This Is What Inequality Looks Like
Teo You Yenn
Ethos Books: 2018

Singapore: Identity, Brand, Power
Kenneth Paul Tan
Cambridge University Press: 2018
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Growing up in Singapore, I quickly became acquainted with the country’s success story. Ingenuity, social stability and economic drive were not mere aspirations but existential necessities. This small nation, as our leaders took pains to emphasise, could not afford to be anything but remarkable in order to thrive.

This narrative of exceptionalism, tinged with Singapore’s supposed pragmatism, is beginning to fray at the edges, as the consequences of economic inequality grab the attention of policymakers. Inequality seems to have become a lodestone for people’s anxieties about the future. In this regard, Teo You Yenn’s This Is What Inequality Looks Like, which has sold more than 20,000 copies, is testament to a relatively recent appetite for critical appraisals of the country’s success. Based on interviews and fieldwork at rental flats, the book is inviting, accessible and appealingly written.

Teo, as observer and guide, picks apart her own biases and subjectivities about those on low incomes, pointing out that inequality is relational. It has to do with us and not them. She highlights commonalities of experience, such as the deep anxiety she shares with low-income mothers over the competitive education system. However hard those on low incomes try, though, they are disadvantaged by their unequal access to resources and their limited time for pursuits outside work.

• Tags: Issue 14, Kenneth Paul Tan, Simon Vincent, Singapore