Learning Japanese; I Really Think So

“of course they could have just had the actress cross-dress as a stipulatively male character, so the point is well-taken—people couldn’t handle the implicit gay?)”

This is how they cast the character of Tripitaka in the Japanese live action Monkey tv series (with BBC voices dubbed over the actors for Australia). this was one of the most popular children’s shows in Australia in the 1980s.

Tripitaka was still meant to be a boy priest, but since as well as looking female Monkey had to guard him on the journey to get the scriptures, I was somewhat disgruntled as a child that the series did not have them get married.

How have you found it (learning some non IE language, I mean.)?

No problem at all, really, but 1) the sound patterns of French and Japanese are eerily close (more accurately, the latter is more or less included in the former) so that went well whereas I understand that native English speakers tend to experience difficulties with Japanese vowels (perhaps hours of singing along Japanese virtual pop-stars helps) and 2) you have to keep in mind that what you don’t know how to say, you really don’t know how to say (whereas with romance and germanic languages, you kind of sort of know, somehow).

More generally, my experience of learning a new language as an adult is that memorization is always a (the?) problem, so languages with tons of cases, or noun-classes or complex inflectional verbal systems or crazy morphology (or all of the above) are hard to learn as adults. But, as you know, Japanese is impoverished in all these respects, in fact exceptionally so, so…

Of course, reading is the real pain memory-wise, but as your daughters have already mastered that…

When I was taking first year Japanese (back in the late 1970s) there was a bloke in the class who was fluent in every Western language you could name, including several Slavic languages. He bit the dust something fierce on Japanese, though, because none of his tricks for picking up the next language worked.

To do Japanese, you have to enjoy the Chinese characters, and the perverse ways that Japanese uses them. The Japanese may or may not have come up with the idea of writing language phonetically at the time they first interacted with China, but seeing Chinese characters, the Japanese thought this was the amazingest thing since sliced bread and went way overboard using them both phonetically (kana were originally Chinese characters) and semantically, and writing in both Chinese* and Japanese. The Japanese would borrow a Chinese word (usually written with a pair of Chinese characters) with (an approximation to) the pronunciation at the period and place (in China) the Japanese were talking to the Chinese, so each character gets multiple different “Chinese pronunciations” (since each character appears in multiple different words (character pairs) borrowed with different pronunciations) as well as multiple originally Japanese words that it is used to write. Chinese and Koreans (for whom one character has pretty much one sound) find this a pain. You have to deal with Japanese as having an underlying spoken language which is vaguely hinted at by the Chinese characters used to write it.

When I was here as an exchange student in ’79, there were Korean and Chinese exchange students who were running rings around me learning Japanese; it was seriously depressing. One day one of the Japanese students in the dorm said “You’re Japanese is very good” with no intent of anything other than saying something nice, so was quite surprised when I exploded. I grabbed him by the lapel and said “Justify that or I’ll do some serious damage: I’m failing miserably compared to the Chinese and Korean kids.” He managed to come up with “But you speak correctly.”, which was flipping brilliant: while way ahead in fluency and vocabulary and reading, and probably pronunciation as well, they were having trouble with the point that a single Chinese character will have multiple pronunciations in Japanese, and would blithely pronounce everything with the same character the same, which is quite grating. I was getting a bit of the basics right, at least.

*: I finally got around reading “Fune wo amu” (we missed the movie), and there was a cute joke in which the main character writes a love letter that is so formal that the woman it’s addressed to didn’t recognize it as a love letter. After a while she figures this out and once they start going out tells him “Next time you write me a love letter don’t write it in kanbun” (Kanbun being the form of Chinese used by the Japanese to write official documents prior to (and through?) the Edo Period). Anyone reading Crooked Timber would enjoy the movie.

Movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2315226/

“I do plan to learn Bahasa Indonesia soon…”

I learned Indonesian for two years at the start of high school. Unfortunately I am not good at remembering other languages. What I remember from learning Indonesian is how to sing Ten Green Bottles (Seppuluh Botol Hijau [sp?]) which we would sing in Indonesian on school bus trips. I mentioned this to my teacher several years afterwards and learned this is not the sort of thing it’s best to tell teachers you remember of their classes.

David J Littleboy,

There was not anyone with an Asian background where I grew up. When I first moved to the city and met Japanese people I would ask them if they could please tell me the meaning of the characters on various pieces of art. They would look somewhat askance at this request because it is not the writing they learn any longer. I saw a nice exhibition of Korean wrapping cloths and tried to have a conversation about wrapping cloths with Korean girls, but they had to explain to a very disappointed me that Korea was modern now and wrapping cloths no longer had quite the importance attached to them.

I don’t know how much use this is to someone starting out, but the Kindle (either an app or the thingy itself) does Japanese quite nicely. There seems to be quite a bit of Manga content available, although that sort of thing would be better on an app on a color device than a B&W Kindle. The problem would be finding stuff on the Japanese site, I’d think, although there may be some Japanese content on the US site. (I was on the train the other day and a young, very blonde Caucasian woman near me was reading Manga on her color reader (even from a bit of a distance away, the screen looked really good: bright and contrasty) and giggling. I don’t do Manga, and it made me feel old and out of it. Ijiwaru Baasan is about the extent of my Manga-ing.)

A quick look at Amazon US shows that much of the learning Japanese stuff is still only available on dead trees. Sigh.

The Kindle Paperwhite (original version) is wonderful for reading novels in Japanese. It comes with a Japanese dictionary (Japanese -> Japanese, though), which I’m finding adequate most of the time: select a word (a bit fiddly, though) and the definition comes up. Screen resolution is way more than adequate for Japanese, with furigana easily legible even at some of the smaller font sizes (if you are really nearsighted and take off your glasses). The screen is kewl. I was in the train the other day, standing by the door reading, and noticed that half the screen in full sun, half in shadow, and the whole page was readable without problem. And no email or internet distractions*.

*: A true fan can always turn a glitches into a feature.

My Spanish teacher in secondary school once asked my mother did she think I might be a little stupid. Nothing more specific, no clinical diagnosis. Just stupid. I thought it hilarious but my mother wasn’t impressed.
I wish you and yours all the best in this endeavour Belle. Ive been trying to learn Arabic for years, and getting nowhere slowly. But next year, goddamnit, Ill have it mastered. (along with linear algebra and three card monte)

Why do you think “the safety thing is underrated’? It seems to me that Americans are obsessed with that “safety thing”, to the point of having destroyed much of their urban infrastructure through urban flight (not to mention voting for Republicans), rationalized by the “safety thing”. Maybe I was missing your irony, in that case my apology for stating the obvious.

14: There is an astonishing amount of Japanese-language help and resources online. Here is Tae Kim’s Blog not as a recommendation but just random out of my desktop folder.

I have the Rikaichan Firefox plugin installed and probably use it everyday. Rikaichan has no romaji.

I spent a little time last month glancing over the work of Shimazaki Toson at Aozora-Bunko, A-B has everything but fully Japanese.

Having said this, I am really nowhere on the language and know nothing. I decided I wanted to put those hours elsewhere, and as I started hearing distinctions within what I was listening to, I also decided I didn’t like Japanese as spoken commonly very much. Too repetitive and ritualistic, too many des ka and wakarimasen, too many words forced into multiple meanings and uses in order to keep native vocabulary manageable, and OTOH, too many different kanji with interesting nuances reduced to simplified kana or romaji transliterations.

I still dabble. Got an entire book on wa vs ga waiting for me.

Tony Judt wrote in an essay that the way he dealt with his mid-life crisis – in the throes of a divorce, doubting the value of his career, getting old – was to teach himself Czech. As a mono-linguist who has failed to master any number of languages I can only marvel at people who seem to find that learning a language is about as difficult as learning to drive.

I’m friends with one of these freak linguist people. He once knocked on my dorm room door at university and announced he had “learned Catalan” and that he was leaving for Barcelona in the morning to check whether it worked.

Amazing how brains differ.

“Amazing how brains differ.”

Just on this .. since this is a place where a disproportionate number of teachers (or at least people interested in education etc) post/comment , is it a case of ‘brains differ’ or can most people train themselves to think in ways that make learning something like a language (or maths) easier ? I know the answer to this is probably complicated (and I havent phrased the question well) but is there such thing as a natural aptitude for X (in this case languages) ?

Being able to afford a live-in maid on a white-collar worker’s salary is also an underrated factor because people are embarrassed to say how awesome it is.

Singapore: Domestic Workers Suffer Grave Abuses
Singapore’s Maids: No Respite?

