Unease: Life in Singapore Families

Book Review

Lim Wooi Tee 林韦地（草根书室董事 Grassroots Book Room Director）：

近日读了新加坡社会学者张优远（Teo You Yenn）的新作《Unease: Life in Singapore Families》，Ethos Books出版，可能可以译为《不安：新加坡家庭生活的日常》。

八年后的这本新作，研究的视线从低收入家庭进一步移向更广泛的新加坡家庭生活，也是一出版即霸占了新加坡主要英文书店的排行榜。

《Unease》研究的是一个社会学问题，新加坡表面光鲜亮丽，人均GDP全球前茅，犯罪率低，教育程度高，但生育率却是全球倒数。新加坡官方高度强调「家庭价值」，但现实是新加坡人在组织自己的家庭生活时，普遍感到疲惫焦虑和不安，这个政府理想很丰满人民现实很骨感之间的差距为何，是本书所试图解构的。

张优远认为新加坡家庭长期处于一种「不安」的状态，那不是一种爆炸性的愤怒，而是一种长期的压力状态。这个压力在于，新加坡父母常常觉得无法贯彻和实践自己的家庭理念，觉得自己好像没有选择。

比方说，新加坡父母知道自己应该为孩子做得更多，却永远不知道什么才算足够。知道家庭很重要，却没有足够的时间陪伴家人，要忙着赚钱养家。希望孩子快乐，又害怕孩子在竞争中落后。不认同过度竞争的教育文化，却又不敢让自己的孩子退出竞争。

新加坡人常被贴上kiasu(怕输)的标签，说新加坡人竞争，补习，抢名校，爱比较。但张优远拒绝将这个标签本质化，她认为怕输文化是被制度和社会结构生产出来。

新加坡教育制度具有高度竞争性，学校之间存在被社会普遍认知的阶序，进什么学校与未来的职业和社经地位高度连结。而新加坡父母也常被认为应该对孩子的成功负起主要责任，父母即使主观上反对竞争，也很难真正退出竞争。而父母也会将自己这个世代的人生经验，投射到下一代身上，张优远认为新加坡父母是很精明的，如果自己的人生经验是「进什么学校就是有差」，那官方美好的说法，也无法改变整个大环境竞争的本质。

新加坡的教育制度预设所有孩子都要在一定的时间有某种能力，如进小学前会阅读，进中学前能坐着完成复杂的考卷。教育的分流制度更像是急于筛选出社会的少数精英，而不是鼓励孩子多元发展。

新加坡家长「不安」的心理反映在补教业的蓬勃发展，新加坡人口只有六百多万人而且少子化，但补教业的年度产值高达16亿新币。许多社区内老旧的购物中心，都依赖补习中心的租金而得以继续营运。

《Unease》是张优远前一本《This Is What Inequality Looks Like》著作的延伸。《This Is What Inequality Looks Like》让读者看见，贫穷不能简单解释为穷人不努力。低收入者的生活选择受到住房，教育，就业，福利制度和社会偏见的共同限制。但在书出版后，张优远得到的回响让她感觉很多读者好像觉得「不平等」只是低收入阶级的问题。

因此她在《Unease》中选择把同样的问题意识带入家庭，证明不平等并不只伤害穷人，而是社会整体。当一个社会存在强烈的阶序意识，人们会开始不断辨认自己位于什么位置，对低收入家庭而言，不平等意味着资源不足，但对中产阶级而言，不平等表现为「害怕向下流动」的恐惧。

《Unease》也处理新加坡家庭的性别分工问题。新加坡是一个高度现代化的社会，女性教育程度与劳动参与率都很高，但家庭内部的照护责任并没有因此完全平均化。当社会同时期待女性成为成功的劳动者和称职的母亲，所谓的work-life balance便不只是个人的时间管理问题，而涉及整个社会如何分配照护责任。

新加坡的社会政策长期强调家庭作为社会福利基本单位，包括住房，税务和医疗养老等。这带来的后果是家庭成为吸收社会风险的重要机制。无论是教育竞争的风险，照护老人的责任和育儿的成本，都由家庭吸收，而女性往往需要扮演那个「无偿的家庭劳动者」的角色。

