Name: Sylvia Tan
Age: 29
Nationality: Singaporean
University: University of Notre Dame
Occupation: Entrepreneur
As a Singaporean girl brought up in an upper middle class family, I spent most of my youth trying to score the best I could at the many exams that were thrown at me. This desire to do well, hardwired by my grade-centric school system and success-driven society, stayed with me throughout college in the US where I graduated in the top 5% of my class.
After I secured a coveted job at one of the top firms on Wall Street, it was jokingly pointed out to me that I had become “The Ideal Singaporean Woman”: educated in the US, working on Wall Street, and in a relationship with a Chinese-Singaporean boy for which marriage was expected in the near future.
Fast-forward three years: I decided to leave my high-profile job and pursue my own personal dreams, which meant enrolling in school again as a language student in France, working at a food magazine, moving in with my American boyfriend, and lo-and-behold, joining an unknown startup in Singapore.
After I made my life shift, things changed completely and I was made to feel like a lowly criminal who shamed her family with every move. My parents started questioning my judgment, referring to me leaving my old job as the beginning of my downward spiral. I felt betrayed and upset, wondering why they cared more about these superficial accomplishments than they did about my new-found happiness with my job and my relationship. The whole process of having 5-hour-long fights with my parents and trying to justify my actions was heartbreaking and brought me to the edge of madness, where I felt like my usually stable self was about to implode.
During this turmoil, my parents stopped updating their friends and family about me. They knew that outsiders would superficially judge me in a negative light because I had chosen to give up the path to becoming the “ideal Singaporean woman”.
In ‘kiasu’ Singapore, most people think that happiness is directly correlated to the size of your bank account, and now it is above my pay grade.
Q: For readers unfamiliar with the concept of Kiasuism in Singapore, can you give them an idea of what it is and how it has shaped your life then and now?
‘Kiasu’ literally translates into “afraid to lose”. This mindset extends to most situations where there is competition for a limited resource. In order to “win”, Singaporeans are known to go to extremes, whereby they famously queue up for Hello Kitty toys at 5am or hire 5 tutors for their children so they come up ahead of their peers. In my case, I guess there is a feeling that since I have such resources in my corner, I should have “lived up to my potential” and fought for a better result than what I did.
Q: How are you doing now?
Well it’s really sad, but I can’t share much of my private life with my parents because I know they still don’t approve of me living with my boyfriend and “ditching my family”. I’ve broken their rules of decency, and given their age and their upbringing, this is something they might never be able to accept as long as we are unmarried. As for my job, I think they occasionally try to be cheerful about it, but I can’t express my excitement as much as I’d like since they don’t really ask me much given that I think they feel a deep sense of fear and disappointment that my life path is going to be the last thing from safe and secure.
Q: Outside of family, how else do you feel with regards to how Singaporeans perceive you…how do you now perceive yourself?
To be honest, I don’t really care about what other people think about me now because at least I’m truly happy with what I do and the decisions I make, good or bad, are my own. Funny enough, I suspect most of the people who outwardly point out my crazy life path secretly wish they had the courage to quit the race themselves.
Q: What event made you start to shift away from the “ideal Singaporean woman” persona?
I don’t think it was so much about me ditching a persona, but more of a personal journey where I realised that being in a fancy but unfulfilling job and trying to love someone just for my parents and not for me, was not going to make me truly excited about life.
Q: Some cultures see leaving the corporate system and pursuing your dreams as a positive – why do you think your family saw it as a negative?
I believe success here is very much built on the premise of safety and stability. Leaving the corporate system here is equated to quitting the game, and when you quit the game, you leave lucrative pay scales and subsequently an ability to achieve the ‘5 C’s’ (cash, condo, car, country club, and credit cards).
Q: After all the experiences you have had trying to carve out your own path, what do you think the reactions of your friends and family say about the mentality and values of Singaporeans as a whole?
All of it has demonstrated that there is an incredibly backward mentality when it comes to relationships, career paths and definitions of success. Because it is such a young country, the older generations’ attempts to protect themselves against a downside has permeated society and transformed it into one that prefers to live on the safe side, where jobs are stable, the bonuses are plentiful, and your spouse is a stable, dependable local (which makes the merging of families easier). Any deviation from the mean is viewed as frivolous and naive.
Personally, I hope we evolve into being more spirited society that encourages personal pursuits rather than succumbs to a fear of the unknown. There is no such thing as an ideal man or woman, but rather one that lives a life that’s true to him or herself.