Musings

As soon as I left for Boston and started posting all those pictures of places I was visiting, Ling began dropping big hints about our upcoming opportunity at the end of this year for a holiday to makeup for the three overseas trips in the last 15 months I’ve gone on without her. While most of my planning so far has been for a 10 day stay in Japan, I’ve continued to keep an eye on other locations, including New Zealand, Arizona (a third trip to the US in 2 years!), and Central/Eastern Europe.

Japan’s an interesting choice, especially since Ling wants so much to visit the place. I’m alright with it but not as enthused and I’ll explain why later. But December is also when the country is in winter. A very different experience from visiting the Kansai region in August to September for instance.

In any case, I’ve been wanting to write about my somewhat conflicted feelings about Japan since the middle of last year but been putting it off as I try to keep our blog light-hearted.

Basically, as fascinating as Japanese culture and the country might be to many persons and that some of us go all gah-gah over things that are Japanese, my perspective of the island country and its people is greatly influenced by its history and its actions in the last century. The 1.3 billion Chinese up north certainly have not forgotten, and while I feel little kinship to my parents’ relations still living on Hainan island, I share some of the ambivalence the Chinese have about the Japanese. And specifically, it’s their psyche that I’m thinking about here.

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My earliest recollections of Japanese history in the last century comes from more than 30 years ago. My dad had a number of pictorial books from our old place in Sembawang Hills Estate, several of which I think are at least half a century old now. I remembered curiously taking out those books to look at as a young boy. One of the books had numerous pictures of the Japanese Imperial Army’s activities in China in the last world war.

Those pictures were not censored. And the photographs of rape, execution, disemboweled body parts and heads held up for display left an indelible impression on my young 7 year old mind back then.

In the subsequent decades, my impression of Japanese brutality got more evolved as I became an avid reader of world history. It wasn’t the graphic pictures anymore, but the text in the historical re-accounts – which admittedly might be biased – and the numerical and statistical representations – which is harder to argue against – of various incidents demonstrating that brutality. That impression got permanently burnt into my consciousness when I read Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking years back – and it’s a book that is best digested in short, separate reading sessions given its seriously depressing and haunting account.

And it’s not just the Nanking incident. When James Doolittle led his small force of American B25s and hit Tokyo in a retaliatory strike after the devastation of Pearl Harbor – and Doolittle did very little actual damage – the Japanese took it out on the Chinese villagers by killing another 250,000 of them. Germ warfare was used.

Or of the Hiroshima sympathizers. The nuclear bomb that Enola Gay dropped on the city caused a huge amount of death and destruction. The Japanese there today continue to emphasize to visitors the extent of suffering they endured, but gloss over the fact that Hiroshima was where their regional army headquarters and a huge depot of military supplies were situated. In comparison, the city of Nagasaki, similarly bombed, seemed to have moved on in sentiment.

I’m not a prude, and I think men are capable of great evil whichever race and nationality. However, there is one theme that all the authors I’ve read agreed on, and it was a theme that struck me first as a young adult: that the Japanese have never properly reconciled themselves to their own actions in the last 70 years of our world’s history. History continues to get whitewashed in their textbooks. Figures that show the extent of their violent actions are disputed by their scholars when they are corroborated everywhere else. Lone individuals – some of whom are formerly serving military officers – who possibly in an exercise of epiphany on their deathbeds try to revisit their country’s actions and seek recounting, but are invariably shouted down by their countrymen in nationalistic fervor.

While there’s the argument that the Japanese actions in South-East Asia were primarily driven by the need for precious natural resources, their actions in North Asia were largely territorial. And in both theaters, they saw themselves racially superior. Everybody else was inferior and less deserving.

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To be honest; it’s the latter that lingered at the back of my mind when I interacted with the Japanese last December, or when someone around me today gushes about how great their culture and people are.

