Young Chinese migrant women in SG

Expensive Jomrade,

Immediately we’ve revealed:

“Are you going to put in writing about ministerial salaries?” a buddy requested over dinner final night time. It was within the information after a former politician trotted out the argument that proficient folks want astronomical wages to be able to enter public service.

Usual story, I replied. Certain, some would possibly need us, as an impartial media channel, to lend our voice to that cacophony. However that’s not Jom’s most important worth add to discourse in Singapore. It’s extra necessary for us to interrogate points we imagine are under-reported or inadequately mentioned.

Final Sunday was the fifth celebration of the Finish FGC [Female Genital Cutting] Singapore motion. It’s a apply that few right here find out about, even my extra progressive feminine pals. We felt that story ought to lead our protection in “Singapore This Week”. 

That’s to not suggest that we’ll ignore headline information. Final week, to the federal government’s credit score, it revealed an improved measure of revenue inequality and, for the primary time ever (hooray), a measure of wealth inequality. We study the statistical progress, in addition to the methodological points and gaps that stay, in our second story.

What we’ve additionally began doing, you could have seen, is simply providing you with a fast abstract, with hyperlinks, of all the opposite necessary information tales this week—sure, together with that e-book launch that sparked that dialogue. On this approach, we hope that this article serves as a correct end-of-week roundup for you. Ahead it to a buddy who would possibly recognize it, and get them to enroll too.

“Singapore This Week”. 

• Progress to be cheered, however nonetheless work to be finished, to finish feminine genital chopping in Singapore
• A clearer, if nonetheless imperfect, image of inequality in Singapore
• Are the Thai election outcomes a mirrored image of its distinctive democracy or a part of a broader Asian development?
• Why has the authorities blocked 47 soccer pirate websites?
• Are Singaporeans ditching relationship apps for conventional, in-person meets?

Above are the problems we selected to discover in additional depth. 

Different information this week included: a roundup of Price range 2026; the tragedy of a six-year-old Indonesian lady killed by a seemingly reckless driver who’s now beneath investigation; publication of Coverage, Equity and Compassion, a group of speeches by Ok Shanmugam, residence affairs minister; debates about Shanmugam’s monetary “sacrifice” when leaving authorized apply for public service; a student-led survey that discovered that one in three employers don’t usually present relaxation days for his or her overseas home employees; an Iranian TikToker’s remark about this “poisonous metropolis” sparks a debate about Singapore’s social norms and work tradition; and our fab disease-fighting scientists have simply revealed an article, “Dengue Suppression by Male Wolbachia-Contaminated Mosquitoes”, in The New England Journal of Drugs.

“Chinese language with a Singaporean passport: tales of younger migrant ladies”, by Shen Chenzi

What’s life like for the proficient younger Chinese language college students who win bursaries or scholarships to review in Singapore? Not straightforward in any respect, as Chenzi, a latest graduate from NUS, explains right this moment in her absorbing, and oftentimes harrowing, exploration of the lives of three younger ladies, herself included.

It’s a novel demographic. Younger ladies from China, as Chenzi informed me, symbolize one of many largest and most vital teams focused by Singapore’s talent-driven immigration technique. They’re additionally the “SG60 era,” coming of age in a vastly completely different context than immigrants earlier than. Their journeys are formed by right this moment’s tightening immigration insurance policies, a precarious post-pandemic job market, and escalating geopolitical tensions. 

Every of them is now at a distinct stage of their citizenship journey: one a brand new citizen, one other a PR, and Chenzi herself nonetheless a Chinese language citizen. Within the week of Chinese language New Yr, we felt it’s an acceptable time to uncover the most recent manifestation of an age-old journey that has led to a Chinese language-majority nation in the course of the Malay world. I’ll depart you with a number of paragraphs from her intro:

“I thought of my very own second semester—simply months earlier—once I couldn’t get off the bed, once I sat within the lounge till 2am looking at downside units I couldn’t clear up, when my mind had stopped working the best way it used to.

I hadn’t informed anybody about that. I believed it was my private failure, my weak point. However sitting throughout from Elena, I realised: perhaps it wasn’t simply me. ‘That is regular,’ I reassured her, repeatedly.

