Dear reader,
It’s the middle of June. Sweltering heat, parents and kids with time off, many on holiday, other people revelling in the gentler morning traffic, and lower ridesharing fares. Barrels of durians from across the border appear in our hoods, their familiar pungency now accompanied by eye-watering prices, reminding us that Malayan staple is now styrofoamed splendour.
It’s also Father’s Day on Sunday, and it’s important to recognise their growing contributions to family life, from bedtime reading and play to household chores. No doubt, there’s still a long way to go, as we collectively strive to undo centuries of gender stereotypes, fossilised roles and deep-seated inequities, including of course the assumption that father must be the breadwinner. All these, in different ways, constrain each individual’s liberty.
Our first two blurbs in “Singapore This Week” and our essay touch on this in different ways. The story that inspired and enraged me in equal measure was of the Singaporean woman who mustered the courage to speak to the press about the sex ring in which several husbands ganged up to drug their wives and rape them. “I want women to know that this kind of thing really happens”, the survivor called “Annie” told The Straits Times (ST). Bravo, ST, for inviting Annie to share her story to an “all-female team of print and visual journalists.”
This is one of those stories through which you can clearly see the implicit, spontaneous cross-media collaborations that might occur between the mainstream media (MSM) and the independent media in a diverse ecosystem. Jom, a weekly magazine, will write about Annie by injecting more of our own opinion than the MSM ever would. In terms of length, we sort of straddle both ends: our blurbs in “Singapore This Week” are usually far shorter than news articles; while our essays afford us far more time and real estate than they’d ever get.
So yes, lest my occasional grumblings about the MSM suggest otherwise, we read their work, and they read ours. (“Soooo long!! But I enjoyed it,” a young reporter from CNA Today told me in late April, about one of our profiles.)
- The brave woman who exposed the shocking, sordid sex ring of husbands raping wives
- The high-stress environment for girls in top Singaporean schools
- Varied commentators enrich public discourse on sky-high rents
- Obituary of Anthony Reid, historian of South-east Asia
- “A Useful Ghost” and other films reflect dynamic South-east Asian collaborations
- The collapse of Builder.ai and the risks with AI charlatans
And more, in our weekly digest. Read it now.
Essay: “Triaging the Singapore education system: the primary care of ‘Secondary: The Musical’”
This production by Checkpoint Theatre and musician weish was one of the best things I watched last year. And in the hands of Corrie Tan, our arts editor (and a former lecturer), we are today invited to revisit it with fresh eyes, with the added layer of the invested, empathetic critic.
“Then there’s the time one of my [Corrie’s] pandemic-era students tells me, over Zoom, that she’s beginning to explore sex work. Another student is so depressed she tells me she’s been catatonic for days. All my classmates seem to know what they’re doing. They’re on this path, she says, rubbing her palms frustratedly, but I don’t know what mine is. Another one says he missed class the week before because he’s just been discharged from the hospital after a suicide attempt.”
Corrie fuses her own experiences with the drama onstage, into an exploration of the very meaning of care: caring “aspirations” and “responsibilities” as we strive to nurture our “caring democracy”. The musical, Corrie writes, “does something radical: it decides it won’t cure or diagnose or test or solve us. Instead, it holds us, and really is a plea for an ethics of care to take root in the school system before primary care becomes palliative care…Care demands both constancy and consistency, and it demands that we all do it together.”
Do find time this weekend to sit in the shade and enjoy Corrie’s piece. Whether you’re a parent or childless, durian-eater or -hater, establishment or indie, care is something we, children of the same earth, must always “do” together.
Jom mengasihi,
Sudhir Vadaketh
Editor-in-chief, Jom
p.s. we’re down to our last 20 tickets for our next Jom Cakap, on “Scam Inc”, on June 24th at The Projector. Get yours now.
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