To be fair, I do find the Japanese very polite, their civilian infrastructures of transportation and communication both efficient and effective (I wouldn’t say the same about their national governance though), and many aspects of their living environment admirable, including care for personal hygiene, respect for authority and the elderly, the naturally beautiful country they live in, and the exquisiteness of their cuisine and dress. I certainly enjoyed my teaching trip to Kumamoto last year and the hospitality of their staff.

But my admiration of Japanese hospitality is also simultaneously tempered by an unsureness that whether beneath that façade lies the potential for yet another explosion where underlining traits that they demonstrated 70 years ago will resurface again, and violently. There has never been the same kind of self-reckoning or actualization that the Germans experienced in post-war Europe.

That said, my bet is that come year end, of the several shortlisted vacation spots, it’ll be Japan that we’ll visit. I have to think of the wife!

There was an article in news pages of The Straits Times today about a secondary school student having an accident while climbing Mt. Kinabalu – yep, that mountain that Ling has scaled 2-3 times now. The 13 year old boy fell and injured his head, but is in stable condition now.

Now, what I found especially interesting, and also heartening, was this part of the news article, which quoted the boy’s father:

Mr Chan, who has two other sons, said he will not discourage his son from other school trips after this.

‘It was purely an accident. These things happen, so I won’t deter him from other trips, but he has to show me he can take care of himself before I let him go on another one.’

This is exactly the kind of parents I think we should aspire to be. No knee-jerk reactions, blaming the establishment and hunting around for someone to blame and absolving your precious tots of any responsibility.

Back last year there was a widely reported and hotly debated incident regarding the takeover of the women advocacy group AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research). I only commented briefly about that incident last year, and while the incumbents of the group eventually managed to get their leadership back to friendly territory, they didn’t exactly come out smelling like roses either. Some bloggers concluded that their agenda had been taken over by the gay lobby, and that their sexuality education syllabus was rejected and removed by MOE didn’t help either.

There was another letter coming out from the group in the last fortnight but on a different issue: this time on declining birth rates in Singapore. True to form, the advocacy group’s public letter stated that men were (at least partially) responsible for it as they were not up to the task of child rearing, among other reasons.

This morning, there was a letter in reply:

May 26, 2010
LOW BIRTH RATE
A nation of spoilt princesses?

THE Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) seemed to suggest last Thursday (‘Singapore still far behind in true gender equality: Aware’) that women are free from blame for the declining birth rate in Singapore.

In Singapore, most parents urge their children to excel in studies and focus on their career. Few prepare their children for the rigours of parenthood.

Many households also employ maids. As a result, our boys and girls grow up lacking parenting skills and are clueless about household chores. The boys, however, have responsibilities forced upon them in the form of national service. Not so the girls. They are free to place personal ambition above all else.

Many women choose to remain single because they do not see the need or the urgency to get married. They do not need a man to provide for them and they can always depend on their girlfriends for emotional support. As for sex, few see the need to have it regularly.

Even when a woman does want to get married, her expectations get in the way. The man must be her ‘type’. He must have a great job, good income, be reasonably good-looking and he must also charm her off her feet before she will contemplate marriage.

Our society glorifies the career woman. Lifestyle and fashion magazines devote pages to tips for the career woman to get ahead. Floors in shopping malls cater exclusively to the needs of these women and credit card and insurance companies vie for their money.

As a result, women are spoilt for choice. Egged on by society, free from national service and reservist obligations and not needing a man, they are totally free to focus exclusively on their careers. Choosing to get married and have children is committing career suicide.

The conclusion is inevitable. We have raised a nation of ‘spoilt princesses’ unwilling and unable to handle the rigours of motherhood.

Sulthan Niaz

I don’t care for AWARE at all after seeing their very public actions last year, but while I can see where this letter writer is coming from even if he’s applied a lot of very liberal generalization, he sure doesn’t mince his words. My bet is on that there’s going to be a vigorous response coming very soon from other letter writers, if not the advocacy group themselves.

