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Tag: Foreign Talent

Lib lung and prosper

This evening we took a break from eating junk food and took Naomi’s visiting cousin out to a chili crab dinner at Long Beach Dempsey. Good thing we got there early, because a little after we got there, a queue formed with several dozen families, tired from visiting and being visited, looking to get a quick crab meal as well.

At the table next to us in the “outdoor area without shelter (sans umbrella)” was a Japanese family who were convinced to order the traditional yu sheng raw fish salad. The dish arrived, and the funniest thing was that they were given instructions on how to partake of the dish by a Filipino waiter (purst, you tuss eberyting as high as you cahn with the chupstick), who also recited English translations of the Chinese idioms/proverbs/sayings/nonsense rhymes that accompany the tossing of the salad.

May your whole pummily prospurr!

What’s going on?

It’s like we’ve been in hiding with all this moving shit. We’ve hardly read the news, and although we know about the major calamities that have struck, it still feels a bit strange that when we’ve started venturing outside of our apartment (both old and new), the country seems to have changed a fair bit.

First, every second 7-Eleven and petrol station cashier / pump attendant seems to sport a PRC (Mainland or whatever you call them) accent, and every second waiter / supermarket cashier sports a Flipino accent.

Multiply that by the number of petrol stations, supermarkets and cafes in Singapore and you’ll have come up with a very rough but very large number of PRC (Mainland Chinese) and Filipinos working in Singapore.

I don’t know about you, but I feel it wasn’t like that, say, six months ago?

Maybe that’s why there was an apparent recent push to un-Pinyinise Chinese names in schools. We don’t want our kids to be mistaken for Mainland Chinese working at petrol stations and Chinese restaurants, do we?