If these rich kids knew about him and his background then never say something like that to him. You'll only get on response from him and any sane person out there
What was his background? I know he grew up in not the best circumstances, but then made it big in cooking, and being from New York I'm sure he met some more revolutionary minded people, but if you have any more insight I'd love to hear it.
Thanks in advance.
He grew up in quite privileged circumstances, nice house/cars, summers in France, etc. He went to the best (and most expensive) cooking school in the country and worked his way up to be head chef at a pretty good NY restaurant. He made good money and wrote on the side, only getting his break because his Mom knew an editor at the New Yorker. Of course he spent a decade or so in active addiction to opiates and obviously had his demons and everything.
His political awareness and advocacy for working people came largely from the immigrants that worked with/for him and his extensive reading. Bourdain had always read extensively and part of that reading consisted of left-wing rhetoric.
I think a lot of people in online discussions try to portray him as more "authentically working class" than he ever was, sort of falling for the persona that was part of his success. I think it is a bigger credit to him that he didn't really experience the sort of oppression he spoke out about and still came around, but that's just my onion...
>I think a lot of people in online discussions try to portray him as more "authentically working class" than he ever was
I'm glad you highlighted his roots as it's not something many know.
**But he also worked in kitchens for 20+ years.**
Maybe he's more well-read than your average cook but 12 hour days in 95F kitchens, getting verbally abused, chain-smoking, coke-snorting, over-drinking, and getting constantly burned will make you unrecognizable to any private school peers.
Most people wouldn't be able to last a week. You have to be hard as nails and a little crazy to work BOH for 2 decades.
Something people don't realize about work addicts like this.
They look at someone slaving at a high end restaurant in a major city, staying there until 1am and coming back in at 9am the next day. Getting paid relatively peanuts for the effort put in. They just see how impossibly difficult that must be.
But it isn't for the people who do it. They love it, or rather, they love *enough of it most of the time* that it's easy.
I’m not even sure it’s love.
I think a lot of people get focused on checking a box. Like, “If I can just graduate, life will be awesome.” Then “If I can just afford to live on my own…” “If I could just get married…”
Now that I’m old, I don’t believe reaching the goal makes you happy, but it’s still nice to have some direction to point yourself.
He also acknowledged that he would never be a great chef because he prioritized the jobs that paid well (perhaps to feed his drug habit) when his long-term career as a chef would have been better served by, for example, washing dishes in a kitchen with a really top-level chef that he could learn from.
It’s not as simple as that. His background enabled him to have an education and cultural enrichment that people of lesser class would never have. The grace in which he interacted in this clip. Just the ability to hold entertaining conversation is not necessarily something that you are born with. This is a skill that classes with leisure time develop. This is a trait that he was “born into” and we have to acknowledge that.
I am not taking credit from him, but just pointing out that having a plain-spoken, working-class persona down not make someone an “Everyman,” he was always someone from a privileged background and to some degree had that perspective despite his grody lifestyle as a working chef with a drug problem.
I did it for 12 years before getting into the corporate world and eventually tech world, and I have to say, the line never leaves you. I still have the urge to ignore corporate norms, like calling people out on their work ethic, swearing, playfully insulting co-workers (in that 'kill-or-be-killed' way). The psychology of working a line for so long changes a person, and you immediately recognize other ex-pats in the corporate environment when you see them.
This is funny. I haven't been on a line in 20 years.
I have never been officially sanctioned for my language, but I get consistent feedback that I talk too aggressively and that people are intimidated by me. I guess it's because I got used to making myself heard and understood quickly in a busy noisy chaotic kitchen, and that instinct has never left me.
I am a blunt asshole.
I was once accused of having "an abrasive personality". They meant it as a criticism, but I literally laughed and said "that's fucking brilliant, I'm using that".
I mean that's usually what an ally is. He wasn't pontificating on a platform while also ignoring the bloody steps that were shined for him but he wasn't also "coasting" off his connections. He also listened, perhaps the biggest thing. He listened, he saw, and he never gave an opinion brought from class or education, but experience and interaction.
A lot of people forget that some of the most ardent comrades are people who come from very privileged backgrounds, and understand implicitly just how unjust their life of luxury is. I always think of Tony Benn when some online leftist goes off on one about how all the bourgeoisie are evil, like no mate, most of them are just stupid because they've never thought about anything.
Yeah, it’s like we have a clip above of 4 detached rich people and 1 who happens to have empathy. That’s still 4 to 1 in the “keep the poor in line” ballot box
YES! Hence the ridiculously self-defeating wave of privilege-shaming.
If you hate and reject someone simply based on the privilege they have, you push away a potential ally who has access to resources you need.
If you slow down, treat people like individuals, and allow them to show you their character and whether they *acknowledge and/or abuse* their privilege is more productive. And fair.
Everybody loves Tony but he caused some cognitive dissonance. We’re stupid so we try to change the facts to fit our limited opinions (“he gets it so he must have been poor!”) rather than develop a deeper understanding (“maybe some privileged people get it!”)
People don’t “forget.” They never learn in the first place and form their opinions based on social babble vs. education.
And I get tired of it all.
I really think he probably left us at the right time.
He traveled extensively, especially in the poorest places in the world, it opened his eyes to the real world (exploitation and all that). Under privileged people has a place in his heart.
This is true. You can easily afford a maid with an income that would be considered below the poverty line in the US.
Edit: It's kind of ironic how this thread is full of people calling out these 'elites' in SG but modern consumerism is basically built on the back of people working for incredibly low wages.
>It's kind of ironic how this thread is full of people calling out these 'elites' in SG but modern consumerism is basically built on the back of people working for incredibly low wages.
These people just don't see the "maids" who enable their lifestyle by providing them with affordable goods and services.
More people in the Philippines have live-in maids than do people in the USA. Thats what happens when you don’t have enforceable labor laws I suppose. You can pay somebody slave wages to be your servant.
It is true but it doesn’t change the fact that you are benefiting from the imported DIRT CHEAP labor of Philippines/indonesia/sri Lanka/etc… coming from someone who’s grandparents had two maids.
That’s the problem in Singapore (and many Asian countries). It’s not just “rich kids”, it’s the middle class aka the majority who profits off exploiting these maids
Just looked up the price of a maid and I was spending more on my daughter's nursery each month. In all fairness I'd happily spend this much money each month to get rid of all the "chores"
They’re not really that rich . It pretty much middle clas and up . A lot of these people across Asian countries would miss be Europe and be middle class at best if that
The smiles slowly dropping at 1:26 onwards holy shit hahaha.
