#57: What 'Kiasu' Culture Is Really Costing Us with Teo You Yenn

0:00Rachel Lim: Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Who We Are podcast. Singapore has one of the best education systems in the world, one of the lowest poverty rates, one of the highest qualities of life by almost every global metric. And yet, we also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world, 0.87, the lowest it has ever been. I've been thinking a lot about that contradiction lately. What I hear underneath is exhaustion, pressure and a kind of low-level dread that's hard to even explain properly. A feeling that life has become incredibly full but somehow also strangely depleted. Associate Professor Teo Yuyan has a word for this.

0:43Rachel Lim: She calls it unease. And in her new book, built on three years of research and 92 interviews with Singaporean parents, she asks a question I haven't been able to stop thinking about. what if this feeling isn't personal? What if it's structural? And what happens when an entire society becomes organized around performance, optimization, and the fear of falling behind? I'm so excited to welcome Yu Yan to the show. Welcome Yu Yan. Thank you very much for having me, Rachel. And thanks for that brilliant introduction. It's always nice to feel like, oh, people have read the book and they get it. Oh, of course.

1:20Rachel Lim: I think for me, it was so interesting. I couldn't put this book down, I think, but from cover to cover, it was so intriguing. I love the way you wrote it. And I love how you also, you know, peppered lots of testimonials and what you have also understood from, you know, the families and parents that you have interviewed. So you spent three years interviewing 92 parents and you went in expecting to find how people navigated work and family life. What genuinely surprised you? Yeah, so maybe if I could, you know, sort of give a bit of context to how this project came about. Previously, I had written a book called This Is What Inequality Looks Like.

1:57And that book was published in 2018. In research and in scholarship, a lot of times when you finish a project, really what you see as it wraps is really all the things you didn't do as well that you wish you could do, have done better. You know, in scholarship, oftentimes a project has, you know, within a project, there are seeds of the next project. In that book, you know, I really wanted, because I was studying poverty and low-income families, but I was starting to see that people were in some ways responding to my work by sort of ghettoizing the problem, further ghettoizing the problem, as if poverty is sort of this kind of minority issue, you know.

2:35It's only an issue for a small group of people. And so when I wrote that book, I really wanted to show, you know, actually this is about inequality and everybody should care. Right. And the way I did it in that book was to put myself into the book in some ways to contrast my life with the life of my respondents. But even as I was doing that, I was feeling like that was not enough, that I really want to do a project where I do a more systematic comparison of people across class lines. Right. So at the time that I was wrapping up work on that book, I was already starting to do work for this project.

3:08But then as I did this work, I realized, oh, but I don't really want to write a book that's just comparing the three groups and then ending up saying, oh, the groups lower are worse off than the groups higher. because what I ended up seeing was really this kind of thing that was permeating across class lines that I end up calling unease, right? That I end up using that term as a shorthand to invite people in to see more closely how although people of different class circumstances do have different lives and they do pay slightly different costs in some ways from our system, but at the same time, there is this common thread running through everybody's lives.

3:49And I think it's worth looking closer at what this common thread is because I think it helps us better understand how inequality is exerting a cost on everybody.

4:02Rachel Lim: And why unease? Why not like stress, anxiety? Yeah. So this is something that I sort of try to develop throughout the book and that at the end of the book, I try to come back to, you know, to explain a little bit more why I use that word and the different layers I'm trying to convey in that word. And the different layers, I suppose, are partly that it is a kind of subtle discomfort. It is a subtle kind of feeling. It's not outrage. It's not outright sort of rejection of something. But it's important to recognize that it's about discomfort and about a sense of having no choice. And that's interesting partly because we live in a society that on the surface is so good.

4:48And yet there's this kind of gnawing sense that something's not quite right and that people can't quite do what they believe to be right. And so it's a kind of gnawing underlying feeling. And it's also important, I think, you know, to recognize that I'm interested not just in the individual emotion. And I'm not just interested in individual subjective feelings. I'm a sociologist and that means I'm always interested in what is the biggest social pattern. and I'm always interested in trying to understand what is it about the social conditions, the social forces that people live in, you know, that can help to explain why people live the way they do.

