Changi Airport was tall and bright. The glands at the back of my neck were working hard to sweat out whatever smog remained from Dublin. I’d started the 24 hours of flying with a full face of make-up, but my skin had absorbed it all en route; somewhere in the neck sweat was about twenty millilitres of Rimmel’s finest foundation. I wondered when I’d get used to it all.
Well in advance of coming to Singapore, I'd planned a sensible travel outfit: grey cotton polo-neck, comfy jeans. The night before leaving, I divided my belongings into two sections (Useful in Singapore, Not Useful in Singapore) and packed accordingly. But on the morning of my flight, I had last-minute doubts about the cull. So I took a massive fake fur shrug and grey platform boots from the impractical pile. There wasn't space for them in either suitcase, so I wore them on the journey. "Long-haul glam" looks great but is far from practical.
A couple of months after finishing my degree, I came to Singapore; I’d got bored of Dublin and couldn’t find work. It’s hard to get into anything writing-related when you can’t afford to work for free. TEFL teaching is highly seasonal, mainstream teaching requires a further qualification, and there’s not a lot else you can do with an English degree.
More searching could possibly have landed me a job in the end, but that wouldn't have meant one less emigrant leaving Ireland; it just would have made someone else move instead of me.
I wanted to live somewhere warm. My other main consideration was how much of my salary I could save.
Most people I talked to found this a confusing reason to move to Singapore - “Isn’t the cost of living really high?” It is if you compare everything people buy in Dublin to everything people buy here. But I’m far too boring for this to be a useful measuring stick: I don’t drive, drink or smoke, and those are the main areas where Singapore is more expensive.
It’s pricier to rent a whole apartment here, but flatshares are about a third cheaper than in Dublin. My main complaint is the price of fruit, but you can get big discounts if you buy it on the sell-by date in Fair Price, Singapore’s answer to Tesco.
People told me Singapore was “sterile and monotone” before I came. I think they must have stayed in the parts that had been expressly Europeanised for their comfort. It’s culturally diverse: there’s Chinatown, Little India, Malay Village, an Arab quarter, a Jewish quarter. As a language-lover, I’m finding it a linguistic feast: Mandarin, Tamil and Malay compete for my earshot wherever I go.
Walking past wet markets, I can smell the durian from a mile away. If you think a clean and efficient country is somehow “less authentically Asian”, I wonder if you also think Dublin is “less authentically European” because it’s dirty and disorganised?
There are places in Singapore with high immigrant populations, but where I live it’s mostly locals. A man in the supermarket once came up to me and joked, “You won’t find any English food here”. Proper order.
I use the word “immigrant” because “expat” makes me nauseous. It means you’re white, of course - and more welcome as a result. Even for “expats”, though, the mood is growing hostile. As the economy worsens here, it can be hard for Singaporeans to see Westerners shipped in for positions they could just as easily fill, especially when they think there are plenty of jobs for those Westerners in their own countries (most people are surprised when I tell them that Ireland has a much higher unemployment rate than Singapore’s).
The government is responding to this pressure. Every year, the Ministry of Manpower makes it harder for foreigners to get a working visa. Companies have to advertise “expat” jobs on a Singaporean-only database before they’re allowed to hire from abroad. When applying for the employment pass, companies have to present the CVs of Singaporeans who applied to prove they didn’t qualify.
Most “expat” countries are like this or worse when it comes to immigration, though; it’s just we’re less explicit about it.
That’s a trend I’ve noticed. The rules aren’t always fair, but they tend to be clearly stated. “Are you Tamil or Malay?” a child asked me once; I think she’d been told there were exactly three ethnicities in Singapore and had worked out I wasn’t Chinese. A Dublin landlord who doesn’t want a tenant outside their race will invite them for a flat view and never get back to them; a Singaporean will write “Chinese-only” in the advert.
Ireland probably puts immigrants through just as many internal hoops; the difference is that we don’t outline them beforehand, which makes it harder to jump clear. It’s not for me to say which is preferable (as an “expat” - ie white person - I don’t experience the brunt of either system), but people are certainly more upfront about race here.
Much of my social life happened on the internet before I left. Sure, I’d go for coffee with people from time to time, but it was much quicker to message each other. Many of my friends didn’t live in Dublin, anyway. As a result, I don’t notice a difference here. We still get into Twitter fights, like each other’s profilers to bump them back up people’s newsfeeds... I’m a night owl, so the time difference isn’t a huge barrier. My Instagram game has improved immensely, and my family and I Skype once a week.
Singapore has been great during my brief stay, but in the end, I turned down a job offer here for another in Hong Kong. The decision was easy enough: I preferred the position and the city. One of the freedoms of living abroad is that I'm already unanchored. I'm flying to Hong Kong in mid-October and have already started working on my Cantonese.