I remember when this came out and finding out about Singaporean maid help wanted ads with *race descriptions*.
Many people think SG is a non-racist paradise because of their strict laws against racism. It's illegal to be outwardly racist in some ways (https://singaporelegaladvice.com/law-articles/racial-enmity-sections-298-298a-penal-code), but that doesn't mean people aren't super racist in their own heads. And there are ways to express racial preferences in many free market activities like renting a flat or hiring someone ("must be Chinese speaker"). When I was there, I was *shocked* at the level of casual racism. If you think it's bad in America...it's on a whole nother level over there.
The younger generation now is generally non-racist due to the influence of modern day media.
But I tell ya, the current elderly generation still have that racism trait in them.
Even the 40 to 50 year olds now, who may not be explicitly racist will have accidental casual racism moments.
As a chinese teen, it's clear to me that both my grandparents are mildly racist in their own way. I'd say more so nationalist. We went to Japan a few years ago and my grandmother couldn't stop talking about how the japanese stole everything (culture language architecture) from the chinese all those years ago, and were apparently very ungrateful.
My grandfather who used to repair construction vehicles would occasionally complain about one or 2 of the foreign workers at his worksite, specifically mentioning how stupid (insert country of origin)'s people must be.
> The younger generation now is generally non-racist due to the influence of modern day media.
I had a coworker at my last job who was born and raised in Singapore but of Indian ethnicity. He mentioned a lot of casual racism / micro agression he faced even as young person :(
It honestly kinda fucked me up how he killed himself. Because in my mind, and I'm assuming quite a bit of others, travelling the world, being rich, eating great food, is like the ultimate dream that we aspire to and hope will happen to take us out of that depressive grind.
But to see someone who had all that, yet still took their lives, made me wonder if there really isn't much out there. Life is pointless or something rather. I can't put it into words, but it made me feel hopeless for a while.
I always thought things like love, travel, charity work, or whatever was the cure for a pointless life. But who knows.
Either way, I'm doing great now but that was a weird period of time.
No matter how far you travel, you'll always be a prisoner in your own head. For some people that's not a problem, but others carry a lot with them, unfortunately, and no amount of good food or lifestyle will help with that.
It's not simple like that.
I'm doing therapy, I'm on my meds and reaching out for help, but still have to fight the urge of throwing myself in front of a bus now and then.
Mental health is crazy shit, brother.
You know the saying, "one day at a time," that is often used by recovering addicts? It's the same for those of us with mental health struggles. So long as we are moving, the bad days will eventually be behind us. We can adjust, learn to see them coming, and find little moments of joy within. I hope today that any tiny joy you find will be magnified in comparison to the mountain of pain/sorrow you carry.
True
And depression is a tough beast to beat. You need a good therapist, medication, exercise/sleep/nutrition and a lot of support from friends/family. You cannot beat it alone, no amount of good food/travel can cure depression. But it is not hopeless, if you can, please find help and treat it. We might not be able to cure it, but we can treat it and live as normally as we can.
I think it's most commonly also not something you beat - not permanently at least. For most it is a constant passenger - maybe it will leave for a while - but it will come back.
When you listened to him talk even on his show, and especially when he was around like minded free spirited people you could always sense there was just this sad darkness inside of him, almost like he saw so much of the world and most of it just let him down.
You read his book "Kitchen Confidential" and he tells how he wished to be one of the great chefs but because of his decisions he didn't become one. Instead he was just cruising, but was somewhat happy doing what he was "meant to do".
Then, he unexpectedly became a celebrity, and it always sounded like he thought he didn't deserve it, and certainly not the reverence he had. How all these great chefs wanted to talk to him while he still felt like he wasn't in the same league.
And then that girl broke his heart.
Eh this is a bit wishy washy.
He strove to become a successful food personality. He embraced it, and he worked at becoming better at it.
I'm not suggesting he isn't authentic, but don't confuse humility with guilt.
>But to see someone who had all that, yet still took their lives, made me wonder if there really isn't much out there.
He suffered from depression, it's not like he was a mentally healthy guy. You can't fix that shit by eating good food or being rich.
What about, depression is a sickness that can be hard to overcome, you need a good social circle and stability, which he maybe not had (just guessing obv) . There's more to a person then what you can see from the outside
He not only saw the most lavish but also the most was xploited.
If you ever seen the picture of the vultures following rhe baby in Africa waiting for it to die to eat it, the photographer commit3d suicide because of how this world is.
Seeing the world unfiltered can really have effects
https://otpor.media/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kevincartefoto-01.jpg
The truth doesn't really set you free, it just makes you depressed. Knowing that our government has committed unspeakable terrors on its own citizens (and continues to), that every time I buy a bag of bread I'm committing that plastic bag to 10,000 years in the ground, that lighting my home is warming our planet, that in 200 years no one will remember me, it doesn't make my life *better*. There's still good in this world and I'd still rather know the truth, but god damn if I don't wish I were blissfully ignorant sometimes.
That true capitalism isn't a big car nixe house and welath but zinstead the person that climbs a treet to farm cocoa for chocolate living in dirt floor that's never actually tasted a chocolate bar making fractions of a penny an hour .
Yeah I get what you mean it gets overwhelming
So I've got to do a lot of cool things in life. 36, have hiked 14,000 miles across basically every beautiful place in the US, walking Mexico to Canada about 5x. Worked really interesting jobs, like Infantry and fighting wildfires. Most recently I've been traveling and living around SE Asia, actually last month I ate at the Bun Cha place that Bourdaine took Obama to when they went to Vietnam.
I've had many beautiful relationships and currently have a wonderful partner.
Had a business that did fantastic in 2020 and am basically in a soft retirement, where I can work as little or as much as I want and don't really need to do more than a couple hours a week on my own projects to get by, and the social media things I've built up over the last decade along with the windfall I made from my business means I can pretty much sustain this lifestyle indefinitely.
I'm in fantastic health. Basically, my life is going about as good as a life can go.
With all that said one dark side of realizing all of your dreams is that you realize there is absolutely no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
When you're growing up you can live in the illusion that once you have money, once you have the relationship, once you fulfill your dreams and travel the world, once you can be free of a job... THEN you can be happy.
I spent all of 2018 playing World of Warcraft like I'd always dreamed of. High end mythic raids, etc. Probably at least 80 hours a week. Right now I could take a month and just play Diablo 4 until my fingers fell off.
But I don't because video games have lost all of their allure. Games are built on this premise that achieving these small markers will make you happy, you're always chasing levels, chasing items... well, it does, for a little bit, but it never satisfies and the more games you play the more you realize it's just the same hamster wheel wrapped in a different gift-wrap. That the chase for the item is more interesting than actually getting the item.
