Last Sunday afternoon, I was greeted by a barrage of tweets and
SMSes.
“Ey, you conduct that poll in today’s paper ah?” some friends
asked. “Where you find these ridiculous girls?”
They were talking about a poll I had been assigned to do.
We had to ask 50 female graduates and undergraduates whether
they'd date a blue-collar worker.
This was in response to a comment by Deputy Prime Minister
Tharman Shanmugaratnam who had called on Singaporeans to rediscover
the pride in blue-collar jobs and regard them as core to the
workforce.
“We cannot just be a society of real estate agents, insurance
agents, bankers and office workers,” he said, and urged
Singaporeans to change their attitude towards blue-collar jobs.
“You need to be a society where customers treat blue-collar
workers with respect and that requires some attitudinal
changes.
“A society where a mother is quite happy when the daughter says,
‘I’m going out with a waiter'."
For the record, I found the women on the streets of Singapore.
And all 50 women we polled said "no".
If they were inclined to say yes at all, they were quick to tag
on conditions: "Must be rich lah, so can support me. Must be quite
smart also lah. Oh, good looking also. And must have car lah, not
motorbike.”
And in the end, they said "no".
Since its publication, this poll has taken a life of its own
this week, having been hotly debated online.
In the 400 or so shares since, comments have ranged from
the withering ("Got degrees, so what? You can do housework or not?
Can cook or not?" or "University people are full of it.") to people
agreeing with the women we polled.
To me, doing to poll was in itself eye-opening.
There are deeply held prejudices and stereotypes:
The caricature of a blue-collar worker is that he's not supposed
to be rich.
He is not supposed to be intelligent.
He is the downtrodden, the world-weary.
He doesn’t speak French, or quote fancy-shmancy novels.
Meeting 50 girls all of whom whole-heartedly refused to date a
blue-collar worker left me a little stumped.
I never expected to be met with the full force of
degree-brandishing arrogance.
I can understand some of their concerns.
Some told me, a little incredulously: “Why you ask me this sort
of question? Where will I meet a blue-collar worker?”
I fear that now, divisions in our society are drawn not with
sticks in the sand, but with rolls of paper – degrees, diplomas,
certificates that supposedly quantify your worth.
I chose to work as a waitress after my A levels. I came home
reeking of soy sauce, but I also made new friends - friends,
I am sad to say I would otherwise have never met because of my
growing up in an all-girls' school, and then in a junior
college.
Maybe its time to rethink how our society has fractured into
little pockets - with the twain hardly meeting. Should we have more
opportunities to mix as students? Does it call for more education
so we can see "the other side" and disperse these strange notions
of differentness?
Having been nurtured sparingly by a cloistered school life, I
rarely got to mix with people outside my tiny social circle. I only
caught glimpses of them. And I was wary, at first - like most of
the girls I spoke to probably were.
But that's what happens when you don't know what to expect. You
have nothing to lean on but bogeyman-like preconceptions. Maybe
this poll is a revelation that we still have some way to go before
we finally achieve that borderless society DPM Tharman is looking
for.
