A letter published in the national Chinese-language broadsheet squarely blamed foreign workers’ living habits for spreading the virus. “Many of them come from backward countries,” the writer claimed. “They like to gather and have poor personal hygiene. Aren’t migrant workers themselves responsible for this state they’re in now?”


Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam slammed the letter for being insensitive and xenophobic. “We are bigger than the sentiments expressed in that letter,” he said. But you only have to dip your toe in the shallow waters of social media to see that such sentiments are common here.

When the coronavirus first arrived in Singapore in late January, the culprits were also outsiders. A taxi driver cheerfully told me he was no longer picking up passengers with mainland Chinese accents. The bias shifted fleetingly to European tourists after Italy and Spain began reporting record numbers.

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xenophobic attack There was outrage and concern when a Chinese-Singaporean student in London was beaten up in a, but with little sense of irony, the search for a foreign scapegoat continued here. Then our borders closed, so we looked inward, landing conveniently on the country’s most vulnerable population.

“circuit breaker” Foreign domestic workers – the “maid girlfriends” from the WhatsApp message – were the first group in Singapore to experience a taste of lockdown conditions two weeks before the government implemented a nationwideto curb a second wave of infections.

advisory As the employer of an Indonesian nanny, I received an emailfrom the government urging me to keep her at home on her days off. The fear was that these women, who keep Singaporean homes clean, would practise poor hygiene nonetheless, and spread the virus at their weekend gatherings. On the other hand, I was still trusted to move freely and comply with safe distancing measures.

The distinction between foreign workers and citizens has always existed in our systems, but the deepening societal divisions are worrying. Recently, several neighbours chided our nanny for letting my toddler take off his face mask while they were out on a walk.

“Ask them to try to keep a mask on a two-year-old then,” I said. She is known to sharply face down this kind of citizen policing – last year, a woman threatened to report her for negligence because my son was running around outside barefoot. “What would the mother say?” the woman asked, to which our nanny replied, “She would tell you to shut up.”


This time though, she just cut the walk short and hurried home. “Nowadays,” she said, “it’s better not to argue.”

Balli Kaur Jaswal's novel Sugarbread, a multigenerational story about racism in Singapore, was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018