Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The Pediatrician for Lakshmi Ganapathi (WhatsApp video call, October 19, 2019) The playground, a pin cushion, needles here, needles there, stuck in her mind but also the fun of being children among children, without a care for streaming, only screaming their hearts and lungs out in mock threat and fear. The honest threat struck in an HIV hospice in India, where as a volunteer she heard a sex worker her age—eighteen—dying and the steep silence of the stricken mother whose ten-year-old just died. Their chronicles made her resolve to work in global health. Singapore gave next to no room for it but corridors of senior doctors screaming at juniors, or else dropping words like acid. She saw her self changing, her world contracting to a conveyor belt, another Yeo’s packet drink with a well-wrapped plastic straw. She wanted more, for herself, for her work, friends who are less, not more and more, like her.... Thanks, Lakshmi, for sharing your stories with me. And thanks, Ian Chung, for publish...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Constance Singam is a towering figure in Singapore's civil society. President of the women's rights group AWARE for three separate terms, she also served as the President of the Singapore Council of Women's Organizations. Her advocacy is not limited to gender equality. She helped create the Society Against Family Violence, The Working Committee to support activism in Singapore, and a foreign workers' rights group that became Transient Workers Count Too. She is one of the lead signatories of the #READY4REPEAL petition to abolish the anti-LGBTQ law, 377A. Singapore Unbound was honored to have her judge our first writing fellowship to NYC, together with two other judges. The launch of her newly expanded memoir  Where I Was: A Memoir About Forgetting and Remembering  is keenly anticipated, as it promises to bring the story of this remarkable woman up to date, including the so-called AWARE saga, in w...