(But, damn street harassment sucks SO BAD I HATED IT. When I think of people doing that to my daughters and making them walk along looking straight forward like soldiers in a war they’re losing, cheeks burning with shame, I want to hit people on the head with rocks.) We’ve stayed in Singapore. The safety thing is an underrated factor.

Singapore’s Ban on Gay Male Sex Is Upheld by Top Court
Massive leap backwards as Singapore resumes executions

I always thought I sucked at languages, especially since I started out with Spanish and failed miserably. (It probably didn’t help that the seating chart placed me next to a native speaker who was sandbagging by taking Spanish I in High School. All he wanted to do was talk about Cream and how awesome Ginger Baker was). Similarly I struggled with Russian and couldn’t make it out of the second year even though I found it fascinating.

But then, courtesy of the study abroad program at UC Santa Cruz I spent a semester in Budapest. While living there I kind of got a handle on Hungarian but still only earned a C in the language class (and a gentleman’s C at that. The teacher said she passed me because she saw and heard me using the language at the market and on the street).

I love Hungarian. Like Cheryl Rofer said, the cases and declensions just totally clicked for me. After studying them a whole bunch, it just worked one day. (The word order thing still totally throws me though). And I love the Hungarian vowels. One of my Hungarian instructors said something liberating about the vowels. “Alright guys! None of the vowels in Hungarian sound anything like English vowels, so just forget about trying to find equivalents.”

That said, I still struggle with vocabulary and word order. Those totally make me stick out as a foreigner. I think that it was easier to learn Hungarian because it was a non IE language. Once you stop searching out Romance/Germanic language equivalents it gets a lot easier.

… but your posts are tops.

Well, used to be, anyway. It’s been far too long since BW gave anyone a good smackdown.

“Why do you think “the safety thing is underrated’? It seems to me that Americans are obsessed with that “safety thing”… Maybe I was missing your irony, in that case my apology for stating the obvious.”

I don’t think there was any deliberate irony. I mean saying it “might be a boring place for…older children? People in their twenties?” may be a very oblique reference to torturing folks for using drugs. But this mostly seems like genuine uncritical praise of Singapore for the comforts it offers wealthy ex-pats. I don’t want to criticise the OP – maybe she’s oblivious, maybe she’s got to get a visa renewed – but it’s absolutely typical the usual clique of ‘smarty pants’ in the comments are lapping this up.

You’re, of course, completely right that Singapore is a deeply draconian, unsafe and oppressive shithole. Their capital punishment rate is what, 3x the all in US homicide rate? More than 5 people protesting in public gets you arrested without a lawyer. And so on and so on and so on, but the conversation isn’t about the safety of those sort of people. Catcalling, that’s where the left’s at these days.

You’re, of course, completely right that Singapore is a deeply draconian, unsafe and oppressive shithole. Their capital punishment rate is what, 3x the all in US homicide rate? More than 5 people protesting in public gets you arrested without a lawyer.

The subtlety of your response indicates that you clearly have a deep cultural, political and legal knowledge of the place.

BTW: the kids water playground in the new gardens area (near the giant trees) is wonderful – my kids are still talking about it a year later… definitely worth a visit.

I’ve known a few people who learned languages as a hobby.

I knew one person who spent every summer in a different country and learned the language. (She was a teacher so she had the summer off, and she lived in Europe so she didn’t have to go far to encounter a new language.) She said that she always started off by imitating the body language of the people in that country, and then started learning phrases.

We are trying to raise our son to speak Mandarin while living in the states. He hears only Mandarin from his mom and grandparents at home and from native speakers at daycare. The only English he gets is from me and some tv. At this point his go to language is Mandarin. My wife is betting that by 7 he’ll only speak English. That would give me a sad. This sort of post is encouraging.
DN

Their capital punishment rate is what, 3x the all in US homicide rate?

Sorry to be a pedant, but everyone has a view on What’s Wrong With The Left These Days and my personal hobby horse is multiple-order-of-magnitude quantitative errors.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

@41
I can understand where your husband is coming from. It is sad that these man children can force those kind of calculations on us but I guess that is the world we live in.

Sigh.

dsquared@48 they in general seem to pass along largely positive messages about growing up, and no death threats or rape jokes at all.

I was nodding sympathetically at this and then I remembered that’s exactly what the death threats, rape jokes, and harassment are for. And now I’m sad, because you’re still right.

Bloody bold tags, will I never learn

dsquared@50

No criticism of pink stuff intended. What I’m sad about is the way a perfectly rational calculus of safety leaves men with the power to exclude and control women in any space they’re able to make “unsafe”.

Is the highway overpass possibly the CTE near KKH hospital? A couple of years ago a colleague who lives near there told me a body of a murder victim was found under the CTE around that area. But your point is still valid, I used to do a lot of late night runs and walks around all sorts of places in Singapore which would be off limits in many western countries – darkened back roads and alleys behind shops, empty industrial parks, canal sides etc.

I would still say encourage her to put those fine motor skills to work by joining the Cute Hairstyles community. (Also, one of the few YouTube channels where the comments are all helpful, positive and pleasant). I’m only semi serious as always but I’ve been really impressed by how nice little girls are, never having had experience of their strange alien culture before. I am a little bit worried that my daughter now thinks Fort Worth is the cultural centre of the USA but that’s second order. I’m now being taught how to do a Dutch plait.

This post recalls a tremendously delightful evening some years ago. It was in the early weeks of business school when everyone was trying so hard to impress. After a class in which we discussed a case study of the U.S. tire industry, a Singaporean classmate came up to me and asked “What’s with Americans and their cars and guns?”

She said it with a smile, but it was no less provocative and I felt an immediate patriotic need to defend the homeland, the freedom of the open road and everything from apple pie to motherhood. I thought about responding with “What’s with your beatings and police state” but refrained and instead suggested a coffee and a chat.

As the coffee became dinner and the evening stretched to last call (I was drinking, she was not) I learned everything I still know about Singapore (which is possibly dated, but probably not). She came from a wealthy family so her views were somewhat colored by that perspective, but she spoke equally about all classes and the reasons for order and control. Limiting the influence of organized crime as dominates Macau and Hong Kong was a big undercurrent of the discussion – as was, reading between the lines, buttering the bread of the wealthy and insuring their dominance.

Safety and cleanliness were also big features given population density. Not becoming Hong Kong, but rather their own independent nation while surrounded by larger countries was another big driver – establishment of a culture that isn’t perfect, but is distinct. Her passion for her country was quite strong, more than I’d have expected given the negative stories that escape from time to time. What Westerners see as bugs, she tended to regard as features, at least up to a point.

I appreciate there was much propaganda in all she said, but she did a better job of defending “What’s with your beatings and police state” than I was able to do with “What’s with Americans and their cars and guns?” I’ve never been to Singapore, but hope to do so one day, I have great regard for at least one of its citizens.

I don’t know if this ramble adds much to the discussion, but thanks to Belle for an excuse to tread down a particuarly happy part of memory lane.

Hmm. If you do the A levels, take it as an independent candidate. The SEAB-Cambridge A levels are substantially more difficult than the OCR/Edexcel/AQA papers, but are considered the same by UK admissions (apparently). You may have to inquire with Edexcel and the British Council as to whether they will invigilate the A levels here – their site only definitively states that they invigilate it at the British Council at Kuala Lumpur, but nothing about Singapore.

The IB is a bit odd in the context of local students. I remember some snickers when Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), the independent/elite-state-school which switched to offering the IB in 2005, started and continued obtaining preposterously high numbers of perfect scores – the difficulty of the IB may not be tuned for students who are accustomed to ten-year-series revision batteries. I don’t know whether this has impacted the value of the IB offered by the international institutions located in Singapore, but you may like to discreetly find out.

The SAT is a maybe/kinda/sorta – check with US college websites before embarking upon it. e.g., NYU does not require the SAT if you have the IB. It is true that most want the SAT or the ACT though.

If they intend to become Singaporeans, better earlier than later; Singapore government scholarships are generous.

Belle, thanks for the reply and sorry if that came across as a ‘gotcha’. I agree that if anyone has health problems that require paid live-in support they should get it but I wouldn’t conceptualise that sentiment as ‘[b]eing able to afford a live-in maid on a white-collar worker’s salary is…awesome’- it don’t that is awesome- and I think formal state harassment of people for their gender is worse than informal street harassment of same (which isn’t to diminish the latter). I’ve only ever spent a week in Singapore but I never assumed that everyone hated the government- I thought it seemed like an air-conditioned Alphaville but à chacun son goût.