《Unease》让读者看见理解低生育率不能离开不平等问题，我觉得书中的论述其实不只适用于新加坡，在高度城市化和资本主义的社会都存在这样的现象。中产阶级面对资本主义异化时的最后的抵抗就是躺平，但穷不能穷教育，苦不能苦孩子，有了孩子以后，这个最后的躺平的自由选择也消失了。成为父母意味者要被资本主义蹂躏至少二十几年，而现代很多人已经疲惫到不愿意让自己陷入这样的处境。

现代人不是单纯不想要孩子，而是不想进入一套一旦成为父母就难以退出的制度。现代人太清楚，一个「好家庭」在当代资本主义社会究竟有多么昂贵。

当一个星期只工作四十小时就可以轻松养育孩子，有很多的时间陪孩子玩和读书，已成为少数资产阶级才能拥有的奢侈，家庭结构和价值的崩坏，是资本主义造就的最大的危机。资本主义把家庭变成了一项高风险，高成本，无法退出的长期投资，以至于越来越多人选择从一开始就不参与。

Synopsis

2nd Print Available Now!

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In Singapore, a loudly ‘pro-family’ society, why is work-life balance so elusive?

And why are parents so uneasy?

What accounts for this gap between the lived reality and ideal narrative of Singapore families?

Sociologist and bestselling author Teo You Yenn turns her eyes to the contours and rhythms of life inside families, exploring how ‘kiasu’ parents are made and investigating the ways in which inequality marks life in contemporary Singapore. Drawing from in-depth interviews with parents from all walks of life, Unease examines how social structures, individual strategies and common practices come to produce Singaporean ‘cultures’ of doing family.

An incisive exposé of how the logics of hierarchy, competition and unequal worth infect ordinary people’s lives, Unease asks what these cost parents, children and the values we hold as a society. And what possibilities are there for living differently?

 

Praise ——

In this powerful and persuasive book, Teo You Yenn challenges Singapore’s self-image as a pro-family society. She reveals the contradictions of a state that champions family life yet often overlooks the stress, anxiety, exhaustion, and gender and class inequalities that define it. Kiasu parenting, she argues, is less a personal choice and more a response to structural conditions and policies. If Unease leaves you unsettled, then it has succeeded in prompting us to confront the difficult questions it raises.

—Donald Low

Professor of Practice,

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Teo You Yenn has once again written a groundbreaking book which speaks clearly and directly to its readers. This time, the concerns are more immediate; they enter each of our lives and homes. Looking at family, gender and class, Unease is a page-turning series of provocations packed with illuminating interviews, punchy analyses and an abundance of care.

From my perspective as a playwright, and one who constantly writes about contemporary Singaporean characters and issues, the book is invaluable as it shines a light on the ‘Singapore condition’—who we are, and why we are what we are. It challenges us to re-examine ourselves as individuals, families and communities in a nation-state; how we can—and should—break away from rigid systems and social conditioning, and find greater agency within ourselves and solidarity with each other.

—Haresh Sharma, Playwright

In this love letter to Singaporean parents, Teo You Yenn sensitively teases out the unspoken truth of family life in a supposedly ‘pro-family’ regime. The author pulls into the spotlight the key contradictions that organise families in contemporary Singapore, conditions that families around the world share: prosperity without pleasure, childhoods without playfulness and education that feels like work for parents and children alike, especially for mothers. Teo You Yenn argues that anxiety, competition and hierarchy influence the tacit knowledge and everyday practices of parents more than we realise. Inequality, she reminds us, harms us all, not just those struggling at the bottom.

Through meticulous research, conveyed through the empathetic voice of a lifelong educator, this book prompts us to realise our shared humanity, our care for our children and the promise of a family life beyond the stresses of kiasu parenting. As you pick up this book, know that Teo You Yenn is asking every reader to make a break from a life structured by inequality to participate in creating a new collective culture of inclusive prosperity, built on the values of ethical agency, solidarity and respect for human worth.

— Smitha Radhakrishnan

Marion Butler McLean Professor

in the History of Ideas and Professor of Sociology,

Wellesley College

This is a book that asks us to look closely at how responsibility and care are practised in everyday life and what we quietly pass on and pass over in the process. It articulates with particular force the gap between the values we profess out loud and the quieter logics we reproduce through habit, silence and structure—giving shape to tensions many of us live with but rarely have language for.

Written with striking intellectual precision and a profound attentiveness to lived experience, this is scholarship that makes room for the heart without sacrificing rigour, and for rigour without losing the human. This work is incisive, intimate and quietly heartbreaking in what it helps us see. It asks, with quiet insistence, what we are really raising ourselves—and our children—to value, and why that question matters more than ever now.

