Who are these foreign people on our bus, Mum?

Overheard on Bus 67 from Serangoon Road by an a fortunes-seeking angmoh: Despite not getting what we want- we still get one thing: experience.

On the bus back home from Little India this Sunday evening, the public bus was filled with a cross-section of present-day Singapore. A handful of locals from the official races, a fistful of expatriate ang mohs, and about seventy percent of the bus crowded with our south-asian neighbours, Bangladeshis and Indians. Who we were on that bus did not determine the space we occupied on it- for regardless of nationality, class and race, we were standing in aisles, seated in seats in a mishmash. Despite societal distinctions, we boarded the bus on the same fare.

But how to justify that sense of solidarity I felt when I sighted young Singaporean Chinese amidst the population on the bus- who is like all other humanity on that bus, a stranger? What makes their faces more indeliable in my mindscape now as compared to the throngs of dark-skinned foreigners? They weren’t in my face. I had to visually pick them out, one by one. This reaction, I guess is what we do when we encounter a majority, we sense our difference and we hope to find our own group, to get back the sense of belonging we lost in that momentary lapse of insecurity.

A desire to seek out one’s own kind (best enabled with superficial factors like skin colour and nationality) has caused me divide the bus, to view the teeming majority on the bus as sheer headcount. They neither have faces nor do they evoke human characteristics. I dismissed them and their lives. I treated them as invisible in the most convenient ways; I omit them unconsciously from my focal attention. Seeing one meant seeing all- their expressions, mannerisms, their dressing and their possessions- because I didn’t afford them observation, I wasn’t curious about them.

But was I wrong in judging them different in the first place?

My attention did however immediately turn to the three ‘expatriates’ who boarded the bus. Their kind are teh food of our media entertainment, their kind are imbued still with qualities of exotic individualities, a assumed class above our class. Their conversation would have been gratifying for a culture-proud Singaporean- it was every Tourism Board employee’s dream of how we would want other people to view Singapore. They spoke of their flavoured experiences in our citystate, the couple had spent the afternoon buying moon-cakes and drawing fortunes from Chinese temple. ‘You are free like a bird, the lot said of the European man, ‘your journey will be smooth-sailing. ‘Bad lot for a woman, ‘but she burned it’ he laughed. ‘She’s allowed to do it.’ Their companion smiled and offered interpretations.

A little Indian girl, a daughter of a foreign worker’s migrant family, who had sat diagonally across the aisle from them watched their conversation with rapture. She was tilting her head and smiling in such a way, it made me realize we shared similar audience seats in that bus.

It is indeed interesting that the first foreigner -‘foreign worker’ who got my attention in the bus, was someone who shared the same fascination and afforded the same attention as I had on the group of foreigner -‘expatriates’. Now who does it make me more different/ or similar to?

Filed under: comment, musings , foreign workers, public transport, singapore