Day 2

Tonight I had a conversation with one of the CMU students attached to my group. Her name is Yok, and she is my roommate. I was out watching the Muay Thai fights near the hotel, and had just returned to the room. We started off discussing the Muay Thai show, and I told her how I felt it was great that Muay Thai was popular with the youth in Thailand. Many youth were still enthusiastically picking it up, and it remains a tradition deeply ingrained in Thai culture. When I compared this with Singapore, what came to mind were how our Chinese opera troupes were so quickly vanishing, with so few youth interested in the art, much less joining the troupes.

Earlier that night, during the conversation my sub-group had over supper with Prof Liew, I had already been wondering how Singapore would change in the near future along with changes in the make-up of our population, as the more conservative people of the pioneer generation are replaced by a more progressive generation.

She asked me what I had for supper, and she asked about the food we have in Singapore. I told her about how we had so many different cuisines in Singapore. Again, I expressed my concern that our more traditional foods would slowly vanish, as other cuisines become more popular with the youth. It occurred to me that fewer people in my generation would want to be hawkers when they grow up. Given the much higher education level that this generation has been so blessed to received, we have greater aspirations. I thought about how our food culture could potentially change — no more Bak Chor Mee, no more coffeeshops, only cafes and restaurants and foreign cuisines. I know this is quite a slippery slope, but such the possibility scares me, and I told Yok about this.

We talked about globalisation, and how our countries will change because of this. We talked about whether globalisation was good or bad.

Yok told me that she envied us Singaporeans. She envied us for the prosperity that our country has. She shared that she did not know how to help Thailand achieve the same standard of living. She told me that many Thais shared a common characteristic of being happy-go-lucky, and it is hard to make any progress when people are happy where they were. I told her that maybe this was a good thing. I talked about how much happier the Thai people seemed to be compared to Singaporeans. We do have wealth, but how much wealth translates into happiness is another issue.

We went to many places today, but this conversation was one the bigger takeaways from the day. I was interacting with a peer. In my pre-trip projections, I wrote that I hoped interactions with peers in a foreign context would help to “foster greater knowledge and understanding of the realities of life as members of other cultures”. I feel that this conversation did exactly that for me.