—Pooja Nansi, Poet

The idea that the family is a basic unit of society is widely held, and not just in Asian societies. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948, includes this article: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”. On the one hand, familial responsibilities and obligations are extolled as foundational for social stability and economic success. On the other hand, beneath this idealised veneer, the burdens and costs of parenting are unevenly distributed amid unequal social conditions and a culture of individualist meritocracy. Teo You Yenn’s Unease is both a model of qualitative social research—learning deeply from the lived experiences of wage workers in Singapore—and a meditation on the disjuncture between ideal and reality and how we can imagine a good society based on relationships of mutuality and solidarity.

—Kwok Kian Woon

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University

Teo You Yenn does it again. Unease represents what good social science research should look like, marrying analytical sharpness with social consciousness. In her typically accessible writing style, she details the lived realities of some Singaporean families which are often glossed over or ignored when macro data is put forth. Statistics do not always capture the complex lives of individuals. This book fills that gap well, reminding us that human beings should never be reduced to mere numbers.

Prof Teo takes the experiences of ordinary Singaporeans seriously. More of us should. Her impassioned call for Singapore to engage in self-introspection on ideas such as meritocracy should be genuinely considered by those in power and everyone else, as evidently, not everyone benefits equally from the system. Hopefully, those who read the book will be filled with some unease, realising that for many people, life is not as comfortable as the stats suggest. Singaporeans should indeed be, in her words, “allowed ambivalence, contradictory feelings, and critical responses to our own lives and the city”.

—Walid Jumblatt Abdullah

Associate Professor

School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University;

Author of Why Palestine?: Reflections From Singapore

Teo You Yenn looks behind the façade of Singapore’s developmental success at what it feels like to actually live there. She finds that many parents feel a palpable sense of unease. Under intense pressure to do everything it takes to help their kids succeed, they feel overextended, stressed out, exhausted and yet still inadequate. They also feel like they have no choice but to play this game. They feel trapped, ironically, by a national identity predicated on success.

The brilliance of Unease is its systematic and sensitive exploration of the texture of everyday life in Singapore. It goes a long way in helping us understand not only how Singaporeans feel but also why they feel this way. The book enlarges our perspective on ‘development’ by examining its hidden psychic and emotional costs. In doing so, it creates the space necessary for Singaporeans (and all of us) to ask crucial questions about what a good society—not just a rich or developed one—should look like.

—Marco Garrido

Associate Professor

Department of Sociology, The University of Chicago

Why, in a country that prides itself on its ‘pro-family’ policies, do parents feel deep unease and worry about their children? Drawing on the lived experience of Singapore parents across class and gender, Teo You Yenn shows that their fears about their children’s preparedness for uncertain futures crowd out the joys and possibilities of parenting. In lucid, approachable prose, she demonstrates how structural constraints—state policy, labour markets, educational systems—shape what seem like individual parenting decisions. Teo vividly illuminates how social conditions shape lived realities and political subjectivities, and how inequalities come to seem natural. Her analysis offers an alternative political imaginary, defined by a common sense of collective care, solidarity and agency, rather than individualism and fear.

—Rachel Sherman

Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology, The New School;

Author of Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence

Unease—what a marvelous title, and what an excellent book. Teo has not only revealed the palpable tension between the imagined and real narratives of Singaporean families, but also opened an important portal that tells us about the lives and realities of families in countries across the world! A real accomplishment and a must-read for anyone interested in learning about family and society today.

—Ito Peng

Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy;

Director, Centre for Global Social Policy

Department of Sociology and

Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy,

University of Toronto

Teo You Yenn offers another lucid analysis of Singaporean families. Blending sociological insight with rich ethnographic stories and a commitment to social change, she uncovers the roots of parental anxieties, explores the broader context of inequality and invites readers to reflect on what a good society should look like.

—Lan Pei-Chia

Distinguished Professor of Sociology,

National Taiwan University

About The Author

TEO You Yenn is Associate Professor and Provost’s Chair in Sociology, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Inequality, at Nanyang Technological University. Her research focuses on poverty and inequality, care regimes and minimum income standards. She is the author of This is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018) and Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How Family Policies Make State and Society (Routledge, 2011).

More information about her work at https://teoyouyenn.sg