Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Bloggers Need Not Apply By IVAN TRIBBLE
Bloggers Need Not Apply
By IVAN TRIBBLE
Personal experiences on the job market
What is it with job seekers who also write blogs? Our recent faculty search at Quaint Old College resulted in a number of bloggers among our semifinalists. Those candidates looked good enough on paper to merit a phone interview, after which they were still being seriously considered for an on-campus interview.
That's when the committee took a look at their online activity.
In some cases, a Google search of the candidate's name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn't fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.
Don't get me wrong: Our initial thoughts about blogs were, if anything, positive. It was easy to imagine creative academics carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom and the narrow audience of print publications into a new venue, one more widely available to the public and a tech-savvy student audience.
We wanted to hire somebody in our stack of finalists, so we gave the same -- or more -- benefit of the doubt to the bloggers as to the others in the pool.
A candidate's blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant's blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.
The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.
A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.
Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.
We've all done it -- expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we're giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person's attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off.
So, to the job seekers.
Professor Turbo Geek's blog had a presumptuous title that was easy to overlook, as we see plenty of cyberbravado these days in the online aliases and e-mail addresses of students and colleagues.
But the site quickly revealed that the true passion of said blogger's life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica. It's one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job.
Professor Shrill ran a strictly personal blog, which, to the author's credit, scrupulously avoided comment about the writer's current job, coworkers, or place of employment. But it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process.
It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people's choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one's childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned. It's not our place to make the recommendation, but we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order.
Finally we come to Professor Bagged Cat. He was among the finalists we brought to campus for an interview, which he royally bombed, so we were leaning against him anyway. But we were irritated to find out, late in the process, that he had misrepresented his research, ostensibly to make it seem more relevant to a hot issue in the news lately. For privacy reasons, I'm not going to go into the details, but we were dismayed to find a blog that made clear that the candidate's research was not as independent or relevant as he had made it seem.
We felt deceived by his overstatement of his academic expertise. In this case, it was not the candidate's own blog, but that of a boasting friend, that revealed the truth. The lesson? Be careful what you let a close associate's blog say about you. What that associate sees as complimentary may cast you in an unflattering light in the eyes of a search committee.
Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee's experience is any indication.
You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, "Oh, no one will see it anyway." Don't count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.
The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.
A colleague from a different university provides this cautionary tale: After graduation, a student goes to the far side of the world to teach English. Student sends delightful travelogue home via e-mail messages, and recipients encourage student to record rare experiences in a blog. A year passes and the blog turns into a detailed personal gripe session about the job, students, coworkers, and place of employment. It is discovered and devoured by students, coworkers, and place of employment. Shamed student turns for support to alma-mater faculty members, who read the blog and chastise student for lack of professionalism and for tainting alma mater's reputation. Student now seeks other job -- without letters of recommendation from current employer or alma mater.
Not every case is so consequential. And in truth, we did not disqualify any applicants based purely on their blogs. If the blog was a negative factor, it was one of many that killed a candidate's chances.
More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.
We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It's in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?
We've seen the hapless job seekers who destroy the good thing they've got going on paper by being so irritating in person that we can't wait to put them back on a plane. Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know "the real them" -- better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more.
Ivan Tribble is the pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.
By IVAN TRIBBLE
Personal experiences on the job market
What is it with job seekers who also write blogs? Our recent faculty search at Quaint Old College resulted in a number of bloggers among our semifinalists. Those candidates looked good enough on paper to merit a phone interview, after which they were still being seriously considered for an on-campus interview.
That's when the committee took a look at their online activity.
In some cases, a Google search of the candidate's name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn't fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.
Don't get me wrong: Our initial thoughts about blogs were, if anything, positive. It was easy to imagine creative academics carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom and the narrow audience of print publications into a new venue, one more widely available to the public and a tech-savvy student audience.
We wanted to hire somebody in our stack of finalists, so we gave the same -- or more -- benefit of the doubt to the bloggers as to the others in the pool.
A candidate's blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant's blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.
The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.
A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.
Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.
We've all done it -- expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we're giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person's attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off.
So, to the job seekers.
Professor Turbo Geek's blog had a presumptuous title that was easy to overlook, as we see plenty of cyberbravado these days in the online aliases and e-mail addresses of students and colleagues.
But the site quickly revealed that the true passion of said blogger's life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica. It's one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job.