Belle: whom should you smackdown?

Based on your past performance, I don’t think you need any advice from me. Perhaps some inspiration, but, again from past performance, I’d rather not be the one to provide you that.

re: language learning
Spaced-repitition flashcards can be helpful (and no more boxes of grubby index cards quietly rotting in the back of the closet).

I’ve used Anki (http://ankisrs.net/) for several years. Mnemosyne (http://mnemosyne-proj.org/) is reputedly savvier in its spacing algorithm; but I don’t expect a program to teach me, just to remind me. (Very useful for Latin/Greek, possibly less so for languages you can speak and write on a daily basis.). Fwiw, Anki looks very sporty on my digital device, and supports various media attachments/inclusions. Too, it is popular with those learning Japanese — lots of user-contributed decks (some with 1000s of cards) on offer.

engels, it sure sounded to me like a `gotcha’, and one assuming that women’s public safety should only be attended to after that of, apparently, every other category

Yeah well your post sounded like a ukelele, and one which assumes that torturing kittens is perfectly fine.

“Yeah well your post sounded like a ukelele, and one which assumes that torturing kittens is perfectly fine.”

Aww, come on now. Ukes are awesome!

http://danielleatethesandwich.com/videos/

I find this OP wretched and appalling. But since so few others do, I wonder if it’s just me. Isn ‘t Waring really just saying “It’s great to be rich!”? I know the feeling. I was an expat in Hong Kong in the early nineties: the private schools, the maid-ironed uniforms, people coming and going from one exotic place to another, etc. Most of the OP sounded like back-handed, covert bragging–splinkled with a heavy dose of cloying, corn pone “y’all’s” to show that she’s a good Ioway farmer’s daughter at heart, or whatever. And the kids! Oy! Smart as whips and learning all these languages! I’ve been trapped by elderly people like this who then want to show you all the pictures in their wallet/purse. But Waring, I take it, is a relatively young woman. Hard to figure. (I did a little research. According to her wedding announcement she is related to the robber baron, Jay Gould. Now, no one is responsible for their ancestors. But why make such a point of it? Especially when John “only a Holbo” Holbo’s ancestory gets no mention at all.)

But so much for form. What about substance? Yes, in places like Singapore, even philosophy profs can live well. But for the most part this is because it is a Republican paradise. No minimum wage, tough on crime, control of the media to ensure that the right peopleget elected, limited concern for due process and human rights–oh yeah, and lingering “white privilege” makes being a WHITE woman extra safe, in a kind of belt-and-suspenders way. What’s not to like? Singapore is by no means the worst place on earth. Some people on the Left, apologists for Castro for example, believe that there must be some kind of necessary trade-off between human rights and economic
development. I’m not one of them. But for those that do, Singapore should be ashining example. They have achieved far more–in terms of living standards and health for the poorest–while being much more free than Cuba. In fact I have always wondered why Singapore didn’t get more attention and praise from the the authoritarian Left. But for anyone with democratic instincts…? I don’t think so.

“Isn ‘t Waring really just saying “It’s great to be rich!”? ”

No. It’s a perspective of life in a country from a specific vantage point. I think the societal costs (to a degree), and the fact that it’s from the viewpoint of someone with wealthy white expat ‘privilege’, are pretty clearly laid out throughout.
(although my priors are to not like the rhetoric of ‘privilege'(which is identity politics nonsense, to my mind) so I was never going to respond favourably to your argument)
A bit of generosity people, no ?

‘A bit of generosity people, no ?”

Unfortunately I find that the female contributors to this blog are unlikely to be granted that courtesy.

See? Ronan’s BEGGING for a GamerGate post!

難しいなあ！

“@81 – I just can’t believe ‘gamers’ have managed to get themselves recognised as an oppressed minority.”

Actually it’s about ethics in game journalism.

I am afraid to say I will now always picture Belle’s grandmother as Emily Gilmore.

There are a number of Singaporean students in the course I am studying. Discussions can be interesting because Australia and Singapore have tense relations sometimes, most epitomised in Lee Kwan Yew saying our government would make us the poor white trash of Asia in the 1980s (I cannot recall how the argument started or the details since I was too young) — this is still bought up whenever we have economic difficulties on the horizon.

In Australia around the same time as Jane Jacobs in New York we had various community protests and upset about comprehensive planning programs , particularly in relation to slum clearances and slum upgrades.

In response, in Victoria we have a planning legal system that mixes 1980s era systems theory with 1980s era neoliberalism.

Singapore did not go in this direction and I understand still has comprehensive planning — as a result Singapore does well in infrastructure and transport provision, affordable housing , and green space provision (in the latter better than Malaysia, when otherwise Malaysia should be better due to natural advantages).

Singaporean students are often bemused that Australian students on the one hand want more democratic planning and on the other hand want more comprehensive planning with better public transport, green spaces, appropriate development etc etc.

Singaporean students usually think it a worthwhile tradeoff to have more government and technical official authority to get better infrastructure etc. Australians tend to want both a democratic means to planning and ends that are probably best achieved by comprehensive planning . I am not sure that this is impossible – you can involve the community in comprehensive planning — but this is problematic in that it either significantly depoliticises the planning process (seen as a problem by some politicians), or might politicise planners; also it might be a fairly slow way to respond to the timely issues eg. causing climate change and living unsustainably both of which are built in to current urban development and economics.

Singaporean students say that Singapore is not a one party state anymore, other parties are allowed, but most people like to vote for the same party as before.

I think political parties are highly over rated, all having 2 major parties/coalitions does is stop people from learning to co-operate with people of other view points, and strengthens pointless opposition that derives not from principle but only from wanting to differentiate one party from another .

I can see that having government and opposition should be useful for arguing over matters like in debating teams — but this structural utility is never realised since the parliament fills most of the time for debate with instead insulting members from the other party and making useless rhetorical points for their own parties.

Am I supposed to lie about my life? Not discuss the interesting ways it differs from the life I ever thought I’d have? We’d all gain what now?

As far as I can tell, the party line of CT commenters is that one is allowed to exist, but never to say anything good about one’s life and career. In principle, there might be some level of wailing and repenting, sackcloth and ashes and general screaming about what a horrible person you are for being part of such a horrible system, which might excuse you, but nobody’s ever found it yet. The crazy thing is that it’s not just you living in Singapore or me being a stockbroker that they object to; even the academics on the blog seem to get the same treatment for mentioning that they’ve been promoted or got a prestigious scholarship or something.

So it basically comes down to “Bitches ain’t shit” then, Wallace. Why don’t you go read some bloggers you like? If I wanted to know your opinions, I’d be reading your blog. I don’t but surely someone else might?

Do your children now have singaporean accents to the point of ending every sentence with a “la” ?

Wallace Stevens,

“second it seemed to blithely ignore the price at which the affordable help and public order in Singapore are purchased.”

I am now awaiting all your comments on dsquared’s travelogue OPs complaining he has left out the high costs incurred by the wealth plundering activities of traders in the City of London (or elsewhere where ever he worked).

This costing could then be added into every travelogue – how wonderful the sights of Spain! Alas! What a cost The Golden Hind!

But the US’ a VAST country. Isn’t it wrong to assume the WHOLE country’s unsafe? I was able to sleep safely in SF’s BART/Muni without being robbed; surely you’d be to blast loud music safely, too.

And the West Coast has decent availability of Japanese teaching and culture.

But Singapore’s oligarchy must be better. After all, SHRUB the sonny-boy was total perfection and good. And rules like the mutual Drug War work rather than being excuses to send the little to prison.

Wallace @ 96–

If you’re going to go on in this strain, perhaps you could do me the favor of changing your cognomen? I don’t particularly want to be reminded of this pompous & whiny overtone next time I pick up the selected poems.

I have not heard of the divide between Singapore and the Dutch Labour Party before. In Australia the difference with Singapore is usually couched in terms of the Asian Values debate, although I think this division seems to have eventuated when the Australian Labor party decided to implement neoliberal economic policies .

I had not really thought about it before, but Singapore was left with more damage than Australia after WW2. And before independence even after the war Britain just liked to exploit Singapore as a trading post and not help with housing people adequately. Slum settlements in Singapore were amongst the worst in the world even in the 1960s , so they made a vast difference and although some people did not like to have to move from shanties into apartments, they mostly got used to this.