The Straits Times today saw five more letters published on the issue of workload faced by public school teachers. Apart from the debate on Mother Tongue language, I can’t recall to have observed so many letters on an education-centric issue recently.

Not all the letters were supportive of Ms. Quek’s letter though; one was dissenting, which I’ll comment on (it’s at the end of this post).

I’m including the forum page letters here for future reference too. The issue of workload faced by public school teachers is something that’s very close to my heart. And it’s not because I have some kind of axe to grind against the ministry – nothing could be further from the truth. But my stake in this comes from after seeing Ling struggle when she was a full-time teacher herself, and witnessing her tears and the emotional and physical damage wrought on her well-being. In view of those years, I’m fully sympathetic to what those of us who’re teaching in public schools have to face.

OK; onto the letters. This will be a very long post, and the dissenting letter is at the end. Formatted slightly to save space, and relevant parts of letters included only.

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I thought the first letter was possibly the most risque of the lot. The letter writer remarked on something that I wonder if is just quietly muttered under breadth but never really debated upon publicly. In all fairness though, it concerns culture that isn’t unique to the public education service. I once had a colleague in a previous institution I lectured at that the only places where office politics don’t exist is when you’re working in an institution where no one wants to get promoted. No motivation, so no act.

21 May 2010
Care for them if we truly care about education

WITH reference to Ms Aishah Quek’s letter last Saturday (‘Work-life balance? Here’s one day in the life of a teacher’), the Ministry of Education (MOE) should take a hard look at what is happening in schools. In particular, MOE should examine how overzealous principals and management are in exerting undue pressure on the average teacher.

The typical workday routine as related by Ms Aishah is sadly true although individual cases may differ. Teachers who are likely to deny this problem exists belong to two categories.

The first are young and ambitious teachers or heads of department who are being fast-tracked for promotion to principal.

The second group comprises the middle-aged or senior teachers who are hoping to bite the bullet and just make it to the next grade so that they can increase their income and pay for their children’s education and clear their mortgage before retiring.

...

James Suresh

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The second letter brought up an interesting point about the issue of performance grades. Is that award supposed to be relative e.g. your performance grade is drawn against a normal distribution, or against non-relative criteria i.e. like when you score a certain mark in an MCQ test?

I don’t think performance grades should be relative. If you meet the mark – heck, if your entire department has done well in whichever job role they’re in – everyone should be awarded the same merit. I’m aware that there might just only be so much bonus or reward funds to distribute in SMEs, but that would be a separate issue. At the very least, recognition should be given.

Difficult for teachers to achieve work-life balance

I REFER to Mr Lim Kim Siang’s letter, “Penalised for trying to be a good mum and teacher”, on Monday. In it, he mentioned how his daughter was assigned “far more responsibilities than the average teacher” when she returned to full-time teaching after her maternity leave. Yet, she was given a lower performance grading.

I believe there is nothing wrong in the school awarding her a lower performance grading. After all, she was out of action for a good six months (four months of paid maternity leave and an additional two months of no-pay leave).

To put it in perspective, someone would have had to shoulder his daughter’s teaching, administrative and co-curricular activity (CCA) duties while she was away for half a year. It is only equitable that she be assessed for the time she was in school, while her colleagues who were hard at work for the full school year should be rated higher, all other things being equal. Imagine the impact on staff morale (just consider the singles and the men) if maternity leave were used to validate an equivalent performance bonus payout.

...

Marietta Koh (Mrs)

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The third letter was by the wife of another teacher, who wrote to say that Ms. Quek’s husband’s life was exactly the same as her own spouse’s. She also reiterated another old issue that’s been debated in public spheres before: the abdication of responsibilities from parents towards their children to educators.

It’s a tough lot, teachers

MS AISHAH Quek’s letter, “Work-life balance? Here’s one day in the life of a teacher”, last Saturday struck close to my heart because that is exactly the life my husband leads.

After a typical routine like the one Ms Quek has shared, where can teachers find time for personal or family activities? It is not a matter of not prioritising their time properly or better time management. Teachers simply have no time of their own.