These phrases gave her, maybe for the primary time, a way of acceptance moderately than judgement—and marked the start of our friendship. Over the following two years, Elena and I spent numerous nights collectively, generally learning, typically simply speaking. After we each struggled with insomnia, we’d squeeze onto one of many slim dorm beds, holding palms at the hours of darkness, holding one another firm till sleep lastly got here. We’d sit on the stairwell till 3 or 4 AM, speaking about the whole lot and nothing. I ponder if that is what earlier generations of migrant Chinese language feminine college students additionally did right here.”

Jom naik kuda api,
Sudhir Vadaketh, editor-in-chief
Jom

p.s. sorry for the mouthful of a sign-off. My cack-handed approach of claiming “Blissful Yr of the Fireplace Horse”.

Behind Jom’s artwork

Our longtime collaborator, Ngiam Li Yi, brings her light palette again for this story on the precariousness of life as a Chinese language scholar in Singapore. The header illustration particulars on a regular basis parts in a typical rented bed room, providing us an intimate view of a transient life right here, each comforting and mundane. Her dreamlike spot brings collectively parts of each the Singaporean and Chinese language flag, as the scholars regular themselves, looking at an unsure future tinged with hope.

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Sport: On the excessive seas

In 2013, the Media Growth Authority (MDA) informed Singtel to share its English Premier League broadcasting rights with Starhub so followers wouldn’t be compelled to change service suppliers. Singtel had paid an undisclosed sum rumoured to be round S$245m for the appropriate to beam premier league matches in football-crazy Singapore for 3 years. Huge cash, however Singtel was nonetheless a brand new entrant to the soccer broadcasting market—having damaged Starhub’s decade-long dominance solely in 2010—and its plan was to entice shoppers with initially subsidised costs earlier than, presumably, climbing them. MDA’s order was meant to widen public entry, which it did in a fashion of talking, however it additionally pushed Singtel into growing the worth of its standalone EPL bundle from S$34.90 in 2012-13 to S$59.90 per thirty days the following season. Per MDA, Starhub needed to supply the identical costs. Singapore turned one of many world’s priciest locations to observe the EPL.

By then, it was additionally some of the well-connected nations on the earth. The primary era of digital natives and quasi-natives was coming of age; raised on a weight-reduction plan of high-speed broadband; used to watching what they needed, once they needed; and in an ambivalent relationship with paid content material anyway (content material piracy was fairly widespread already). These priced-out youth (and undoubtedly some savvy older people) gorged on their favoured matches and gamers through the “darkish arts”: Consumer-Generated Content material (UGC) websites; VPNs, P2P networks. On-line boards and message boards, Twenty first-century speakeasies with their very own language and sub-cultures, buzzed with exercise earlier than large video games as customers shared information on how greatest to observe them. Singapore, and far of South-east Asia, turned a hub of illicit exercise with 60 % of respondents in a single up to date native survey admitting to watching pirated content material—among the many highest on the earth.

Alarmed, the Premier League in 2019 arrange its first abroad workplace, in Tanjong Pagar, with the mandate of combating piracy. “[I]t is crucial that we now deploy native useful resource [sic] and experience to fight the growing menace of piracy which undermines all stakeholders within the inventive trade,” mentioned Paul Molnar, then the league’s director of broadcasting. Costs have been already stabilising then, and right this moment, a Starhub buyer can watch premier league matches on their laptop computer or telephone for S$40 per thirty days (Singtel prospects pay extra).

MDA’s perception that its “cross-carriage” guidelines would profit shoppers in the long term has maybe come true. What the company couldn’t have anticipated is simply how culturally entrenched piracy would change into. Economically too, it makes extra “sense” than ever, with the unfold of bodily gadgets that stream different sports activities in addition to motion pictures, and TV exhibits for which shoppers would in any other case need to subscribe to tens of OTT companies. Earlier this yr, a Sim Lim retailer was handed a four-month jail sentence for promoting one such gadget; that is along with the 800 domains in Singapore and 30,000 websites throughout Asia Pacific that the courts have helped the premier league ban since 2020. On this context, the Excessive Court docket’s order directing native Web Service Suppliers (ISPs) to dam 47 pirate websites is probably much less a conflict with digital buccaneers, extra a fist-fight with the tides.

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