5:26And so, Anise is a shorthand because I use plenty of other words in the book also, right? But it's a shorthand for bringing readers along with me so that they can see also, you know, what I'm trying to convey is about the social conditions and Anise as a social phenomenon, not just an individual feeling.

5:45Rachel Lim: You know, people tend to also often describe like the high pressure parenting culture in Singapore as just, you know, the Asian culture or even kiasu mentality. But you said that, you know, that is too simplistic. So what are we missing when we just brush it aside to just, you know, conveniently explain it as Asian mentality or kiasu mentality? Yeah, I mean, I think that when we do that, the tendency is to in some ways not explain it. And like there's a way in which it's a very like there's nothing we can do about it. or there's not much we can do about this. Yeah. When in fact, and especially as a scholar, because I read so much that is about other contexts, right?

6:25And I read so much about social policy that's on other contexts. I mean, a lot of this book is about pointing out that social policy matters. That different types of social policy, when they embed within them, different kinds of ethics and principles can have a very big and disproportionate effect on the kinds of choices people can make. The book is really meant to sort of get people to look at how the cultural and the structural interact. And how we should think about, and by the cultural, I mean meaning systems, values, beliefs, habits. And by structural, I mean rules and regulations and institutional procedures, right?

7:04And I'm trying to look very, very nitty gritty, very, very closely at, you know, in everyday life, how those two things, you know, kind of come together all the time.

7:14Rachel Lim: Right. And I talk about this in the book in quite concrete ways also, you know, how this is part of the political discourse and why it's problematic. And why it really is a kind of worldview that doesn't take seriously people's everyday challenges and struggles and that we need to challenge that. And so, you know, if I were to go back to the point on, you know, Kiansuk parents, you have also said that Kiansuk parents are made, not born. How do we become Kiansuk parents? Yeah, so the book is really very nitty gritty, right? It talks about the encounters that parents have in some ways in their own lives with the education system, you know, in their own youth, in their own childhood.

7:56And then the experiences they have in the job market after that, right, that really drive home for them the importance of credentials. And this informs, you know, seeing it with their own eyes informs, I guess, some of the way they look at what their children are experiencing. So that's one, that when systems have been in place for some length of time, that also means that as a culture, if you will, as a society, we have in some ways learned some of the lessons of that, the importance of hierarchy, the importance of sorting, the importance of competition and the realities of credentials and what they mean in our lives.

8:33So that's one part of it. The other is sort of the encounters that parents have with different institutional actors, you know, when they have to figure out how to put their children into preschool and what that means and what are the choices that are there and what are the different quality that comes with different costs. The encounters they have when they put their kids in primary school and that whole process and how, what are the criteria, different criteria that matters for getting kids into what kinds of schools. And again, the salience, meaning the very high level of consciousness around the fact that there is uneven, you know, there are differences, you know, across different school types.

9:14That also shapes the way they experience that. So the book goes into sort of various kinds of details about what parents are encountering and at each step, how they see it, you know, what they are informed by. And then how that shapes their view about what is the right thing to do as a parent, you know, and given the resources that they have, what is the responsible thing to do as a parent in this society?

9:42Rachel Lim: That's right. And I love it because I think, you know, you hear in a lot of the examples that you share in the book, they really resonate and they're so relatable. For example, you talk about like preschool waitlist. Even when someone is, when a mom is already pregnant, she has to start thinking about being on the preschool waitlist. And then comes like the primary school balloting and so on and so forth. And I think all of this inevitably, like consciously or unconsciously, shaped us to also sort of be in that race. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, a big part of what I try to convey in the book is that how we live actually shapes our views.

10:18So oftentimes I think people think, oh, our values are the thing that shapes our practices. But I'm trying to turn the arrow the other direction, that the way we live, the habits we have, the things we do shape our worldviews as well. It's not just, you know. For example? So it's not just that because I believe in education being like that, therefore I will do this. you know, because I think education is very important, therefore I will do all these things. It's more that I'm compelled to do all these things and that reinforces a certain view of what education is.