Does the Education Ministry look into the well-being of its teachers or is that the principals’ responsibility?

Even during school holidays, teachers have to attend staff meetings, workshops and courses, as well as remedial and supplementary classes, holiday camps and overseas excursions. They also have to contend with more administrative work and prepare lesson plans.

...

Tan Lye Neo (Ms)

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The fourth letter: the parent of a teacher. The letter writer’s concern was wholly pragmatic – how is her daughter going to find a life partner if she has to continue working the kind of hours she does now, much less even think about having children. I shared this letter with Ling, and Ling remarked that before we met, “That was exactly my fear before too.”

Passion for teaching quickly sapped

I AGREE with Ms Aishah Quek’s letter, “Work-life balance? Here’s one day in the life of a teacher”, last Saturday. Her husband is not alone.

The situation is also true for my daughter who is in the teaching profession too. She leaves home at 6.45am, returning at 7.30pm for dinner and continuing her work till midnight, all for a meagre salary. She hardly has any time to be with us or for herself, much less enjoying any kind of work-life balance.

My daughter was full of passion when she started teaching, but under these circumstances, it won’t be long before her passion gets eroded and she suffers from burnout. Any new teacher would be quickly disillusioned and thus leave the profession in search of more fulfilling careers.

My daughter is single and with this routine, how is she going to look for a life partner? A number of my daughter’s teacher friends who have been in the profession for about 10 years are still single, with no plans to get married. With the Government’s push for more families and babies, even if my daughter wanted to support it, she is unable to.

…

Chin Sian Yew (Mdm)

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The fifth letter was the one that nearly had me falling off my chair. I shared this one with Ling as well, and she was flabbergasted at the kind of ‘spin’ that was put into it. I think elements of it are debatable and I’ll concede are valid points of arguments, but other parts of it is just nonsensical and demand a response.

A teaching life or a teacher’s lot?
Stressful yes, but not unusual as jobs go

I FIND Ms Aishah Quek’s diary of a teacher’s day last Saturday (‘Work-life balance? Here’s one day in the life of a teacher’) misleading in detailing the lack of a work-life balance for her husband, a teacher.

Using the same diary format as Ms Quek, I would like to explain why.

5am to 6am: Wake up and prepare for school. A lot of people, including students, take only half an hour to prepare for school or work.

Ling will tell you I’m a speed dresser, speed bather, speed reader, and a speed typist. But I can only get ready for work within 30 minutes if I skip my morning scan of emails to see the urgent ones that need immediate attention before I leave for work, skip breakfast, skip the entire routine of briefly scanning news headlines, and assuming if I don’t take any longer than a speed dump in the toilet. 30 minutes is EXACTLY enough if all you do is wake up, rush to the toilet, brush teeth + bath, change into clothes, and rush out of the house. No more.

And how about when you have your own children who’re also preparing for school as well then?

Leave for school at 6am and arrive at 7am. If he needs to take one hour to reach school, Ms Quek’s husband should ask for a transfer to a school nearer home.

Let’s go with the median then, 30 minutes.

30 minutes travel time in morning peak hour traffic even for people like myself who drive is a fetch, unless you’re staying in some low population density place – e.g. you’re not living in Woodlands, Ang Mo Kio, Sengkang, Toa Payoh, Bishan, Clementi, Jurong, Tampines – and not needing to travel along major choke points, e.g. CTE, PIE, Upper Serangoon Road, Lornie Road, Adam Road, Upper Thomson Road.

But we’re supposed to move away from private to public transporation, aren’t we? Let’s go with that then. 30 minutes for you to get to the bus stop, wait for the bus, hope the bus coming still has standing room, wait for the bus to clear the bus stop (alongside other buses trying to get in or leave, and with other vehicles also trying to get to work), bus traveling time, and for you to walk from the bus stop to the school gate itself. You better hope it’s your lucky day.

