When I first moved to Singapore, I made the same mistake most newcomers make.
Something felt abrupt or unfamiliar, so I assumed there was a problem. Not with me. With Singapore.
It didn’t take long to figure out the truth.
You are not going to change Singapore. If you stay long enough, Singapore changes you. And honestly, that is not a bad thing.
Why I Chose Singapore
Before landing here, I had been backpacking around Southeast Asia. Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand. I loved the food, the culture, the people, the pace. Then I arrived in Singapore and felt something I wasn’t expecting.
It had all the energy of Asia, the hawker centres, the mix of cultures, the density, the heat, but it also had English everywhere. Government in English. Schools in English. Road signs you could actually read. Same side of the road.
Asia, but with the subtitles already on.
Comfortable but not boring. Efficient but not sterile. It kept me here.
The Culture Shock Nobody Warned Me About
It wasn’t the heat. It wasn’t the food. It was the abruptness.
You go to a coffee shop. You hand over money. The uncle throws the change onto the counter. No smile. No small talk. No performative warmth.
You think: okay then.
Back in the UK, we layer everything with politeness. We apologise for standing in the wrong spot. We make conversation in post offices. We over-explain our own existence.
Here, it is just: “What you want?”
At first it can feel rude. If you let that feeling grow, you will start resenting it, and that is usually when people leave.
But here is what I learned. It is not rudeness. It is efficiency. It is directness. It is linguistic economy.
Now when I go back to the UK and a shop assistant starts chatting about my weekend, part of me thinks: why are you talking to me? Just scan the item.
You adapt. And once you do, the abruptness stops feeling like a wall. It just feels honest.
Singapore Changed, And I Watched It Happen
I started teaching in government schools in the early 2000s.
Back then, classrooms were extremely regimented. You would ask “What do you think?” and the room would go completely quiet. Students were hesitant to volunteer opinions. Debate activities were hard work to get started.
Over the years, something shifted. Students became more expressive, more willing to push back, more confident sharing a view that was different from the textbook answer. Society was loosening slightly. Not dramatically, but noticeably.
Singapore is often described as conservative. And in some ways it is. But it is also aggressively progressive in infrastructure and technology. Old buildings get knocked down without much nostalgia. New ones go up fast. High-speed internet has been a normal household expectation here for years while parts of the UK were still buffering.
Conservative in some values. Pragmatic and progressive in execution.
It does not fit neatly into Western political labels, and once you stop trying to force it into those boxes, it makes a lot more sense.
Local School: Before and After Having My Own Son
Before my boy entered the system, I would have said confidently: the local system is great. Rigorous, structured, focused. Keeps kids out of trouble.
When I was a kid in England, “after school” meant loitering, mild chaos, and occasionally getting told off by neighbours. Here, children are rarely idle. School, enrichment, tuition, CCA. You see kids in uniform on weekends.
But when it is your own child, you see the pressure differently.
You see the tiredness. You notice the weight of PSLE building up. You see how quickly grades can become identity.
Now I think balance matters more than I used to. Structure is good. Discipline is good. But so is space to breathe. That perspective only came from watching it up close.
Being Called Ang Moh
After 20 plus years, people sometimes ask how it feels to be a foreigner here.
Honestly, I have had very few problems.
If your default personality setting is: be polite, do not argue unnecessarily, give people the benefit of the doubt, do not take things personally, life here is smooth.
Yes, I have been called ang moh. It literally means red-haired and is used colloquially for white people. It is a label. A descriptor. Labels are not automatically insults. You can turn any word negative just by adding the wrong adjective in front of it.
I once had a student tell me to go back to my own country.
Instead of getting angry, I grinned.
Back home, people say that to immigrants. Now it was happening to me. It was oddly symmetrical. It made me reflect rather than react.
That habit, zooming out instead of flaring up, makes life easier anywhere, not just in Singapore.
Singlish and Why I Code-Switch
People ask why I do not just speak Singlish all the time.
The simple answer: I was an English teacher. My job was to model standard English. Speaking like I had grown up in Toa Payoh would not have helped the Year 5 students I was trying to get to write a proper essay.
But of course I code-switch. In a taxi or at a kopitiam, you adjust. You do not want to sound like you are ordering chicken rice in a Victorian novel.
From a linguistic standpoint, Singlish is genuinely fascinating. Three things stand out.
First, the grammar. It follows patterns influenced by Chinese sentence structure. “Why like that?” mirrors Chinese word order, not English.
Second, verb simplification. A student once asked me “Can I keep my books?” I thought, of course, they are your books. But what they meant was can I put them away in my bag. The word “keep” in Chinese carries both meanings, possession and storage, and that crossed over.
Third, the particles. Lah, lor, leh. These function almost like emotional punctuation, changing the tone and meaning of a whole sentence depending on how you say them.
And then there is timing. English stretches syllables in specific ways. Singlish syllables tend to be more evenly timed. That subtle rhythm difference is why faking the accent convincingly is much harder than people think.
It is not broken English. It is a system. Once you see it as a system, it becomes interesting rather than irritating.
The One Thing I Tell Every New Expat
If someone has been here two years and is on the fence about staying, I say this.
Analyse your pros and cons. That is sensible.
But remember one thing.
You are not going to change Singapore. You have to change your attitude towards Singapore.
If you are still interpreting everything through your home-country filter, reading directness as rudeness, reading efficiency as coldness, you will always feel friction. But if you slow down your judgments and assume most people are not actually out to offend you, the place opens up.
Singapore is not cold. It just does not perform warmth for strangers the way some Western cultures do. Warmth here tends to come after familiarity.
Earn your way into the warm version.
What I Try to Teach My Son
After more than 20 years, the principles have not changed.
Be on time. Be polite. Respect people. Give others the benefit of the doubt. Do not rush to judge.
Simple. Boring, maybe. But they have served me well here.
Singapore does not feel like a foreign country to me anymore. It feels like a system I have learned to read.
And once you stop fighting the system, you start seeing its logic.
You are not going to change Singapore.
But if you let it, Singapore will change you. Quietly, gradually, and probably for the better.