10:49Rachel Lim: So where does agency come in? Because you said that the opposite of unease is not ease, it's agency. I think that that is the big problem I'm trying to point to in this book, that the way we live is one in which exercising agency is very difficult. I try to sort of play with this idea of ethical agency, by which I mean the agency to do what we think as right. For example, parents in ways that we think are right and good for our children, that that is very much a thing that parents struggle with. So that they feel very sorry for their children and they feel like too much tuition is not a good thing and that their children are under a lot of stress and they wish their children could have more free time or to play etc but they they don't feel like they can really allow that yeah yeah and i think i mean the the point of talking about ethical agency is in some ways to point out how what a profound loss it is right that not being able to do what we think is right i think is a very is a is a pretty large human cost.

12:00Rachel Lim: But do you think, you know, Yu Yan, that our definition of right is also influenced by the system that we grew up in to show us that this is, you know, the right path or this is what we need to do in order to succeed. But I think, right, like I was just wondering while reading the book, is this definition of success also a previous era definition where very clearly the country was at a time where we were also surviving and trying to get to a certain level of success, which we did. I think like we mentioned earlier, I think on global standards, in so many ways, we are successful. But today, I think we need to perhaps rethink our definition of success to something bigger or different.

12:45I think actually, I think about it as that a lot of the promises of economic development and economic growth have yet to be properly fulfilled. That I think that a lot of the early dreams about prosperity were about how they would be broadly enjoyed by everybody. And I think that we are not fully there yet in terms of achieving that dream. So I would not say that we need different dreams. I think that we need to go back to those same dreams of, you know, building a democratic society, build on justice and equality, right? So that, you know, there is broad prosperity for all. I do think there is a cost, you know, and I do think that because we live in an unequal society, that A, a lot of the promises of what the economy is supposed to be for and what building this nation is supposed to be for, There are many ways in which I think those promises have not fully been achieved or fully been fulfilled precisely because we are such an unequal society.

13:50And that in addition to that, even if there is great prosperity among certain classes of people, that we've also paid a huge cost there. In terms of broad things that I come to at the end of the book, the sort of cultural habits we've produced that are increasingly individualistic, that are sort of away from a broad solidarity with others, that also lead us, I think, in some ways to have an overly narrow view of what human worth and what human life is for. You know, when we spoke about the interviews that you had, which you shared also in the book,

14:34Rachel Lim: I think one thing that really struck me was also how rarely people spoke about their children as people. Most of them spoke about problems to solve. And, you know, what did that reveal to you? And what happens when parents relate to our kids more through the lens of performance and problem solving? Yeah, one of the things that I talk about in the book is how when I ask people about their children, in the context of an interview that's talking about work-life balance. And I say, oh, how about your children? You know, tell me a bit about them. That one thing I noticed was that they immediately talked about the problems that they have, particularly when where education is concerned.

15:14Yeah. And I highlight this in order to highlight that this is what is top of mind for people. That it's top of mind for people, their kids struggles with school. And that when that happens, it's very unavoidable to frame their children in these problem terms. I'm not saying, of course, that this is the complete picture of how parents see their children. Because I think that is an overly strong argument. And that would not be fair to parents that I interview. But I think it is notable that framing comes through so quickly and so strongly. right and it also resonates i think in a lot of conversations people have on an everyday basis about their kids right i mean i have lots of friends who have children and whenever we meet and if we're talking about children that is the first thing that comes up so i think that a lot of people will recognize that yes yeah but i do think it is noteworthy it's noteworthy that um that as a society we often think about children in those terms um it's noteworthy that that is in some ways a very reductive way to think about children and childhood.

16:23So that was the main point I was trying to get across.

16:26Rachel Lim: And what does it signal to you then when parents tend to think about our children in that way? Yeah, well, it signals the importance of education for parents that parenting has become so strongly oriented around education. I don't think we should take that for granted And you know also I thought what was very interesting is Across the different income or class groups that you have interviewed People kept describing this feeling of no choice But what does no choice really look like in a family that's really just trying to survive Versus one that's materially comfortable Yeah. So in one of the chapters, I try to show this a little bit more by talking in greater depth about sort of three kind of typologies of persons, right?

17:19Of course, I give them, you know, pseudonyms and I describe a little bit about their lives so that people can see a little bit more clearly, you know, what lives within low-income households might look like, middle-income households and high-income households might look like. and it does look obviously it does look different you know especially in terms of how much money parents can spend on their children and can spend on children's education it looks slightly different in terms of the aspirations people have and feel they can have for their children and it looks different in terms of the flexibility people have in their work that allows them and frees them to spend energy on their children, right?