Professor Shrill ran a strictly personal blog, which, to the author's credit, scrupulously avoided comment about the writer's current job, coworkers, or place of employment. But it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process.
It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people's choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one's childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned. It's not our place to make the recommendation, but we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order.
Finally we come to Professor Bagged Cat. He was among the finalists we brought to campus for an interview, which he royally bombed, so we were leaning against him anyway. But we were irritated to find out, late in the process, that he had misrepresented his research, ostensibly to make it seem more relevant to a hot issue in the news lately. For privacy reasons, I'm not going to go into the details, but we were dismayed to find a blog that made clear that the candidate's research was not as independent or relevant as he had made it seem.
We felt deceived by his overstatement of his academic expertise. In this case, it was not the candidate's own blog, but that of a boasting friend, that revealed the truth. The lesson? Be careful what you let a close associate's blog say about you. What that associate sees as complimentary may cast you in an unflattering light in the eyes of a search committee.
Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee's experience is any indication.
You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, "Oh, no one will see it anyway." Don't count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.
The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.
A colleague from a different university provides this cautionary tale: After graduation, a student goes to the far side of the world to teach English. Student sends delightful travelogue home via e-mail messages, and recipients encourage student to record rare experiences in a blog. A year passes and the blog turns into a detailed personal gripe session about the job, students, coworkers, and place of employment. It is discovered and devoured by students, coworkers, and place of employment. Shamed student turns for support to alma-mater faculty members, who read the blog and chastise student for lack of professionalism and for tainting alma mater's reputation. Student now seeks other job -- without letters of recommendation from current employer or alma mater.
Not every case is so consequential. And in truth, we did not disqualify any applicants based purely on their blogs. If the blog was a negative factor, it was one of many that killed a candidate's chances.
More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.
We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It's in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?
We've seen the hapless job seekers who destroy the good thing they've got going on paper by being so irritating in person that we can't wait to put them back on a plane. Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know "the real them" -- better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more.
Ivan Tribble is the pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
DOWD / Love Lit 101 By MAUREEN DOWD
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
WASHINGTON — There are many angles for romance.
In the movie “Silk Stockings,” Fred Astaire uses geography. He croons to the leggy Soviet apparatchik Cyd Charisse that he loves “the east, west, north, and the south of you.”
In “My Little Chickadee,” Mae West rolls her hips and eyes and goes with arithmetic. “A man has $100 and you leave him with $2,” she lectures a class of schoolchildren. “That’s subtraction.”
Physics, of course. As an old boyfriend used to say: “It’s all electromagnetic.”
And then there’s my favorite: the alphabetical approach.
I once had a crush on a guy who told me he was reading great works of literature from A to Z, and had gotten as far as K. So I went to a bookstore and picked out classics from L to Z and sent them to him. I couldn’t find one for X, so I stuck in a tape of “The X Files.” He liked the present, but the romance never went east, west or north. Just south.
Still, my ears perked up when I recently heard the tale of a New York journalist who gave his wife an unusual birthday present: a list of books from A to Z that would help her better understand him.
I decided to adapt the idea for Valentine’s Day, and get some lucky guy the books from A to Z that would help him better understand me.
I prowled Borders, but the more I looked, the more I fretted. I could start with “All the King’s Men,” but it’s pretty obvious that I’m interested in the nexus between politics and dishonesty.
I love Shakespeare, but if I put in “The Taming of the Shrew,” would I send the wrong message?
Everything suddenly seemed fraught. What inferences would he draw from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”? Would he find me stuffy if I included “Ethan Frome”? Pretentious if I threw in Ovid? Mirthless if I chose the shame-spiraling “House of Mirth”? Hostile if I picked “Be Honest — You’re Not That Into Him Either”?
High-maintenance if I selected “Empty Promises,” Ann Rule’s true stories of love affairs that ended with a horrible crime? Scheming if I put in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seminal treatise: “How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man”? Needy if I chose the Deepak Chopra cookbook to nourish body and soul, unlock the hidden dimensions in your life and harness the infinite power of coincidence? Pandering if I stacked the deck with guy-lit like Nick Hornby, Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” John Keegan’s “The Face of Battle” and my Mom’s recommendation, “365 Ways to Cook Hamburger and Other Ground Meats”?
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed not only risky, but the height of presumption to expect someone to devote that many hours to fathoming someone else’s psyche. What guy would drag himself away from ESPN’s “SportsCenter” to read “Sense and Sensibility” or from beer and pizza to devour “Cakes and Ale”?
