The War Between Two Women

I spoke to my mother last night. Well, I speak to her almost every night. And normally, here's how our conversation goes:
Mom: "You had your dinner?"
Me: "Yes. Just done."
Mom: "Did you cook tonight?"
Me: "Yes."
Mom: "So what did you cook?"
Me: "Oh this and this and this."
Mom: "Oh. You know, your sister-in-law...."

So there we would, or rather she would start again, complaining to me about my sister-in-law. Incidentally, she lives with my brother and his wife, and helps look after their two daughters.

As you can imagin, conflicts arise very often. So I thought I would, since I hear about it almost every day, really sit down and analyse the conflicts.

I attribute it to competition. Psychologists often wonder if competition provokes hostile conflict. And of course their studies confirm this. I can confirm this too. Both women, ie my mother and my sister-in-law are constantly "competing" with one another - they probably don't realise it, but to me, it's very clear - they compete for power - who has more power in the household? Who does the maid "report" to? Who do the kids love more? Who makes the decision as to what the kids should or shouldn't eat?... these are the issues that arise all the time.

I also attribute it to perceived injustice. Seeing from my mother's perspective, she feels that her helping of looking after my brother's kids are not appreciated by my sister-in-law. From my sister-in-law's perspective, my mom is not giving her enough "respect" as the "head of the household". Both feel that they are more competent than their other, so both feel underbenefited and thus eager to retaliate.

Misperception of course would cause the conflicts between mother- and daughter-in-law.

At the end of the day, there is really nothing I can do to make peace for these two women. Because it takes cooperation, communication, and conciliation - something that they are not really ready to do. You need these two women to find a superordinate goal - seeing that the main objective is to benefit the kids, no matter what methods it takes; willing to learn from each other (old people are really wiser when it comes to certain areas like raising a kid); have positive attitudes (which they are not willing to give up any part of their own turf yet so can't create positive attitudes); and really, I think the most important thing is that you must be willing to sacrify a bit of "power" and "turf" in order to make peace.

But until they can do that, I will still be at the receiving end of all the tiresome complaints.

Argh.

While We Were Sleeping

So the government is alarmed that we are not making enough babies to renew ourselves as our population is aging.

That is the results of social change.

Key contributors to social change, as we all know, are economic, political, and cultural. What do these have to do with people not having more babies / can't have more babies?

I guess our focus has changed. Because of the fast growing economy, our primary concern now is how to live a better life. And of course we can all blame globalisation - with globalisation, we see what are the so-called "better lives" can be - bigger houses, bigger cars, better education, latest fashion.... So how do we achieve that "Singaporean dream" of having the 5 or more Cs? We work harder. Who told us that we need to work harder? The government - because we need to stay competitive. And the cycle goes on.

So - there comes the problem - we don't have enough time to spread among 5 or 6 children - so we settle for 2. We don't have time to start a family when we were young because we need to work harder, venture outside of Singapore, and by which time we come back to Singapore to settle down, we are in our 30s - too late to have more kids - or worse, too late to have any kids.

And when we have fewer kids, we tend to provide them with better stuff - just ask one of my students whose mother bought him a $1000+ LV bag... so there - again, our focus has shifted - what do we value now? Not so much of the quality time you can spend with the kids, but the quality stuff you can buy for your kids.

It's a vicious cycle. And they are all connected.

Social change does not happen in a day. It does not happen right before our eyes. It happens while we were sleeping.

The 7th Month

I attended my first 7th month dinner over the weeked at my in-laws.

So there I was, enjoying the dinner at the void deck area (which means vey warm), and experiencing this highly symbolic event for the first time. The auction (as normal 7th month dinner would have) started as the dinner started. And the entire process didn't end until about 11pm.

I saw this entire event from the symbolic interactionism perspective.

Every auctioned object can be a symbol of something: charcoal is "black gold"; "huat" cake is "prosperity"; rice is also "prosperity"; wine/liquor is "longevity"; lanterns (3 sets altogether) are "prosperity" and "have more children"; and flower of course, you guessed it, "prosperity".

You can thus see the culture of this society: we are a highly materialistic society - we care about making more money and more baby. But can you blame us? Not really. Because that's the essential to our survivol. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, money give us security, food, a place to live, etc. And according to the evolutionary theory, having children is the way to carry on our human species. So these are two very important things in our society.

It was also an occassion for interaction between the neighbours. It was actually quite heartening to know that in this days and age, there still live a highly close-knited community. Perhaps it was an old estate, perhaps it was the fact that in the middle (or fringe) of the town, those are the only four blocks of flats still standing tall (so close proximity), but here, you witnessed the long forgotten "kampung spirit" - the everyone knows everyone situation. Mr Goh was telling me "that was so-and-so's brother and they have this shop downstairs" and "that was whoever's mother"... See them interacting with one another, I remember when we used to be a smaller world.

Not forgetting the "group influence". The dinner area was small, tables were also smaller than your usual wedding dinner tables. So it was a "full-house". As you can imagain, a full house is a good house. People where fed with enough of alcohol to keep their inhibition low. The crowding effect thus can be observed through the shouting for the auction. Competition of couse also brought up the "price" - from $50 to $80 to $188 to $189 and on and on...

It was a lesson of sociology and social psychology in one night.

Oh, the liquor fetched the highest price - so you know what was popular.

The Idol Syndrom 2

So why is it the Idol Syndrome?

People don't admit that there are rooms for improvement. I think we have come to a point where we confuse arrogant with self-confidence. We confuse self-centeredness with high self-esteem. While it is great that we maintain self-confidence and have high self-esteem, I always believe that we need to be humble, and we need to really do some self reflections to know ourselves better - know our strengths, know our weaknesses. Only then we could move ahead, and gain more self confidence.

The problem is we are in this world that is too fast-paced - too fast that we have no time to sit down and think about things. No time for self reflections.

At the end of the day, all we see is just - we are THE idol.

And I worry if you think that that is "individualism".