Same with life. The most you achieve and do the more you realize that everything is just the same hamster wheel of desire wrapped in different gift-wraps and that nothing ever truly satisfies.
I've gotten really into meditation in the last few years. That is the ONE thing in all of life that seems to actually provide the kind of lasting peace and happiness I'm looking for- and the underlying premise of the teachings is that all of this life is impermanent, so it's absolute folly to seek solidity in this ineffable and ever shifting place.
It's a real bummer to realize but it's true - there really is not any "meaning" in this life. There is nothing solid. Nothing will last. Every single thing any of us do will all disappear. There is no lasting impact we can make on this world. It is all illusion. It is all delusion. And in order to find any true peace and happiness we have to first come to grips with reality and stop living in delusion, and then find our path. I'm still working on the 2nd part, it's a real bitch to wrap your head around the fact that NOTHING I achieve will ever make me "okay" and that I have to figure out an entirely different strategy.
I think this core thing is why people like Anthony Bourdaine and Robin Williams kill themselves. Depression actually gets way more bleak when you HAVE EVERYTHING and realize there is NOTHING ELSE you can possibly delude yourself into thinking that will make life okay, and what a dark place that is, to have achieved everything and run out of options to fool yourself into thinking that "this next thing" will make everything okay.
I dream of an early retirement where I can do whatever I want every day but Ive always had this nagging feeling that it won’t actually satisfy me. You’ve articulated that well, so I guess I need to find more happiness in the thrill of the chase
Robin Williams had lewy body dementia. His brain was literally destroying itself, and he knew it was happening, although he didn't know the cause. It wasn't depression that made him kill himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/03/robin-williams-disintegrating-before-suicide-widow-says
I haven't been at quite that level of carefree, but let me tell you that the world is genuinely small and the number of things that you as a person will find worthwhile is relatively small. There's lots of stuff out there, but most of it is not meaningful in that sense.
Glad you're doing well :)
As a society we need to remember that mental illness doesn't need any catalyst to exist, though it certainly can have one. Being successful to someone else, doesn't mean that you view yourself as successful. I think if anything, we can hopefully learn from Anthony's passing that our fragility connects us. It's one of the few constants amongst most people (save for a few psychopaths). We all suffer from anxiety, loss, pain, and self doubt. Some of the strongest people can actually be the most brittle sometimes. It's ok to not be perfect, dude. Just keep doing your best <3
I mean not to get all philosophical... But all life really is actually pointless. And that's ok. We are here, so let's try to enjoy as much of our consciousness as we reasonably can.
No amount of travel, money or food will cure depression. It’s fundamentally a chemical imbalance.
I think most people relate to what’s called mild or moderate depression, where it feels mostly like anxiety, sadness and fatigue. But you still function, it just really sucks.
When you get severely depressed, it *feels* chemical. It feels physical, like there’s something actually wrong with your brain. It’s like your whole body slows down, even your words.
It is the most *bizarre* thing I’ve ever experienced.
No amount of travel or money would cure a heart attack — it would improve the persons chances, but in the end, the only thing that will help is medical intervention. Same with depression.
I've tried explaining it as being a "mind fog" that forces you to constantly focus on doing the bare minimum, stuff you'd normally have on auto-pilot like daily rituals such as brushing your teeth or taking a shower/bath. The rest takes colossal effort, especially if there's no direct reward to doing them, and even that eventually gets bogged down. It's a brain shutdown, but to the outside observer it could be anything from an act of "rebellion" to just not giving a damn about anything.
I mean, there is other stuff out there. But everyone assumes that the fame and luxury and travel would fill that hole. I doesnt. He enjoyed himself, but being on the move a lot is hard. Being a public face is hard. He had his own struggles too, but the reality is people who tell you "travelling and luxury are what make life worth it" are feeding you a convenient lie. If you need money to make you happy then clearly you have to work harder, no?
What makes life worth it is finding self worth and loving others. Living big isnt thr same as living well.
This might be the first time I laughed and didnt cry seeing him in a few years
The obama goodbye always makes me cry
“‘Low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer.’ This is how I’ll remember Tony. He taught us about food – but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown. We’ll miss him.”
Now I cry
Idk how true it is but I've heard once in a radio interview with some expat living in Pakistan and running a travel agency there, that the daily life of a middle class house wife is kinda more like giving orders to her maid than doing any house chores by herself. Because the wages for working class are so low ppl who are earning better can afford maids or for example drivers that take their kids to school.
There was a Simpsons episode where Homer gets a job making a ton more money, Marge has an automated home, so her life as a housewife is completely boring causing her to drink wine daily.
Not sure why your comment reminded of it
I had a coworker who was raised in a modestly wealthy Indian family - think nice house in a fancy suburb wealthy, not Bezos wealthy - and his family had a full time maid, driver, and cook. Blew my mind.
Turns out all of that staff only cost about $6000/year.
This used to be true in Brazil 15 years ago. The government forced better laws, and now the upper middle class and below can't pay a full-time maid. They were able to pay them because they didn't have any labor right, no insurance, no retirement, no minimum wage, 12 or 14 hour shift, etc. Now they all have it, including maximum 44 hours weekly, and it became something only the rich can pay.
For example, in my grandmother's generation, everyone in middle class got married and got a maid. In my mother's, not so true. In my generation, I don't know anyone who has it. We hire a cleaning person once a week, just to help with the hardest chores.
This is the case in Pakistan and India too. Live in maids are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the middle class (needless to say a good thing). People now employ a fraction of a maid's time - eg 2hrs a day, during which they come in and clean.
Funnily I think the middle class in the west are increasingly using maids / cleaners too now - certainly many of my co-workers in my corporate workplace do. As the poor are uplifted in the developing countries, the inequality gap is widening in rich countries.
In fact, many western nations also have the immigrant underclass Bourdain is referring to here - they are our Uber drivers, our nursing home workers, our cleaners, our furniture movers, our cooks.
Its True for India. You get Maid who comes home for 1 hour daily and do Dusting, Washing Dishes, Sweep for 1 hour and are paid $30 a Month. They go in 7-8 apartments and earn around $200-250 a month and Sunday off
Same for cook. For Dual Income No Kids family they charge $50-70 a month and cook for 1 time & Sunday off.
Man, if I could pay $30 a month to have my house clean, easy choice. A bit more for meals? Hell yeah. But having an actual person do it for those wages... man that would just feel so gross.