“Mr. Lim Kim San, the first HDB Chairman recalled of his visit to Chinatown in the early 1960s:

I went into a three-storey shophouse with one lavatory and two bathrooms. We counted 200 tenants living there. It was so dark and damp. It was an inhuman and degrading existence. Underneath the staircase was a single plank. A man was lying on the plank. He had rented it. That was his home! And he was lying down covered by a blanket; the thick red blanket made in China. I paused to ask him if he was sick: “Why are you covering yourself with a thick blanket?” He replied: “I am covering myself out of respect for you. I am wearing only undershorts. My brother is wearing my pants.” They were too poor to afford clothing. In those days, there were shops which pulled clothing and shoes off the dead to sell them. “My God,” I thought to myself, “I really must help those people.” (The Straits Times, 9 Aug 1997)

At night, many others would sleep on makeshift canvas beds placed along street pavements (Chen, 1983).
..
The core objective of the public sector housing initiative is to make housing affordable and accessible to the lower income families, which until then suffered from discriminatory actions. As elaborated by the Minister for National Development in 1959:

Most of the houses will accommodate those in the lower income group, who have never been cared for in the past. The previous Government cared only for the middle class group, who can afford to pay tea money to get S.I.T. (Singapore Improvement Trust [the colonial administration housing authority]) flats. (The Straits Times, 19 Sep 1959)”

Squatters No More: Singapore Social Housing, Belinda Yuen, PhD

The fracture between the DLP (the PvdA) and the PAP was what led to the expulsion/resignation of the PAP from the Socialist International in 1976.

A careful observer should remember that Singapore had a very different politics as recently as the 1970s. The reason the tenor is largely forgotten is because it is useful for both the governing establishment to let it be assumed that the opposition ‘back then’ were uniformly dangerous communists and for the opposition to let it be forgotten that their forebears freely campaigned under assorted communalistic banners that would be regarded as both deeply dangerous in modern Singapore, and deeply alien to modern Singapore which has largely discarded old identities. A Western liberal in 1975 thinks of the Catholic church as a rock upon which an anti-authoritarian liberation theology is to be built; in 2014 it is the platform upon which homosexuals are persecuted.

*Do* you think we only ought to care about women’s safety after, etc?

Clew, no, I don’t, but I’m inclined to question a safety audit that extends to cat-calling but not to non-consensual BDSM:

http://www.news.com.au/national/beyond-excruciating-when-it-comes-to-brutality-singapore-canes-it/story-fncynjr2-1226560039163

david,

They are quite interesting links. I am not well versed in the differences between socialism and communism at the time which seems to be at the crux of the grievance by the Dutch group against the Singaporean group:

“It may be difficult for West European socialists to understand that communists in Southeast Asia are different from their own communists. They think of communists as somewhat odd and eccentric people who, having moved close enough to get into government in coalition with socialist and even non- socialist parties, have now become so patently democratic as to renounce the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Singapore, it is difficult to persuade the communists whom we have arrested, so as we can release them, to denounce communist use of terror and armed violence to bring about their dictatorship of the proletariat. We do not try to persuade them to renounce the dictatorship of the proletariat as undemocratic in a multi-party system.”

But thinking of the time, it might just have been crafty strategy to distance Singapore from communism so America didn’t go to war on them. Asian values might have been another use of rhetoric – William Saffire I think complained Asian values should be treated as European totalitarianism , but the Asian values argument seemed to elide the matter quite well for a decade or so.

In Australia I don’t think that was the attitude to the Catholic Church in 1975 – there was an earlier schism in the Labour Party here over Catholicism/Marxism which resulted in the small catholic Labour Party the Democratic Labor Party. I think this party mostly ended up supporting the liberal party. Catholics are still a fairly mixed bunch here – some like the Jesuits are more left wing, others are more right wing,

I would say (and not to curry favour with the management) that I like these posts. I MUCH prefer these types of posts than,say, something on gamergate (that’s just my personal preference, neither here nor there)
I (personally) would find it much more tedious if it was just an endless jeremiad against the Sinaporean government, or apology for being white and wealthy. The best way (imo) to learn about a place is to listen to people who actually live in that place tell you what it’s like, for them (while being aware of their position within the society) I dont see why that doesnt apply to long term expats as well as locals (or guest workers) There is a specific perspective that comes with being a (relatively wealthy) foreign resident in another country. That’s the story I’d expect Belle to tell, not what it’s like to be an underpaid domestic worker or day labourer (any more than if Henry Farrell wrote on his life in the US Id expect it to be from the perspective of someone broke and unemployed in the ghetto) I mean, christ almighty.
I’m surprised as well if people are saying (although I might have misread) that Belle’s post isnt being ‘honest’ in some way. The one thing that I would say about Belle’s posts is that they are always personally honest, to a point that I’m taken aback at times that someone could be that open about themselves in a public forum (people can judge whether that’s good or bad – I’d say good, although I wouldnt/couldnt do it personally)
If someone hires, and enjoys the benefits of, a maid (or domestic worker, whatever the term) then I think it’s better they mention that. It’s more honest to say that it’s ‘basically awesome’ than to bemoan the exploitation while benefiting from the service. If someone has found themselves enjoying the safety and comfort of a middleclass family ex pat life in Singapore after also enjoying the wildness of New York in the 90s, then mentioning that is also being honest. It’s saying this is how my perspective evolved,when my life changed in X manner. I dont see how it ignores the costs. It explicitly recognises them (and the hypocricy, I guess)
And *there is* merit in telling about family(or just personal)life on its own, devoid of politics. A person has to be allowed live their life without apologising for it endlessly, or being tuned in politically. Stories are also worth telling because theyre funny, or interesting, not only when they serve a larger political interest.

..also crossposted with a number of posts above (anyway Im off, g-luck)

“Maybe she should give her employees an extra good deal? How do you know she doesn’t?”

She did say in another post that she bought a former maid a plot of land or a house for her return to the Phillippines, but it was a sad story because the maid’s children were missing her and resentful she was living far away from them, even though she was providing for her family financially by doing so.

“Singapore did something amazing in achieving this, and it is not merely expats but Singaporeans too who have the plane land at Changi, get into a clean taxi, then race along the wide, perfectly maintained lanes of the AYE, black and then glowing under streetlamps, endless rain trees at the sides making almost a tunnel, bougainvilla running riot through the median strip (Ha! Not running riot! Pruned recently!), and thinks, ‘this is a bit more like it.’”

Personal reflection, beautifully written, aestheticizes a politics that I find highly objectionable. Note the differences between this and ZM’s quotes in #109: those quotes are about housing; this is about cleanliness and control. “Wallace Stevens” is annoying and has pretty much poisoned the well for talking about this, but personal reflections they bear on Singapore politics are still going to cause argument even though they’re personal reflections.

“One thing I will say about Belle’s aesthetic; it’s a very rich one, and not at all innocent.”

I’ll argue via poem. Here’s one about trash (and children’s TV).

Nice poem. Not a bad argument, either.

What would Singapore be if it wasn’t Singapore? Something else, something better for the majority of its inhabitants perhaps?

Americans have traditionally believed that benevolent tyrants provide the best government and the most prosperous nations etc. The problem is how to choose your benevolent tyrant.

It sounds like Singapore has done pretty well at that so far. Maybe they could do better if they could find a good way to choose a better tyrant. Possibly some other system would work better for them, if they could agree on it and switch to it without tearing stuff up much.

Other nations can’t follow their example until they figure out how to choose good tyrants. So there isn’t that much to learn from them along those lines.

“That’s the story I’d expect Belle to tell, not what it’s like to be an underpaid domestic worker or day labourer.”

Actually, she wrote about this awhile back, after the riot in Little India. As a fellow Singapore expat resident, I find her insights quite interesting. I too love the rain trees, perfect asphalt, mix of languages, and government planning.

There are all sorts of one-party or not-so-democratic states in the world yet Singapore routinely is singled out for criticism. How about this hypothesis: Westerners find Singapore upsetting not because it’s a one-party state but because it’s rich and a one-party state. Or to put it another way, it’s rich but not liberal democratic. That’s not supposed to be the recipe, the tide of history. It unnerves Westerners.

in 1958 JK Galbraith railed against “private opulence and public squalor” – as I noted, Singapore is what happened when a generation of leaders who retained those aesthetic attitudes swung into power and were simply never pushed out by New Left-flavoured community awakenings.

there is a tendency for contemporary Western writers to react as if Lee is an oriental alien but in fact the outlook of him and his cabinet was very much present in the West, American intellectual life included. It simply died in the face of changes in the political culture.

Seriously, click the link. Even in my own jaded context it reads like the most transparently frenzied pro-policing statement to be ever issued by a local mouthpiece. But no! This is the leading light of the American intellectual liberalism, circa the 1950s!

