Connections and Disconnections: Forming Parallel Societies in Transience
In this chapter Gomes delivers a captivating description of the at the social spaces transient migrants in Australia and Singapore occupy and puts forward the argument that they live in parallel societies which are exclusively made up of fellow transient
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One of my daily rituals is to read the newsfeed on my Facebook page. Without fail, there will be a handful of comments or links reflecting the anger Singaporeans feel towards foreigners living in Singapore. One of the issues which Singaporeans take offence to is the perceived inability of the foreign migrants (permanent and temporary) to integrate, assimilate and acculturate into Singaporean society. Likewise, whenever I write opinion pieces on international students in Australia, the comments I receive often highlight the opinion that international students don’t speak English and seem only to mix with other international students. Clearly some members of the host nations’ societies take issue with foreigners’ apparent inability to blend in. So why do foreigners, or in this case transient migrants, seem disconnected from their host nations and choose only to socialise with fellow transient migrants? In answering these questions this chapter will examine the social spaces transient migrants in Australia and in Singapore occupy and put forward the argument that they live in parallel societies which are exclusively made up of fellow transient migrants. These parallel societies allow respondents to create a sense of belonging in the host nation yet not to the host nation. This is due to disconnections with local society and culture and, as first mentioned in the chapter ‘Replicating Everyday Home Life in Transience: Connecting to the Home Nation through Social Media and Entertainment Media’, with their home country societies as well. Here they create spaces for themselves in the host nation from their perspective and so experience what the © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 C. Gomes, Transient Mobility and Middle Class Identity, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1639-4_6
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host nation has to offer on their terms. By investigating the communities they inhabit through their social networks and their social media use, the current chapter presents an indirect yet creative way of understanding how transient migrants negotiate everyday life in Australia (with an emphasis on Melbourne) and in Singapore. In doing so, it continues to highlight the ways in which transient migrants make use of social networks and social media in order to feel a sense of belonging in a foreign country. It also encourages us to rethink the ways in which transient migrants engage with host nations, since while transient migrant societies are grounded and nourished in the host nations, membership and experience are exclusively transnational and impermanent.
New Communities, New Societies In my second week of conducting fieldwork in Singapore in 2014, someone asked me what I did over the weekend. I replied that I spent a good part of my Sunday walking along the national shopping strip of Orchard Road but found it incredibly crowded. The person I was talking to replied: ‘It is because Singapore has too many foreigners!’ The comment was not surprising, since Singaporeans have long been critical of the rising number of trans
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