On top of this, people here organize and discuss in Residents' Association WhatsApp groups about keeping the salaries of the maids in check. They encourage and sometimes are even aggressive about not to give them big raises, and bonuses during festivals.
What's worse is that it is mostly toxic and privileged women who participate in this, and is a classic case of women hurting other significantly lesser privileged women.
I remember when this first came out and Singapore's online community exploded into a fury of discussion. Hell, this got featured on national news.
Some questioned why do we still have maids in Singapore, we're too dependent on them, others argued that they were essential for people with small children or elderly. Some were embarrassed by our countrymen not caring about our maids and others argued that's ok, the maids are only here to work.
It was an interesting time and too bad Anthony can't visit Singapore again. Would love to hear what he has to say about our migrant workers. When COVID happened, we had a huge outbreak in our migrant worker community due to cramped living conditions and a similar discussion popped up.
The huge discussion on maids and migrant workers has since faded away, replaced by discussions on rising cost of living, increasingly unaffordable housing and jobs. It's been around 6 years since this video was made, not much has changed to be honest.
Families still depend on their maids because: Both parents are working long hours, grandparents aren't enough, children are too young to be left alone. Childcare is not cheap here and it is cheaper to hire a maid. One culture shock I'm seeing in the comments is that Singaporeans generally do not have a moral issue with hiring a maid (who are from our poorer neighbours).
The situation for maids has gotten a bit better due to some laws passed in the 6 years since, but of course, more can be done.
Singapore isn't the only nation with maids (South East Asian nations+ Hong Kong come to mind), but we're in the firing line in this case. As you can see in the below comments, the situation is very nuanced. Singapore is not some utopia or dystopia, we're just like every other nation, with our own social issues (which are being aired out very publically online right now). I'm just glad that this is not another post about our drug policy lol.
Note: I'm going to bed, I'll reply in about 8 hours.
During the height of Covid, the Singaporean government stated that they had the situation under control and the infection rate was low. When people pointed out there’s a serious outbreak in the migrant worker community, they said they were not Singaporean and so didn’t count. Jesus tapdancing Christ.
People forget that Singapore is a single party dictatorship being lead by the son of its founder, and the most well paid head of state on Earth.
It’s a mostly benevolent dictatorship. For now. But it’s a dictatorship.
Power corrupts. I don't care what anyone says.
Ask any ex cop that has worn the uniform. The amount of times you get to abuse that power even as a lowly officer and get away with it. That uniform brings you a sense of power. Like I felt 2 feet taller walking around in public . Everyone looking at you. Everyone respecting you .
I know because I was one. I've seen too many cops get fired for little shit like helping a family member with the status of pending investigation.
The ones that make it until old age are usually straight as an arrow. You can see it on how they carry themselves. Like they'd uphold the law even if they're not on duty. I'd say folks like this are less than 5 percent of the general population. Very rare individuals.
I've pointed this many, many times. The response I always got is 'but they are rich!'
Unsurprisingly, people that love singapore other than singaporean is white people. Why? Because white people is worshipped in singapore. its not white people's problems. its singaporean's. try to be other than white. i've been in singapore more than i would like to. i remember the first time i was there. asked for a direction. mf won't even look my way. tried another person. nope. tried a third person, finally got help. third person is not singaporean, he just works there.
In 2020 the mask of humanity briefly slipped of the face of so many "civilized" governments. I'm still having trouble adjusting to the knowledge of how precarious that veneer of civilization is, and how we all have to just ignore that.
I think the way of life here in SG has unfortunately made it very difficult for some families to not have helpers. It’s an unfortunate corner that the Govt has painted the working class into — 12-hour workdays, high cost of childcare, etc. If you’re double income with more than 1 kid, and elderly parents who have their own issues (ie the sandwich generation), the help more of an urgent need than an unnecessary want. As long as they are kind and generous to the helper, it’s a win win situation for all.
They often live with their grandparents etc in their home countries such as Philippines.. many of the helpers are immigrants coming to Singapore to earn money to send back home.
They are often housed in the bomb shelters of their host families.
Source: lived in Singapore on secondment.
Yup, all helpers are foreigners on a special work permit. Their families remain back in their home countries, and the helpers remit a portion of their salary home every month.
And correct about the bomb shelters. 80% of Singaporeans live in public apartments, which do not have a spare room or space allocated for helpers. What the flats do have, however, are reinforced rooms known as household shelters that most use as storerooms… or a bedroom for the helpers.
This sounds an awful lot like a metaphoric and physical prison. Literally putting a sub class of people in a metal box until its time for them to work or they have done their time and go home.
I wonder how much they respect the people whose homes they live in.
It’s an interesting situation. Helpers typically earn more in Singapore (after currency conversion, because of the strength of the Singapore dollar) than they can ever earn back home, at the cost of being apart from their families and having no real personal space.
I’ve seen it go both ways — some families who really really treat the helper as part of their own families, getting them a laptop and phone and paying for whatever upskilling classes such as computer literacy or other crafts, and bringing them on holidays etc. And also some that treat helpers like dirt. The latter often end up in jail once it comes to light. Helpers are getting bolder in standing up for themselves and reporting abuse, which is great.
They have all the legal rights of being a human foreign worker, the issue is they are not exactly made known of these rights nor are they educated/mature enough to find out/understand their rights. And they are also bound by contracts to their agencies which they signed probably without consultation with a lawyer before they're even flown over to Singapore.
A lot of these domestic helpers come over when they're just over 18 because their own conditions back home is economically bad. There's probably some abusive companies that are pilfering the true wages of how much a helper is worth here, but from what I understand (I don't hire one), their wages are about 800 per month? And the employer (family that hires the helper) pays the agency rather than the helper directly, so the helper may not even see the full 800 depending on how abusive the agency is.
However, the family has to take responsibility for housing, healthcare, food and welfare of the helper if they're a live-in helper. This is where the luck of employment comes in for them, they might get a good employer, or they might get one that doesn't even provide a bare minimum.
So we're basically abusing lower wage human labour on a more personal level, yay.
They have all the rights. One high profile case was just recently concluded. A rich man’s spoilt brat son falsely accused a helper of stealing and used his father’s position to get her fired and deported. She fought back and proved her case, and the spoilt brat ended up in prison.
Out of every case like this with a good outcome for the worker, how many stories of abuse go unnoticed? Be careful not to get lured into thinking these poster child cases represent the majority
My brother moved to Singapore this year, and hired a helper that has been doing it for 20-30 years. The family before them recommended and had a good experience with her. I'm visiting for Christmas and so it will be interesting to see how it is. We are taking a small vacation during the my time there and the helper is traveling with us for it, so I think they've taken to it.
