Satire

Singapore: Where Talent Is Always Imported

sam choo

04 Mar 2026 — 1 min read

Nothing in Singapore is actually from Singapore.

People, food, talent, ideas.
Everything seems to arrive by plane.

We’re not a country. We’re a 24-hour airport with HDB flats and a Michelin star.

Your HDB was built by Bangladesh, your streets are swept by India, and your blood is drawn by a nurse from the Philippines.

Your chicken rice? Hainanese. Your laksa? Peranakan. Your "local culture"? A committee decided it in 1965.

My mum? Immigrated from China.
My father-in-law? Dutch.
Your domestic helper? Indonesia.

The Singapore Girl serving you champagne on the plane? Might be from Johor.
Even our Olympic hopes—imported from China, complete with table tennis paddles.

Training talent takes a generation.
Importing it takes one SilkAir flight and a Ministry of Manpower approval stamp.

The only things truly Made in Singapore:
The ERP — the only robot that charges you for the privilege of moving two inches an hour.
The kiasu queue for a limited-edition Hello Kitty that nobody actually wants once they have it.
And the uniquely Singaporean ability to claim everything foreign as our own — and somehow, genuinely mean it.

Everything else,
we import.

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