18:05And I think that that is very important to pay attention to, that those differences in terms of the capital parents have in educating their children, whether it's, you know, sort of monetary capital or cultural capital, that is very likely to lead to different outcomes, right? And so, of course, I also zoom out so that we can look sort of broadly what are some of these patterns where we can see differences in outcomes across class lines, the chapter ends up wanting to complicate the idea of inequality. So a lot of times when we talk about inequality, it's much easier and intuitive to say inequality is about how for different classes of people, there are different outcomes, right?

18:51And I think that is important. But what I want to show also is that they are all responding to a broader context of inequality. And that inequality manifests as the salience of hierarchy, as the salience of competition and sorting and unequal worth. And you can see this in all of their expressions of unease. That all of them are expressing in different forms. A kind of feeling of, oh, this is not quite right. Or a feeling of, I don't quite have choice here. Yeah. And I think that that is very, that is really interesting to me, you know, that you could not tell a very straightforward story of like, if you're wealthy in this society, life is very easy.

19:42And if your poor life is not easy, and therefore that the only problem to resolve is to make sure nobody is, you know, within that very poor circumstance. Yeah. Which, of course, again, I have to emphasize is important on its own terms as well. But the fact that across class lines, you see this kind of unease, I think, tells us that something deeper and more profound and in some ways more serious is happening that all of us have to pay attention to. And I mean, the thing I said earlier about, you know, where the chapter ends up is in talking about values. and there I talk about what well if people value meritocracy what do we actually mean by that if we say we value family what do we mean by that if we say we value community what do we mean by that and these are all things that these are all words that we constantly throw out as if they are as if we really value them yeah and so a big part of I guess what I was trying to do is to just unpack all that and say if we have reason to value those things then we have to look closely at whether the way we actually live, you know, abides by those values.

20:46And I think it doesn't.

20:48Rachel Lim: On that note also, I wanted to ask, you know, I think that today, even today, in very progressive dual-income households, motherhood still affects women more than fatherhood affects men. Why do you think that gap persists? Yeah, so in the book, there is a whole chapter that talks about exactly this, right? And I think there are two things I wanted to do in that chapter. First is to lay this out. I think that the way you've put it, that in many cases, motherhood is somehow more significant than fatherhood. I think a lot of us see that, and it's not really going to be a surprise in some ways. But one of the things that I found very striking when I talk to people is the extent to which women really kind of fold themselves down.

21:39And that's the way I describe it in the book, right? And honestly, I was a little bit surprised. Yeah, I was a little bit surprised at the extent to which that is still true. And maybe I had expected a greater change between my mom's time and mine and between my time and my students' time or something. And really, I saw quite a bit of that, right? And so I spent quite a bit of time just kind of laying that out, what that looks like and how it works. Again, what is the nitty gritty of life that in some ways propels women more so than men to really reconfigure their lives after they have children?

22:26And then I try to integrate in some ways how social policy shapes those decisions. We have to think beyond the individual decision again to connect to what is the social policy regime that in some ways encourages or creates, you know, this kind of diversion paths between young men and young women. even when actually over time we can see that they've converged in many other ways in terms of how much education they've had and in terms of how much they value work and careers and in terms of how much they think men and women should be involved in children's lives. I think a lot has changed actually in terms of people's quote-unquote mindsets, if you will.

23:10Rachel Lim: Which is great. Yeah. But yet when it comes to living their lives, they find a lot of constraints in actually I suppose, bringing their ideals and realities in line. So the chapter really sort of then backs up to look at, you know, across the last couple of decades, what is the logic of family policies in Singapore and why we need to really ask the question, is this a pro-family regime? Is it really? And look at that more closely and critically. So what do you think a pro-family society would really look like? So I think that it would have to have more enabling conditions that are genuinely enabling.

23:52Genuinely enabling means, you know, we live in a very diverse society, so people don't all want the same things, right? Genuinely enabling means policies that are not so oriented towards social engineering, not so oriented towards this is the kind of family you must have by what age and this is the pathway you must have, right? so that different people can make some range of different choices. I don't think any sort of regular sensible person thinks they have to have infinite choices. But I think real choice has to mean that the cost of the choice cannot be just borne by. You know, if I make this choice, then I have to pay a big price for it.

