I believe what I am going to say is going to strike a cord among many singles living in modern Asian societies. My upbringing taught me this: girls are at their best when they are eighteen in junior colleges/high school.  Once they enter universities at around nineteen, they are expected to study and also start finding their boyfriends. When they start working, not only should they find a good job with a good salary, they should also quickly get a boyfriend. At around the age of 26 to 28, they should quickly settle down and start a family. By the age of early thirties, they should have two children, ideally a boy and a girl.

Well, I chose a major that my parents didn’t encourage because it was so new that they did not know what it means – Communication Studies (huh??). My mother was disappointed that I did not follow the accounting route (all girls should take accounting, because it is an iron rice bowl for them and they can do it at home when they have their own families). However, long story short, I didn’t. Not only that, because I have more females than male schoolmates in my cohort (70 female versus 30 male), I didn’t have much chance nor options meeting much guys. My holiday jobs were also female-oriented in positions such as sales assistants or temporary administrative assistants. I started to wonder if there was any problem with me. Yes, eventually I realised I have been dressing too unattractively in pants and shirts, and having straight rebonded hair. I was even wearing the wrong bra size throughout my twenties. I was an idiot seriously. It was in my early thirties that I found that with a permed/wavy hair, some light make-up, and occasional dresses or more feminine tops, PLUS the correct bra size, I was actually attracting attention from guys in the train or shopping malls. It was a great sign of relief as I seriously thought there was something really wrong with me.

Throughout my marketing and now communications career, I still work in a predominantly female environment. Chinese new year and weddings became a torture for me because relatives would start asking me if I have any news etc. Although I know they meant well, it was absolutely annoying for me. Even my mother thought she has “no face” in front of the relatives.  At my most recent cousin wedding younger than me by six years or so, my uncle was so concerned that he came over to tell me the merits of having a husband and a family. So I became a 剩女 (literally means “leftover”, pronounced as shengnu). Actually I don’t think I qualify as a 剩女, because the definition means after marriageable age (usually in thirties, have high education and hold a high-paying job). Well, I don’t have a high-paying job.  

During the age of 27 to 30, I admitted I became anxious of my singlehood. I envied friends who posted pictures of their wedding photos and soon after, baby photos on their facebook. I started going on speed dating events, met up with guys online and even met them offline. However, I soon realised something. If your time is not right, you would not find the right person. And when you spend intimate time with someone not on the same frequency, each minute passes really slowly. And you got to smile and pretend to be interested in the conversation (Usually I act extra nice and proper towards people I am not familiar with). It’s tiring and I gave up.

As I stepped into my early thirties, I began to compare my married friends and single friends (thankfully, yes I do have quite a fair bit of single friends as well). My married friends start to whine about their husbands, daily chores and mother-in-law horror stories. They also started to complain and talked more about the hardships and troubles of raising kids. However, kids became closer to their hearts than their husbands. In fact, kids surpassed their husbands and became the top spot in their hearts. I wondered in my heart if that was good. When kids grow up, they will leave with their own spouse and set up their own families. It is a very sad scenario when you realised you have nothing to talk to your husband after all these years.

Maybe because I have met a lot of colleagues, some of their divorce stories actually affected me in a negative way. Some of my friends’ not-so-happy marriages also painted a negative picture of marriage to me. In fact, right now, I am slowly relishing the freedom and simplicity that my singlehood life brings. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. Of course, there are down sides too. Whenever I want to go to concert, movies or especially travel, it is hard for me to find companions. My single friends have their own preferences and schedule to follow as well, and I cannot expect them to adhere to my schedule too.

I must also admit that at this age, I do not say much about my status to my colleagues as well. Society has this negative view of singles at workplace. When one hits thirties and still single, colleagues will start gossiping behind her back that there must be something wrong about her. It is ALWAYS the girl.

Facing pressure from parents, workplace and relatives, sometimes I get depressed as well. And yes another down side to being single is you have no one you can turn to when you are unhappy or happy. There is no one to share your joys and sorrows.

In the past, the government even imposes housing regulations that are unfair to the singles. Only couples that are getting married were given rights to purchase houses from the government at a subsidised rate. I am glad that finally this unfair system has seen some changes and singles are now also eligible to purchase these subsidised houses, albeit the restrictions on location.

I wish the society could be kinder to singles. We singles are humans with emotions after all. We need to support ourselves and our families on our own and cope with our daily emotions on our own as well. It takes a lot of courage and independence to do that. So please, stop asking us to stop being choosy. Sometimes we are not and our wish is very simple – to find someone that we can connect. Not all of us are fortunate enough to meet that guy in our twenties. So stop all those negative labelling. 

As one grows older, you become firmer and clearer on what you want, not what others want you to do. You become clearer that you really DO NOT want something, and you set out to do it. I am one of those passive defiant types of children that used to be very obedient and even look obedient on the outside when I was young.  But in reality, I like to defy against things that I do not believe in.  This trait in me showed up as I reached adulthood. But this journey was indeed not easy.  Thankfully the more someone tries to bring me down, the more fighting spirit it generates within me. Thus through this journey of heeding my own voice I learnt a few things.

