It’s been so long since I last wrote a post. Things have been busy, and I’m on my last semester of Law School already!

The past week was packed for me. It was the Chinese New Year holidays and we had relatives coming over for almost three days. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there could only be five visitors to our house per day.

On one of the days, we had my mother’s side of the family coming over to our house, and one of the topics that kept coming up was jobs and work for the adults. I hadn’t really spoken with these relatives in awhile, and never knew what work they did, but the conversaton made me realise how fortunate I was to be born in this generation and to my parents, something that I had hitherto taken for granted, or even be slightly displeased about (because our generation is so competitive).

My relatives spoke about how their typical work week and how it is extremely tiring for them. One of my uncles work for 6.5 to 7 days a week, waking up at 4 or 5am every single day, yet the salary is barely enough to cover the family expenses. His wife, my aunt, works around 11 hours a week, doing overtime almost every day. Otherwise, her base pay is barely over a $1,000 a month, the same pay I earned when I worked part time in a law firm after my A-levels! Other relatives work hard at blue collar jobs outdoors, such as cleaning, or selling vegetables at a market. In comparison, a typical white-collar worker like some members of my family may work a 9-5, Monday to Friday job sitting (relatively) comfortably in an office, yet easily earn double or triple the pay.

[When I say blue-collar, I don’t mean any disrespect to my relatives or their occupations. I believe anyone making an honest living does not deserve to be looked down on. Neither does holding a white-collar job make you superior. Sometimes, certain Asian mindsets about jobs irk me. Things like only government jobs or full-time white collar jobs are respectable and if you choose to be a freelance insurance agent or property agent, you kind of get looked down on. Unfortunately, some of these views are held by people around me.]

In my mother’s family, none of them got a chance to go to university. Most of them barely finished primary or secondary education and had to work while studying. My mother told me that their family wasn’t wealthy then, and it was typical for her brothers to have to wake up in the dawn, help pack the vegetables, go to school, then return to help out at the market until late in the eveining after school, with barely any time to study. My mother considered herself fortunate that because she was the youngest girl in the family and has many male siblings, she barely had to help with any of the physical labour, save during her school vacations. She was thus able to study all the way up till polytechnic and obtain her diploma, though she couldn’t make it to university as during her time, there was only one public university in Singapore and spaces were very limited (now we have six public universities in Singapore!)

Fast forward to my generation, my brother and I are perhaps the most fortunate among our cousins on my mother’s side of the family. Both of us are able to study full time at public universities in Singapore. Unlike my uncle’s children, who have had to help out in their parents’ vegetable business since young, and have to work while studying part-time to pay off their tuition fees, my brother and I do not have to worry about earning our school fees. My mother invested a lot in our education and personally taught us from a very young age, saving up for both of our tertiary education since we were a child. Although my family is not rich at all, I am able to pursue my interests thanks to my parents.

It also made me reflect on how important education really is, and how it may or may not be unfair that jobs that requires thinking always pays better than jobs requiring physical labour. Especially during this pandemic season, many low-skill workers have been retrenched or displaced, and have no other choice but to turn to jobs with no CPF (Singapore’s mandatory retirement saving scheme), such as food delivery or private hire vehicle drivers.

While looking for part-time jobs to earn my own allowance, I often brush off certain jobs that require heavy lifting or are too far from my home. Nonetheless, this still leaves me with many options available, such as working in an office as an admin assistant, doing online tutoring or teaching tuition offline. These jobs that I take for granted would have been off-limits to my relatives due to their basic education qualifications requirements of having O-levels or N-level.

It’s been an eye-opening CNY that made me re-think my circumstances. While growing up, I sometimes had sinful thoughts such as wishing I had less strict parents, or my family had a little more money so we could buy a car or eat out at restaurants more. [Sidenote: Cars are really expensive in Singapore and one can get around perfectly fine with just public transport, but having a car would have been more comfortable at times, such as not having to wake up so early for school, or when visiting a doctor when I was sick. Thankfully, fast forward to the 2020s, we have private hire services like Grab and Gojek which allows us to book taxis and private hire vehicles with just a few taps on the mobile phone, without having to wait at the roadside for taxis anymore.] But this CNY really showed me the things that I took for granted, how I should be thankful for being born in this family.