7am to 7.30am: The ‘guard duty’ he does is usually done by parent volunteers or rotated among teachers, so it is not a daily affair.

7.30am to 1pm: Regular teaching. Teachers do not teach from 7.30am to 1pm at a stretch. They have one or two free periods in between each day.

1 pm to 3.30pm: Prepare for and conduct remedial lessons. Again, this is not an everyday affair as different subject teachers will take turns to conduct remedial lessons.

It’s true that remedial doesn’t run every day. But it’s not as though on the days when teachers don’t have remedial, they have nothing to do. Otherwise Ling would had been coming home during those years every day at 3 pm on non-remedial days.

3.30pm to 5.30 pm: Take charge of co-curricular activities. Again this is usually only once a week for primary schools. For secondary schools, these are usually done by outside coaches or student leaders.

The training might be done by external vendors for the performing CCAs and sports, but teachers have to be physically around still in school and to supervise throughout the sessions. When Ling was handling the choir CCA, she had to be present to supervise each session while the external conductor did the training.

5.30 pm to 6.30pm: Key in remarks on students for mid-term report book. This is required only twice a year, during mid-term and year-end.

6.45 to 7.45pm: Travel home. He should request to teach in a school nearer home to cut travelling time.

When I read the above, the first thing that struck in my mind was a programming analogy. Programming language classes should be, in theory, modularized resource units with low coupling and high cohesion ratings, and can be plugged and inserted into different code environments with little transitions or adjustments required apart from parameter and return value changes.

But teachers are human beings. The letter writer’s whole notion that you should just change school to cut traveling time completely ignores every other humanistic factor that goes into the decision not to change schools.

8.30pm to 1am: Marking books, worksheets and the like. Most homework is marked by students who exchange books and worksheets, with the teacher going through the answers during class time.

Ling’s face turned into one of horror when I told her of the above statement made in the letter. She would only say that clearly, the letter writer isn’t a teacher.

Language teachers, essay answers, anyone?

An exception is for examination papers and compositions, which are marked by teachers. These are usually marked in school during the teachers’ free periods. The daily routine listed by the writer did not include lunch breaks.

Before Hannah, I lost count of the number of times when Ling came home from school 6 pm-ish and said she did not have time for a proper lunch. Her sustenance that day came from biscuits in the staff pantry.

When she was in charge of staff welfare, one of her responsibilities was to buy food for the pantry. And we had to buy baskets of food (biscuits, beverages, instant cup noodles, bundled fruits) from NTUC every week. I remember those days because I had to help her plan to buy the most amount of food each time within her very limited staff welfare budget.

If teachers had time for proper lunches every day without fail, why then was the food so rapidly consumed each week?

Maybe teachers just love Khong Guan biscuits and Maggi cup noodles for lunch. Or maybe there were rats in the pantry, and they nibbled away at the food every day.

While a teacher’s job is stressful, so are other jobs. Having to work long hours is the norm for all jobs now. At least the workload of a teacher’s job is seasonal and there are times when they can relax a little, for example, during the long mid-year and year-end holidays.

I sure would like to see quantifiable evidence that “working long hours is the norm for all jobs now.” If the statistic doesn’t show that 50.1% of jobs around here require you to work well in excess of your stipulated work hours in your employment contract and on a frequent basis, then the letter writer has no basis to make this sweeping generalization.

And mid-year and year-end holidays are really breaks for teachers…? It was crazily difficult trying to find a block of even 4 days where Ling and I could both find free time to go on a break. Why? There were meetings, more meetings, CCA practices, student camps, and staff training for her during those ‘holiday’ breaks.

And the parents who have written to the forum page over the years to ask why schools are running lessons and activities in holidays will also tell you a very different story from what the letter writer has claimed.

So teachers, cheer up, you are not alone, all other jobs are stressful and requires us to work long hours as well.