It strikes me that there must be a gender difference here. From my own unscientific sampling, I think it’s far rarer for women to ask men to read their stuff than it is for men to ask women to read their stuff. Poor Condi Rice couldn’t even get George W. Bush to read her presentation of his foreign policy goals in Foreign Affairs during his 2000 campaign.
While I hardly ever hear from female readers who want me to read something, male readers are constantly e-mailing and sending me stuff to read: op-ed pieces, essays, letters to the editor or letters they’ve written to friends, e-mail messages their girlfriends or wives or buddies have written about me, original poetry, lists of favorite CDs and books, unpublished manuscripts, novels, jokes, business advice books, plays, TV sitcom treatments, recipes for cranberry orange nut bread. One guy even sent me his script for “George W. Bush: The Musical.” (Georgie sings to Big Daddy: “Any war you can start, I can make bigger; I can make any war bigger than you.”)
One reader sent me his latest humor column, “Have Pity on the December Baby” — “a look into the lonely world of living in Santa’s shadow” — and said to call if I wanted to discuss his publication fee.
Sometimes, if I don’t read their work and write back, the authors send me snarky notes complaining about my insensitivity.
While I could never give a guy I was dating the A to Z on me, I’d love to read the A to Z that guy would choose to give me on himself. I just hope it includes “The X Files.”
Maureen Dowd is of The New York Times.
WASHINGTON — There are many angles for romance.
In the movie “Silk Stockings,” Fred Astaire uses geography. He croons to the leggy Soviet apparatchik Cyd Charisse that he loves “the east, west, north, and the south of you.”
In “My Little Chickadee,” Mae West rolls her hips and eyes and goes with arithmetic. “A man has $100 and you leave him with $2,” she lectures a class of schoolchildren. “That’s subtraction.”
Physics, of course. As an old boyfriend used to say: “It’s all electromagnetic.”
And then there’s my favorite: the alphabetical approach.
I once had a crush on a guy who told me he was reading great works of literature from A to Z, and had gotten as far as K. So I went to a bookstore and picked out classics from L to Z and sent them to him. I couldn’t find one for X, so I stuck in a tape of “The X Files.” He liked the present, but the romance never went east, west or north. Just south.
Still, my ears perked up when I recently heard the tale of a New York journalist who gave his wife an unusual birthday present: a list of books from A to Z that would help her better understand him.
I decided to adapt the idea for Valentine’s Day, and get some lucky guy the books from A to Z that would help him better understand me.
I prowled Borders, but the more I looked, the more I fretted. I could start with “All the King’s Men,” but it’s pretty obvious that I’m interested in the nexus between politics and dishonesty.
I love Shakespeare, but if I put in “The Taming of the Shrew,” would I send the wrong message?
Everything suddenly seemed fraught. What inferences would he draw from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”? Would he find me stuffy if I included “Ethan Frome”? Pretentious if I threw in Ovid? Mirthless if I chose the shame-spiraling “House of Mirth”? Hostile if I picked “Be Honest — You’re Not That Into Him Either”?
High-maintenance if I selected “Empty Promises,” Ann Rule’s true stories of love affairs that ended with a horrible crime? Scheming if I put in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seminal treatise: “How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man”? Needy if I chose the Deepak Chopra cookbook to nourish body and soul, unlock the hidden dimensions in your life and harness the infinite power of coincidence? Pandering if I stacked the deck with guy-lit like Nick Hornby, Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” John Keegan’s “The Face of Battle” and my Mom’s recommendation, “365 Ways to Cook Hamburger and Other Ground Meats”?
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed not only risky, but the height of presumption to expect someone to devote that many hours to fathoming someone else’s psyche. What guy would drag himself away from ESPN’s “SportsCenter” to read “Sense and Sensibility” or from beer and pizza to devour “Cakes and Ale”?
It strikes me that there must be a gender difference here. From my own unscientific sampling, I think it’s far rarer for women to ask men to read their stuff than it is for men to ask women to read their stuff. Poor Condi Rice couldn’t even get George W. Bush to read her presentation of his foreign policy goals in Foreign Affairs during his 2000 campaign.
