[February] I am a GEMM

I am in the midst of preparing for my reading seminar and thought this was an important entry that I ought to make.

I had chosen the topic of culture initially without knowing what the content of the readings were as I was keen to explore the place of culture in therapy.

When I started to pick up the readings, I thought that one of the readings was very close to heart for me. It had me reflected on a lot of current experiences being a minority here in London.

What struck me was the acronym GEMM – Good, Effective, Mainstream Minority. I have not come across that and perhaps, not necessarily experienced it entirely previously.

In Singapore, I am a member of the racial majority. While I am possibly guilty of participating in racial microaggression, I think by and large, I have been rather respectful of other races and took against outright discriminatory acts. I remember thinking that Singapore is a multi-cultural place where we try to promote and value racial harmony. We generally see our fellow people from other racial groups as fellow Singaporeans than Singaporeans from different racial groups. Or so I thought. I realised I was speaking from a place of privilege. After reading the paper from Afuape, I reflected on this belief and thought that I do not know what fellow Singaporeans from other racial groups have gone through.

This thought was particularly salient when I recounted the experiences I have been having in London. I have been here for one and a half year. To be honest, I do not think anyone has been particularly hostile or nasty towards me because of who I am. But I will say that there had been times I had felt that my ethnicity or accent has influenced how others perceived me and it had not always been comfortable.

To cite an example, I had received more than 10 years of education with English as the medium of teaching. Nonetheless, I realised that owing to various cultural and personal reasons, languages have not been my strengths be it English or Mandarin. As a nation, our language competencies vary significantly. By and large, most of the younger generations are able to communicate effectively in English and a second language with our fellow countrymen. But, with the outside world, special effort have to be made for others to understand our accents especially given our tendencies to speak in a staccato manner and rush through our speech. At times, I received compliments for being able to manage to do a programme in English when that is not being my first language. I do not actually know how to respond to that. Should I clarify with the person? What was the unspoken message behind this statement? Was I being overly sensitive? But for the most part, I behave myself as a GEMM.

I took the opportunity during the reading seminar to speak about this. I think to increase our cultural competency, we need to be able to recognise how prejudices can look like. Outright oppression is often easy to pick out and spoken against. The bias in comments or actions influenced by stereotypes are often subtle and unintentional. Perhaps things like microaggression could be more widely discussed in our work. Living in a society where norms are shaped by the majority can have a bearing on a minority's thoughts, feelings, behaviour, identity and eventually mental health. My personal experiences had made me a lot more aware of these possibilities.

I meet quite a lot of migrant families in my course of practice. Being a minority myself in London now, I thought that this has been an important learning point for me to know what it can possibly mean to be a minority. At the same time, this experience makes me conscious of my majority privilege back home and I do not think I can look at some things the same way anymore. There have been too many examples that I had taken things for granted such as buying lunch from a stall owner who can only speak Mandarin. Retrospectively, these were moments of daily lives which might not had not been things easy for my non-Chinese Singaporeans.