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?