There’s much to love about Singapore if you understand, or are willing to learn, Asian culture. It’s more collectivist than individualistic and while that certainly comes with trade offs, it has many benefits. I’ve lived here for almost 3 years and it feels like living in the future. No where is perfect but the quality of life here is amazing. The people I know who don’t like it are almost always white folks who don’t interact with locals and don’t want to understand Asian norms.
3 years was about how long it took me to really loathe the place.
There was an excessive deference towards authority (derived from confucianism, i think) that rubbed me up the wrong way and a definite streak of selfishness/uncaringness that permeated the culture. Also that shallow vapid wealth-worshipping thing that "crazy rich asians" captured so accurately.
I remember the way foreign workers were treated was just brutal, too. I was there for the bus driver strikes and the little india riot and i was appalled by how thuggish the authorities acted in both cases while everyone else just shrugged.
Plenty of casual racism lurking under the surface too, although white people are probably more of a beneficiary of that than a victim. This is perhaps partly why so many love the place.
Is the large South Asia underclass part of that "collectivist" nature? It's an awesome country (I visited for several weeks in the 90's) but I always cringe when people start talking positively about collectivism in highly stratified societies.
Also, it’s a great place to do business, education is top notch, virtually no crime, very ethnically diverse, amazing food, and a few hours flight to anywhere from Bali to Bombay.
Family-oriented social conservatism, instinctive obedience to authority and disinterest in political debate mostly. A lot of it actually bottom up rather than top down.
Obviously this clashes quite hard with cyberpunk using the aesthetic of Asia for characters who epitomise American ideas of rebellion, competition and countercultural coolness...
I'm not sure if this is one the parent was thinking of - but there's generally a huge culture of "don't inconvenience others." This can have a lot of knock on effects, like leaving early (really, leaving before others) from work is inconveniencing your peers and your boss.
Also, "filial duty" is pretty strong across a number of Asian cultures. i.e. you should be thinking of your family (parents, grandparents) before yourself.
> This can have a lot of knock on effects, like leaving early (really, leaving before others) from work is inconveniencing your peers and your boss.
Does this go the other way too? Is the boss staying late (with the expectation that others do so as well) considered rude because it inconveniences his workers?
Because if not, this has nothing to do with being polite and everything to do with power and deference to power.
Think conservative values on a social scale minus the personal property part(don't know if the personal property is a general consensus or just authoritarian laws.) Drugs are forbidden, fathers rule the household, children are disciplined when they don't meet satisfaction, you're expected to work hard. You know all the things the conservatives get a bad rap for in the US but everyone thinks that way there and uses it in collectivism
On the flip side, the child didn't consent to being born, and indirectly any suffering a child endures can be traced back to a parent's decision to bring them into the world.
Focusing on the choice of the individual child is a very American way of looking at things. Nobody chooses to be born. So what? The obligation arises out of the relationship between parents, as a category, and children, as a category. Individual choice doesn’t carry nearly as much weight in Asian culture as it does in American culture. Likewise, the notion that obligations can only arise from voluntary and consenting exchange—as if it’s an economic transaction—is one that doesn’t make much sense in Asian culture.
I didn’t say it wasn’t arbitrary—culture often is. My point is that as someone steeped in the asian way of thinking about it, the cultural conflict with the American mode of thinking is really significant.
Under that logic and reasoning any joy or happiness the child experiences can also be traced back to the parents decision to bring them into the world.
My dad mentioned the other day that he had the impression that American parents “don’t really love their kids.” I think what he meant was that the western, particularly Protestant, way of raising children is very hands off. In Asia, parents are expected to subordinate their individual identity to their role as a parent. Sadly that makes Asians raising kids in the US particularly thankless—the parents follow Asian norms in sacrificing for their kids but the kids often grow up westernized and don’t reciprocate.
> the kids often grow up westernized and don’t reciprocate
That should be expected though, and is likely an advantage for those kids. Integration is an important step in adopting a new country. That this will put you at odds with your parents is a common thing too, almost every group of immigrants that I'm aware of has this.
