publichouse.sg

By Elaine Ee

Some thoughts ahead of marriage and parenthood benefits the government will be announcing.

As some of you already know, I am a mum with three kids (13, 10 and 6 ½ years), and have a fourth one due very soon (in January 2013).

I love our big family. I can’t wait for number four, a girl, to be born.

Needless to say it’s not easy—our lives are decent, but we are not rich by any stretch of the imagination. We have to watch our budget very closely every month, juggle everybody’s schedule and workload, give everyone enough time and personal attention, and try and fit everybody into our family car! (No we don’t have an MPV.) Travel as a family is already challenging and it’s going to get even more challenging after the fourth child arrives. It might be drives to Malaysia or chalets in Singapore for a while.

By Elaine Ee

Absences, voids and disappearances form the theme of Felix Cheong’s masterful new collection of short stories, Vanishing Point. He talks to publichouse.sg’s Elaine Ee.

What happens when a person disappears? Not just when they die, but when they become so disconnected that they are no more a part of this world, or when they simply decide to one day leave their lives behind? Singapore writer Felix Cheong, a familiar name in our literary scene, looks at these absences, voids and in-between spaces in this new collection of short stories, Vanishing Point.

Each story revolves around a character who is about to, or has already, fallen off the edge of his life. Mysterious disappearances, addiction, alienation in a society to whom they mean nothing—are some of the situations in which Cheong’s characters struggle. Some find redemption, some don’t and some are left staring into the unknown.

By Elaine Ee

Think about HDB’s Ethnic Integration Policy—it’s really racist.

Recently ex-NTUC assistant director, Amy Cheong, displayed her irritation at her Malay neighbours’ wedding in an unfortunate Facebook post that went viral. On top of the venom angry netizens spewed at Amy, her post raised the issue of racial harmony, which many felt has been artificially imposed in Singapore at the expense of dealing with the real inter-racial issues that exist here.

HDB’s Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) has had a large part to play in this veneer of racial ‘harmony’. Designed to ‘prevent the formation of racial enclaves by ensuring a balanced ethnic mix among the various ethnic communities living in public housing estates’, this policy is responsible for the racial quotas each HDB estate must maintain.

By Elaine Ee

As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced that Singapore is likely to avoid a technical recession, he also cautioned of challenging economic times ahead. “There’ll be ups and downs,” he said. “There’ll be rough spots, and we are going to get used to not so fast growth as before, but we have to work to achieve that, because you can’t just lie back and say, ‘I’m working too hard, I have to slow down.’” (See here.)

Singaporeans are amongst the hardest working people in the world. The number of hours Singaporeans spend working are so long that work-life balance here has become some elusive dream. And of course with wages being low compared to our high cost-of-living, many of us here have to toil to make ends meet.