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The pace of change
Ruby Xuequn Pan

Singapore

GALLERY

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Things change at a phenomenal pace in Singapore. In my grandmother’s generation, arranged marriages were the norm and divorce was seen as unacceptable. Men disliked their wives to go out and work. With my mother’s generation, women were going to college, taking up professional jobs, and choosing to marry for love. Divorce is growing more and more common, although some measure of social stigma is still attached to the “broken family.” My generation, I believe, is struggling with the conundrum of living in a morally conservative society where sex outside of marriage and homosexuality are regarded as taboo by the state, while the influx of Western media is increasingly bringing these phenomena into public discourse and making them seem commonplace. Some young women, myself included, now find it possible to talk candidly about our sexuality in private conversations without any sense of shame, while my mother’s generation would never have openly discussed such matters with their friends – sex was only supposed to happen after marriage. There is, however, also a growing fundamentalist Christian movement in the country in reaction to what might be termed the influx of “liberal Western values,” so I feel like I can’t generalize with regard to matters of sexuality – books like Joshua Harris’ “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” are also making the rounds with some young women I know. I am deeply interested in the relationships between Singaporean and Filipina women - it fascinates me that a key factor that has allowed Singaporean women to leave their homes and work is their ability to employ maids from the Philippines and Indonesia to take over childcare and domestic duties. While I do believe that the feminist movement is growing in Singapore, with a number of NGOs springing up in the past decade to advocate for the rights of both Singaporean women and female foreign workers in the country, young women are still struggling with questions about self-image, sexuality and what it means to be an “Asian woman” living in a Westernized, late capitalist society that places a central emphasis on “family values” as a basic building block of society.

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