I enjoy the way that Belle’s posts balance adroitly between anecdote and argument. Or, particularly this one, between joie de vivre and “liberal guilt”. Why should that enjoyability be suspect? (Not entirely a rhetorical question. How much did I find myself siding with John Holbo throughout the recent lengthy abortion thread — against the critics who felt that he wasn’t being serious enough about the real-world danger posed by the likes of Kevin Williamson — because I enjoyed his own evident enjoyment of subtle argument “for its own sake”?)

A less obviously hedonistic enjoyment of mine, 26 years ago, was the “brute memorisation” of 2000-odd-kanji (in P.G. O’Neill’s primer), with all their variant readings and all the accompanying sample words and phrases. It took me about an hour a day for more than a year, but stood me in good stead for reading (over about the same number of hours, but this time with more straightforward pleasure) “Sasameyuki” (“Fine Snow”, or [!] “The Makioka Sisters”).

But I think I would now recommend to my past self reducing the macho bench-pressing to just the first 300-500 most common Kanji, and proceeding from there with reading books and looking up the characters as I came upon them. This would make the learning process more like a slower version of an IE language speaker’s learning another IE language, and starting on an unsimplified novel after just a basic grounding, and with just the aid of a dictionary and grammar reference book.

What makes a big difference, as others have said above, is if you can get hooked on the aesthetics. It may be the norm for westerners to be attracted by Kanji right from the start, but fatigue can easily wear away most of the delight. And many (though by no means all) Japanese will say that they don’t notice let alone savour their script, any more than we do ours. All I can say is that while I’ve never pursued Shuji or Shodo, reading about Abe’s boring cabinet reshuffle, or his slipperiness over nuclear power and Yasukuni, in the Asahi Shimbun — and in whatever humdrum digital font it is that they use, and in the relatively unpleasing format of left-to-right — has one particular fun element for me that no IE language will ever have. As if, throughout even the dullest of meetings, someone kept bringing me exquisite canapes or tapas or sake-no-sakana, while the Bill Evans Trio played softly in the background.

J Parnell Thomas, You said in Corey’s thread that you were banned under another handle. What handle was that?

JakeB@105 – “I don’t particularly want to be reminded of this pompous & whiny overtone next time I pick up the selected poems.”

That’s what Wallace Stevens (Mr Harmonium , not the CT commenter) sounds like on tape – not whiny but definitely pompous. I imagine that’s how the patriarchs in Edith Wharton or Auchincloss novels sound.

Except for one brief interjection about Hong Kong, I have stayed out of this, but let me go on the record as saying I greatly enjoy Belle Waring and all that she has written, definitely including this . . . what? effusion? screed? slice of consciousness? I have not lived in Singapore, but have visited it, know a number of people who have lived there, have taught its history, and have lived elsewhere in Asia. These cities (and I have never lived in the countryside) are – as one might anticipate – full of contradictions, frustrations, and delights, which we encounter at different levels depending on who we are and what’s happening at the time we’re there. For expats (and wealthy locals) having a maid is often part of the experience, which was new to me (us) when we first lived in Manila, but both there and later in HK we found that trying to do without meant cramping other aspects of what we were doing there for what seemed inadequate reasons. But of course we felt ambivalence (as well as spasms of “awesome”), and it is very much to Belle’s credit that she acknowledges this, as many of us did/do. If someone is not interested in what life is like for expats in Asia (or elsewhere), fair enough; but anyone even remotely curious about it should welcome her honesty as well as her exuberance. Well done, Belle!

Nine – in 145 I am paraphrasing Cherian George’s own analysis of the Singapore govt’s attitude toward state-civilsocial relations, as in his book Singapore: The air-conditioned nation : essays on the politics of comfort and control. It is meant to describe, not normatively persuade.

Re: Spain: “and hell, you could drop your wallet on the sidewalk, come back two hours later and find it still lying there.”

Hmm. That reminds me. On a Japan-related list that I no longer subscribe to, one of the denizens (a long-time Japan resident and academic who is well-known as one of the go-to foreigners for both TV and government think tanks) went off on a what at the time sounded to me to be a racist rant; what had set him off was that he had dropped his wallet and it had been returned with even the cash untouched. He thought that this was completely and insanely crazy and the product of a unique and sick Japanese personality/psychology. If he had argued that the Japanese were victims of a police state and too terrified to even not return found cash, he’d have had an argument that would have had a grain of truth to it: the legal system here doesn’t like losing, and if it gets you in their sights, you’re in trouble, long term trouble. But returning things to their owners is part of the “culture” here. It’s just expected and seems natural. What’s interesting is that when you actually do return a found wallet, they make you fill out so many forms that it very much seems that they’re trying to persuade you to never ever again even think of returning a lost wallet. (I was around when my wife’s aunt made this mistake.)

Japan, like Singapore, is an extremely low-crime country, and at least part of that is a larger than would seem necessary police presence. When I was here as an exchange student (1979) with hair down to my ass*, I was stopped fairly often (3 or 4 times in a year) by very young policepersons who were almost always extremely apologetic about stopping me, and seemed honestly interested (in a friendly, personal way) in what I was doing in Japan. But they needed to see some ID. (Once, I ran into an officer who had woken up with a nasty headache and busting a hippie was going to make his day attitude; he was really pissed when I politely showed valid ID (the Japanese friend I was with was majorly pissed/embarrassed). My understanding is that this policy of asking foreigners for ID got them so much grief they stopped. Also, interestingly, there was a left-wing student demonstration of some sort, so I pulled out my camera. The students were all wearing surgical masks, so there was no way they could be identified in a photo, but one of them came over and asked me not to photograph them. My assumption is that this was the University of Tokyo, and they were expecting to get posh and/or important positions later in life and didn’t want youthful indiscretions to come back biting them. Sheesh. Nowadays, I live in the (tiny remnants of) a rather ordinary (except if you try to buy property therein) residential neighborhood a stone’s throw from the imperial family residence, and the whole area is heavily patrolled 24/7. Just before I first moved here (25 years ago), some lefties had tried to fire homemade rockets at the imperial family residence, but only succeeded in blowing up their car.

Really: http://www.pbase.com/davidjl/image/151837214/large

The whole returned wallet things seems like a weird point to make. I live in Canada and have valuables returned to me by total strangers more than a couple of times. Is it really that unusual?

And no, it didn’t seem like an unusual thing to do.

“And no, it didn’t seem like an unusual thing to do.”

Yeah. I didn’t think so. Thanks for taking the time to respond Lynne. :-)

I returned the only wallet I found. It was in a library bathroom and I could spot the guy easily from his photo ID. I’d have had no trouble giving it to the library lost&found, but I’d have to think about turning it in to the police. He seemed kind of hostile and suspicious when I first handed it to him.

I don’t think it’s at all uncommon for that to happen, but you can’t expect it to.

I can imagine a place where people are so scared of police and informers that they just leave wallets on the sidewalk rather than either take them for themselves or pick them up to turn in. Sometimes it’s safer to just not get involved.

clew,

The collection looks well worth reading.

“But mostly I’ve been thinking about the Maid Question. It’s not clear we can automate away all housekeeping … Even what rich people mostly do in the States tends to rely on labor that’s not paid or treated well … and on throwing stuff away…. Possibly we need housekeepers, but we don’t know how to choose, distribute, respect, or pay them.”

Housekeeping needs to be done so long as people live in houses, but that does not mean people need housekeepers.

Belle has said she has a chronic pain disability that prevents her from doing housekeeping, so she needs a housekeeper.

But she also suggests having a housekeeper is quite normal for most expat households in Singapore (except Japanese).

The households without disabilities should be able to do their own housekeeping. If they can’t manage this they should move to a smaller house they can manage, share housekeeping more equitably between household members, or decrease the hours of work they do so they have more time for housekeeping.

In Australia there are some government social support services for people with disabilities (who can’t otherwise afford it) to help with housekeeping or other caring needs such as showering etc, but depending on the circumstances some people do not qualify or get insufficient assistance.

Often the caring and housekeeping burden can fall on children, who may not be any older and sometimes younger than Belle’s daughters. This is very difficult for the children and affects their ability to study and participate socially. Belle’s daughters are fortunate not to have that onerous duty, but it is very unfair that the world is so un-equitable.

