A family's invisibles

by Zeal

My grandmother passed away recently, the last of the first generation of Chinese immigrants in my family in Singapore. On the surface, she could be typecasted as the traditional Chinese working class woman with highly internalised heterosexual norms, having borne many children, and who constantly nagged me to get married.

Besides the family who mourned her loss, the maid - a foreign domestic worker - was quite badly shaken too, having looked after granny for the past five years. But there was more, for a part of her life was a kind of “dark secret”: On one of the nights of the quintessentially Chinese wake that occasionally resembled a party, with laughter breaking out, an elderly woman went up to my grandmother’s coffin, there to sob uncontrollably. Usually, relatives of the deceased would accompany the visitors in paying their last respects. But, none came forward this time, not even to console her. Was this visitor my grandmother's female lover, of whom I had heard whispers since I was a kid? Of course, neither this elderly lady nor the maid, who had probably meant a lot more to my grandmother during her life, were publicly acknowledged.

At the Urban Redevelopment’s Authority’s (URA) exhibition on Singapore’s masterplan, where I was lately, Singapore's future was quite prominently personified by means of a heterosexual Chinese family of husband and wife, boy and girl, signifying the crucial importance to our society of what most people would consider the “normal” heterosexual Asian family. This is how we see ourselves, it seems to say, providing a useful justification against what may be deemed the undesirable decadent Western homosexual lifestyles. In this idealised portrayal, foreign domestic workers too, do not exist, and thereby the absence of any legal protection, for example rest days which most of us take for granted, are conveniently avoided. Hence, like my late grandmother’s female partner and her maid, characters who by circumstance do not fit the conventional and ideological mould are rendered invisible and irrelevant. 

New downtowns and park connectors are welcome. But should not the more important goal be that of nurturing a culture of dignity and respect? One that would give a legitimate place for people like those who have loved and cared for my late grandmother regardless of their sexual orientation or nationality? Like everyone in Singapore, they too should have a past, present and future.   

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