Third Wave Poco Asian Politik

from AngryAsianMan


A reflection on Waves.
I first learned of the metaphor of 'waves' of activist leanings from feminism. While arguably Eurocentric in its articulation, I still find it a helpful metaphor when considering some of the emergent sense of identity in being Asian in Australia.



Briefly, and from wikipedia:
1st Wave feminism
focuses on de jure inequalities (or sex/gender-based inequality enshrined in law)... The first of the most important struggles was/is of that to vote (to participate as full citizens in a nation).

"Women deserve the right to vote"

2nd Wave feminism
sees a slow shift to de facto inequalities (or sex/gender-based inequality enshrined in non-state-based institutional practices, as well as in socio-cultural norms). One of the major cultural issues I see at play here is, in particular, the importance of advocating for increased participation of women in historically demarcated 'male' or 'masculine' spheres of influence (e.g. 'public' spheres, managerial/government positions, etc.)

"Equal pay for Equal work!"
"Rights, not Roses!"
"The Personal is Political!"


3rd Wave feminism
sees yet another shifting disposition, into politicising the intersectionality of gender as one of and among many factors that constitute the lived material reality of women's lives. Thus a focus on pluralism, multiculturalism, inclusivity of sexual diverse, transnational discourse, migrant women's issues (as opposed, strictly, to woman-as-citizen) etc.
Here also: the 'reclamation' (or simple 'claiming') and radical valuation of positions historically constructed/demeaned as female/feminine: e.g. Slut-walks, 'lipstick feminism,' etc.

"The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house" (Audre Lorde)
"Stop slut shaming!"




Once again, I recognise that this is a very broad and sweeping brushstroke. I certainly do not mean to diminish the diversity and specificity of the actual histories and herstories of feminism(s) as it/they have unfolded til the present and hereafter.

My interest here is not in feminism per se,
but about the way that feminism, as a movement (or series of movements) has been historicised into 'waves'.
(i.e. my interest is not in history, but in historiography)


Can this metaphor of waves be helpful in considering the unfolding of postcolonial/diasporic Asian-ness (within Euro-/Anglo- American/Australian-dominant spaces)?



Here is a beginning stab at what this might mean:

1st Wave Poco Asian Politik
We see first the waves of migrants from Asian countries into European/White-dominated national settings, fighting around de jure inequalities... Most simply: To be regarded as naturalised citizens. Sometimes, historically, at least in the USA, as far as I know, this has taken on the fight by some ethnic migrants (particularly those of Indian and Japanese descent, as far as I am aware) to be regarded as "White" by the state (and thus be conferred citizenship).

"Let me be a citizen!"


2nd Wave Poco Asian Politik
We see new naturalised Asian citizens struggling around de facto inequalities, particularly pertaining to profession and cultural membership. These include being seen as individuals in highly individualistic cultures, politics of representation in historically white-dominant spaces. For some Asian men (certainly for myself), this can sometimes take on a body-politik of fashioning myself as passably 'masculine,' given Eurocentric body-/and behavioural norms.

"I speak English!"
"Asian men can be muscular / hot / athletic!"


3rd Wave Poco Asian Politik
Here, the issue of intersectionality... And also about the 'reclamation' (or simple 'claiming') and radical valuation of positions historically constructed as Asian/"Asiatic," particularly by those who experience the entitlements and privileges of citizenship.

"RESPECT: Take your shoes off when you come into my home"


Let's see how this one unfolds...

Acknowledging, for now, some of my limitations in this post:
Where women have been constructed as Euro-/White-/American women
and examples of Poco Asian Politik have been male...
No explicitly queer examples ------>        >:(

Wanting to expand and rectify in future posts.

Growing up Middle Class in Singapore - Part 2

Work/Merit

I received various messages about the purpose and nature of work when I was growing up. One important idea was that work could, and should, be meaningful. It could be challenging, interesting, and, importantly, make a difference in the world. "When you grow up, you need to make a mark," my father would say to me, as a way of motivating me to study harder, or to try to get into a "top" school.

Which brings me to a second set of messages about work - that personal responsibility mattered, meritocracy prevailed and that this was a good thing. I learned that if somehow you failed to get meaningful work, that it was your own fault for not trying hard enough. This fit well with the idea that the world should (and did) reward merit, and punished mediocrity, and that this system was a good one. Along with that was the idea that merit could be measured relatively objectively, and was separate from "politics," as in office politics, which both my parents, to my recollection, spoke of in disparaging terms.