It is quite hard to discuss un-equitableness with people from diverse backgrounds and lives. I studied a subject on gender and agency in Asia, and one week the topic was female domestic/reproductive migrant labour. I felt very sad for the women having to go so far away and have to work as maids, and not only that but often things don’t turn out well for them and they could get trafficked into slavery or raped or not paid and not allowed to go home etc. But another student in the (small) class was used to having migrant maids as her family were diplomats. It was quite a difficult discussion .

This is an interesting article –

“Relegated to women more so than men, reproductive labor has long been a commodity purchased by class-privileged women. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1992) has observed, white class-privileged women in the United States have historically freed themselves of reproductive labor by purchasing the low-wage services of women of color. In doing so, they maintain a “racial division of reproductive labor,” which establishes a two-tier hierarchy among women (Nakano Glenn 1992).
…

The globalization of the market economy has extended the politics of reproductive labor into an international level. As I show in this article, the migration and entrance into domestic work of Filipino women constitutes an international division of reproductive labor. This division of labor, which I name the international transfer of caretaking, refers to the three-tier transfer of reproductive labor among women in sending and receiving countries of migration.While class-privileged women purchase the low-wage services of migrant Filipina domestic workers, migrant Filipina domestic workers simultaneously purchase the even lower-wage services of poorer women left behind in the Philippines. In other words, migrant Filipina domestic workers hire poorer women in the Philippines to perform the reproductive labor that they are performing for wealthier women in receiving nations.
…
Various case studies on domestic work establish that women often use their class privilege to buy themselves out of their gender subordination (Palmer 1989; Romero 1992; Thornton Dill 1994). As Mary Romero (1992, 129-30) puts it:”The never-ending job described by housewives is transferred to workers…
…
As Saskia Sassan has further indicated, globalization has sparked the feminization of migrant labor. Contributing an insightful theoretical framework on the position of women in the global economy, Sassen (1984, 1988) establishes that globalization simultaneously demands the low-wage labor of Third World women in export processing zones of developing countries and in secondary tiers of manufacturing and service sectors in advanced, capitalist countries.”

Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor Author(s): Rhacel Salazar Parrenas
Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Aug., 2000), pp. 560-580

“Really, it can’t be just unless the housekeeper can have a family too (later? in the concierge’s flat??).”

BW has written about this in the context of her own maid’s children. Look, it’s impossible to point this out and still be polite, but BW has written about how she knows how to hire / employ maids in a sense that people uncomfortable with doing so don’t, and I believe that this is true (i.e. that she pays them more than usual, is comfortable with them being around and makes them more comfortable, gives them extraordinary bonuses that don’t interfere with their work, etc.) but at the same time it’s clear that she knows about this kind of thing because it’s knowledge from childhood in a wealthy or ex-wealthy Southern family, or in other words it’s a remnant of U.S. Southern slavery traditions. When NickM @ 140 admires a certain joie de vivre and and asks “Why should that enjoyability be suspect?”, well, that’s why. Of course it’s enjoyable to have someone else doing work for you, someone for whom your job is the lesser evil and the best deal they’re going to get even if it keeps them away from their family. Or with John Holbo, who NickM brings up, sure it’s fun to have subtle argument for its own sake and not be primarily concerned with the outrage involved.

So people are like, why are you so grumpy, Oscar the Grouch? Why are you saying mean things about someone being happy and enjoying their aristocratic privilege? (Well, meritocratic now. Or whatever you call being an ex-pat professional with a family member with a professorship in Singapore.)

Against which, as in upthread, I can again only say that what I’m saying isn’t new and is just as old as Southern tradition. While people in the South were learning how to deal with service issues in a fine and civilized way, people around where I live were being grumpy and uncivil and generally no fun. Thoreau was going to live in his garbage can in the woods, and later coming out and telling everyone that John Brown was right.

And people have always hated that. Here’s Packer on Snowden (quoted second-hand from a post here):

“Edward Snowden is a child of the internet and at the same time an old American type—the solitary individual whose religion is conscience, and who follows his own regardless of where it takes him. … he type goes back to the English Protestant dissenters who settled the New World in the 17th century. Its most eloquent exemplar was Henry David Thoreau […]”

People who are grumpy on the Internet are not Thoreau, or Snowden. But there is an actual difference of morality involved, not dsquared’s rendition of Morrissey.

Oh. Lordy, I dropped the Thoreau reference. Thoreau, at the most generous reading, didn’t eschew trading for (highly gendered) labor: he didn’t do his own laundry or raise children at the Pond. Come to think, people tend to say his mother did his laundry, but they seem well-off enough that I doubt she did it alone. There’s someone else with chilblains in there. (I’m reading Longbourne, which is long on chilblains and reasonably kind to everyone but Mr Bennet. Even before the Gothic twist, Mr Bennet looks even more like a defalcator from the servants’ view. His comfort, their risk.)

Sounds good, is about as realistic as J Thomas’ proposal of prison-cell layout for all.

Prison cell? Anyway, I’m not talking about making everybody create less housework, I’m suggesting that it should be possible for people who want to.

(Also, J Thomas, the housework done in actual cinderblock-and-hammock Central American houses is still significant, in my observation.) Size isn’t always the problem — crowding is as troublesome.

I think with careful design a lot of the housework could be minimized. Design the layout to make it easier. Something like the carwash machine is potentially good, you lead it to the room you want to clean and turn it on. It cleans the empty room — windows, everything — and then you turn off the cleaning and lead it to the next empty room. A bunch of apartments or houses could share one, if they wanted.

It takes a big effort to reduce clutter, but then it’s easier to clean.

I’m not sure how to improve sanitary arrangements. Fewer and smoother exterior surface. But the first warning that one of my family members was getting diabetes came when the toilet that one used needed to be cleaned sooner than the others, sooner than the schedule.

Consider just food as a representative sample of all housework. In the last 150 years, less in some places, we’ve moved most food processing out of the house; it’s now possible to not cook at all in a lot of families.

There’s a trade-off, it’s more expensive and creates more trash, and may be less healthy, but it’s easier and you can get arrangements of spices and fancy effects that are not practical for one family. No need for everybody to do the same thing.

If you like to cook, you can save money and get better meals. If you hire a cook, they’re competing with mass-produced food. You need to be pretty well-off to afford a real cook for decent pay. It’s like John Henry competing on cost with the steam drill.

Anyway, my point is that we could automate a whole lot more housework than we do, and there are reasons for that — construction codes, zoning, tradition, etc.

Non-permeable room surfaces aren’t pleasant to live with; usually loud, and the humidity is difficult to control. There’s someone who builds rammed-earth houses in ?Iraq? and figured out how to glaze them inside and out (domestic-sized firestorm) to make them weather-durable. But they had terrible moisture and mold problems if animals, e.g. humans, were respiring or cooking in them. (Excellent for food storage, though.)

I’m more perplexed that the kind of housekeeping you think is the basic challenge would be solved by hosing the room down. You get your walls that dirty? A Roomba wouldn’t do you? Do you have toddlers? Sealed, hose-blastable surfaces literally are prison architecture — and some RVs, I guess — Dymaxion plans tried similar stuff for the House of the Future and people tried them but they didn’t get more popular. Legal and buildable, though.

In countries where there is a lot of wood there are also freezing temperatures. People leave the bedding and carpeting to air out in the snow and that kills the dust mites.

In countries where there is a lot of wood there are also freezing temperatures. People leave the bedding and carpeting to air out in the snow and that kills the dust mites.

That makes sense!

New York City has freezing temperatures, but I hear about New Yorkers trying far more complicated and expensive methods that tend to fail.

First world solutions….

everyone ought to do their own housework (and that housework is qualitatively different from any other form of labour

I haven’t read all the comments, but I don’t think housework is qualitatively different from any other forms of labour. But living in someone’s house full-time, likely without colleagues, and taking orders from them imo creates a qualitatively different working relationship and conditions to eg. preparing food in a factory (and that’s leaving aside other factors- low pay, precariousness of employment relationship, immigration status of workers- which while contingent to full-time domestic work seem to be strongly asssociated with it).

clew,

“Sounds good, is about as realistic as J Thomas’ proposal of prison-cell layout for all. (Also, J Thomas, the housework done in actual cinderblock-and-hammock Central American houses is still significant, in my observation.)

Size isn’t always the problem — crowding is as troublesome. ”

Very crowded houses would be troublesome for housekeeping – but people who are impelled by necessity to live in overcrowded arrangements are not very likely to be able to afford a housekeeper to assist them in housekeeping.