While I hardly ever hear from female readers who want me to read something, male readers are constantly e-mailing and sending me stuff to read: op-ed pieces, essays, letters to the editor or letters they’ve written to friends, e-mail messages their girlfriends or wives or buddies have written about me, original poetry, lists of favorite CDs and books, unpublished manuscripts, novels, jokes, business advice books, plays, TV sitcom treatments, recipes for cranberry orange nut bread. One guy even sent me his script for “George W. Bush: The Musical.” (Georgie sings to Big Daddy: “Any war you can start, I can make bigger; I can make any war bigger than you.”)
One reader sent me his latest humor column, “Have Pity on the December Baby” — “a look into the lonely world of living in Santa’s shadow” — and said to call if I wanted to discuss his publication fee.
Sometimes, if I don’t read their work and write back, the authors send me snarky notes complaining about my insensitivity.
While I could never give a guy I was dating the A to Z on me, I’d love to read the A to Z that guy would choose to give me on himself. I just hope it includes “The X Files.”
Maureen Dowd is of The New York Times.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Man jailed for bomb hoax
Singapore
Selina Lum
11 March 2005
Straits Times
English
(c) 2005 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
He wrote hate notes with bomb warning and handed them to SMRT employee saying he saw them being dropped by another.
MAK Hoy Meng, 29, went up to an SMRT employee and gave him two handwritten notes that declared there was a bomb at one of the stations.
The restaurant supervisor told Mr Yeow Meng Chai that he saw a man drop the notes and even described the fellow in detail.
But under questioning by the police, he admitted he had written them himself and there were no bombs.
Yesterday, he pleaded guilty under the United Nations (Anti-Terrorism Measures) Regulations to trying to hoax Mr Yeow about a bomb last month, and was jailed for 2 1/2 years.
He admitted that at the time he tried to fool Mr Yeow, he was disgruntled with the police and society in general, because he had been charged with theft and was out on bail.
The theft charge - stealing $50 from a restaurant - was taken into consideration during sentencing.
A district court heard that at about 8pm on Feb 4, Mak approached Mr Yeow at the Jurong East MRT station, and handed over notes which said, 'I WANT TO BOMB SINGAPORE People today OR 2moro I HATE All THE SINGAPORE People HATE!!!', and 'CAN you ALL FIND the BOMB IN BETWEEN 8 HR START for 2000PM GIVE you ALL the CLUE THE BOMB is A ONE of the MRT STN NEAR left side find it BUSTER'.
He described the man who dropped the notes in detail, down to the brand of the bag he was carrying. His story came apart when his description differed in later versions.
By then, police officers had searched extensively for the man. However, trains were not stopped.
District Judge Aedit Abdullah said that while the disruption caused was not as serious as that in previous instances, it called for a deterrent sentence.
The maximum punishment is five years' jail and a $100,000 fine.
Last April, more than 200 commuters were evacuated from a North-East Line MRT train and Singapore Armed Forces explosive experts were called in when an SBS Transit customer service officer left a box and note on the train with a threatening message.
Selina Lum
11 March 2005
Straits Times
English
(c) 2005 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
He wrote hate notes with bomb warning and handed them to SMRT employee saying he saw them being dropped by another.
MAK Hoy Meng, 29, went up to an SMRT employee and gave him two handwritten notes that declared there was a bomb at one of the stations.
The restaurant supervisor told Mr Yeow Meng Chai that he saw a man drop the notes and even described the fellow in detail.
But under questioning by the police, he admitted he had written them himself and there were no bombs.
Yesterday, he pleaded guilty under the United Nations (Anti-Terrorism Measures) Regulations to trying to hoax Mr Yeow about a bomb last month, and was jailed for 2 1/2 years.
He admitted that at the time he tried to fool Mr Yeow, he was disgruntled with the police and society in general, because he had been charged with theft and was out on bail.
The theft charge - stealing $50 from a restaurant - was taken into consideration during sentencing.
A district court heard that at about 8pm on Feb 4, Mak approached Mr Yeow at the Jurong East MRT station, and handed over notes which said, 'I WANT TO BOMB SINGAPORE People today OR 2moro I HATE All THE SINGAPORE People HATE!!!', and 'CAN you ALL FIND the BOMB IN BETWEEN 8 HR START for 2000PM GIVE you ALL the CLUE THE BOMB is A ONE of the MRT STN NEAR left side find it BUSTER'.
He described the man who dropped the notes in detail, down to the brand of the bag he was carrying. His story came apart when his description differed in later versions.
