Melissa Chen: Life in the US versus Life in Singapore

Now, what year did you come over here? How old were you? 17. 17. Yeah. What was this shift like going from Singapore to the United States? You live in New York then? No, no. Boston. Boston. Your hometown, right? Yeah. Yeah. I lived in Boston for 10 years. Really enjoyed it actually. It's cold as fuck. It... No, I like it. I don't know how I'm a skier, so I really like it. But there was huge culture shock. In a way, I knew what signing up for, I chose America. It's actually easier for Singaporean to plug and play into any of the Commonwealth countries because it was a former British colony. So all your credits would just transfer kind of more easily to a university in England, for example, Australia. But I chose America precisely for the First Amendment. Really? It was a very strong motivating factor for me. And also just the culture of, like we said, celebrating weird people. Yes. Because I was weird. So I wanted to be in a place where I thought I would be accepted. What made you weird? So Singapore is pretty conformist in terms of... You talk about monocultures. There is a conformist drive. Like there is the right schools you go to, the right paths you take. Very entrenched. And I really rebelled against that. Like, you know Singapore chewing gum is banned, right? Yeah. I have here. Do you always bring chewing gum because it was banned in Singapore? It's one of those things that's just like stuck in my mind. I... Freedom! Had I grown up here, I probably wouldn't be chewing this right now. It wouldn't... It just wouldn't matter. But when somebody says I can't like... Do not touch wet paint. I'm like... Yeah. This has always been a part of your personality from the time you were young? Yes. It was kind of disagreeable and... Was this nature or nurture? Don't know. I don't know. I raised you really. But... So when you came to America when you were 17, you said? Yeah. Was that like... Yes, it was. But it was also... There were a lot of culture shocks that I had to adapt to. You know, for starters, it definitely felt like a bit of a step back for me in terms of... How... In terms of comfort of living, like standard of living. The United States is kind of a thorough country compared to Singapore. Really? Yeah. Boston? Oh, when I landed in Logan and we were taking that drive to... You know, like at the time I was going to be living in Cambridge. We went by under these like highways. I'm like, it's rusting. This was kind of like just like me before the big dig was done. And the infrastructure was kind of broken. The potholes, your health care. What the hell is up with that? So it was a step back in material comforts for me. And in Singapore, you know, if you grew up even middle class, like the 50th percentile family. Can afford a domestic helper. So many Singaporean kids, in fact, 90% of all the kids I know growing up all grew up with maids. Picking up after them, doing their laundry, everything. So Singapore is no minimum wage. No minimum wage. No minimum wage. And so if you measure employment in that country, it's in some economic measurements, the way they do it. It's almost like it's over employed. Don't have an unemployment problem. Everybody has a job. Pretty much. No minimum wage. But what, what, how do people take be taken advantage? How are people taking advantage because of that? Well, that's why we just are on average low in Singapore. They're not that high. The United States practices what you call efficiency wages, which is, you know, they kind of pay people a little bit more to extract a better performance. Incentives matter. Right. But in Singapore, that's not the case. But in Singapore, the streets are taking care of better bridges. Oh, the government. The infrastructure. You know, I tweeted maybe like last week saying something like, especially now we're in like political debate season. I'm so tired of this whole left right argument like small government, no big government, government's a problem, government's a solution. It's, it's about effective government. And I think that's something that the Singapore government had really perfected. It's, it's effective governance. It's not about the size. We're gonna, I don't care whether this is a policy that came from the right or the left. It's what works. People respond to incentives. Right. And if you want to encourage a certain kind of behavior, you there's carrots and sticks to to basically encourage that behavior. And so it's there. There are things that the government would do in a way that just would never fly here where you, you know, we treasure civil liberties too much in a way, which I personally came here. For that reason, but I'll give you a good example. Social cohesion is engineered in Singapore. So there's, it's a very, very multicultural, multi-ethnic society. You have Malay Muslims, Indians, Hindus, Chinese who are Buddhists, Christians and, you know, Caucasians all living in a, in a, on an island city state. That's about 5 million in terms of population. And how the government manages this multicultural project is that 80% of people actually live in public housing. That's very high. It's like a socialist thing, right? Public housing that the government builds for you. And each block has to mimic the racial demographics of the whole country. So you don't have ghettos. Right. So you imagine like a housing state that basically mirrors like, okay, if the total makeup of the country is 60% Chinese, 20% Malay Muslim. It has to follow. So you can't have basically an area like Birmingham in the UK where all the Muslim immigrants or, or, you know, something like Dearborn Michigan or Minnesota with all the Somali immigrants. You are forced to integrate. It's a, it's a way to force people to integrate and have, you know, neighbors that are just not, not your own kind. And that's how they've created this like national identity. That's very strong.