| Chapter 1: | The Historian and the Singapore Story |
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the people that I spoke to referred to class explicitly, which was unsurprising, as most were not confident enough in the lexicon to do so. But the idea of advancement in life—materially, foremost, but also by way of status and self-worth—underpinned every life story. If there was one lesson that I took from the uncounted hours spent listening to people tell me about their past and present lives, it was that engaging with the idea of class is unavoidable for the historian interested in unpacking the Singapore Story and recovering its subaltern twin. It was thus important that I find a way to reconcile how my interviewees, as laypersons, and I, as a scholar, thought about class in Singapore and its attributes.
In my analysis, I approach class as the product of a series of life chances, drawing influence from the works of Max Weber on social structures and power relationships. In more recent times, Weber seems to have fallen out of fashion in class analyses. Yet, his ideas about class formation remain robust in the face of more recent works, and the global economic recession in 2008 has also resulted in a minirevival oftwentieth-century Socialist scholarship on industrialisation and class.
The Weberian idea of life chances within the context of class is simple. The lives of individuals are shaped by a series of economic encounters, and class is the product of such encounters taken collectively. For the individual, the type and frequency of economic encounters are determined by the ownership of economic resources, which are limited not only to financial resources but also to opportunity-generating capital, such as higher levels of education and the ability to access economic gatekeepers. It is entirely possible for a person to make the most of just a few economic encounters, just as it is possible for one to fail to take advantage of numerous opportunities. The Weberian approach to class therefore allows for both structure and agency to coexist.
We will see in this book that the stories of ordinary Singaporeans reveal to us that one of the most important forms of opportunity-generating capital in contemporary Singapore is English literacy. This statement may not raise many eyebrows, since it is only logical that familiarity in the lingua franca of the trading world would vastly increase one’s opportunities. Yet, these life stories will reveal to us two important points