Tan Lee Hwang (Ms)

That sounds really like the letter writer telling teachers to suck it up because everyone else in her world view is also suffering. So much for the motivation to change situations for the better. The ST discussion board in response to this letter comprise several laughing at the letter’s content and not in a good way, and others asking if Ms. Tan has any clue on what really is going on. A few have remarked that this is a silly letter and should never have saw print.

That aside, I don’t know who Ms. Tan is. Maybe she has got her information from someone who’s lucky enough to work in a school where there is excess manpower resources to handle a lot of these workload-centric issues. But based on what everyone else is saying – the spouses, parents, and ex-teachers themselves – and based on my own friends’ experience who have left the teaching service for good, the letter is just more wrong than right.

But then again, I was never a public school teacher – only married to one and saw first hand what that one had to go through. It hurt Ling, and it in turn hurt me.

Another letter published in The Straits Times about the punishing workload faced by public school teachers, and – yet again – not from the teacher herself but from her parent.

I empathise with Ms Aishah Quek’s frustrations over her teacher husband’s life (‘Work-life balance? Here’s one day in the life of a teacher’; last Saturday).

My daughter, a junior college teacher for more than five years, typically works for 80 to 90 hours a week. Weekends are often reserved for marking and events related to co-curricular activity, and the so-called school holidays are filled with remedials, meetings, courses and camps.

Things got worse when she had her first child. Choosing to breastfeed for six months, she decided to take two months of no-pay leave, in addition to the four months of paid maternity leave. But she often had to return to school during this time to perform ad hoc duties assigned to her.

Upon returning to school full time, she fought a losing battle with the school administration to provide her and other mothers-to-be with a place for expressing breastmilk. It was suggested to her that she should use either the storeroom or the toilet. In the end, other teachers who took pity on her plight set up a makeshift corner in the staff room, with a shower curtain for privacy. More than five new mothers now use this corner.

…

Lim Kim Siang

I’ve wrote last year about the kind of school workload (i.e. insane) that Ling had to put up with daily, and that it was telling that it’s the spouses and parents of public school teachers who are writing to the press demanding to know why. So, it wasn’t surprising when the following very pointed letter by the wife of one such teacher was published in today’s The Straits Times. Formatted slightly to save space.

May 15, 2010
Work-life balance? Here’s one day in the life of a teacher

I AM often told how the Ministry of Education is easing teachers’ workload, but I see little evidence of it.  My husband has been teaching in a neighbourhood school for several years. Despite the mantra of work-life balance, I see little of it in the lives of teachers. Here is a typical weekday routine for my husband:

5am: Wake up and prepare for school.
6am: Leave for school.
7am: Arrive at school and perform morning duty (in a sense, ‘guard duty’).
7.30am to 1pm: Regular teaching duties (including extra games for students who need more exercise during recess, which is part of the Holistic Health Framework that replaced the Trim and Fit scheme).
1 pm to 1.30pm: Prepare for remedial lessons.
1.30pm to 3.30pm: Conduct remedial lessons (my husband’s school believes that to improve students’ results, remedial lessons must be conducted daily).
3.30pm to 5.30pm: Be present for the co-curricular activities he is in charge of.
5.30pm to 6.30pm: Administrative work like keying in remarks on students for the mid-term report book).
6.30pm to 6.45pm: Pack 36 books and piles of worksheets to take home and mark.
6.45pm to 7.45pm: Travel home.
7.45pm to 8.30pm: Eat dinner and rest.
8.30pm to 1am: Continue with administrative work, such as marking books and worksheets, reviewing examination papers, and preparing programmes for the June school camp and Youth Olympic Games activities.

Weekends are hardly restful. I often ask him if the endless work is because he is singled out. That is not so, he tells me. His colleagues face the same punishing workload.

As I am writing this letter at 10am, my husband has developed a fever. But he is unable to seek medical attention as there is an oral examination in the afternoon.

I understand there is a need to be accountable to students’ parents. But in this case, who is answerable to a teacher’s family if anything happens to the teacher?

