Loud American Kids

In the northwestern corner of Singapore, within the neighborhood boundaries of Marsiling and Woodlands, there’s a group of people with accents and traditions different from that of typical Singaporeans. It’s a place every GrabFood driver in the area knows how to get to. Singapore American School (SAS), as one Redditor describes, is “the school tucked away at the remote corner of [Singapore].” “That’s the American expat enclave,” says another.

At SAS, there’s a large table on the ground floor near the entrance where food is delivered, where many students in the middle of the day receive their lunch or snacks. On the consistently crowded table are bubble tea, fast food and fries, and bowls of Japanese donburi and ramen. Every few minutes there’s a student—or a group of students—walking down the staircase beside it, checking their phone, matching it against the order number, and running back up. There’s also a sign on the same table warning against stealing food and pointing out the security cameras in the vicinity.

Students of international schools are in a privileged bubble separated from the rest of the population to many around the world. Although one writer in Shanghai describes Chinese New Year celebrations and Mandarin lessons at an international school, she does not feel as if people are “truly immersed.” Expats are “privileged enough to have the ability to live in comfortable ignorance.”

With the lack of a significant language barrier between American students and Singaporeans—both speak English—one may expect that the situation at SAS is a bit different. A student can walk from school to a nearby hawker center (a neighborhood complex for affordable meals) to Marsiling MRT station and eventually arrive home; they would understand every sign, every announcement, every transaction. The SAS student does not need to point at the menu to order from the hawker center.

Yet students may still be seen as “spoiled and out of touch.” Pictures of “ang moh” (slang for White) students—SAS students—breaching COVID-19 protocol and sitting with their feet up on the MRT still make for good news. And if the typical Singaporean never interacts with the typical SAS student, they may still be reminded of past incidents and an old reputation.

I take the same journey from one of the campus gates every day, saying hi to the neighborhood cat that purrs cutely enough that I stay to spend some time with him every once in a while. And on a rather uneventful afternoon in April, I took that same path home with my friends. I remember seeing a lot more white along that void deck, the ground floor where community gatherings occur: I had been around for long enough to recognize that it was a funeral.

As my friends and I yelled at each other, complaining about homework and gossiping about everything that had happened in our grade, I took brief notice of the funeral and mentally stored it away. I did not need to be anything other than a loud American kid at that moment. From the bus stop I could see in my peripheral vision both a large patch of white and more loud American kids walking past the funeral. They were moving slowly and unable to walk in a straight line, either talking loudly in groups or fixated on their phones. Clearly I was no different from any of them, even if some part of me said that I should be quiet, because I ignored it.

But I had taken this same path every day for years. An outsider would call me a member of this community. Why, then, would I turn a blind eye to what was happening? Why would I not have the respect to be quiet, to even think about what I had just walked past for more than two seconds? Did the death of one of these people really mean nothing to me? Or was I just not a member of the community but an irrelevant outsider who should have minded his own business?

When I joined a service club for a soup kitchen once, my first service meeting involved taking a taxi to the neighborhood of Jalan Besar. We picked up a large bag of freshly wrapped warm cooked meals, walked to a nearby HDB block, and delivered the food to four units per floor. It surprised me that something felt different after spending half an hour delivering the food and checking off all the boxes in a badly worn-out piece of paper. I had been here before and I had walked past some of the people here, but I had not talked to any of them before now. There were parts of Singapore I never got the chance to see—kids watching television, old ladies taking thirty seconds just to get to the door, parents waiting patiently for us and making it clear they were glad we were here. I had been around most of the island, but seeing the people felt different.

We weren’t loud American kids in the obnoxious sense. If anything, I was the opposite. Every time I bumped into someone, I would say “sorry” at a volume only I could hear, without having any eye contact with the person I bumped into at all. But I still couldn’t say I fit in: whenever I ordered from hawkers or talked to the people there, my accent was still American, even though my face looked like one of them and not an “ang moh.” I could try to understand some of the Cantonese and Hokkien those hawkers spoke, but it couldn’t come from my own voice.

The issue was not the volume of my voice; if anything, the thing that stopped people like me—SAS students, or any other international school student in Singapore—from fitting in was not being loud enough. Not having the hawker remember my face, not being able to look at the person I’m saying sorry to, and not knowing when to be quiet. If I was loud enough to know anyone there, I would have been quieter at the funeral.