| Chapter 1: | The Historian and the Singapore Story |
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between employability, occupational status, education level, and one’s mode of literacy.
Chapter 5 traces the emergence of an English monoliterate community. Shifts in economic policy and the resultant knowledge-based economy meant that this group was best positioned to take advantage of the changing occupational landscape. For the English monoliterates, the decade was also a time when the fragmentation of the extended family began in earnest. As socioeconomic stratification became more clearly defined, so too were families increasingly divided along similar lines of language, literacy, occupational status, and class.
Chapter 6 continues with an analysis of the social impact of Singapore’s rapid industrialisation and development during the 1980s by taking a closer glimpse at the other side of the economic miracle. It views the historical experience of Singapore during the 1980s through the lives of the non-English-literate Chinese factory workers and demonstrates how, in the absence of English literacy, the ensuing sequence of life corralled individuals into the lower economic strata of society.
The final section of this book brings the history of both the English-literate and non-English-literate Chinese communities into the 1990s, when the popular discourse of the economic miracle reached dizzying heights and when the materialisation of everyday life became an almost suffocating process. Isolation became a defining feature of existence as nodes of the extended family were beset by strained relations that were the result of unequal opportunities in life. Within the nuclear family itself, members of the household discovered that being on the trail of the so-called Singapore Dream consumed every waking moment of one’s being. Even with the enormous sacrifices made, success in the pursuit was not guaranteed, increasingly hinging upon the acquisition of English literacy. And it was a pursuit that, ultimately and cruelly, left many frustrated, dissatisfied, and alone.