In a language I do not know

The end of fall was marked by a week of gloom and heavy rain and an acute sense of melancholy I feel in my bones like the first winter chill. Besides the weather, it must also be the student worker strike happening in the background that lends the air a certain charged quality affecting me unconsciously. Harvard is set ablaze, not just in the physical spaces by the fiery autumn leaves and the union strikers banging their plastic drums and chanting their anger, but also in the online spaces reposting stories and receiving many emails about the strike. Harvard has peeled back the nice academic calm of tall oak trees and library steps and shown the messy and noisy – almost market-like chaos – of the machine that keeps the school running. I think about the Yale-NUS saga and the impossibility of strikes in Singapore, how that has left me utterly ignorant and ill-equipped to have a conversation about what was happening around me. Nonetheless, I want to try to make sense of the past few days, even if I am speaking in a language I do not know.

Strikes quite literally have a new language that I have to learn. Maybe it is just because I am not woke enough, but when people started posting/chanting “don’t cross the picket line” or “don’t be a scab” I had no idea what was happening. In my mind floats a line of beautiful white fences in front of a suburban home, or a dirty hard piece of skin I keep picking on my knees. These are terms I have never heard of before (so go look it up for yourself too if you have not seen it before). The labour songs the student workers chant and fill the campus with was also a demonstration of the power of the rhyth, and music of language. It is very similar to military marching music because apparently labour songs were also used to keep time and unite people in their marching and demonstrations. A final thing I have learnt was that it was apparently against the union laws (both spoken or unspoken) to ask a worker whether they were planning to go on strike. Such questioning can be construed to be trying to pressure them into making promises to not go for strike and interfering with their union efforts. All these new things I have learnt reminds me of how a de-politicised society like Singapore quite literally censors the language used in association with strikes and unions.

The rallying cry for undergraduate students like me was to not show up for class/walk out of class (basically don’t cross the picket line) in order to add pressure and disruption to the school administration. To do otherwise would mean being branded as a scab. I did some calculations with my school fees – which I have hitherto ignored – but it amounts to roughly SGD$480 of tuition I am paying per day in the fall term. The ever-practical Singaporean, I think the opportunity cost of striking was not worth it. My family is just not rich enough for me to treat a Harvard education as something I could turn away from, especially if it is affecting three days of my classes which amounts to the monthly salary of some people. It is inherently selfish – we want to stand for the change and we want to support it, as long as it does not inconvenience ourselves. I am hesitant to judge myself whether this is necessarily a bad or good thing, because I do think we are all entitled to a bit of selfishness as individuals.

Besides, I thought it was ridiculous and unfair to demonstrate support that way. First of all, I am sure that some undergraduates will join the strike just so that they do not have to go for classes, because there were always small victory fist pumps and celebrations when a Teaching Fellow announced they were not holding their classes. To most of us that is extremely disruptive, but for some the free holiday seems great, so would it still be striking if it is for the wrong reasons? Secondly, I don’t think any of the professors or relief Teaching Fellows who still hold classes during the strike (the scabs basically) do that maliciously, but because of a contractual obligation to fulfil. The University surely must have aggressively come up with contingency plans to deal with the disruption of the strike and pressured the few teaching staff remaining to teach. It seems very disrespectful to the few who, no matter willingly or unwillingly, shows up to give us the education and keep academia a de-politicised space for learning.

No matter how much I justified to myself, when I approached the building for my class, which was coincidentally the epicentre of the strike, I felt sweat prickle on my back and was overwhelmed, both by shame and by the loudness of the chants of the slowly circling mass of strikers. I was ashamed to see my Teaching Fellows there, feel their eyes follow me into the building, crossing the picket fence. With the thick skin I have newly acquired after a few months of the American air, I smiled and waved at them and pretended to be completely innocent.