By then, police officers had searched extensively for the man. However, trains were not stopped.
District Judge Aedit Abdullah said that while the disruption caused was not as serious as that in previous instances, it called for a deterrent sentence.
The maximum punishment is five years' jail and a $100,000 fine.
Last April, more than 200 commuters were evacuated from a North-East Line MRT train and Singapore Armed Forces explosive experts were called in when an SBS Transit customer service officer left a box and note on the train with a threatening message.
China hookers are now in your neighbourhood
China hookers are now in your neighbourhood
News
Li Xueying
04 July 2004
Straits Times
English
c) 2004 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
Sometimes you find them sitting on men's laps in kopitiams; sometimes residents are mistaken for hookers
MR CHAN Weng Seng was going home to Toa Payoh Lorong 2 for lunch, after visiting his grandchildren in Lorong 7 last week.
But as the 84-year-old retiree walked past the library in Toa Payoh Central, a long-haired woman, all dolled up, approached him and said: 'Lao bo, wo dai ni qu wan.' Translated, it means: 'Old uncle, let me take you out to play.'
His amused reply: 'I'm not a three-year-old but over 80 years old. Play for what?'
She wasn't put off. 'She followed me all the way to the interchange before giving up,' he added. 'I tried to walk quickly but it was of no use.'
He is hardly alone in his heartland escapade.
The coquettish qiang or accent of China streetwalkers has floated out of Geylang and into residential areas such as Toa Payoh, Joo Chiat and Tanjong Katong, where they approach elderly men practically at their doorstep.
Joo Chiat MP Chan Soo Sen, who is also Minister of State (Education, Community Development and Sports), said that he gets four or five complaints a month.
His constituents say Joo Chiat is becoming like the red-light district of Geylang. 'I'm talking regularly to the police on what we can do about it,' he said.
He said of the hookers: 'Sometimes, they're sitting on men's laps in the kopitiams.'
Other times, they're literally streetwalking. 'I was cycling around one evening when I saw a woman cross the road, knock on a lorry that was stuck in a jam, and jump in,' he said.
Marine Parade GRC MP Othman Haron Eusofe and Jalan Besar GRC MP Lily Neo also report a rise in complaints.
Residents say they have seen the women at the old Woodlands interchange, the void deck of Block 254 Choa Chu Kang and in MacPherson Road's coffeeshops, although The Sunday Times did not spot any in these areas.
Sometimes the hanky-panky is all but in one's living room.
Housewife Lee Siew Heng, 30, who lives in Tembeling Road, said: 'At night, the girls and their customers park in front of our house, and you see them kissing.'
Twice this year, China girls have rung her doorbell, asking whether they could rent rooms. Ms Lee also gets mistaken for a streetwalker. 'Sometimes, I go to 7-Eleven and men ask 'How much?'. So I take my sons with me now.'
It's got to the point that businesses are moving out. Construction firm manager Jason Lim, 35, whose office had been in Joo Chiat Road for four years, said: 'It's bad image for business.'
It is the same in Tanjong Katong Road, where residents and shopkeepers say the number of China hookers has 'doubled'. They mingle with students from Chung Cheng High, Tanjong Katong Secondary and Tanjong Katong Girls' School (TKGS).
Said TKGS vice-principal Terry Theseira: 'We ensure our school activities end by 6.30pm so that our girls can leave the area when it's still bright.'
MP Andy Gan (Marine Parade GRC), whose Mountbatten ward includes the road, said he has not received complaints, but may get residents to keep the authorities informed.
Other solutions suggested by the MPs include: more frequent police raids, increasing the number of designated red-light zones so that such activities can be confined and regulated, and public education for Singaporean men.
Hong Kah MP Ahmad Khalis Abdul Ghani wants immigration officials to track visitors with suspect travel patterns. Mayor Othman says the women caught should be blacklisted and barred from returning. Yet, all of them caution against being 'unfriendly to our friends from China'.
Singapore recently relaxed restrictions on visitors from China, granting visas valid for up to 30 days, up from 14 days previously.
They now form the second-largest group of visitors, after Indonesians. In 2002, 670,000 China tourists spent a total of $313 million here.
Police confirm that the illegal China prostitutes they have caught were here on social passes and the situation in the heartland was being 'closely' monitored.
In Toa Payoh, The Sunday Times followed a Chinese streetwalker and her Singaporean customer into the library. They lingered at the Chinese children's books section but left in a hurry when they saw librarian Neo Yam Hoon keeping an eye on them.
