Singapore Stories: Language, Class, and the Chinese of Singapore, ...

society: the trajectory from Third World to First through the ruling regime’s scientific approaches to solving the problems faced by a developing and industrialising society engenders a sense of pride among broad sections of the nation’s citizenry, but among English-literate Singaporeans in particular.

The economic facet of the Singapore Story has two main contentions. The first is the notion of mass affluence, that the leap from Third World to First has resulted in collective, but not egalitarian, prosperity. The second has to do with socioeconomic mobility within this framework of mass affluence. The idea here is that traditional barriers to class mobility—from lineage to arcane laws—have been thoroughly dismantled by the regime. Upward socioeconomic mobility should, in theory, be achievable by anyone with the appropriate level of talent and motivation, and meritocracy is the ideology that guides this mobility.

For the historian looking to unwed the Singapore Story from the nation’s past, the first contention is ripe for invalidation. Evidence exists in the form of readily available statistical data and in the stories of everyday life “from below” presented to historians willing to canvass the working-class suburbs of the island. Over the course of the coming chapters, this is exactly what we shall see: that the much-vaunted “economic miracle” cast long shadows over much of the population that was supposed to be benefiting from it.

The second assumption is more challenging to scrutinise. What are the most significant barriers to socioeconomic mobility in Singapore? Is this a question that we can historicise, or is it one that persists? How have they changed over the five decades between the conclusion of the Second World War, when things seemed most desperate, and the end of the twentieth century, when the thriving city-state stood at the threshold of a new century? What drove class formation during this period of time? How static were, and perhaps are, class groupings?

This book has as its cornerstone a basic contention: English-language literacy has been an inextricable force in shaping and cementing class structures among the Chinese in Singapore. But why the Chinese? The Chinese of postwar Singapore have long been portrayed in scholarship,