Singapore: Ethos Books, 2017. xiv, 324 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, illustrations.) US$22.39, paper. ISBN 978-981-11-3281-0.
Living with Myths in Singapore represents the end product of a series of ten “Living with Myths” seminars organized by the editors between July 2014 and August 2015. It is a landmark book for a comprehensive, alternative understanding of Singapore’s post-World War II development trajectory. This volume, superbly edited by three historians, brings together twenty-four academics contributing twenty-four crisp, sharp, and well-written chapters. The chapters comprehensively cover all aspects of Singapore’s society, including its foreign policy, politics, economics, and culture.
All the book’s chapters are motivated by a singular purpose—helping the reader deconstruct the myths within the standard narratives of Singapore’s development. This includes myths, among many others, about the reasons for Singapore’s economic success, in the state’s approaches towards social welfare, heritage, and multiculturalism, and in existing public policies regarding education, technology, and migrant workers. In the process of deconstructing these myths, the authors reveal their underlying assumptions, expose the power structures that perpetuate these myths, and probe the neglected conversations that these myths obscure.
Remarkably, there is no singular definition of myths that the authors employ. I counted at least four different definitions that were used throughout the book. Despite the diversity of definitions, the consensus among the authors is this: myths are not falsehoods. They are sweeping, imagined, simplified generalizations that highlight certain dominant logics of thinking while obscuring others. Moreover, these myths are consistently and actively maintained by specific actors, institutions, and the public. As many of the authors suggest, one of the key actors invested in sustaining these myths is the dominant People’s Action Party (PAP) that has governed Singapore for more than half a century since 1959. The PAP looms large in the background of almost all of the chapters.
The book is organized into four sections: “The Singapore Story,” “Third World to First,” “Vulnerability and Faultlines,” and “A Deficient People.” Each section contains at least five chapters that deal with their respective themes.
In “The Singapore Story,” the authors discuss, from their varying perspectives, what it means to be a Singaporean. This discussion necessarily entails struggling between the standard narrative of Singapore’s history that the PAP government imposes and emphasizes on the one hand, and a bottom-up citizen driven understanding of what becoming and being Singaporean means on the other. Mark Baildon and Suhaimi Afandi’s chapter “The Myth that a Singular Historical Narrative Molds Good Citizens,” for instance, questions the utility of propagating a singular, objective account of Singapore’s history for lower secondary school students. They argue that teaching the true nature of history as a discipline should involve exposing students to interpreting and debating various types of evidence and perspectives. In so doing, history becomes meaningful to students, and better prepares students to deal productively with complex issues in the future.
The “Third World to First” section interrogates the myths of Singapore’s economic development. Specifically, the phrase “Third World to First” was popularized when the former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew published the second volume of his memoir with that title. The phrase evokes an imagined progressive linear trajectory of economic development which emphasized Singapore’s meteoric economic growth driven by state-directed global capital. The authors in this section set out to challenge such a straightforward narrative. Ho Chi Tim, Lee Kah Wee, and Seng Guo Quan in their respective chapters, for example, note the Singapore government was not always anti-welfare and anti-casino with an orientation towards neoliberal capitalism. In fact, the direction in which Singapore’s economy should take was vigorously debated and contested within the PAP itself for many years before and after it secured a commanding victory in the 1959 general elections.
The third “Vulnerability and Faultlines” section contains seven chapters that deal with law and order in a socially diverse Singapore. At least three of the seven chapters question the government’s existing approach towards governing a multiracial and multicultural society. For Laavanya Kathiravelu, Lai Ah Eng, and Wong Chee Meng, Singapore’s insistence on the CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) model of multiracial governance is deeply problematic. In particular, the model obscures the diversity within and across ethnic groups, entrenches ethnic stereotypes, and is unsuitable for dealing with a rapidly changing society buffeted by the forces of excessive immigration. New models will have to be considered to celebrate Singapore’s multiracial diversity as a source of strength, rather than as a source perpetual tension, division, and conflict.
Finally, the fourth section on “A Deficit People” questions common myths about Singaporeans being politically and socially apathetic. Contrary to popular imagination, Liew Kai Khiun, Loh Kah Seng, Edgar Liao, and Jack Meng-Tat Chia see Singaporeans as very much socially engaged active citizens who can undertake collective action in reaction to varying circumstances. Singaporeans only appear apathetic because the state views their form of activism as inconvenient and contrary to the state’s interests, and therefore sidelines them and writes them off as apathetic. Teo You Yenn and Charapan S. Bal’s chapters on poverty and migrant workers in Singapore respectively neatly conclude the section and the book. These last two chapters highlight the various ways in which Singaporeans have been deficit in their conversations about the struggles of the poor and migrant workers in the country, and stress the need to expose the structural forces that shape popular misperceptions of these two groups of people.
The last two edited volumes on Singapore that had a similar size, scope, and ambition to this book were the Management of Success: The Molding of Modern Singapore published in 1989, and the Management of Success: Singapore Revisited published in 2010. Both published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, for the last three decades they have been standard references for a comprehensive introduction to understanding how Singapore works. Living with Myths in Singapore will become the third standard reference for research on Singapore in the decades to come. Students, academics, and the general public will find it an essential companion to a more holistic understanding of Singapore’s past and present.
Elvin Ong
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada