sounds more like their 1965-Singapore are stories that are troubling – they challenge the coherence of their stories, they disturb the moral goodness of their trajectories, they raise questions about their deservedness.”
I could go on and on about everything that is tackled in this incredible book. Probably why I broke one of my biggest bookish rules by heavily annotating TIWILL (no offence to those who enjoy annotating; I just happen to be an old maid when it comes to my books). But I should end this review here for now. I would love to discuss this in more detail with anyone who is interested though!
Once again, my heartfelt thanks to Teo You Yenn for putting this out there and shining a spotlight on the realities of social mobility, income gaps, and social policies. TIWILL truly hit differently for its representation and gave me the satisfaction of seeing my family’s as well as several others’ lived experiences being acknowledged.
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sawasawako · 6 months
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- kirsten han (we, the citizens newsletter)
*MIS refers to the Minimum Income Standards report led by sociologist Teo You Yenn from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore
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beetothelee · 4 years
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jaggedwolf · 5 years
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Roundup (8 Sept 2019)
Reading
From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew
( Read more... )
Malay Sketches by Alfian Sa'at
( Read more... )
This Is What Inequality Looks Like by Teo You Yenn
( Read more... )
The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt
( Read more... )
Other Media
Caught up on Critical Role, modulo the last hour of the most recent episode, and I'm in love with the new character art
( Juno Steel live show/started listening to Second Citadel )
Random Articles
Midway through listening to a podcast episode I got distracted by a mention of epigenetics and started wondering whether that was just a tiny version of Lamarck's debunked theory of evolution. This article, One More Time No Epigenetics Is Not Lamarckism makes a convincing case it isn't.
Race Riots Remain Biggest Bogeyman
comments x-posted to jaggedwolf |
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When I speak with people who are not from Singapore, one of the things that comes up is how small it is, how it is just an island. I often perpetuate this truism when I describe Singapore to friends who have not been here. Yet here I was, meeting people for whom the island is in fact large and rarely explored beyond a few must-go places - the schools their kids attend; the market to buy food; the bank to deposit money; the post office to top up their pre-paid utilities cards or pay other bills. While people in my social circle go wherever they wish on a regular basis and complain about running out of things to do on weekends, I was meeting people whose experiences of space in Singapore was limited to a radius of a few kilometers. If they traveled longer distances, it was to get from home to work and not necessarily to see leisure or consumption spaces. Soon after my initial visit, I would meet many others who have lived in Singapore their whole lives and yet not been to many of the places I give little second thought to.
This is what Inequality Looks Like, Teo You Yenn
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sawasawako-archived · 5 years
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...to really understand and then explain how ‘race’ works and how racial domination is produced and reproduced, scholars have to interrogate the taken-for-granted, carefully generate data, rigorously scrutinize and analyze what they observe, and then in their presentation of their work, scaffold knowledge, unpack, fight off folk beliefs, build new knowledge that challenges, disrupts, discomforts.
Teo You Yenn, This Is What Inequality Looks Like
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loveandknowledge · 5 years
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Low-income parenthood
I was struck by the comparatively easygoing attitude of people I was meeting in low income communities. It is not the case that having and raising kids is easy for them - they face numerous hardships. But they spoke of life differently from people I had interviewed a decade earlier, and from people in my own social milieu: marriage and kids are not events to be planned out in precision. These are not part of sequential five-step life plans: school, work, [housing], marriage, children. Talking to low-income parents compelled me to reexamine the strong need for planning and control so characteristic of people in my social milieu. In their stories of becoming parents, I noticed a lack of angst. I heard a sense of wonder and openness toward seeing children as gifts or - for the more religious - as blessings. Low-income persons do not have all kinds of (financial) preconditions in mind that they think they must have in order to have children.
[If they waited to have the same kind of preconditions that middle-class respondents imply are necessities, they would of course never have children. Edin and Kefalas (2011) argue that low-income women often place motherhood as a high priority because this brings them a sense of accomplishment and self-worth, in a context where few other things do.]
- 'This Is What Inequality Looks Like' by Teo You Yenn
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