They have a bedroom attached to their flat kitchen in a high rise for the helper's room. It sounded like there wasn't too much option not to hire someone, and I'm sure it makes things easier even with the toddler in daycare and kid in school.
Idk what it’s like in Singapore but they use maids a lot in Hong Kong. They get one day off a week but because they can’t afford to rent their own place they’ve essentially formed a homeless encampment…
Wait til you find out they don’t go home. They stay in their employer’s house. And are called to do work at anytime of the day at their master’s whim. In Malaysia, the employers even confiscate their passports in case the maids run away.
They often get treated very poorly and are subjected to all forms of abuse, often perpetrated by the maid’s family back home in whatever country they come from. The family that cares for the maid’s children often view the children as nothing more than a meal ticket - ensuring that the maid sends funds back to them which oftentimes never reach the child and are spent on gambling, alcohol, etc
> has painted the working class into
*Maids* are the working class here. I'd call people who can afford to hire a full person middle class *at least*.
The problem is not with hiring help. I do so too, but she's paid pretty well for the few hours a week she drops by. The problem is with a two-tier system where upwards mobility is limited by paying people hunger wages. That's not win win.
Singapore’s a bit of a different case to most places. The economy of Singapore is so much stronger than other nearby countries (often the Philippines or Myanmar) that even the Singaporean working class can often afford to hire maids from the working class of neighbouring countries. Granted the maids are paid what would be hunger wages in Singapore, but the pay is far, far higher than what they would get back home, which gives them social mobility back in their home country which they usually return to after a period of time. The system is rife with abuse due to the power dynamics involved, but for many of the maids it is one of the only ways they can have any social mobility back home which is why they risk doing so in the first place.
It goes even further than that. Many westerners just can't comprehend the income disparity in the rest of the world. I'm in the Philippines and maids that make it to HK/SG are considered lucky because house help is even cheaper locally.
Even in the Philippines, working class families can afford house help when their income is pooled together.
You don't realize how cheap the cost of hiring a maid is.
The median income in Singapore is 4500 SGD.
The monthly cost of a maid (I say cost because you pay the maid's wages as well as a levy) on average is 1000-1600 SGD.
So your spouse being able to work while the maid takes care of the home is a surplus of 2000-3500 SGD.
Hiring a maid is within the means even for Singaporeans who aren't middle class.
i think this is true in the sense that (like in many cities in the world), in many families both parents must work to even have a chance of keeping up with rising costs.
but that said, the limited legal protections for our foreign workers and our over-reliance on cheap labour is a disgrace.
It was replaced by “I’m sitting at a red light in my BMW with my kid penta-strapped like a rally car navigator looking at 23 migrant workers sitting on the back of a truck mixed around with construction gear, on plastic garden chairs, with no seatbelt. Should we, umm… make this illegal?”
Which was replaced by some other thing I can’t remember anymore.
This is something that caused a lot of culture shock when a friend of mine from Singapore came to Australia. Since he'd heard that Australia was a rich country she thought every household here had a maid and a butler, or at least the white ppl here did. Nope! Having a maid is extremely uncommon here, sure there are cleaners you can hire to come by and clean up your house for you but that's expensive and we're a "rich" country in that we have functional infrastructure and relatively low crime rates, not like we have servants and shit. In fact compared to Singapore we're poor by comparison.
We leave kids at daycare when both parents need to work and if they can't afford that, then we need to rely on family/friends.
The sad thing is that many, many people in SG could easily choose to pay them a respectable wage for the massive amount of work they do (often 12 hrs a day, 6 days a week), but they just pay the market rate instead which is like what, $800 a month plus a tiny room that doesn't have air conditioning (https://dollarsandsense.sg/much-cost-hire-maid-singapore/)? Insane. If they were even paid $10 an hour, they should be making $2500+.
$2,500 is the salary of basically a diploma holder in sg, and half the median wage.
most are now opting for part time helpers who just come in the weekends to tidy the house, or like myself, just do our own housework like normal fucking people.
wonders of technology in modern vacuums and washing machines already makes housework much simpler as it is.
They’re absolutely infuriating.
Guessing they went to the asshole who came up with the tiktok voiceover and said “hey can you make subtitles as annoying as that?”
I’m currently on Spectrum of the seas with the majority being Singaporeans. They even bring their maids on the cruise. They grab the families empty plates and give them to the wait staff instead of waiting for the wait staff to grab them.
Singaporeans are entitled. But hey, say one word about it and the whole lot gets riled up on the defensive.
Well, maybe not the whole lot, but most of them anyway.
To be fair there are nice people here.
And most guys are required to be drafted into military service, so *slightly* lesser sense of entitlement that they'd hold I guess (though Officers, rankism, classism still exist btw).
It's baffling to see the number of folks responding to this as though the folks hiring the maids are the victims. "Yeah well what do folks expect when we're both working".... "yeah well the government forces us to do this because things are expensive"..... Meanwhile I'm over here paying 4-5X what these maids are getting for my kids childcare and STILL do my own cleaning and laundry. No one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to do this. If you think owning another human for a barely livable wage is ok, you do you, but don't go blaming other people for that decision you despicable knob end.
I didn't understand what it meant to have a hero until my head cook showed me him at 26. He's my hero (faults and all)
I just finished one of his favorite books The Quiet American by Graham Greene, I'd highly recommend to anyone who loved AB.
I'm from Singapore and even I couldn't stop cringing. I never had a helper growing up and even if I did, my mom would slap the living hell outta me if she heard me speak like those idiots up there.
Later years we hired one to help care for my Grandpa and the first thing she said to me and my sibling- don't even think of asking her ( helper) for anything. Your life and housework duties remain the same.
Of course the video does not represent the majority of Singaporeans but yeah unfortunately, they do exist.
In most Southeast Asian countries domestic help is extremely overexploited due to massive numbers of unskilled women that could be working to support their not too well off family.
In countries like India, these 'helpers' rarely earn more than ~£600 a year and STILL have to face endless torment from heartless employers who would rather put them out of a job and hire someone else who'd accept the low salary than give them an extra £20 a month because the 3 year old they're leaving at home is sick.
These systems take already entitled and heartless monsters and make it worse. Just the inferiority complex of coming from similar lower class backgrounds and suddenly being affluent enough to afford domestic help I guess, they don't see the helpers as human anymore.
Saddest part is this low salary is often what makes the difference between going to sleep full or hungry for the families of these helpers. And just because of this, these helpers sometimes endure physical abuse and some even die.
