When I’m out and about, be it on a bus, in a train etc, I rather enjoy eavesdropping on other people’s conversation. I’ll then be trying to make out the background story, the relationship between the speakers and will sometimes be bemused at the opinions being voiced. It can be a rather amusing exercise and it’s good for collecting anecdotes to be used in small talk.
So I was at the hairdresser’s two weeks ago and overheard another client talking to her hairdresser. The client was a woman in her early 30s and was pregnant with her second child. She was telling her hairdresser that she’s thinking of trying for a third child in the hope that she’ll have a girl (she’s expecting a boy). And then she goes on to say in Chinese:
“现在男孩子一定要读大学， 因为他们一定要赚钱养家。如果他们不能养家， 人家会讲他吃软饭。女孩子吖， 读到diploma就可以了。”
Translation: These days, boys will definitely have to get a university degree because they have to bring home the bacon. If they can’t do that, people will say they’re living off the woman. But for girls, getting a diploma is enough.
Needless to say, I was appalled and shocked by a woman in her 30s, who lives in Singapore, having such opinions in this day and age. I felt like asking her, ‘What if your daughter doesn’t marry well? What if your daughter doesn’t even marry? What if your daughter ends up having to work after marriage? What if your daughter isn’t pretty and can’t even bank on her looks to get ahead?’
While a university degree is certainly no guarantee of big bucks and a stellar career (and who but me would know better…), it at least opens the door to more job opportunities and a higher chance of getting paid more – especially so in Singapore’s civil service. More importantly, it gives women a means of financial independence. So while my degree hasn’t made me ‘successful’ in most people’s definition of the word, I’m still glad I have it and am grateful for the fact that I don’t have parents who have such antiquated ideas about education.
Similarly I was rather taken aback by a Shanghainese friend of mine the other day. She had asked me about the demographics of the people in my translation and interpretation class and I told her most of them are female and the few men in the class are all much older than me – three of them older than my father. And the next thing she says is, 那你读来干嘛？ (Translation: So why are you taking up the course for?)
I mean, did she actually think I was taking up the course to meet men??? She’s 28 and is really bent on finding a boyfriend this year (it’s one of her new year resolutions), so everything she does is motivated by the fact that she wants to find a guy. It’s probably why she can’t understand why I’m taking up the course when it’s not going to help me in my ‘quest’ of a partner. While I, for the life of me, couldn’t fathom what she was thinking because I believe we should be learning simply because we want to improve and enrich ourselves as individuals.
So much for us living in Singapore, a developed – supposedly anyway – country.