My parents did acknowledge that some people did not have the same opportunities as others to succeed under the existing system, but the solution was to give them those opportunities while maintaining the meritocracy. In other words, to make the system more meritocratic, and minimize what I think they thought of as accidents of birth. Both my parents had gone to college in the U.S. on scholarships, and my father, especially, was very grateful for having had the opportunity to do so.

As a child raised for most of my life in the middle class, I was told that I had every opportunity, and that, if I failed to take advantage, and to make something of myself, I had nobody but myself to blame if I ended up... someplace bad. It was never said explicitly in our nuclear household - I think both my parents were too liberal to repeat the cliched Singaporean/Malaysian warning that if I didn't work hard, I would end up a roadsweeper - but I think that this unspoken (unspeakable?) fear was of ending up in poverty or working a "mindless" job, or both - to become somebody to pity and/or despise.

I internalized this message strongly. At the age of about nine or ten, a partner at my father's law firm who was visiting from the U.S. asked me what I thought of affirmative action, and explained (inaccurately, and certainly incompletely) that it was a system of giving preference to candidates for colleges based on race. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to trumpet my meritocratic ideals, and emphatically denounced such a system. This drew some delighted laughter from the visitor. I don't know what his intention was in asking such a question of a child, and I don't know what impact my answer had on my parents, both of whom had attended college in the U.S. as Asian people in the 70s and may have themselves benefited from race-based affirmative action, whether they knew it or not. If they objected to my answer, they held their tongues.

I also learned how to wield these ideas as weapons. Once, upset at my father for lecturing me about some bad grade or other, I threw the idea of meaningful work being the reward for industriousness back in his face. "What change in the world does your job accomplish?" I spat, "you're just a lawyer who helps companies make a lot of money!" In essence, I was questioning his credentials - who are you to tell me how to live my life, when you have a job that doesn't measure up?

Both my parents were professionals with prestigious advanced degrees. My mother was a professor of science, having received her higher education in the U.S. and the UK. Most of her career was at the National University of Singapore. My father got his education also in the U.S. and UK, taught in a University for a while, then returned to University in the UK for a law degree, and became a lawyer. He worked for most of his career with a large firm.

I idolized my parents for their intelligence and hard work. In the universe of possible meaningful future careers, academic and lawyer were pretty much at the top of my list. They still are today.

Rarely did my parents talk about how difficult it was to make their way through college as foreign students who had been raised working class and poor. I think that doing so would have threatened both the idea that the world was at least relatively meritocratic, and that there were neutral standards of merit out there. However, there are a few memories that stand out from my childhood as a clue to how hard it was for my parents.

My mother once told me how hard it was for her to leave home. It was strange to her to think of there being a "good" school so far away. She did not know how to decide which schools were good or not. Once she had been accepted to the school of her choice, her mother, my Amah, objected strenuously to her leaving - from her point of view, she was losing her daughter, and for what? My Ah Kong, my mother's father, however, was a teacher, and supported my mother's desire to get a good education. My mother ended up going to that school and now, as an alum, helps to recruit and interview young women in Singapore and Malaysia for her alma mater.

My father would sometimes allude to the racism of white people, specifically certain partners in his law firm (this was before he made partner himself), and professors in the US and UK. "They think they're smarter than me just because they're white," he said. He told me he had to work much harder, and be much smarter, than his white counterparts, just to prove he belonged, and deserved to be there. Even after he made partner, he told me, some white partners in the firm would treat him with condescension and hostility, especially refusing to credit him for his ideas for directions the firm should take.

As I reflect on work now, I want to hold on to the idea that work can be meaningful, but let go of the idea that there is a hierarchy of work, that only certain people (hardworking, smart people) deserve to do meaningful work, and that anyone who works at a job they dislike does so because they didn't try hard enough or weren't smart enough to do anything else. It is very difficult to let go of this idea, however. Not only was I raised with it, but it is constantly reinforced now. It's an easy thing to fall back on too, when my ego is shaken by the daily indignities of living in this society - I may have it bad, but at least I'm smart enough to not be working at that guy's job.

It is important, as a mainly raised middle-class child, that I did still get some glimpses of my parents' insights and experiences from being raised poor and working-class, even if they came with a heady chaser of meritocratic ideology. I think that I would also like to talk with them more about their experiences becoming middle-class, especially to see if they feel like they have lost something in the process. I know that I feel a sense of loss having left Singapore to come to the U.S., in order to go to a "good" school, and then "make it" in a major center of capitalist power.

Growing up Middle Class in Singapore (Part One?)

