#199: Pritam, ‘Dear You’, minorities, and summer lists

Dear Jomrade,

This is Abhishek. We’re on our usual mid-year break—just the newsletter this week, no “Singapore This Week” or essay.

It’s shocking that we’re already halfway through the year. Resolutions have been consigned to mental landfills, that insurance policy still awaits signatures, and most public holidays have passed. I’m sure most of us would love a do-over. Not Pritam Singh though. The Workers’ Party (WP) chief held on to his position following a secret vote at the party’s special cadres conference on Sunday. It’s been a gruelling few months for Singh—he’d already been removed as leader of the opposition by Lawrence Wong, prime minister, and censured by his own party before news of the secret vote invited further speculation about his political future. Even though he still has to face a Law Society case, Singh’s steps are probably springier than they’ve ever been this year. Weary Singaporeans too will be glad to see “Raeesah-gate” disappear from their screens; the popcorn had long gone stale for even the most ardent lovers of drama.

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Anyway, much of the nation is obsessed with a new drama—“Dear You”, which seems to be single-handedly saving Singapore cinemas from oblivion. I took advantage of Jom’s mid-year break to catch a weekday show. It’s a beautiful movie, scripted to unabashedly tug at the heart-strings and caress the tear ducts. In that, it succeeds marvellously. If you’d peeked into Hall 2 of the Golden Village at Great World City on Monday afternoon, you’d have seen three brown folks blubbering in a sea of bemused Chinese uncles and aunties. This show was in Mandarin; the ones for the original Teochew version are selling out uhm, fast. Yesterday, the authorities approved 70 more screenings in Teochew (a bizarre sentence to consider if one zooms out a bit). The fervent ticket sales have sparked equally fervent debates on nationalism, linguistic identity, and the “Speak Mandarin” campaign that created the ferocious hunger now gorging on “Dear You”. Will all this nudge paranoid officialdom towards greater acceptance, not just of Teochew, but all other long-suppressed tongues? Hopefully.

It was jarring then to follow the discussion while reading about China’s “Ethnic Unity Law” which came into effect this week. With the stated aim to promote “unity”, “social harmony”, and a “shared” national identity, the law, among other things, gives Mandarin primacy over regional languages like Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongolian. One official argument is that this will improve employment opportunities for minorities but critics view it as forced assimilation that will subordinate cherished cultures, traditions, and languages to a larger, more impersonal national project. Singapore isn’t China. But to flatten, homogenise, and erase, no matter the means and ends, is to skin people of the layers that make them, them.

Policy is fair game. Still, blaming policy alone is to ignore, and so leave unaddressed, our own biases. Recently, my five-year-old daughter insisted on wearing a full-sleeved t-shirt and tights to school. This was strange because, like a true child of the tropics, she loves her shorts and half-sleeves. After some coaxing, she revealed some friends had mocked her, saying that “peach” or “white” was the only “nice” skin colour; one had said brown was like “poo-poo”. Which the juvenile in me would have found funny had my five-year-old not been writhing in shame, her sartorial armour making up for the lack of an emotional one. How should I explain prejudices, groupthink, and pride in one’s identity to a kindergartner? Nonplussed, the best I could come up with was to gently tell her that if her friends claimed brown was like “poo-poo”, she should say that they shouldn’t eat chocolate in that case. She flounced off happily, so that’s something.

Where do these ideas come from? Where does nature end and nurture—be it policy or parenting—begin? That may be impossible to disentangle but let’s keep asking anyway.

Jom soal,
Abhishek Mehrotra, head of content
Jom

p.s. The hawk-eyed among you may have noticed the newsletter coming from a different e-mail address. Nothing to worry about, just part of some backend changes being implemented by Scott, our inimitable tech lead. But just in case this e-mail landed in spam or promotions, try moving it to your primary inbox and adding this address to your contacts. We’ll be using this address moving forward. If you need help, do write to Zaid, our community manager at community@jom.media.

Jom’s mid-year media diet

The Jom team has put together a list of things we’ve liked immersing ourselves in so far this year: books, essays, movies, TV series, podcasts, music. It’s a varied (and long!) list, reflecting our varied interests, and hopefully, all of yours.

Reading
Essays
“Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse” by Heidi Blake in The New Yorker

“Common Readers: BookTok’s Critical Values” by Selen Ozturk in The Point Mag

“The pain of caring for a parent who abused you” by Katie Engelhart in The New York Times

“‘What aesthetic is this?’ Elizabeth Goodspeed on the push to categorise visual culture ”, by Elizabeth Goodspeed in It’s Nice That

Books
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois

On the Calculation of Volume I-V by Solvej Balle

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien

Listening
Audiobooks
The audio adaptation of Myle Yan Tay’s catskull (Disclosure: Scott Lee Chua, Jom’s tech lead, produced it.)

Podcasts
“Can Everybody Be A Runner? | Scottee on Beginner Running and Belonging” by The Runna Podcast

“Olivia Rodrigo has The Cure for sadness” by Switched on Pop

“Serial - The Idiot” by Serial Productions & The New York Times