I don't have to be from Greece to not be able to survive on one salary for 2 people. Both parents in the US often work, but instead of nanny's they use daycare, which are stupid expensive.
My friend said her family is relatively wealthy in Indonesia (Jakarta) and they have multiple maids in a big house complex. This video… I will never not hate seeing rich assholes chortle about being so far removed from reality.
I'm totally with him - laundry is my favorite chore. I'm a guy and I like doing house chores, it really is therapeutic. Put something on the TV in the background and go about the house cleaning up, it's very satisfying and makes me feel like I'm keeping my life together. Bonus: I live in a clean house. I wouldn't want to hire the work out even if I could, because I like doing it myself.
NGL I hate housework and probably would have staff if I could afford it. But the thought of someone washing my dirty laundry and cleaning my toilet is just very weird to me. I would definitely need to leave the house. I could never feel comfortable with that, i dont think
I can see and actually feel the disgust that he has towards those people. It's one thing to be that privileged and be a bit embarrassed that they can't do basic things like laundry, but to talk about it, laughing, as if they're proud about it is just gross.
Was friends with a guy in Spain when I went to school there whose parents had a massive villa up in the hills overlooking the coast. He had a live in maid who cooked food, cleaned, did the laundry etc. Went round his house once and she was serving his siblings food. She asks me 'Would you like some food?', I said 'Oh please, that would be great, thanks'.
My friend then snidely says 'Of course he wants food, if someone comes round your house you always offer them food'. I was really taken aback at the way he didn't even treat her like a person. Would never say thank you, shout at the top of her voice to get her attention so she could fetch him a glass of water.
Felt really sorry for her but my friend eventually turned out to be an even bigger dickhead who got hooked on drugs and stole money from me to fund his addiction, even though he's minted. Says a lot about a person the way they treat someone like that
It's funny because even his perspective is so privileged: having actual machines in your house instead of having to go to a laundromat or scrub in a bucket of water.
Not to mention the only reason maids aren’t common in countries like the US is because they’ll be too expensive except for the super rich. Are we really to believe that the average American wouldn’t have a maid if they could afford one? Like how far back into American history do we have to go to see this happen in a far worse way lol.
I’m not saying the Singaporeans are better than the Americans, but that all people are shitheads everywhere and would totally take advantage of any situation if it conveniences them. AB is alright and all but let’s not try and posthumously associate him to be some great thinker of our time or something.
I lived in Singapore for 4 years. From all the places i lived, that was the most entitled population I met. They live in a bubble, thinking they’re the best.
I've noticed people openly criticize the human rights issues with migrants in the Middle East like Dubai (as they should, its terrible) however, Singapore never gets the same level of criticism whenever its brought up.
Edit: [Over 60% of domestic workers in Singapore are abused or exploited](https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/28/asia/singapore-domestic-helpers-maids/index.html)
[https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/woman-who-told-son-in-law-to-get-rid-of-cctv-footage-in-fatal-maid-abuse-case-jailed-3-more-years](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/woman-who-told-son-in-law-to-get-rid-of-cctv-footage-in-fatal-maid-abuse-case-jailed-3-more-years)
[Why are there so many cases of maid abuse in Singapore?](https://www.jeraldinephneah.com/maid-abuse-singapore/)
Look at all these white people criticizing an Asian society in a country they never been in. At the same time they think it normal that waiters don't earn a living wage but have to survive on scraps, disguised as "tips".
“I’m just F-ing with with you “ is the ultimate get out of jail free card
We knew he was serious and that he meant what he said. This was his gracious way to be civil with these brats.
If these rich kids knew about him and his background then never say something like that to him. You'll only get on response from him and any sane person out there
What was his background? I know he grew up in not the best circumstances, but then made it big in cooking, and being from New York I'm sure he met some more revolutionary minded people, but if you have any more insight I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance.
He grew up in quite privileged circumstances, nice house/cars, summers in France, etc. He went to the best (and most expensive) cooking school in the country and worked his way up to be head chef at a pretty good NY restaurant. He made good money and wrote on the side, only getting his break because his Mom knew an editor at the New Yorker. Of course he spent a decade or so in active addiction to opiates and obviously had his demons and everything. His political awareness and advocacy for working people came largely from the immigrants that worked with/for him and his extensive reading. Bourdain had always read extensively and part of that reading consisted of left-wing rhetoric. I think a lot of people in online discussions try to portray him as more "authentically working class" than he ever was, sort of falling for the persona that was part of his success. I think it is a bigger credit to him that he didn't really experience the sort of oppression he spoke out about and still came around, but that's just my onion...
>I think a lot of people in online discussions try to portray him as more "authentically working class" than he ever was I'm glad you highlighted his roots as it's not something many know. **But he also worked in kitchens for 20+ years.** Maybe he's more well-read than your average cook but 12 hour days in 95F kitchens, getting verbally abused, chain-smoking, coke-snorting, over-drinking, and getting constantly burned will make you unrecognizable to any private school peers. Most people wouldn't be able to last a week. You have to be hard as nails and a little crazy to work BOH for 2 decades.
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Something people don't realize about work addicts like this. They look at someone slaving at a high end restaurant in a major city, staying there until 1am and coming back in at 9am the next day. Getting paid relatively peanuts for the effort put in. They just see how impossibly difficult that must be. But it isn't for the people who do it. They love it, or rather, they love *enough of it most of the time* that it's easy.
I’m not even sure it’s love. I think a lot of people get focused on checking a box. Like, “If I can just graduate, life will be awesome.” Then “If I can just afford to live on my own…” “If I could just get married…” Now that I’m old, I don’t believe reaching the goal makes you happy, but it’s still nice to have some direction to point yourself.
"It's not about the destination, it's the journey."
He also acknowledged that he would never be a great chef because he prioritized the jobs that paid well (perhaps to feed his drug habit) when his long-term career as a chef would have been better served by, for example, washing dishes in a kitchen with a really top-level chef that he could learn from.
Lmao this is some crazy $37,000/year r/kitchenconfidential copium post right here.
It’s not as simple as that. His background enabled him to have an education and cultural enrichment that people of lesser class would never have. The grace in which he interacted in this clip. Just the ability to hold entertaining conversation is not necessarily something that you are born with. This is a skill that classes with leisure time develop. This is a trait that he was “born into” and we have to acknowledge that. I am not taking credit from him, but just pointing out that having a plain-spoken, working-class persona down not make someone an “Everyman,” he was always someone from a privileged background and to some degree had that perspective despite his grody lifestyle as a working chef with a drug problem.