Aishah Quek (Ms)

Ms. Quek’s husband sounds nearly like what Ling had to go through every day while she was still teaching full-time, with the only difference being that she could wake up at 5:55 AM as we drove to school.

If there’s one agency in Singapore that gets a lot of ire in their direction, it’s the cab companies in Singapore. The online complaints in discussion rooms leveled against them have typically centered on the relative lack of added value they offer despite the high rental charges they put on taxi drivers.

Over the last week again, there’s been anger towards the alleged degree of which the public is held hostage by their practices. I’m referring specifically to the announcement last week that cab companies are going to impose surcharges for passengers wanting to catch taxis at the new Integrated Resorts. As others have angrily stated, the cab companies are imposing surcharges at their whim, and the latter are defending themselves by explaining they’re just trying to address demand and supply mismatches in ‘certain areas’.

I’m not an economics person (beyond my obsession with home finance spreadsheets); I dropped Econs at my ‘A’ levels in fact. But my sense tells me that imposing surcharges is zero sum. If you put surcharges at just and only one place on a small island in Singapore, that’s still fine since demand and supply will work itself out – i.e. not all the drivers will converge there given that the place can only produce so much clientile.

But if you start slapping surcharges on every mall, district and place of interest, soon enough that will be the only places you’ll find taxis. What then happens to the heartland areas of Singapore where the bulk of its population need to find transportation as they go about their daily business? Are these areas going to get surcharges put on them too when the cab companies find that all the cabs have flocked to the airport, the malls and the IRs and there aren’t any more cabs working the heartland areas?

Just imagine: what if one day in order to hail a cab at Punggol Road outside our place I need to pay a surcharge? The cab companies would tell me it’s to address “demand and supply mismatches in certain areas”.

What rubbish. The system should be working itself out. The IRs have a lot of passengers. There are enough taxis. The supply should be automatically going there to meet the demand. Full-stop. If it isn’t, the underlining issues should be looked at instead of trying to artificially adjust the equation by throwing money at it. E.g. if the drivers are only interested in working easy locations or areas with existing surcharges, or fixing taxi touting for good.

The funniest thing is that I have really zero interest in visiting the IRs right anyway even. Oh, when Hannah’s a little older I can foresee her asking daddy and mommy to bring her to Universal Studios Singapore, but that I imagine is still at least many years away.

Many of the news regarding home helpers in Singapore these days aren’t flattering. On too many occasions, they’ve been on misdemeanors either on the part of the home helpers, or of their employers abusing their helpers. So, when the below showed up on The Straits Times earlier this week, while on the one hand it’s terrifically sad, it also reminds us that there are real gems in a workforce level that many Singaporeans are starting to take for granted. Formatted to save space, and source here.

Apr 26, 2010
Maid dies saving baby girl

SHE loved them so much that she was even willing to lay her life down for the girls. On Saturday night, Indonesian maid Puji Astutik died proving her love – and saved her boss’ one-year-old.

Ms Puji, 28, was crossing the road with her employer, Mrs Lam’s younger daughter, when an SMRT bus ran into her at the junction of Choa Chu Kang Street 52 and Choa Chu Kang North 6. She flung the baby girl forward but was pinned under the wheels, The New Paper and Chinese daily Lianhe Zaobao reported.

She was rushed to the National University Hospital, but died later that night from her injuries. The Lams’ daughter suffered minor scratches on her left arm and kept shivering that night. Neighbours remember Ms Puji as a ‘very friendly’ person who would say hi. Mrs Lam said she intended to renew the maid’s contract when it expired in September.

There’s no indication yet of whether the lights at that traffic junction were in the deceased’s favor or not. Not withstanding that, it was still absolutely stunning bravery shown on the part of Ms. Puji, though it also cost her her life.

There are two really bizarre incidents covered in the newspapers these days. One of them is the still unfolding Apple vs Gizmodo drama over a misplaced iPhone prototype, and the other is a more localized issue. Thanks to messed-up competitive bidding between the major television companies, those of us here in Singapore might not be able to watch the coming FIFA World Cup 2010.