A library user, whom the woman had earlier solicited, tipped off Ms Neo. It's the first time such a thing has happened there, said the library's assistant manager, Ms Ong Hui Pheng.
The pair left for a nearby foodcourt. The man, apparently the customer, said when approached that he was a Singaporean and gave his name as 'Mr Tan'. He claimed the woman from China was lost and he was trying to help her get her cellphone repaired.
The danger of having prostitutes in the heartland, said sociologist Paulin Straughan, is that it becomes more tempting for the men. 'There's still an element of guilt attached to visiting Geylang, but when she shows up in the neighbourhood, it diminishes that perception of deviance as it happened in a 'normal' setting.'
Ultimately, it is up to Singaporeans to solve the problem, said Mr Chan Soo Sen. 'We have to ask ourselves why this is happening. And that is because there is a demand from our men.'
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X - X-rated spills over
Saturday Special Report
25 December 2004
Straits Times
English
(c) 2004 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
X-RATED Singapore, once relegated to the traditional red-light fringes of Geylang, Desker Road and Keong Saik Road, spilled over to the mainstream and the HDB heartlands this year.
Prostitutes, who once confined their prowling to Orchard Towers, began plying their wares along Scotts Shopping Centre, Marriott Hotel, Tangs and Orchard Plaza.
Foreign women in risque dresses, slurring in different languages, these days flank Orchard Road and approach men boldly: 'Want some company, sir?'
There is also blatant soliciting by Chinese hookers at MRT stations, coffeeshops, HDB void decks, and even secondary schools in the heartlands such as Toa Payoh, Joo Chiat and Tanjong Katong, where they stand around suggestively, winking at old men.
As the year ended, more audacious China girls progressed onto yanking open car doors at HDB carparks, even before the male driver could switch off the engine, and accosting men even in the presence of their wives.
The rise of foreign prostitutes here coincided with the relaxing of visa requirements for tourists from China this year.
According to the police, the number of sex workers rounded up in the first half of this year already overshot those arrested in the whole of last year.
In just six months, 2,670 prostitutes, as compared to last year's haul up of 2,301, were picked up.
With official warnings that Singapore is facing an alarming Aids epidemic, doctors say these women pose untold dangers.
They are not screened for diseases such as HIV, unlike legal sex workers in the red light districts, who undergo health checks every month.
-- BEN NADARAJAN
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News
Li Xueying
04 July 2004
Straits Times
English
c) 2004 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
Sometimes you find them sitting on men's laps in kopitiams; sometimes residents are mistaken for hookers
MR CHAN Weng Seng was going home to Toa Payoh Lorong 2 for lunch, after visiting his grandchildren in Lorong 7 last week.
But as the 84-year-old retiree walked past the library in Toa Payoh Central, a long-haired woman, all dolled up, approached him and said: 'Lao bo, wo dai ni qu wan.' Translated, it means: 'Old uncle, let me take you out to play.'
His amused reply: 'I'm not a three-year-old but over 80 years old. Play for what?'
She wasn't put off. 'She followed me all the way to the interchange before giving up,' he added. 'I tried to walk quickly but it was of no use.'
He is hardly alone in his heartland escapade.
The coquettish qiang or accent of China streetwalkers has floated out of Geylang and into residential areas such as Toa Payoh, Joo Chiat and Tanjong Katong, where they approach elderly men practically at their doorstep.
Joo Chiat MP Chan Soo Sen, who is also Minister of State (Education, Community Development and Sports), said that he gets four or five complaints a month.
His constituents say Joo Chiat is becoming like the red-light district of Geylang. 'I'm talking regularly to the police on what we can do about it,' he said.
He said of the hookers: 'Sometimes, they're sitting on men's laps in the kopitiams.'
Other times, they're literally streetwalking. 'I was cycling around one evening when I saw a woman cross the road, knock on a lorry that was stuck in a jam, and jump in,' he said.
Marine Parade GRC MP Othman Haron Eusofe and Jalan Besar GRC MP Lily Neo also report a rise in complaints.
Residents say they have seen the women at the old Woodlands interchange, the void deck of Block 254 Choa Chu Kang and in MacPherson Road's coffeeshops, although The Sunday Times did not spot any in these areas.
Sometimes the hanky-panky is all but in one's living room.