A note: Right now I am on a project of thinking about class more. As part of that project, I am hoping to reflect and write about how it was to grow up middle class, and what it is like now to be a middle-class professional. I think that part of what perpetuates the invisibility of class, and thus a lack of public discussion of how we can end class structures and oppression, particularly in the United States and Singapore, is the reluctance or inability of middle-class people to talk honestly about our experience of class, and to acknowledge the ways we both benefit from and are oppressed because of the class structure.

There is a lot of fear, shame, and guilt associated with encountering class difference and thinking about class. This is not unique to middle-class people, but I think that the way it manifests for the middle-classes is in silence and/or a superior distancing attitude from people they consider to be of a lower class background, and from poor people. I hope to unlearn and undo these rigid patterns of thought in myself by openly talking about class and its role in my life without denigrating the intelligence, goodness, and value of working-class or poor people, or of other middle-class people.

Auntie



When I was six, my family moved to Singapore, and hired a live-in maid. Her name was Belan, and she was from the Phillipines.

Because it would have been near unthinkable for a child to call an adult just by their given name, my brother and I were told to call Belan "Auntie." However, unlike other Aunties in our life, my brother and I did not append her name to this title, so she was just an unadorned "auntie," not "Auntie Belan." This was the same way we would address older women that we barely knew or with whom we had a merely commercial relationship ("Auntie, soya bean how much?"). Thus was she marked out as always a stranger to us, even though she lived in our home.

Auntie had a small bedroom with a very small window. The room barely fit her bed, a small plastic dresser, and, as I recall, a chair. I believe she also kept some laundry supplies in her room. I would often see her ironing and folding our clothes in her room. Unlike my brother and my bedroom and my parents' bedroom, Auntie's bedroom door opened into the laundry and trash area connected to the kitchen, rather than into the living room. It was distinctly the "back" of the house. Of all these details I cannot be too sure - the various apartments we lived in blur together, as do the various work lives of the four different live-in maids we had over the course of our childhood.

Auntie did almost all of the work of maintaining the household, including all of the cleaning, cooking, laundry, and some of the grocery shopping. When we ate, my nuclear family would eat first. Auntie, having cooked the food, would set it out on our dining table, and would usually retreat to her room while we ate. When we were finished eating, Auntie would clear the table, and then prepare a plate for herself to eat in her room or standing in the kitchen. She then put away the leftover food, and cleaned all the dishes.

Auntie took on a caretaker role for me and my brother for the hours between when we got home from school and when my parents returned from work. This was not a happy role for her or for us. She rarely seemed pleased to see us when we arrived home and, similarly, we were rarely pleased or delighted to see her. Our relationship was arms-length, cold. When I saw other children being physically affectionate with their families' Filipina live-in maids, I felt a kind of shocked dismay each time. It seemed unnatural to me, and a little unsavory, like hugging someone you had just met on the bus.

Auntie had one day off a week - Sunday. On that day, my mother or father would sometimes cook lunch for the family - usually a noodle dish. I think my mother would then clean up, or perhaps rinse the dishes and leave them for Auntie to clean fully and put away. I do not remember my father helping with the cleaning. Although I now see preparing food for one's family and friends as an expression of care and love, I also realize that for most of my childhood, there was at most only one day a week that one of my parents prepared food for us without a financial transaction taking place.

Auntie was a working class young woman living in a house with two early-middle-age professionals (my parents). A native Tagalog speaker in a country dominated by English and Chinese speakers. A Catholic living among atheists. A single woman with no children, she was suddenly faced with caring for a six and a three year old. I don't know how much she got paid, but I can't imagine she was raking it in, since her salary just came off the top of whatever my parents earned, with the agency that placed her with us taking a cut. It was not a great setup, and she sometimes expressed her anger at her situation by telling me stories of Filipina maids who had gone off the deep end and gone on murder sprees, killing their employers, their employers' children, and even other Filipina maids (this was the kind of story that the Singaporean media loved), the implication being that if we did not behave ourselves, she might snap in a similar way.

To us children, Auntie was a person with no backstory, and little context outside of the work she did. We never met her friends, her family. Unlike everyone else in our lives, she seemed un-tethered, completely outside the network of kinship and acquaintance about which we were often kept updated as a way of signalling social connection (Are you still in touch with so-and-so? Did you hear his wife just got out of hospital? Her sister just moved to Penang, down the street from such-and-such you know. Her nephew is friends with your cousin etc. etc.). Even now, as far as I know, I have no way of finding out what has happened to her. She lived with us for four years, and, once her employment with us was over, she was out of our lives.

I'll probably write more about this and other memories of growing up middle class in Singapore in subsequent posts.