Saving race

“My mother was a spi­der and my father was a clown”

Because it has always been our government’s pol­icy to pay atten­tion to mat­ters of race and eth­nic­ity, our iden­tity cards and gov­ern­ment records require that we be clas­si­fied under dif­fer­ent “races”.

Both my par­ents are Chi­nese, so there doesn’t seem to be any­thing com­pli­cated about that, even if you’re not com­fort­able with the notion of “race”. But when you have chil­dren of mixed parent­age, that’s when it starts to become funny.

On Wednes­day, an intern from The Straits Times called and stut­tered his way for five min­utes try­ing to explain to me that the ICA had changed the “by default the child’s race shall be that of the father’s” rule, and that from next year, par­ents were “free to choose their child’s race”.

I thanked the intern for this piece of infor­ma­tion, upon which he stam­mered his way for another five min­utes explain­ing that he needed me to answer a few ques­tions for a story his supervisor/journalist was writ­ing for Thursday’s Straits Times.

So I explained a lit­tle about how I had no inter­est in “chang­ing Kai’s race”, because there’s not enough space in that field to put “Chinese-Japanese-Taiwanese-Dutch”.

But maybe Beat­rice and Mark Rich­mond have a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. Their son Sol is clas­si­fied “Eng­lish”, because the ICA of the day con­sid­ered Grandpa Brian’s “race”, “English”.

And of course, we should have every con­fi­dence that the new scheme has been really well thought out and pre­cludes the pos­si­bil­ity of par­ents rort­ing the sys­tem for their child to obtain State ben­e­fits from Sinda and Men­daki, and that there won’t be a surge in the num­ber of Malay-Indian children.