24:30Then that's not a real choice. I think what we're facing is more than just things that a few small policy tweaks can change. I think that, you know, we also have to broaden in some ways who gets to make decisions, who gets to be part of the conversation about where our country is going. And so the book is not just about parenting and specific policies around parenting or even about education policies. It's about how, what are the underlying principles and ethical beliefs we want to defend and how will we do it? and who is we and if people are interested to be part of that or not. But the spirit of the book is very much about like, let's create this space together, you know, so that we can properly face up to and ask these big questions about who we are as a society and where we want to go.

25:28And I really sincerely believe those are not questions that should be limited to a small political elite, to a small economic elite, you know. And that is actually the point of the book is to, the point of writing a book for a broad public is that.

25:43Rachel Lim: Do you think, Yu Yan, in your opinion that Singapore has a fertility problem or a conditions for family life problem? I guess they're related, right? They are related. I mean, I didn't start out writing this book thinking about the fertility issue per se. Although, of course, for many years, I've been paying attention to that as well. But for many years, I have been saying in various writings that I've done that we have to look at this more broadly, you know, not just as a TFR issue, but as a broader issue of people. What are the conditions that allow people to live the lives they want? To dig deeper to the root of the issue.

26:26Yeah, yeah. I mean, those are personal choices that people have to make, But we have to look at why they're making those choices and how to think about what that tells us about the broader social conditions.

26:41Rachel Lim: And clearly, it is something that is a point of concern for the government today, and understandably so. So if the government were to ask you, Yu Yan, what can we do to resolve this issue? What would your response be? I think take more seriously how ordinary people feel about their lives. And your definition of ordinary people is the everyday person. Yeah, people in, of course, it's not one ordinary person, right? And that means that people span a range of backgrounds, right, in terms of their occupations or their interests, in terms of age and gender, in terms of ethnicity and religion, in terms of class, of course.

27:25and that obviously in a diverse society, that means that people's interests, meaning what's good for them or bad for them, are going to vary. And living in a complex society means that not everybody is going to agree, of course, right? But I do think social policy, as I said earlier, needs to be enabling to this broad diversity, right? Rather than being overly obsessed with how we draw boundaries around who counts as family.

27:56Rachel Lim: Yeah. Paying more attention to the diverse needs of ordinary people. And I also want to go back to, you know, earlier where, you know, you shared also in the interviews where, when the parents shared their relationship with education and tuition. You know, Singapore's private tuition industry, like you shared in the book, is$1.8 billion. And you also point out that even when exam pressure is reduced, The response that parents have is to increase tuition instead. So what does this reveal to us about the limitations of the education reform in Singapore? I think if some of the requirements of the system don't change, meaning, for example, one requirement is really precocity.

28:40Precocity means you need to be able to perform at a certain level at a very young age. This obsession with, you know, at a young age, you must be able to do this. Before you start P1, you must already be able to read. By age 12, you must be able to sit still and do all these incredible exams. I think as long as those things don't, as long as that doesn't change, even if you change some of the things at the surface level, the incentives, the broader incentives have not shifted. So that's one thing to think about. Having a system in which that doesn't require children so early to be a very fixed thing and to be able to do a very small range of tasks.

29:20That's important. I think the variations across schools and the variations and this obsession with kind of separating students into different tracks and the sense that the different tracks lead to different outcomes in the end or different destinations. As long as that doesn't shift, of course, that is, you know, You know, changing the sort of, again, the surface level requirements is not going to change that. I think Singaporean parents, in fact, are very astute in understanding the kind of underlying logic, you know. So maybe the train can be painted a different colour on the outside. But if they know where the destination is, they're not going to necessarily change their behaviour very much.

30:05That's a great analogy.

30:06Rachel Lim: It's true. But why do you think, Yu Yan, that, you know, there is so much expectations on like, you mentioned a kid is supposed to learn to read before primary one and supposed to be able to sit for all the major examinations by 12. Is it because for Singapore, that's our only natural resources, you know, people and things like that? Yeah, you know, I think the way you just phrased it, right, that people are our natural resources. I think that from that perspective, we are probably not making good use of a lot of our natural resources. Why should it be that a child who cannot read by seven is then sort of tracked into a lower performing set of expectations and aspirations?