The latter especially strikes a chord in me. Because just 4 years ago, I’d just returned from Perth after concluding my Ph.D work and was back in Singapore seeking employment, doing marriage preparations and planning for our new home – and for several evenings a week in that month of June in 2006, the two of us would spend our time at McDonalds watching the World Cup.

Oh, we could have watched the matches from home, but there’s just incredible thrill watching the events with other Singaporeans. It’s also one of those few occasion types where I don’t mind noise – there’s a lot of fun cheering, howling, yelling with everyone else in the small restaurant. I think McDonalds themselves welcomed the patrons:  they even sent staff during matches to take orders from the crowd, then return with trays of food.:)

Things are a little different 4 years later now of course, even if by some rare chance Singapore does get coverage of the World Cup. There’s Hannah to think about, but it’d be in the June holiday break, so if the matches in South Africa match our hours here, Singapore still might be able to watch the live coverage.

But hey – during that crucial month I won’t be in Singapore anyway! There should be TVs in the accommodation I’m at – I hope. :)

Update: We’ll be getting to watch the competition – hooray!

“SINGAPORE: After more than six months of nail-biting suspense, sources have confirmed that football fans will be able to watch all 64 matches of the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa ‘live’ on television in Singapore.”

[Source here]

While reading up on some legal precedents in defamation suits, I came across a story that’s in equal parts both hilarious and also just plain bizarre.

A family of South-Korean immigrants, the Chungs, were running a Pop-Mom laundry shop ‘Custom Cleaners’ in Washington DC in 2005. From all counts, they were an honest, low-key establishment well-regarded by their group of customers who frequented their services. Like many other service-centric operations there and also around the world, their shop carried advertisements claiming “Same Day Service” and “Satisfaction Guaranteed”.

In May 2005 though, they were served notice for a suit by an administrative law judge in the district – a Roy Pearson. The judge had sent in his pants for cleaning, but the apparel was mistakenly directed to another dry cleaners. The mistake was rectified with the return of the pants delayed by a couple of days. When Pearson got the pants back, he insisted it wasn’t his – despite corroboration of the pants with Custom Cleaners’ records, tags, and Pearson’s own receipt.

The two parties couldn’t come to agreement, so Pearson filed suit. And here’s the wickedest part of it – he wanted $67,000,000 in damages. And that’s in USD. In Singapore dollars, that’d be one hundred million moola… for a pair of pants. His case? He said that the Chungs had not delivered their promises of “Same Day Service”, and “Satisfaction Guaranteed” to him.

Maybe the pair of pants he lost was diamond-studded with 24 carats, or the pants was sent to laundry with two million cans of premium Abalone stuffed somewhere inside it. But the suit was no joke to the Chungs, who were completely bewildered by the awesomeness and audacity of the claim. The public came to their rescue though with donations for them to seek legal aid and for lost business. The Chungs had already offered settlement offers of $3,000, $4,600, and $12,000… all of which were rejected by Pearson. I’m not sure what the good judge was smoking, but $12,000 for a pair of pants sounds like a very good deal to me.

In any case, the suit reached trial and after a bit of ding-doinging was concluded in 2007 – with the D.C. judge ruling in favor of the Chungs, awarding legal costs to them and sanctioning Pearson $12,000 for “creating unnecessary litigation”.

The story doesn’t end there: for the next two years, Pearson filed motions of appeal and reconsideration but was overturned and rejected each time. Along the process, he lost his job as judge on the basis that Pearson lacked the necessary “judicial temperament” for that position.

The case became fodder for bloggers, news commentaries and even international attention, with most persons – not surprisingly – unsympathetic to Pearson. Even Fortune magazine listed this incident as #37 of that year’s dumbest moments in business. Pearson himself ended up being referred to by bloggers as “Judge Fancy Pants”.

[Sources: here, here and here]