Opinion | Are Singaporeans becoming too entitled and feeding into their inner ‘Karen’?

“They are just a country of small island Karens with main character syndrome who literally think they have all the answers despite having zero perspective on the world.

“Great chilli crab, though.”

We like the chilli crab bit, but the rest rankles.

Perhaps we have grown too addicted to our Mighty Mouse narrative: puny Singapore is so phenomenally successful at making big money that we all qualify for red-carpet treatment.

We resent the insinuation that we live in a bubble, oblivious to others. Because if we agree that we can be brats, we lose face, and we have to follow up by reflecting on how we can do better.

All apologies to anyone named Karen, which in recent years has become pejorative slang for entitled, obnoxious behaviour, usually associated with a rich, white social caste. Apologies that it now, unfairly, refers to anyone who demands a privilege they do not deserve – people who place such stock in their own sticker value that they neglect their flaws elsewhere.

Chieng won’t be the last to call us out for being insufferably smug. He certainly isn’t the first.

In 1998, feeling that Singapore had not behaved as a friend, then-Indonesian President B.J. Habibie reductively dubbed it “that red dot” in The Asian Wall Street Journal.

Just last month, Thailand’s prime minister claimed concert promoter AEG told him the Singapore government had offered Taylor Swift about US$3 million a show (she did six) to perform exclusively in the republic. Responding to the news, a Filipino lawmaker sourly echoed Habibie’s earlier sentiments: that “isn’t what good neighbours do”.

In other headline-making incidents in the years between, Singaporeans have objected to columbariums and migrant-worker dormitories being planned near their upper-class dwellings, fearing they would tank the value of their properties. Not in my backyard, cried all the Karens.

This, despite having decades to intentionally shape our national identity. In fact, Singaporeans are hard-wired to function as part of a larger ecosystem, and maintain a global perspective.

We have a bilingual education so we can honour cultural heritage but also trade with Indonesia, India and China. Economically, we rely on foreign labour from Myanmar, the Philippines and South Asia across all sectors to take jobs we snub. And, with the drive of Pygmalion, national campaigns have been launched to polish us for the international stage: to be more gracious, more courteous, more likely not to spit on the ground.

Yet here we are, 60 years on, in an age where the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) continues to publish regular findings on prevalent discrimination against foreign domestic workers, age, gender and LGBTQ people.

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Sure, we are big investors and also charity donors in the region. But pouring cash on a problem when you have it is easy. Acting the Karen when you are in fact an Ah Beng amid a cast of regional powers is also easy.

But it is dangerous to think that having money excuses anyone from behaving better, or playing well with others.

It implies that we can afford to skimp on empathy.

Even if a tiny country is punching above its size, there are weight classes for a reason. Cash buys things, but social capital leads to genuine friendship. It can’t hurt to think about what would happen to the kid who gets invited to the game because he has the ball, who one day loses that ball.

Interestingly, while Chieng’s job is to make digs that lead to follow-up commentaries such as this, offstage, he is the opposite of his media persona.

In September 2023, he opened his show in Singapore with local comedians who were nowhere near his league, Sharul Channa and Jacky Ng. A few months later, in December, over a personal break to visit his mother in Singapore, he made time for a shoot with a fashion magazine because he had not managed it earlier.

That morning, he arrived early, got his own coffee, and was complimentary to everyone on set.

During the interview, he spoke about how he’d had to manage his own marketing, branding, and representation as he worked his way up. He never told his parents, because he did not expect them to back his decision to pursue show business over a legal career. He wanted to achieve his own success, so he told them only after he found his footing.

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It’s hard to imagine Singaporean parents stepping back to let their children try and fail, before they succeed. Instead, our mums and dads are better known for taking on teachers, principals, even a ministry, to get special treatment. Perhaps at a macro level, the country’s government does the same, all with good intentions.

The trade-off is that we have spoiled ourselves into thinking we no longer need to earn goodwill, and it is enough to simply demand it.

Now, apropos of Chieng’s reference to Lee Kuan Yew, and commemorative of his death anniversary on March 23, 2015, here is an oft-told story of how Singapore’s first prime minister had answered “Remember Ozymandias” to the suggestion that a public structure be named after him.

Alluding to English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet about the rubbled statue of a once-great pharaoh in the desert, Lee had pointed out that prominence and empires, however mighty, all eventually decay. So naming a monument after him would be hubris.

Or, in short: just don’t be Karens. They, too, shall pass.