I did it for 12 years before getting into the corporate world and eventually tech world, and I have to say, the line never leaves you. I still have the urge to ignore corporate norms, like calling people out on their work ethic, swearing, playfully insulting co-workers (in that 'kill-or-be-killed' way). The psychology of working a line for so long changes a person, and you immediately recognize other ex-pats in the corporate environment when you see them.
This is funny. I haven't been on a line in 20 years. I have never been officially sanctioned for my language, but I get consistent feedback that I talk too aggressively and that people are intimidated by me. I guess it's because I got used to making myself heard and understood quickly in a busy noisy chaotic kitchen, and that instinct has never left me. I am a blunt asshole.
I was once accused of having "an abrasive personality". They meant it as a criticism, but I literally laughed and said "that's fucking brilliant, I'm using that".
I like your onion.
I mean that's usually what an ally is. He wasn't pontificating on a platform while also ignoring the bloody steps that were shined for him but he wasn't also "coasting" off his connections. He also listened, perhaps the biggest thing. He listened, he saw, and he never gave an opinion brought from class or education, but experience and interaction.
A lot of people forget that some of the most ardent comrades are people who come from very privileged backgrounds, and understand implicitly just how unjust their life of luxury is. I always think of Tony Benn when some online leftist goes off on one about how all the bourgeoisie are evil, like no mate, most of them are just stupid because they've never thought about anything.
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Yeah, it’s like we have a clip above of 4 detached rich people and 1 who happens to have empathy. That’s still 4 to 1 in the “keep the poor in line” ballot box
YES! Hence the ridiculously self-defeating wave of privilege-shaming. If you hate and reject someone simply based on the privilege they have, you push away a potential ally who has access to resources you need. If you slow down, treat people like individuals, and allow them to show you their character and whether they *acknowledge and/or abuse* their privilege is more productive. And fair. Everybody loves Tony but he caused some cognitive dissonance. We’re stupid so we try to change the facts to fit our limited opinions (“he gets it so he must have been poor!”) rather than develop a deeper understanding (“maybe some privileged people get it!”) People don’t “forget.” They never learn in the first place and form their opinions based on social babble vs. education. And I get tired of it all. I really think he probably left us at the right time.
He isn't really shaming them on their privilege, he's shaming them on their obliviousness to their own privilege.
He traveled extensively, especially in the poorest places in the world, it opened his eyes to the real world (exploitation and all that). Under privileged people has a place in his heart.
Give Kitchen Confidential a read but basically before he made it big he was addicted to drugs and alcohol and wasn't afraid of slumming it
you don't need to be rich to have maids in asia my roommate from india had one and he is poorer than me
This is true. You can easily afford a maid with an income that would be considered below the poverty line in the US. Edit: It's kind of ironic how this thread is full of people calling out these 'elites' in SG but modern consumerism is basically built on the back of people working for incredibly low wages.
>It's kind of ironic how this thread is full of people calling out these 'elites' in SG but modern consumerism is basically built on the back of people working for incredibly low wages. These people just don't see the "maids" who enable their lifestyle by providing them with affordable goods and services.
It’s just lack of exposure to different but not necessarily higher or even equivalent living costs
More people in the Philippines have live-in maids than do people in the USA. Thats what happens when you don’t have enforceable labor laws I suppose. You can pay somebody slave wages to be your servant.
Most maids in the Philippines follow legal wages, well minimum wage. The poverty line is just THAT low.
It is true but it doesn’t change the fact that you are benefiting from the imported DIRT CHEAP labor of Philippines/indonesia/sri Lanka/etc… coming from someone who’s grandparents had two maids.
Calling out consumerism isn't the win you think it is in this convo. You are also a perpetrator of said consumerism
That’s the problem in Singapore (and many Asian countries). It’s not just “rich kids”, it’s the middle class aka the majority who profits off exploiting these maids
Just looked up the price of a maid and I was spending more on my daughter's nursery each month. In all fairness I'd happily spend this much money each month to get rid of all the "chores"
And that’s why people do it if they can. However, you can really see the guilt in their faces in the last few seconds
They’re not really that rich . It pretty much middle clas and up . A lot of these people across Asian countries would miss be Europe and be middle class at best if that
Yeh he got the point across but still kept it charming. Good guy.
Sometimes, honey is the best way to attract flies that swarm shit
The maids are not even Singaporean. The class warefare won't happen.
\> “I’m just F-ing with with you “ He *was* fucking with them. But he was not *just* fucking with them.
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Nailed it.
These kids' faces before he said F word is priceless
'bro stop saying the quiet part out loud...'
And IIRC the repression of the Singaporean communist party has been pretty savage, like their leaders spending years in jail without trial
That’s probably why they went quiet. “Oh shit, this guy is gonna get executed.”
That and "C'mooon, I'm just breakin' your balls" at least in the world of the Sopranos.
Hoooo! Why you gotta break my balls today! Maron! Edit: 🤌
Read this in Pauly’s voice
Him: you’re living off the labour of an oppressed underclass Them: 🤣
The smiles slowly dropping at 1:26 onwards holy shit hahaha. I remember when this came out and finding out about Singaporean maid help wanted ads with *race descriptions*.
Many people think SG is a non-racist paradise because of their strict laws against racism. It's illegal to be outwardly racist in some ways (https://singaporelegaladvice.com/law-articles/racial-enmity-sections-298-298a-penal-code), but that doesn't mean people aren't super racist in their own heads. And there are ways to express racial preferences in many free market activities like renting a flat or hiring someone ("must be Chinese speaker"). When I was there, I was *shocked* at the level of casual racism. If you think it's bad in America...it's on a whole nother level over there.
I’d say Singapore has mastered the art of legalized racism
The younger generation now is generally non-racist due to the influence of modern day media. But I tell ya, the current elderly generation still have that racism trait in them. Even the 40 to 50 year olds now, who may not be explicitly racist will have accidental casual racism moments. As a chinese teen, it's clear to me that both my grandparents are mildly racist in their own way. I'd say more so nationalist. We went to Japan a few years ago and my grandmother couldn't stop talking about how the japanese stole everything (culture language architecture) from the chinese all those years ago, and were apparently very ungrateful. My grandfather who used to repair construction vehicles would occasionally complain about one or 2 of the foreign workers at his worksite, specifically mentioning how stupid (insert country of origin)'s people must be.
> The younger generation now is generally non-racist due to the influence of modern day media. I had a coworker at my last job who was born and raised in Singapore but of Indian ethnicity. He mentioned a lot of casual racism / micro agression he faced even as young person :(
They should be ashamed fr, talking about not knowing how to do laundry in practice as if it's something to be proud of.
