the samsui woman

today, whenever we talk about the people involved in building the country, we remember political figures such as the late lee kuan yew, toh chin chye, rajaratnam and so on. we also fondly remember the silent workers, the nurses, the labourers and significantly, the samsui women. the latter comprised a community of women who toiled a significant part of their life doing simple labourer jobs like carrying bricks to aid builders of yesteryears and they are recognised by their signature red-cloth headgear.

all of them came from china to earn a living and many left the job and went back to china when the demand for them dwindled. a few stayed behind and are in their 70s or 80s today, if they are still alive. we recall them affectionately whenever we talk about the early years of singapore.  and we continue to reflect on their contributions whenever we talk about values - values such as commitment, hardwork, sacrifices, strength and for that matter, female independence.

fast forward to 2000s, we continue to build the country at a neck-breaking pace. singapore is no longer a third world country, but a developed metropolis that enjoy one of the highest standard of living in the world. and instead of samsui women, we now have construction site workers from all over asia and they include bangladeshis, chinese, koreans, indians, etc. visually, we can probably group them into two based on their skin tone - dark-skinned south asians that came from india or bangladesh and the fair-skinned central and northern asians from china, korea and to a smaller extent, japan. most of the former work as construction workers whereas for the latter, koreans and japanese tend to be of the executive and supervisory-grades whereas chinese tend to be employed as construction workers.

i know it is not fair to generalise but when we see them from afar, the tendency for us is to generalise based on visual features and associate them with the characteristics of what we know of indians and chinese (given that chinese are the largest number represented here). and a clear example was when my mum tried using malay to speak to a bangladeshi worker sometime back. he couldn't understand her and replied her in english "ah ma, you speak malay i cannot understand". haha! over the last couple of years, we also see the extra negative publicity created by small numbers of such workers and that created quite a bit of xenophobic reactions from some singaporeans.

it was against this backdrop that i started my reflections - construction workers, same job functions, same place, different time, different people.

picture from https://farm9.staticflickr.com/