As someone who grew up Chinese in Singapore, who is queer, whenever they don’t like something they call it Western or ‘Murican. And they can all shove a straw up their noses for that. https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1283955157705924608

Our entire ‘asian values’ system was simply our Anglophile prime minister borrowing loosely from so-called Confucian values to justify his belief in (1) East Asian intelligence and (2) illiberal political control. Don’t at me, read a book.

There is no such thing as Asian values. Most of the time it’s just code for ‘we inherited a few things from colonial systems that we kinda like, like homophobia’

And our society is so ill-equipped at criticizing official BS that anything not status quo is ‘against asian values’. Our families weaponise ‘asian values’. You’re gay? Trans? You’re moving out before marriage? Against Asian values!

You’re refusing to be emotionally blackmailed into taking a 100K loan to pay for the big wedding you don’t want so that your family can show off? Against asian values, you’re too Americanized!

Our education system is not set up to handle anything critical of itself (or of the status quo). You can’t pass a top-down directive to make people start talking about race and religion in a way that is acceptable to you.

The kids have already started these conversations. And god knows they know more about all of these topics, and about nearly everything else, more than you, more than me. You don’t really have a say in any of this!

Link to readings from said book (one of several on this topic): http://www.cafefle.org/texteskkkmg-icc_articles/13_Singapore_26p-Pol%20copie.pdf

I would go as far as to argue that we cannot, in Singapore, progress significantly socially until we re-examine our commitment to ‘Asian values’. It’s at the heart of everything discriminatory about our society:

The concept of the heterosexual nucleus family is the foundation upon which our welfare and healthcare system is built, which discriminates against single parents and untraditional families;

The concept of the Chinese Malay Indian Others racial paradigm, which touches everything from education to housing to immigration (and our currently stunted racial discussion)

As individual Singapore citizens, we can’t lead full lives if we are constantly asked to put our identities into buckets. This is westernized, this is Chinese, this is Chinese Christian but not westernized because oh Chinese Christians define Asian values

Chinese Christians in Singapore are happy to refuse to send off their Taoist parents in Taoist rites because it’s ‘satanic’, even tho Asian values ask the eldest to do it, but they’re also happy to say homosexuality is Western values even tho we’ve had y’know gay Chinese emperors

Chinese Christians in Singapore are also happy to force religious conversions of dying family members so ‘they don’t go to hell’ but asian values mean they should disinherit their queer family members

Watch out for my rewrite of Crazy Rich Asians, set in Wesley Methodist Church with a sequel in Barker Road Methodist

The punchline is that the country’s leading homophobes are all like that because their husbands and sisters are all queer because Singapore is actually secretly a queer haven. Maybe a true story.