Encountering Asia

Abstract

This article explores the narratives of Filipino medical workers on their encounters with other Asians during their migrant journeys to Singapore. Migrants speak of their encounters with regional cultural diversity and the everyday manifestations of regional political-economic power configurations and inequalities. The narratives show that beyond merely responding to state discourses on how migrants ought to represent the nation-state abroad, migrants attempt, on their own terms, to understand their place in Asia, and the world. Their journeys take place at a moment of social and demographic change as many Filipino medical workers travel across borders to care for aging populations in other Asian countries. The field of care raises complex moral dilemmas for Asians of different ethnic and national backgrounds, and this complicates any simple notion of Asian values. Moments of pan-Asian solidarity, in which friendships are cultivated across national boundaries, are often overridden by experiences of racial and cultural prejudice. Among diverse Asians in Singapore, divisive and hierarchical notions of first world and third world, modern and backward, caring and uncaring are prevalent in everyday judgments of others. Filipino migrants assert their global aspirations and their moral reflections on how to live and care for others; simultaneously they create distance from those who they believe do not share such aspirations and moral views. This article illuminates the transformations in migrant subjectivities as migrants experience and evaluate a range of cultural encounters as medical carers in the region.

Notes

^1. In Tagalog, kapwa refers to a fellow human being, The notion of pakikipagkapwa refers to how one relates to others.

^2. Duara 2010, 977.

^3. Ibid., 979.

^4. In 2009, the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) estimated that 8.58 million Filipinos were working in various destinations across the world. In 2010, an estimated 12,000 nursing professionals and personnel left the Philippines, along with approximately 9,000 caregivers, the vast majority going to the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE), followed by Singapore. Actual numbers are likely to be significantly higher as not all migrants go through the POEA. See Philippine Overseas Employment Agency 2009; 2010.

^5. Yeoh 2004 (Cosmopolitanism) and 2004 (Migration).

^6. Werbner 1999.

^9. Ibid., 120. See also Chua 1995 and Hill and Lian 1995.

^7. Almonte 2004.

^8. Chua and Kuo 1995, 118.

^10. Anderson 1991; 1998; Zialcita 2008.

^11. Place and date information has been suppressed to safeguard those interviewed.

^12. I am reminded of Pnina Werbner's notion of “working class cosmopolitanism” – “a knowledge of and openness to other cultures”; in this case, in the intimate context of the care home, there are “close encounters between people from different nationalities [which] results in an esprit de corps, a collective sentiment of interdependency.” See Werbner 1999, 23.

^13. Borneman 2001.

^14. Faier 2009 (Intimate), 11.

^15. In postcolonial studies, the term “Third World” is generally avoided. As Robert Young writes, “the notion of ‘third’ came to carry a negative aura in a hierarchical relation to the first and second and gradually became associated with poverty, debt, famine and conflict.” (See Young 2001, 4.) I use it here to be consistent with the categories used by my sources in the field.

^16. Young 2001, 68. See also Spivak 1999 and Yurchak 2005.

^17. A look at the newspaper archives of Singapore's Straits Times reveals how the issue of race has been prominent in nursing historically. Initial tensions surfaced between European nurses and “Asiatic” nurses; later, nursing grappled with tensions involving the inclusion of Malay nurses into a Chinese-dominated profession. What is different now with migrant nurses is that race becomes more deeply entangled with debates concerning nationality and citizenship.

^18. Li 1989.

^19. Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, famously wrote in The Malay Dilemma (1970) in strongly racialized terms of “innate” qualities of the “Malay race,” arguing in this text that the value systems and codes of ethics of Malays hindered them from “progressing.” See Mahathir 1970; Li 1989; Rahim 1998; Long 2009.

^20. Pinoy (masculine and general) and Pinay (feminine) are commonly used terms among Filipinos to describe themselves.

^21. Stoler 2002, 6.

^22. Marks 1994, 164.

^23. Straits Times 2011.

^24. This discourse is echoed in some economic and policy oriented works (e.g., Severino and Salazar 2007) that portray the Philippines as a country in social and economic crisis compared to neighboring Asian countries, or in statements made by politicians and the media about the Philippines being the “sick man of Asia.”

^25. Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore come from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, some previously working as dentists or accountants in Dhaka.

^26. Chua and Kuo 1995, 110.

^27. Ibid., 110.

^28. Singlish is a marker of Singaporean identity in everyday life in Singapore. The Singapore state, however, worries about Singlish being so widely spoken and so synonymous with Singaporean identity. “Speak Good English” for instance, is a government campaign that sponsors columns in the newspaper on “how to speak good English.” Economic motivations, Singapore's relations with other countries, and tourist impressions of Singapore are some of the key factors behind this campaign.

^29. Tyner 2004.

^30. Lorente 2007.

^31. Lan 2003.

^32. Cannell 1999, 93–96.

^33. On Chinese spiritual beliefs in Singapore, see, for example, Toulson 2009 and Ju 1983. See also Manderson 1996 on medical pluralism in colonial Malaya and the encounters between local healing practices and biomedicine.

^34. Datta et al. (2010) write about how migrants involved in care labor in London also develop social critiques about the lack of care they observe, comparing it to an ethic of care in their own countries. A “feminist” ethic of care is broadened to consider a “migrant ethic of care,” where care is given national inflections.

^35. New Paper 2010; National Family Council 2007; Straits Times 2009; Toulson 2009; Hill and Lian 1995.

^36. Barr 2002.

^37. Aguilar 2002, 18.

^38. Faier 2009 (Filipina), 149, 155.

^39. See Amrith 2010.

^40. Said 2000, 577.

^41. Herzfeld 1997, 26.

^42. Young 2001, 5; Yurchak 2005.

^43. Constable 2007; Mok and Cheung 1998; Lorente 2007.