A strange Singapore Foreigner debate

Last Sunday, I went on to do a shoot for a good friend who is a student at NTU and need to do a series of nude shoot for his assignment. Yes. That is the first time I went naked in front of the camera and having your nude pictures taken when having a conversation with the photographer is kinda of unusual. Then another guy joined in and we did a couple shot. Non sexual if you are wondering. I dun think I look particularly good in those photos anyway but helping a friend to do something is all right. One of my way to debunk the idea that naked body equates SEX. People actually just need to learn to see our bodies as sex tool and appreciate the beauty. How many animals are actually fur less and look completely distinctively within the same species?

Anyway, the shot is not the main highlight of that Sunday. It is the journey there. I have not travelled to the west for a long time. Though my place is actually in the western part of the little island I called HOME. The whole bus terminal at Boon Lay is relocated and everything just look so unfamiliar. There are easily half a million of foreigners in the bus terminal, shopping mall and the surrounding car parks. I suddenly lost sense that I am in Singapore. Everywhere, the faces and the voices are alien. When I stood in the crowd, I just hear something like chanting, not a single word I can understand.

Recently there was a debate on whether Singapore can take in another one million of foreigners. If yes, will the social structure hold? Many of us have friends and colleagues who are foreigners. Malaysians have been here (in large numbers) that we sometimes stopped seeing them as foreigners. And the focus move on to Chinese nationals and Indian nationals, whether they can fit into the local context. Some Singaporean think these new immigrants are the main sources of social problems and quick to stereotype them, all of them. As always, this is how people do to help themselves to understand new things around them. Just like they stereotype gay and lesbians. We are all guilty of that.

Sometimes I felt that we are all so preoccupied with things we are doing and familiar faces that we are meeting all the time, we forgot that the society is evolving. More influx of people from different countries. We understand very little about them. There is little or no interaction with them and there are Singaporeans who think Singaporeans are of higher social class. Just two or three generations ago, we are new immigrants ourselves. Because the lack of integration, when problem arise, we accused them of bringing in the social issues. Like the study mamas issue which was debated publicly and in the parliament, have we stop to think that the social problem actually originated from the lack of communication or understanding between a married couple, instead of pointing to the mamas so quickly. They are just here... sure, there must be some black sheep. They can be replaced by Vietnamese, Thais, Indonesian or your friendly female (or male) neighbours. Perhaps it so much easier to blame others and to think that we dun have a problem to start with.