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

prestige and listened as many of them spoke quietly of unsuccessful students in the context of opportunities lost and lives forever changed. The way I determined whom I spoke to was never meant to be scientific; as a historian interested principally in the biographies of those who lived under the overburden of the Singapore Story, I wanted to hear what people had to say about their lives, framed within the broader context of the national narrative. Some people just said no. Some people invited themselves to my interviews. But I was keen to speak to as many people as I realistically could; all up, I listened as nearly eighty individuals told me their life stories. Individually, each voice from below delivers a poignant tale. When examined and then retold as a collective biography, this bundle of Singapore Stories offers a powerful set of annotations to the national narrative. These are stories about fading hopes for a better world, of a community increasingly divided, and of a system that finds merit in entrenching these divides.

When I listened to the most depressing stories, I found it easy to take the moral high ground. There was a part of me that wanted to champion their causes and lay a historian’s charges against the agents of their dispossession. Yet, with each interview, while I heard many stories about the persistent presence of economic and social insecurity, I came to understand, by listening carefully, that it was clear that the people I spoke to were not telling me about their woes because they saw themselves as victims, or that they wanted their stories told because there were wrongs that they felt needed to be made right. On the contrary, they were eager to have their stories recorded for posterity and presented to the public because they wanted to share with me the achievements that they celebrated in their own way in their lives. Some might thumb their noses at these feats, simple as most of them are—a grandfather learning a smattering of English words to get to know his grandchildren, a retrenched factory worker finding a new line of work in a hotel, the first son in a family to complete secondary school—but they coloured and radically reshaped the complexions of everyday life all the same. The voices from below are not simply the voices of victims; they are also the voices of individuals, and of a collective, infused with agency.