Housewife Lee Siew Heng, 30, who lives in Tembeling Road, said: 'At night, the girls and their customers park in front of our house, and you see them kissing.'
Twice this year, China girls have rung her doorbell, asking whether they could rent rooms. Ms Lee also gets mistaken for a streetwalker. 'Sometimes, I go to 7-Eleven and men ask 'How much?'. So I take my sons with me now.'
It's got to the point that businesses are moving out. Construction firm manager Jason Lim, 35, whose office had been in Joo Chiat Road for four years, said: 'It's bad image for business.'
It is the same in Tanjong Katong Road, where residents and shopkeepers say the number of China hookers has 'doubled'. They mingle with students from Chung Cheng High, Tanjong Katong Secondary and Tanjong Katong Girls' School (TKGS).
Said TKGS vice-principal Terry Theseira: 'We ensure our school activities end by 6.30pm so that our girls can leave the area when it's still bright.'
MP Andy Gan (Marine Parade GRC), whose Mountbatten ward includes the road, said he has not received complaints, but may get residents to keep the authorities informed.
Other solutions suggested by the MPs include: more frequent police raids, increasing the number of designated red-light zones so that such activities can be confined and regulated, and public education for Singaporean men.
Hong Kah MP Ahmad Khalis Abdul Ghani wants immigration officials to track visitors with suspect travel patterns. Mayor Othman says the women caught should be blacklisted and barred from returning. Yet, all of them caution against being 'unfriendly to our friends from China'.
Singapore recently relaxed restrictions on visitors from China, granting visas valid for up to 30 days, up from 14 days previously.
They now form the second-largest group of visitors, after Indonesians. In 2002, 670,000 China tourists spent a total of $313 million here.
Police confirm that the illegal China prostitutes they have caught were here on social passes and the situation in the heartland was being 'closely' monitored.
In Toa Payoh, The Sunday Times followed a Chinese streetwalker and her Singaporean customer into the library. They lingered at the Chinese children's books section but left in a hurry when they saw librarian Neo Yam Hoon keeping an eye on them.
A library user, whom the woman had earlier solicited, tipped off Ms Neo. It's the first time such a thing has happened there, said the library's assistant manager, Ms Ong Hui Pheng.
The pair left for a nearby foodcourt. The man, apparently the customer, said when approached that he was a Singaporean and gave his name as 'Mr Tan'. He claimed the woman from China was lost and he was trying to help her get her cellphone repaired.
The danger of having prostitutes in the heartland, said sociologist Paulin Straughan, is that it becomes more tempting for the men. 'There's still an element of guilt attached to visiting Geylang, but when she shows up in the neighbourhood, it diminishes that perception of deviance as it happened in a 'normal' setting.'
Ultimately, it is up to Singaporeans to solve the problem, said Mr Chan Soo Sen. 'We have to ask ourselves why this is happening. And that is because there is a demand from our men.'
-------------------------------------------------------------
X - X-rated spills over
Saturday Special Report
25 December 2004
Straits Times
English
(c) 2004 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
X-RATED Singapore, once relegated to the traditional red-light fringes of Geylang, Desker Road and Keong Saik Road, spilled over to the mainstream and the HDB heartlands this year.
Prostitutes, who once confined their prowling to Orchard Towers, began plying their wares along Scotts Shopping Centre, Marriott Hotel, Tangs and Orchard Plaza.
Foreign women in risque dresses, slurring in different languages, these days flank Orchard Road and approach men boldly: 'Want some company, sir?'
There is also blatant soliciting by Chinese hookers at MRT stations, coffeeshops, HDB void decks, and even secondary schools in the heartlands such as Toa Payoh, Joo Chiat and Tanjong Katong, where they stand around suggestively, winking at old men.
As the year ended, more audacious China girls progressed onto yanking open car doors at HDB carparks, even before the male driver could switch off the engine, and accosting men even in the presence of their wives.
The rise of foreign prostitutes here coincided with the relaxing of visa requirements for tourists from China this year.
According to the police, the number of sex workers rounded up in the first half of this year already overshot those arrested in the whole of last year.
In just six months, 2,670 prostitutes, as compared to last year's haul up of 2,301, were picked up.
With official warnings that Singapore is facing an alarming Aids epidemic, doctors say these women pose untold dangers.
They are not screened for diseases such as HIV, unlike legal sex workers in the red light districts, who undergo health checks every month.
-- BEN NADARAJAN
