Roll Out the Champagne, Singapore! by Catherine Lim

Author:Catherine Lim
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814561976
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International

17

The Sixth C

Here is a rather sad story of a Singaporean man named Benny Tham who, at the time of this writing, is in his late seventies. He had a major problem when he was approaching his fifties, and since it was said to be a common one among Singaporean males in his age group, his story is theirs too. If he had been asked to give the cause of his melancholy, he would have said, simply and succinctly, ‘The missing Sixth C.’ He would not say what that was, but would add that his fellow Singaporean males would understand the loss very well.

Benny’s tale is certainly a complex one, and requires much careful telling. It is about the interplay, many years ago, of three occurrences in the Singapore social and cultural landscape, each of which was significant and distinctive enough to merit a special label. The first was called the Kia Bor Syndrome, the second the Lee Kuan Yew Shocker, and the third the Tanaka Effect. All three had combined to cause that mysterious missing Sixth C that was giving Benny such heartache. But each will have to be presented as a separate narrative to understand its impact on Benny Tham.

The Kia Bor Syndrome: This condition was first pointed out by the then Prime Minister Mr Goh Chok Tong. Kia Bor means, literally, ‘fear of one’s wife’. A man who is a Kia Bor can have such a deeply rooted fear of his wife that he does not dare do anything that will provoke her wrath. It can be a pathological condition if it leads to an overwhelming helplessness for which he can find no cure.

The English dictionary has a word for such a husband — ‘henpecked’. It conjures for the male a painful image of an aggressive hen repeatedly pecking at a poor rooster that is squawking in pain as his feathers are being plucked out in clusters by that powerful beak. The hen is supposed only to peck at those hens below her in the barnyard hierarchy, and these hens are supposed to peck at those below them, and so on, down to the bottom of the ‘pecking’ order. The rooster does not belong to this order; indeed he is above it, as he is the lord of the barnyard, with his harem of hens. Hence, in becoming the victim of the ferocious female, he has unwittingly allowed her to upset the social hierarchy, the universal scheme of things.

That was, for Benny Tham, the worst aspect of the Kia Bor syndrome. He realised to his alarm, that like the poor rooster, he had allowed the overturning of the natural order, and thus deprived himself of his male pride and self-worth. Benny resented the fact that for all Singapore’s reputation as a largely patriarchal society in the Confucianist tradition, male dominance in politics, public administration and business was only a facade. Singapore was in truth ruled by women.

Singapore women had become so well-educated, so career-minded and so articulate that they held the true reins of power.

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