1.       Career switch is never easy

First, at the age of 28, I finally decided marketing was not for me. I worked in a famous cosmetics company doing one aspect of marketing. The corporate culture at that time was totally fantastic, the colleagues were good and my boss was great – it was like working for a male boss except without the dick. I got work-life balance and it was my first regional role, except it was still related to marketing. I remembered walking out of the office on my last day telling myself I would never want to work in another marketing job again. I took a finance course and a Japanese course at the same time, and suffered from nervous breakdown as my health suffered from the intense schedule I put myself through. The next three years were spent trying to figure out my next career move and whether I was able to switch into it successfully. I freelanced at small PR sweat shops but I gained quite a fair bit of experience to know this was something that I like to do – research and writing. I also tried to get some freelance writing assignments. I knew writing was something I wanted to do, not the journalism hours but the pay that public relations practitioners could get. Hence I moved into public relations finally after three years of moving in and out of jobs to figure out. My ultimate wish is to be a full-time writer/blogger but I need the money to sustain myself and my parents. Hence, doing this website is one step towards my dream. However in total, I “wasted” three years during the transition period and also having to start off on a slower pace compared to my peers who have been in this line since day one.

2.       There will always be people who say you CANNOT.

I had this boss that once commented that I was lousy in writing. I thought so when she sat me down beside her to correct my grammar. I got to admit I always had to pay attention to my subject-verb agreement but I refused to believe my writing was so bad. My instinct told me she just simply wanted this person to do the coordination work, administrative work and some of the bullshit branding work that she was responsible. I left after four months without a good job in hand. I knew it was risky but it was worse for me to stay on. Eventually, I still made it to a public relations agency, wrote a lot and even took on freelance writing. Had I chose to stay on, I think till now I would still be doing meaningless administrative work and branding work that I simply hate.

3.       Working for others is meaningless. Only working for yourself truly counts.

I spent a lot of time at work since young. I hated and in fear of long working hours now because I simply refused to give my life away to work. Big corporations will continue to survive without you. So why should you spend so much of your time there? Why spend time generating ideas and writing a perfect piece of work, which subsequently will be dismantled and destroyed by someone else simply because of their rank? I rather use my ideas on my OWN work. If it works, all glory, money and credit goes to MYSELF. Some months back, I suddenly had this great urge to be my own entrepreneur as I read in the papers on the stories of many businessmen building their own wealth and networks. For me, I never dream of becoming a millionaire. I simply want to be able to sustain myself on my dream. Well, bread and passion are both essential in life. And I definitely do not wish to lead a life on bread alone.

4.       Have faith in yourself and experiment.

If you don’t believe in yourself, who will? Right now, many jobs are rejecting me because I do not have social media background. To me, social media is not about how many modes/channels you are familiar with, but rather the content creation and generation (which I think the power of public relations in social media has been too belittled. But that is for another post). And I am determined to use this website to experiment and prove to others that CONTENT is KING. Not using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc with the same story. IT DOESN’T WORK! You are just insulting your audience.

What are your thoughts? I would love to hear from my readers. 

The successful set up of this website meant a lot to me.  I have been pondering about setting up a website of my own, primarily to satisfy two desires. First, I have wasted my precious ten years during my twenties thinking that I cannot write, and was utterly miserable in my marketing career. To me, marketing is CRAP. All those so-called marketing strategies are simply BULLSHIT. After experiencing myself, I find that marketeers very often are just getting tons of vendors to help them do the work. Market research, find a market research agency to do it. Advertising, get an advertising agency to do it (which is often fluff). Public relations, source for an agency to do it. In the end, as I pursued this route further, I realised I might very well be a jack of all trades but master of none. I will just be a high level coordinator at the end of the day. Is this what I want? No. But I admit I have side-tracked. I will devote one post to this topic very soon. 

Secondly, I am sick of the corporate shit out there. As I shifted from marketing to my current role as a public relations/corporate communications role, life gets shitter. No matter how good you are in writing, it always gets vetted by the top management who are not as good as you in terms of grammar and the way media works. However, you got to listen to them. Why should I, since I am the one who should be a specialist in this field? I got frustrated but I was mentally prepared by my PR mentor that this is the way life goes in the corporate world. Hence, I decided to create a website of my own. Through this website, I will get to say what I want to say – 100% my own thoughts and feelings – undiluted.

Many successful bloggers have a specific theme dedicated to their website. For me I am still trying to decide on a few, hence I decided to leave it open for now. There are many topics that I want to touch upon: the stigma of a single living in an Asian society, the woes of being a public relations professional and a very poor cousin to marketing, office politics, and other random musings as I go through life and the people that I meet on a daily basis.

One thing I want to do is to stay close to the normal things and circumstances we go through regardless of nationality and culture. I hope to hear from readers who happen to pass by my blog, contributing their ideas and comments.

Thank you and hope to hear from you.