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.