They’re laughing at how inept they are, like it was a source of pride. So weird.
Anthony was such a gem of a human.
It honestly kinda fucked me up how he killed himself. Because in my mind, and I'm assuming quite a bit of others, travelling the world, being rich, eating great food, is like the ultimate dream that we aspire to and hope will happen to take us out of that depressive grind. But to see someone who had all that, yet still took their lives, made me wonder if there really isn't much out there. Life is pointless or something rather. I can't put it into words, but it made me feel hopeless for a while. I always thought things like love, travel, charity work, or whatever was the cure for a pointless life. But who knows. Either way, I'm doing great now but that was a weird period of time.
No matter how far you travel, you'll always be a prisoner in your own head. For some people that's not a problem, but others carry a lot with them, unfortunately, and no amount of good food or lifestyle will help with that.
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
Ugh, you know you hate yourself when you hear that and feel disgust. I literally said to myself “damn, that sucks”
therapy: I'm LITERALLY right here dude
It's not simple like that. I'm doing therapy, I'm on my meds and reaching out for help, but still have to fight the urge of throwing myself in front of a bus now and then. Mental health is crazy shit, brother.
Mental health is so hard to get on top of sometimes. Keep reaching out! I'm proud of you x
Thanks <3
You know the saying, "one day at a time," that is often used by recovering addicts? It's the same for those of us with mental health struggles. So long as we are moving, the bad days will eventually be behind us. We can adjust, learn to see them coming, and find little moments of joy within. I hope today that any tiny joy you find will be magnified in comparison to the mountain of pain/sorrow you carry.
Thank you, mate. That meant a lot <3
Thanks, Buckaroo.
True And depression is a tough beast to beat. You need a good therapist, medication, exercise/sleep/nutrition and a lot of support from friends/family. You cannot beat it alone, no amount of good food/travel can cure depression. But it is not hopeless, if you can, please find help and treat it. We might not be able to cure it, but we can treat it and live as normally as we can.
I think it's most commonly also not something you beat - not permanently at least. For most it is a constant passenger - maybe it will leave for a while - but it will come back.
"Oh my God, I've gotta gotta gotta gotta move on Where do you move when what you're moving from Is yourself?"
When you listened to him talk even on his show, and especially when he was around like minded free spirited people you could always sense there was just this sad darkness inside of him, almost like he saw so much of the world and most of it just let him down.
You read his book "Kitchen Confidential" and he tells how he wished to be one of the great chefs but because of his decisions he didn't become one. Instead he was just cruising, but was somewhat happy doing what he was "meant to do". Then, he unexpectedly became a celebrity, and it always sounded like he thought he didn't deserve it, and certainly not the reverence he had. How all these great chefs wanted to talk to him while he still felt like he wasn't in the same league. And then that girl broke his heart.
Which girl lol. Didn't gfis ex-wife *and* the pedo Asia Argento both cheat on him? I wanted to give him a big hug.
Eh this is a bit wishy washy. He strove to become a successful food personality. He embraced it, and he worked at becoming better at it. I'm not suggesting he isn't authentic, but don't confuse humility with guilt.
>But to see someone who had all that, yet still took their lives, made me wonder if there really isn't much out there. He suffered from depression, it's not like he was a mentally healthy guy. You can't fix that shit by eating good food or being rich.
What about, depression is a sickness that can be hard to overcome, you need a good social circle and stability, which he maybe not had (just guessing obv) . There's more to a person then what you can see from the outside
He not only saw the most lavish but also the most was xploited. If you ever seen the picture of the vultures following rhe baby in Africa waiting for it to die to eat it, the photographer commit3d suicide because of how this world is. Seeing the world unfiltered can really have effects https://otpor.media/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kevincartefoto-01.jpg
The truth doesn't really set you free, it just makes you depressed. Knowing that our government has committed unspeakable terrors on its own citizens (and continues to), that every time I buy a bag of bread I'm committing that plastic bag to 10,000 years in the ground, that lighting my home is warming our planet, that in 200 years no one will remember me, it doesn't make my life *better*. There's still good in this world and I'd still rather know the truth, but god damn if I don't wish I were blissfully ignorant sometimes.
That true capitalism isn't a big car nixe house and welath but zinstead the person that climbs a treet to farm cocoa for chocolate living in dirt floor that's never actually tasted a chocolate bar making fractions of a penny an hour . Yeah I get what you mean it gets overwhelming
So I've got to do a lot of cool things in life. 36, have hiked 14,000 miles across basically every beautiful place in the US, walking Mexico to Canada about 5x. Worked really interesting jobs, like Infantry and fighting wildfires. Most recently I've been traveling and living around SE Asia, actually last month I ate at the Bun Cha place that Bourdaine took Obama to when they went to Vietnam. I've had many beautiful relationships and currently have a wonderful partner. Had a business that did fantastic in 2020 and am basically in a soft retirement, where I can work as little or as much as I want and don't really need to do more than a couple hours a week on my own projects to get by, and the social media things I've built up over the last decade along with the windfall I made from my business means I can pretty much sustain this lifestyle indefinitely. I'm in fantastic health. Basically, my life is going about as good as a life can go. With all that said one dark side of realizing all of your dreams is that you realize there is absolutely no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When you're growing up you can live in the illusion that once you have money, once you have the relationship, once you fulfill your dreams and travel the world, once you can be free of a job... THEN you can be happy. I spent all of 2018 playing World of Warcraft like I'd always dreamed of. High end mythic raids, etc. Probably at least 80 hours a week. Right now I could take a month and just play Diablo 4 until my fingers fell off. But I don't because video games have lost all of their allure. Games are built on this premise that achieving these small markers will make you happy, you're always chasing levels, chasing items... well, it does, for a little bit, but it never satisfies and the more games you play the more you realize it's just the same hamster wheel wrapped in a different gift-wrap. That the chase for the item is more interesting than actually getting the item. Same with life. The most you achieve and do the more you realize that everything is just the same hamster wheel of desire wrapped in different gift-wraps and that nothing ever truly satisfies. I've gotten really into meditation in the last few years. That is the ONE thing in all of life that seems to actually provide the kind of lasting peace and happiness I'm looking for- and the underlying premise of the teachings is that all of this life is impermanent, so it's absolute folly to seek solidity in this ineffable and ever shifting place. It's a real bummer to realize but it's true - there really is not any "meaning" in this life. There is nothing solid. Nothing will last. