Yours Toothfully by Dr Chan Joon Yee

The strangest patients I’ve met are those think that I should give them a discount for insulting me. Do people not realise that if they want a discount, they should at least say something nice to the one who is in the position to give them a discount? Flattery may not work all the time, but being nice is the necessary first step to getting a discount.

My friend Uncle George recently posted me a YouTube video. I realised that there are good places where one can get very cheap dental treatment. Perhaps that’s where I should refer some of my troublesome patients.

Many companies that provide services have taglines. Some are catchy pieces of advice like:

“Don’t leave home without it”

“Just do it”.

Some are boasts like

“The ultimate driving machine”
“The happiest place on earth”
“The world’s favourite airline”

Others are promises, pledges or guarantees if you will.

“Melts in your mouth, not in your hands”

“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”

The problem with such promises is that it’s not always easy to live up to them. For the cosmetic dentist who dares to call himself a cosmetic dentist, patients can expect miracles. Take the example of lady who walked into my clinic recently. She had a terrible looking bridge. I’m always happy to see such cases because it’s so easy to make an improvement.

Not so in this case. After numerous waxups and trials of provisional bridges, she was still not satisfied. She started pointing out ways in which her new bridge differed from her old, ugly bridge as if she was suddenly missing the ugly old bridge. Nightmare. Numerous things to change, numerous times, they were changed back because the changes asked for were just not right. It’s too late to re-access the psychological profile of the patient and the patient, from her point of view, must be wondering if I’m really good enough dedicate myself to cosmetic dentistry. Why do other cases look so perfect in other people’s mouths but not in hers? Shouldn’t I be treating my patient’s equally?

In despair, I sought help from a great man. In a recent speech he made, I learned something important. Cosmetic dentistry is an aspiration and not an ideology. It’s going to take decades or even centuries to reach such goals. Equal treatment for all cases is false and flawed, and completely untrue.

Some people may not believe that these words came from a great man, but what are great words but words that cannot be challenged. Obviously, I lack such greatness and must therefore continue adjusting that stupid bridge.

“Our forefathers were once foreigners here, and they managed to rise up to own property and land, which they have passed down to us, their children. Truly, we have forgotten our roots.”

The blogger who said that didn’t mention if he lives at Serangoon Gardens. I don’t. So why not we try to persuade our fellow citizens at Serangoon Gardens to be more gracious and let the 1000 or so foreign workers stay at the former Serangoon Gardens Technical School? After all, they are contributing to our economy, they are humans too and our ancestors were just like them. See how easy it is to say politically correct things when you are not immersed in the situation?

But let’s put matters in perspective. There are Chinatowns everywhere in the world. Rude, rowdy and spitting mainland Chinese immigrants have once colonised relatively undeveloped places all over the world and turned them into dirty, noisy and chaotic marketplaces that did a lot of good for the regional if not national economy. Had the governments in these countries been hostile towards these folks, they might not have realised their country’s full potential for growth.

As a far more soft-spoken and non-spitting descendent of these Chinese folks, I had a similar intention of building up a “Singapore village” for our retirees in Thailand. We can have a food centre serving laksa, mee siam (without cockles of course), char kway teow (with cockles), Hokkien mee, mee goreng, roti prata (with curry and not condensed milk), nasi lemak, nasi biryani, bak koot teh and nonya cakes. We can have bookshops selling publications which our local bookstores are not keen to carry. We can have a few mahjong tables to steal some local customers from the IRs. We can hold long tea/coffee sessions to gossip about bungling ministers and their well-deserved salaries. In short, it would be a fun place for Singaporeans to feast and have fun in a familiar environment - in Thailand. We can eat, drink, smoke and swear all we want. We can play mahjong late at night. We can even chew gum and act like teenagers.

Does it make me a hypocrite if I sympathise with the unhappy residents at Serangoon Gardens? That would depend on where I decide to build my Sin-Thai Village. Would I be so insensitive as to build it in in front of some prominent landmark in downtown Bangkok? Of course not. This village will have to be in the mountains of Chiangmai or even Mae Hong Son - accessible only by trekking or 4WD. Being an expat “colony”, it has to be low profile and totally unobtrusive. Can I expect to build this village in some Bangkok suburb dominated by middle class yuppies and not expect a major protest?

It’s really a matter of common sense. If I lead an exodus across a desert and set up shop in an undiscovered oasis, nobody is going to bother me. Rewind to the days when our forefathers were rowdy, foul-mouthed, spitting and opium-smoking coolies. Where did they live? Next door to Sir Stamford Raffles? Could Sir Stamford have welcomed the delivery of a steaming bowl of pig organ soup, courtesy of his Chinese neighbours? Could he have welcomed Malay fishermen to feast on durians on his porch? The old Singapore had plenty of space for the various foreign communities to set up shops and cater to their own people’s needs. There was class struggle. There were racial riots. There was poverty. There was widespread illiteracy. And there was even chewing gum and durian intolerance. But decades later, water found its own level. We are reaching a state of equilibrium.

Equilibrated Singapore today is very, very crowded. Chinese, Indian, Malay or Eurasian, we can communicate in English and we know that there are no cockles in mee siam. Another wave of wealth-seeking foreigners has reached our shores. Frightened? Why? They are not criminals - not that we know of. Why can’t we accept them as a part of our society. Nobody is going to die if they put cockles into our mee siam.

But we can’t really accept and embrace people we don’t know. Must we wait for government to declare a Foreign Workers’ Day where each Singaporean family that takes a foreign worker out for a day at Sentosa or the zoo will stand to win a lifetime ERP-free pass? Or is it the duty of common citizens like us to connect with a foreign community operating on a different wavelength, working long hours for 2 years for the sole purpose of sending money back home? How about inviting a few Indian construction workers for tea every Sunday afternoon without the enticement of a lucky draw? How about introducing our maids to them? How about letting them go on dates. They are humans too, aren’t they? They need a social life, don’t they? Our forefathers were like them, weren’t they?