Date : 31 January 2010
31 January 2010
Trend shows growing integration between races here, say experts
By Tan Dawn Wei
She is Malay but has never had a Malay boyfriend before.
He is Chinese and had never had a non-Chinese girlfriend before.
But four years ago, Mr Winston Ong fell in love with Ms Jihan Kinnear after he attended a course at a training company where she worked. They married a year later.
'We were a very unlikely couple. I'm very extroverted. He's an IT geek. But the race thing never came up,' said Ms Kinnear, 27, now a headhunter. Mr Ong, 32, is a technical analyst.
She had it easy. There had been many mixed marriages in her family, including her own mother, who remarried an Englishman, and several of her aunts.
But his parents - a Chinese Malaysian father and a Taiwanese mother - took a while to come around to the idea of having a daughter-in-law of another race.
These days, few will bat an eyelid whether it is an Indian and Chinese couple, a Chinese and Eurasian pair or a Caucasian and Malay twosome walking down the aisle.
The issue of mixed marriages came up recently in Parliament after several Members of Parliament asked if the Government would let parents of different ethnicities reflect both their races on their children's identity cards.
The answer was yes: Soon, parents can give their children double- barrelled race classifications on their birth certificates, like Indian- Chinese, Malay-Chinese and Chinese-Eurasian.
Before that even kicks in, parents in interracial marriages can, starting this month, decide if their children want to take the race of the mother or the father. Previously, the child had to take the father's race.
Mixed marriages have been on a steady climb since official statistics became available in 1961. But it was not until the last 10 years that the numbers saw a big leap: 16.4 per cent of about 24,000 marriages in 2007 were interracial compared to 8.9 per cent of about 25,000 marriages a decade before.
The number could well be larger than this, given that the statistics taken from the Registry of Marriages come from the races reflected on couples' identity cards.
They do not take into account the possibility that any of these newlyweds could themselves be from mixed marriages too, since, up until the recent change, a person takes on only his father's race on his IC.
National University of Singapore sociologist Tan Ern Ser said given that Singapore has emphasised integration since its beginning, it should come as no surprise that Singaporeans or residents are intermarrying.
'After all, intermarriage is usually considered a very strong indicator of integration. It suggests a narrowing of social distance between the different ethnic categories in Singapore. Indeed, if this is not happening, we should be asking why,' he said.
'As more Singaporeans become more highly educated, belong to the same (middle) class, go through the same system, speak the same language, eat the same range of food, watch the same drama series, laugh at the same jokes, and do things together, the probability of getting hitched should be increasing,' said the professor.
The country's regionalisation drive has also meant increased business and cultural exchanges as foreign companies set up shop here, while Singapore firms take their investments abroad.
Manpower Ministry statistics show there are about one million foreigners working in Singapore.
Since 1999, the authorities have also made it easier for foreign husbands of Singaporean women to apply for citizenship.
They are eligible if they have been permanent residents for at least two years and the family is able to support itself.
At Lunch Actually, a matchmaking agency which hooks up professionals, about half of its members say they do not mind meeting someone from another race.
'Many expatriates are now based in Singapore. So many singles have had the experience of working with people of other races or nationalities. And they realise that actually, they can really relate and communicate with one another despite being of a different skin tone or colour,' said Ms Violet Lim, Lunch Actually's co-founder.
It is not just the educated, cosmopolitan set in Singapore that has looked past ethnicity when it comes to love.
Mr Francis Toh, who runs Overseas International Matchmaker, an agency that pairs up Singaporean men with brides primarily from
Vietnam and China, said Singaporeans are much more open to marrying someone of another race now.
'I think we're quite racially blind. It's the mothers who sometimes insist that the brides be from the same race,' he said.
About 5 per cent of his clientele are Indian Singaporean men who marry Vietnamese women.
In his 2007 book The Population Of Singapore, Professor Saw
Swee Hock of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies pointed out that opportunities for racial intermingling in public housing estates, schools and workplaces exist and have been helped by the wide use of the English language as part of the Government's racial assimilation programme.
He also computed an interracial marriage rate that showed that the proportion of Indian men who marry outside their race in 2006 was highest at 36 per cent, followed by Malay men at 22.5 per cent. Chinese men scored only 7.6 per cent.
For women, only 5.1 per cent of Chinese women had interracial marriages in the same year, compared to 22.7 per cent for Indian women and 22.9 per cent for Malay women.
'The willingness to marry outside one's race appears to vary conversely with the size of the population because the small supply of marriageable persons from one's own community in a small population is one of the important factors determining mixed marriages,' he wrote.
'This will naturally be reinforced by a common religion such as Christianity, and hence the extremely high incidence of mixed marriages among the minority races known collectively as 'Others'.'
This category includes Eurasians and Caucasians, who had an interracial marriage rate of 77 per cent.
At the 4,000-strong Church of the Holy Spirit in Upper Thomson Road, parish priest Reverend Andrew Wong has seen an influx of foreigners with local spouses at services.
'People have become more open, more cosmopolitan and more educated,' he said.
But the Ongs are unlikely to take up the double-barrelled race classification option.
'I'm quite happy to have them follow Daddy. I feel having the
children be Chinese will give them more opportunities in life because it's more straightforward rather than having to explain I'm this or that,' said Ms Kinnear.
(With thanks to SPH - StraitsTimes.com)
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