30:48And then why should it be that if they don't do well at 12 in some exam, that they are then further tracked into a narrower thing, right? Why should it not be that our education gives children more time so that they can then develop their strengths and talents? I think our system is very oriented towards finding the so-called, the quote-unquote top talent. And it's overly obsessed with that and has been overly obsessed with that for decades. As if in a population you can only have a very small number of talented people. And I think that that's a very elitist kind of view of education. And it does mean that lots of people, including many of the people I've interviewed for this book, including even more so the people I interviewed for my previous book, that there are many, many talented people that this education system has failed to identify and then failed to nurture.

31:47So I think that it's very irrational, given our small population, to only be obsessed with finding the top people.

31:55Rachel Lim: So what do you think, in your opinion, or also based on what you know, what do you think that the Singapore government has done well for us? I think that this is still a government that believes in governance, right? And that is attentive to people's well-being, right? And I think that, therefore, there is opportunity for society and for civil society in particular to make it better known what are people's needs and what are people's aspirations. And it's interesting, earlier you talked about how there is an obsession of how Singapore defines family or even some privileges that family gets to enjoy.

32:39Rachel Lim: What do you think are some groups that are neglected in this equation? I mean, this is of course not really the empirical focus of this book, But I and many others, I think, have pointed out that this is a very kind of narrow way to think about family. So that, for example, single parents often really have to struggle to sort of be legible in our society. LGBTQ members of our society really struggle to have a sense that they have a place in Singapore. and so I mean there are obvious in some ways there are obvious exclusions of persons right but more broadly speaking I think increasingly as people as marriage and childbearing become not necessarily the the the norm that everybody is able to choose or want to choose or wants to live, then, you know, that model of family also fails to capture the reality of what family is, right?

33:47That increasingly, you know, people are living in sort of relationships of care that maybe don't have, are not all oriented towards this particular form of family, for example. So the demographic changes have already gone ahead, I think, of the kind of ideal model. And And I think social policy should serve people's needs, not insist on putting people into narrow boxes.

34:16Rachel Lim: What I found really interesting also, Yuyen, was that you said that you were writing this book partly with a historian 50 years from now in mind. And if they were to read this book, what do you want them to understand about this generation of Singaporeans living in this era? Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not sure I have a good answer to that. I think I said, was this something I said to the Straits Times journalist? And the context of saying this is to say, you know, when you're writing a book, you need all kinds of self-encouragement to keep going. And one of the ways I was trying to encourage myself to keep going when I felt like maybe nobody will be interested in this was to say, well, at the very least, I should record this, you know, because I found all these things out.

35:02And at the very least, I should record this so that 50 years from now, people will know this is how we lived. But now that you've asked me this question, if I could give an idealistic or optimistic answer, it would be that if 50 years from now, we are living in times that are indeed more equal, if we do indeed have a more expansive sense of what human worth is, then we would look back on this time and think, wow, how did people live like that? how could they think this was okay to think that only if you are in certain kinds of jobs, then you have the right to, you know, take time off to take care of your children?

35:38Like, how could people think it was okay that only children from well-to-do families would end up in, you know, X, Y, or Z places? So to speak. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that that is one way for us maybe to orient ourselves to the future. I mean, it's not easy to be optimistic, I think, in the contemporary context.

35:56Rachel Lim: Living it then. Yeah, but I feel like, you know, we should nonetheless try to have some positive kind of goals that we want to imagine for the future. You know, Yu Yan, you end this book not with a solution, but an invitation for us to imagine differently. With everything that you have studied and set with, what are you hopeful for? When I was finishing up the book towards the end, my main worry would be that nobody will want to read it because, I mean, it's like, this is my life. Why do I need to read about it? I mean, that was my main... Oh, because in a sense where there's nothing I can do to change it.

