Dear reader,
Among other stories in “Singapore This Week”, our weekly digest, are mini profiles of four men: two politicians, the WP’s Pritam Singh and the PAP’s Zhulkarnain Abdul Rahim; and two champs, pool player Aloysius Yapp and Wikimedian of the Year Robert Sim.
Other stories that caught our eye but didn’t make it in include an awful video of an LTA engineer berating a migrant worker (for which he was in turn “counselled”); calls to legalise part-time work for domestic workers after one was fined S$13,000 for moonlighting; and the claim by Sammy Obeid, a Lebanese-Palestinian American comedian, that Singapore censored his shows—which IMDA rebutted. (The apparently prosaic reason is that poor Sammy’s team didn’t file their paperwork in time.)
- Aloysius Yapp’s 19-year journey to the throne of “Ah Beng sports”
- Do Pritam and Zhul aspire to greater things?
- Can Commune@Henderson, a new intergenerational co-living space, offer not just beds but belonging?
- Examining Singapore’s ranking as Asia’s most peaceful country
- Robert Sim’s 19-year journey to the throne of Wikipedia
- What CNA’s new documentary on Separation reveals about our history—and who gets to tell it
And more, in our weekly digest. Read it now.
Essay: “Air Angels: The sexualised female icons of Singapore Airlines and Thai Airways” by Jasmine Chia
Men in our weekly digest, and women in our essay. This one combines many compelling elements: a recognisable symbol that stirs the nation’s soul; a mother-daughter relationship; and a nuanced discussion on servitude and sexism that is probably unsettling to anybody who’s flown Singapore Airlines or Thai Airways. Jasmine begins:
“A glamorous apparition, a sensual spirit. ‘Singapore Girl, You’re Always There’, rang the 1986 ad from Singapore Airlines (SIA). Over in Thailand, the woman in question is in pink-purple regalia with a regal sash affixed with an orchid flower…she is bowing, palms pressed together, promising to ‘รักคุณเท่าฟ้า’ ‘Love you as much as the sky.’ She is one of the ‘นางฟ้า’ or ‘Air Angels’ of Thai Airways (TG).”
The beguiling nature of modern mass media—with commercials that deploy beautiful women and stunning landscapes to intoxicate the wanderer in us—can dull our senses. By simply spelling out a base description of them, Jasmine provokes introspection. What exactly are we selling? And to whom? By twinning the stories of The Singapore Girl and the Air Angels—same same but different—we better appreciate how similar commercial interests in our fledgling, post-war countries leveraged these sexualised, exoticised images of our women for apparent national progress.
“In the 1970s, just as SIA and TG were building brands around their female icons, female flight attendants in the US were filing class action lawsuits for gender discrimination and lack of equal pay.”
Jasmine documents the obvious forms of sexism and labour discrimination over the years, including height and weight restrictions; retirement “encouraged” at an early age; and prohibitions against maternity. (Only in 2022 did SIA relax its policy for flight stewardesses who get pregnant.) Yet the story is complex because it is told by the child of a former Air Angel.
“Even as feminist mores shifted vernacular away from the term ‘air hostess’ to the more gender-neutral, ‘flight attendant’, my mother clung to its original meaning. ‘To be an air hostess was a privilege, to be a host of the sky. We were taught to look after passengers as if they were guests in our homes.’”
There is much more here, including on the strong and unusual labour agitations by unions in both countries. Having read it now a few times, I’m still left with a niggling discomfort. Is the famed service by The Singapore Girl something to be proud of? Or must we reckon with the injustices to women, and with the possibility that, rather than emancipating ourselves from colonial mindsets, we’ve simply perpetuated neocolonial fantasies about Asian servitude? Read it now and do share thoughts.
As editors, we often ask ourselves who’s best placed to tell a particular story. Sometimes, both the story and the narrator fall into our laps. Jasmine is a former journalist covering Thailand, based in Singapore, and of mixed Singaporean-Thai descent. Thank you for sharing you and your mother’s stories with us.
Jom fikir,
Sudhir Vadaketh
Jom
Behind Jom’s art with Charmaine Poh
Lauren Cheung’s surreal illustrations make their appearance in this week's essay on the aesthetic and emotional labour required of female flight attendants, a form of “pink-collar” work. Lauren draws from the visual and cultural language of Japanese Noh masks to, as she says, “represent the polished, controlled persona” these women put on at work, while critiquing the uniformed “commodification of service workers” through the composition of an assembly line. With a palpable tension brewing under the surface, it’s both alluring and confrontational.
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