It is nothing short of exploitative for both the university administration and student union to weaponise guilt. I am suddenly caught in a family feud, standing between Mum and Dad and I have to pick a side to a lose-lose war. Harvard knows that students would want to continue classes, and does everything they can to enable that, so we feel guilty for ditching class. The union also knows that anyone of us with a shred of liberal morals would also feel bad for turning away from their cause, and they stare and question and bugger you into a shrivelled fist of guilt. I felt, very keenly, my weakness and inability to do anything between these two diametrically opposed powers. Undergraduates are stuck with no bargaining power (somewhat of a parallel to Singapore’s foreign policy). I just have to feel guilty and endure that fallout as I must.

To ease my guilt, I decided to show my support by scanning a QR code on the flyers they hand out and send an email to the school administration. I had filled in all my information, then I read again the instructions again and realised it was going to flood the email addresses of individual board members in the administration (understandably so, because they probably have the final say). That bothered me a bit, but I was willing to still do it. What I found to be – here’s a hot take – extremely distasteful though, is that they have even included the personal handphone numbers of the few administrators and asked us to call and text and reach out as many times as we want. A nice way to encourage online harassment. What is the difference between this behaviour and hazing and cyber bullying? Does fighting for a social cause ever justify harassment and invading other people’s privacy? What if they have need to make an important call to their families or people in their lives? Something rose up in me, and I discarded the email I was going to send.

This entire ordeal made me wonder how much of my seemingly scabby and unsupportive attitude is a result of the influence of Singapore, a society that has aimed to defang the tools of disruption in us since young. Not only do I not have the apt language to talk about this, I do not have the same political courage to stand up for a cause. Too balanced and objective. Typical rational Singaporean. Am I just like this just because I am not “liberal” enough? I have always disliked mob behaviour and “with us or against us” rhetoric, so how much of it is just my own moral code? What if I am just engaging in this conversation in a deeply flawed and underqualified way? However, seeing the fact that the classroom for the scabs is filled with students who refuse to let it disrupt their learning, surely I am not the only one of this opinion? I am unsure if we are the majority or the minority, because we could very well simply be the silent majority being pressured by a very loud very passionate minority of the school population.

If I were to reflect on Singapore, perhaps the same fuel for strikes and demonstrations exist too – the passionate discourse on the Yale-NUS closure is proof that there are many university students who have a cause to fight for. The only difference is that unionising is illegal, and that there is a disciplinary system in Singapore universities (as compared to Harvard, where I was shocked to hear that the only few disciplinary boards are used for plagiarism and dishonest academic practices). Perhaps that makes all the difference. Singapore is losing something by leaving all of us so completely unprepared to respond in an appropriate language to political differences.

That said, I wonder if strikes and unions are really the best response to a problem? For all the progress we make here in America about fighting for our own rights being free to lobby and protest for whatever cause, it is an extremely harassing experience to go through, and brings about great disruption. Disruption in small things like temporary closures of some services and buildings, to big things like grading system and timeline for covering lesson material (my math lesson for example had to readjust the exam scope and homework grading in view of the missing lessons this week).

It is also inherently unfair to anyone caught in between the vertical and lateral riffs of the two opposing parties. Professors and teaching staffs sandwiched between the administration and student union are pressured to teach, and have to deal with an influx of student concerns and extra work trying to mitigate disruption to their lessons (my math professor is an ancient old man whose pale skin is threaded with blue veins and he has to lean in to hear you ask a question, and when he had to deliver the fourth make up lesson of the day I felt that this was just sad); moderate students who do not really have or want to take a strong stance on the issue is guilt tripped and manipulated by both parties to get back at the other.

Finally, there is also the question whether the costs of such strikes are worth the payoff. Would it really be effective to pressure Harvard administration into making a concession? The emails we send could very easily be marked to go to trash, or easily cleared with two clicks of the mouse. What if we really are just like 孙悟空(the monkey king) dancing around like a fool in the palms of 如来佛 (buddha)? Then again, this just might be my practical upbringing’s incompatibility with a liberal state.

For someone who really does not speak the language of these issues, I think I have written enough on this topic. While the strikes left me feeling bewildered, it has given me a lot of think about how Singapore should approach the admittedly very sensitive issue of building a strong civic society. Should we seek a middle ground? Is there even a middle ground to be found? As with many other things I am learning at Harvard, there are only questions with inadequate answers.