“Share housekeeping more equitably, work less”: yeah, very familiar way of suggesting that we solve systemic problems with private heroism. ”

It is only a systemic problem because of private choices – there is not a law that says people holding over X amount of money must buy a big house and employ a housekeeper. People just do this of their own volition, so they can just as easily not do it. If you like there could be a law made to Address it – The Act of Equitable Household Housework Duties 2014, although I think people might complain of government overreach. Perhaps it could be a Code instead, with a tribunal to oversee it.

“And even then it isn’t obviously fairer than hiring the work done, because (a) we no longer marry people because they’d be good at housework, ”

A married couple should be able to complete the housework between them whether or not either of them are especially good at housework. Housework is not rocket science , but if people are very particular about housework they can go and take a course like in the movie Sabrina.

I wonder what the people who do housework think? My father’s parents were working class immigrants, and his mother’s family were all English servant class, cooks and the like. (Aside: the English servant class was a significant share of the English workforce as late as 1900 or so, but was down to zero by 1950.) As a result, father had a violent and visceral negative reaction when mother suggested hiring housekeeping help; he really didn’t want to be on the other side of that relationship. But questions arise: do they think they are being exploited, is housekeeping work better paying and less gross than other near-minimum-wage work, do they even have other options at all?

Obviously, there’s some amount of exploitation going on in the housekeeping industry; there can’t not be. But the Irish (!) woman my father had clean his house (in Boston, when he was in his 80s) once a week seemed happy to do the work, and seemed not happy when (after my father died) my real estate agent insisted on taking over responsibility for making the house presentable to potential buyers and I had to fire her. I only met her two or three times, but she seemed quite businesslike about doing housework.

In the US, prior to ACA, the lack of benefits would have been a major problem, making any employment of part-time workers exploitative. Here in Japan, universal affordable health care and a pension system (albeit an extremely minimal and painfully regressive one) have been in place for an age, so working part time/freelance is not a complete disaster.

Most of the people I know who hire maids are somewhat older or are taking care of an elderly relative (that was us for the last few years of my wife’s aunt’s life; now that we renovated the place, we clean religiously every week, especially since the apartment we lived in for the previous 20 got completely out of control).

But what about the MA/MS level middle-class two-income family? Most such jobs in the US have required doing the work of two people to keep a reasonable career going for an age now. My father was home for dinner at 6:00 pm every day of his career, that lifestyle is a thing of the past. I asked a friend at Microsoft if they’d hire me (my SB in comp. sci. is from the mid 70s, this was early 90s). “Yes, but they’d eat you for breakfast.” If two people are going to both avoid getting eaten for breakfast, housework is going to be a problem and they’ll have enough disposable income to pay someone twice minimum wage for one day a week. It sounds as though that could be a plus for both parties. If not, why not?

Speaking of other languages, the local convenience store has four employees from Nepal, so I looked into Nepalese. Ouch. It’s got just enough phonetic things not in English that it’s not going to be easy for a native English speaker, and the script is terrifying. Sigh. They’re really sweet kids: three sisters with radically different personalities and a somewhat reserved bloke. The serious one of the sisters asked what I did, and gave me a thumbs up when I didn’t answer “English teacher”.

David J Littleboy,

“I wonder what the people who do housework think? ”

The women I have known who have worked as domestic housekeepers have done so on a part time basis to supplement their partners income .

There is not a great difference practically in the type of work done in domestic housekeeping and in some public realm housekeeping wg. hospitality.

Householders/guests can be either fairly clean and tidy or somewhat gross in their mess in either situation (although a study could quantify whether these situations are more common in one field or in another).

Sometimes women might prefer housekeeping over other sorts of work available to them – although this is reflective of another gender issue because often they can be mothers who have taken time out of the paid workforce and find it difficult to get into ‘skilled’ work again.

Also, housekeeping is different from being a live-in maid. But I still think people should do their own housework.

But living in someone’s house full-time, likely without colleagues, and taking orders from them

Yes, this is past what I think is manageable in an egalitarian society. There’s a difference between cleaning up after someone, as a service, and colluding in the pretense that their sh*t doesn’t stink, which servitude keeps coming to. And the cleaner in your shared house, engels, needed — hourly wages? an understanding that more dishes meant less dusting?

On the other hand, if we had a livable minumum wage, even for domestic workers, and national health and free education, I’m not sure cleaning and cooking and organizing (things, time) as a service is so bad, as jobs go. It does have to be done by someone, unlike PR. Better than chicken processing, tied with childcare? Why not Wages for Housework — *all* housework paid by the hour, even if it’s within the sanctity of marriage? You think you’re joking about the Act, ZM, but Wages for Housework is serious.

—

The oligarchette (!) has such hopeful little glimmers of sanity — don’t break the laws! don’t make a servant pretend she’s your friend! it’s unethical to be angry at your servants! and then the whoppers.

dsquared,

now I think of it I am also against management of stocks as a field of employment. If people insist on businesses being owned by shares, then the least the shareholders can do is take on the responsibility of owning a share in a business themselves. This would hopefully improve the ethics of business which is so low at present.

People with disabilities can need assistance with housework and this should be provided in a caring society.

Some people missing a limb would be ok with housework, others would not. That is why the council employs people to assess actual people’s needs in the community.

I myself have never heard being temporarily ill with flu called a disability – it is an illness. There could be cases where people gravely ill with flu might need assistance, for instance if they live alone so there is no partner and children and they are far from other family and have no close friends so no one will volunteer to do the housework and their flu is so serious they have delerium and are bedridden. Then they or their kindly neighbours could call the council and arrange some home assistance for the period.

Crack cocaine addiction is also not a disability, it is an addiction. Crack cocaine is often used by poor people who can’t afford to hire a housekeeper. Likely they might not ask council for help because 1. It is illegal, and 2. They might be ashamed. However, if they are having trouble with housekeeping and potentially also childcare etc – then the council should give them assistance to stop their addiction and help with housework and child care in the meantime.

Anyway, I think it more likely a woman with a crack cocaine addiction would become a maid rather than hire one.

It is an interesting topic, addiction, disability, and maids. There is a movie called Passionfish about a black woman who had an addiction and then she eventually stopped the addiction and broke up with her partner who from memory was a dealer. She needed a job and her farther wouldn’t let her look after her young daughter anymore – so she became a maid for a white Southern woman with a disability who also developed a drinking problem since she did not have use of her legs anymore . But the black woman said the white woman didn’t know what addiction and troubles were really like, and was just being selfish with her drinking.

dsquared: “I am less amazed that the main form of reasoning is “everyone must listen to me because blah blah blah Thoreau””

I think that your #1 fan, “Wallace Stevens”, really appreciates the quality of your writing.

clew: “Yes, this is past what I think is manageable in an egalitarian society.”

Yep. Look, the original sentence was “Being able to afford a live-in maid on a white-collar worker’s salary is also an underrated factor because people are embarrassed to say how awesome it is.” BW then says that she’s chronically ill, but then that all the people in her circle of ex-pats except the French and Japanese mothers hire live-in maids. And this: “And the truth is that I remember an expat friend asking people for her book, trailing spouses (mothers) what the best thing about living in Singapore was, and I said ‘being able to afford to hire a maid.’ She said, I was the only one willing to say that for the record, but that all the others said they would have said that, had they considered it an acceptable answer, except for the Japanese mothers, who did not hire maids (in the cases she interviewed).”

OK, so we’ve made the shocking discovery that Singapore is not an egalitarian society. But let’s follow this one a bit further. All right, *why* are people “embarrassed to say how awesome it is”? *Why* was BW the only one willing to say that for the record? Because people generally understand that they are taking advantage of a privilege that by its very nature can only be available to a few people, and that it’s a privilege that they couldn’t have in their home societies because their home societies are generally more egalitarian.

Maybe some people here think that no one should hire anyone else to do any housework at all, I don’t know. But that’s not really what the question is when you talk about hiring a live-in maid.

To get back to why I brought up Thoreau. It’s not an argument of the form “Thoreau was cool, so I’m right.” It’s implicitly in answer to this:

“I just think judgments like: ‘Singapore’s one-party rule privileges low crime and cultural homogeneity over the freedoms that make human flourishing possible, and so it’s childish to praise one’s personal experience enjoying the low crime rate’ or ‘it’s not acceptable to outsource the most intimate domestic labor to other people and so it’s morally wrong to hire someone to do this job and then enjoy having it done’ are not the most apposite in the case of a personal reflection. Maybe the latter if you’re committed to certain beliefs.”

Why might some people be committed to certain beliefs that mean that they have to insist on their moral judgements in response to a personal reflection? Because this is connected to American history that is still very much alive. dsquared can call it a personal aesthetic preference as part of his amazing grasp of stockbroker leftism, but it’s anything but personal.