36:32Oh, there's nothing new to me. I already know this. And that was my big, in some ways, that was my big anxiety as a writer that I would have written something so obvious to people that there would be no reason to engage in it. And so in the last few weeks, when I've seen the book be number one on, you know, the bestseller list, I can see, I'm sort of, don't say yeah, yeah. So, you know, I do feel like a relief that, you know, that I think there is a resonance. I think there is a resonance between me as a writer and readers encountering the book, right? And that is very, very, how should I say, comforting for me.

37:12And what I hope to do in these podcasts and events that I'm doing is I feel like I'm just trying to be part of the conversation. You know what I mean? Like I'm trying to like, this is a space you've created and you've invited me to be part of it. And now we are in this space that other people will come into as they listen to this. And there are multiple of these instances where that is possible. And each one is small, you know, but that is important. Like all of these things add up in some way. Right. So earlier when we first met, I mentioned I'm doing a few podcasts and events for this book. Right.

37:52And it's interesting. I'm enjoying this book a lot more than the previous one in terms of just the the this this kind of public facing part of it. And I think partly I'm appreciative, you know, that people are interested and I'm appreciative that people want to show up at these events. and that there is this certain connection that happens when we are in these events, you know, having these conversations. And so I think that that on its own is very precious. You know, it doesn't sound like much, but for some reason, I feel like it's quite a lot. You know, that these encounters and the relationships that can be built through them and the connections.

38:34This is exactly what quote-unquote community is, you know. It is these relational ties. And I think many of us don't spend enough time building them. But I think they're extremely important and valuable. They are these kind of ways in which if you want to build community, they are absolutely the building block of that.

39:00Rachel Lim: And I do think, adding on to what you said, it also has a ripple effect on the different sub-communities that they have. So this is, in some ways, also very powerful and meaningful, you know, what you do through the book that you wrote. One last question, Yulian, you know, if you could have a billboard down the streets, because, OK, Singapore, right? Wherever I will get to see, what would your billboard say and why? Wow. So WADA Books, you know, a few days ago had invited me to speak and they had made this giant poster of my book cover. on their, it's in their window. And it's this huge poster.

39:41And I think they are, you can tell they are readers, right? They're not just, you know, bookstore. It's not just a bookshop for selling things. It's their readers. And the tagline on the poster was basically the title of the last chapter of my book. How we live is who we are. How we live is who we become. How we live is who we become. Yeah. And I just think that that's so, I felt very seen seeing that poster, you know, in some ways that, you know, it's such a nice question, your question about a tagline. But I think the book, you know, the various activities I've been doing with various colleagues over the years is about trying to get people to be part of the conversation.

40:25So it's not a solution I want to present. It's more maybe this is a nice reminder. How we live is who we become. So we should take seriously how we live.

40:35Rachel Lim: If someone were to ask you, what do you mean? Or how would you explain how we live as who we come a bit more simply? How would you say? I think that the kind of everyday things that we do in life really do add up to the life we live. So all of us have to partake in that seriously, I think. That a lot of the everyday things that we do, how we treat each other, they matter. It's almost like our habits, our actions, our choices, they all eventually shape who we become. They all matter. And since your podcast, part of your following are women, right? So often, women's lives and the kinds of things we do in our everyday lives, the housework we do, the care we give to children or to older people, so often these things are not taken seriously as public issues and as significant things.

41:28But I think they're all significant things, you know, that how women live our lives in what seems to be the interior of, you know, very intimate moments and intimate spaces, private spaces. All of that adds up to actually what it is to live, you know. So we should, I think women especially, and the lives that we live that seem private, really we should take that seriously as forming a part of our public and political culture as well.

42:01Rachel Lim: Wow, Yu Yan. Thank you so much for having that courage and persistence to write and publish this book. It really reframed a lot of things for me that I used to think twice about. And I do think that this is something that all of us have the ability to spark a change if we want to in our lifetime. So for those of us who want to continue to follow you and the work that you do and also where can we get the book? Where should we follow you? You can get the book from Ethos Web Store, right, Ethos Books, who are my wonderful publishers. And you can get it at Kinokuniya, at Book Bar, at Warda. I think a lot of the other smaller bookstores probably also are carrying them.

42:44You can follow Ethos Books. They're my publisher and they will often post updates and things. Thank you so much, Yuyen. Thank you very much for being here

42:52Rachel Lim: and for sharing whatever you've learned and your insights with all of us. Thank you.