Helping Hands (DB Exclusive, 6.25.24)

The difference we can make.

I attended middle and high school in Singapore, where every morning we would gather in a school hall, sing the national anthem and say the pledge. As we went through the morning ritual, my eyes would drift to a wooden board mounted on the wall, where my dad’s name was inscribed at the top of a list titled “President’s Scholars”. He was one of the first batch of Singapore’s President Scholars – university tuition paid for by the government in exchange for a commitment to work for the government for 8 years.

Without the scholarship, he would not have gone to university; his family was too poor to afford even the nominal amount it would have cost (bear in mind, tuition in Singapore is US$8000 a year today (not a typo, 3 zeroes) – so they could not afford the 1965 equivalent of that). Savings from his government job paid for his sister to attend university, and then his younger brother after that.

Photo by Alejandro Olalde Miranda on Unsplash

Those bleary-eyed mornings were a time to reflect, to be proud of my dad, but also to remember that all the opportunity that lay in front of me could be traced to that fragile thread: of him being helped at a time when it made a real difference.

Although my pre-teenage brain did not process it this way at the time, I grew up surrounded by reminders of just how fragile that thread truly was. I spent weekends with my grandparents in the dilapidated shophouse my dad grew up in. I was too young to think deeply about why it had no running hot water. To take a shower, my grandmother would boil a kettle and pour it into a large urn of room temperature water. The urn sat on top of a stack of wooden planks behind the corrugated tin panels that divided the “bathroom” from the “kitchen”. You would soap up, but shower quickly, dipping a scoop to rinse before the water in the urn cooled. One grew skillful at avoiding the roaches and lizards that stalked the walls, their movement caught by the dim light reflected into the shower stall from the kitchen area. The toilet next door was a squat toilet with no flush – someone would come every morning to clear the waste, my cousin and I “competed” every morning to be the first to go. As precious grandchildren we often slept on the bed in the one bedroom. It was different for my dad and his three siblings, who slept on, or below the dining room table. I do not think I will ever understand how a President Scholar crawled out from under that dining table.

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

When I met my wife, she had similar stories, about how her father’s family sold his youngest brother to pay off debt; how distraught her father was when, as a schoolboy, his only pair of shoes was lost to the mud on a particularly rainy walk to home; how dessert growing up was sugar syrup poured over noodles set aside from an earlier meal. For my father-in-law, the simple pleasure of a single scoop of store brand vanilla ice cream has never lost its power to delight, not to this day.

I say all this not to reminisce or to solicit your sympathy, but only to explain. I have had a wonderful, international, career. My children have opportunities I could never have dreamt of providing when I was their age, hitting the books and trying my best not to drop the baton I had been handed. For the latter part of my childhood, I grew up fairly comfortably, as my family’s economic success grew in tandem with Singapore’s emergence as a global financial power.

But it could have been different. And for many people – too many people – it is very different. I wish that the story of my parents’ success was not exceptional, but ubiquitous. Perhaps we can work towards that world in the future, where stories such as mine are more commonplace, more universal – where more and more people can be helped at a time when it makes a real difference.

Photo by Aamir Suhail on Unsplash

I have hands. You have hands. We have hands.

When do mere hands become helping hands?

- J

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