I looked into Nepalese. Ouch. It’s got just enough phonetic things not in English that it’s not going to be easy for a native English speaker, and the script is terrifying.

Isn’t the script just Devanagari? It’s actually a lot easier than it looks. As a child, I was supposed to learn both Devanagari and Persian* (both as second scripts, I already knew Roman), and I failed miserably at Persian and I can still read Devanagari passably. (Although… Devanagari is I think really easy to sound out if you already know the spoken words, in a way Persian absolutely is not, so I have no idea what it would be like if you were also learning the spoken language.)

*Yeah, yeah, Perso-Arabic.

Is the living American history Thoreau, as one who sacrificed for his beliefs although those didn’t require doing all his own chores; or slavery, skipping over the history of domestic service or servitude in most of the world for the last couple centuries?

Carver is a richer example in either case.

I mean, one possible interpretation of Rich’s point is that he’s harping on about Belle employing a housekeeper because of her family background and the constant blah blah blah Thoreau is just meant to convey the message “I’m the side that won the civil war, you’re the side that lost, neeny ner ner”. But that would be so pathetic I can’t believe anyone would bother with it.

dsquared: “it’s just one of those empty phrases people use when they don’t want to give a proper reason for something.”

dsquared’s crushing rejoinder has made me completely revise my understanding of contemporary American politics. I had thought that the rough divisions between American left and right as they showed up in who-won-what electoral maps followed the geographic boundaries of the Civil War almost exactly. Academics have even done studies showing that — well, I’ll quote an article by Chait that is worth reading despite its hippie-punching:

And the truth is almost too brutal to be acknowledged. A few months ago, three University of Rochester political scientists—Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen—published an astonishing study. They discovered that a strong link exists between the proportion of slaves residing in a southern county in 1860 and the racial conservatism (and voting habits) of its white residents today. The more slave-intensive a southern county was 150 years ago, the more conservative and Republican its contemporary white residents.

And I’d thought that one of the ways this history manifests itself among people from the South who really are not racist was in the sanitization of these kind of relationships as market relations — the whole neo-liberal – to – libertarian idea that if you can hire your servant and pay them well, and it’s a better job than they could otherwise get, that’s awesome. Who’d want to deny someone a good job, and what’s so important about egalitarianism anyways, and who cares about why they can’t get a better job? But again, I think that dsquared is so much more insightful about American politics than I am that I should just give up on this idea. Being on the left means market liberalism, and I shouldn’t think that it’s anything more than that.

“Carver is a richer example in either case.”

Belle Waring’s personal reflections are inextricably joined up with the history of the South, clew. Carver, admirable as he was, isn’t part of the history of the North in a similar way. If you’d rather not talk about Thoreau, I could go on about Sojourner Truth, who was part of a commune in my home town.

Berfore World War II, it was not unusual for middle class and professional families in the North to have live-in maids. That is why all those pre-war West Side apartments had maid’s rooms. During the Depression, my grandparents, who lived on Riverside Drive, had a live-in maid, of German origin, while their children were growing up. They were far from having great wealth, in fact, my grandmother’s job as a school teacher in Harlem kept them from being homeless, since my grandfather’s business made virtually no money until after the war was over. Nevertheless, thanks to my grandmother’s job, they were able to help their parents and various in-laws who had fallen on hard times, as well as pay for piano lessons and summer camp for the children.

Longbourne just got better and better and less dependent on the P&P plot as it went on. The sentences are lovely shapes, too.

engels, 193; so if the employee had enough negotiating power to profit off the unwashed dishes, the icky housemates would be the more unsatisfied and looking to dominate. Ech.

Wasn’t it Agatha Christie who described the social change in the 20th c. by saying that, growing up, she couldn’t have imagined she would be rich enough to buy a car or too poor to keep a servant?

I am assuming that housecleaning is tiring and complex enough, and a clean house pleasant enough, to be worth spending money on even if you don’t get domination jollies from it. So the domination isn’t actually a necessary part of having someone else clean.

Then I leaped to, if people want the domination for itself, improving the labor status of the cleaner (enough that you can’t get an edge on the cleaner by leaving more dirty dishes, because she’s paid for all her labor) won’t actually make the would-be-dominators nicer. Would leave the cleaner slightly better off, though working for bullies is unpleasant in itself.

Oh my God. Puchalsky’s point literally was “Belle’s family were on the wrong side in the 1850s, so she isn’t allowed to talk about having a housekeeper now”. I sometimes think that it’s pretty tragic the way that British people keep going on about the second world war and the 1966 world cup, but this is a whole new level.

Where were domestic help unionized two centuries ago?!? Heck, even one century? You mean labor power when the unions were strong was shared with domestic help? That’s a badly phrased paragraph, or I just disagree with its facts: A really tight labor market won days off and so forth, with the threat of leaving service entirely, but in the US at least domestic labor has never been protected by labor law or (as far as I can find) unions. It’s been getting slightly better very recently in the US: http://www.udwa.org/.

I’ve been arguing throughout that it should be protected, note: also “party to a legally safeguarded service-provider contract”, as in the example with engel’s housemates.

Your claim that the tiring-ness or tiresome-ness of housekeeping is never significant is… not congruent with most people’s experience. Also, how far does this extend into the reproduction of labor? Making one’s clothes? Garment makers are also immiserated.

Housekeeping is really not that tiring and complex .

Then it’s an easy job, innit. Money for jam. Maybe I should stop looking for work in my doomed industry with all the typing and indoor work, take it up as a manservant. ‘parrently — sez you — it’s a piece of piss.

Collin Street,

“Then it’s an easy job, innit. Money for jam. Maybe I should stop looking for work in my doomed industry with all the typing and indoor work, take it up as a manservant. ‘parrently — sez you — it’s a piece of piss.”

You are being silly.

My argument was that housework is not sufficiently complex and arduous that a household without disability is not able to manage to do their own housework.

If the case for having a maid is that housework is very tiring – then the households most in need of maids would be households without modern devices in developing countries where they have to carry buckets would be the ones most in need of assistance.

Perhaps you can take up being a manservant helping women in their arduous bucket carrying in Africa.

I certainly was not arguing that maids and manservants do a job that is “money for jam” — although they are often paid as if they were especially female domestic migrant workers from developing countries.

These women are often taken advantaged of, paid poorly, and work in poor conditions, or are not allowed to go home, or assaulted and don’t have any recourse to legal remedies etc.

If you wish to work as a migrant domestic worker then then you would at least have an understanding of the conditions.

201/202 I didn’t make a very good point. I’m contending that part of the benefit of hired help (in an inegalitarian society) is status or self-esteem boost of not having to do ‘crappy’ work or being able to force someone else to do it. In an egalitarian society, where cleaners were paid the same as lawyers, that work might no longer be considered crappy and people might take pride in doing it themselves. Maybe.

Oh, since I ask for a title; my references are Daphne Spain’s _How Women Saved the City_, Laura Schenone and Laura Shapiro (different books) on the history of cooking, esp. w.r.t. migration between continents and/or classes, the Beecher and Beecher-Stowes proposing skilled, rationalized and paid domestic labor as part of the first wave of political feminism in the US, Susan Strasser’s several books on housework, recycling, and consumerism. Isabella Beeton for a detailed list of just how much has to be done in the last generation in which is was all done by hand, and Olwen Hufton’s _The Prospect Before Her_ for a glorious analysis of women’s work in Europe 1500-1800.

“Housecleaning and dishwashing aren’t the nasty end of the problem, even. Care work, that is, looking after the physically incompetent, often in their houses, is hard to improve in a lot of the US because we need *so much* of it and we barely fund it even with immiseration wages for the workers. As the Boomers get old-old, I expect this to get bitter.”

Exactly. Especially since Medicare doesn’t cover care of the elderly if you have any resources whatsoever. So people paying for this care are not in a position to pay generously.

Still, the US has it really really easy in this respect. Currently there are 2 retirees for every 10 working age persons in the US. In Japan, there are slightly over 4. In 2060, the US will have slightly _under_ 4 retirees for every 10 workers (Japan will be 7 for every 10; ouch), so Japan is already in worse shape than the US will ever be. There used to be stories in the news here of someone in their 60s breaking bones trying to lift an 80-year old relative they were caring for. I missed a talk here on this recently, but friends (early 70s) who went said that the take-away was “80 is the new 65”, which they really liked. The pianist/bandleader in the jazz quintet I play guitar in is 84, at least four of the players in the big band I sit in with for two concerts a years are over 80.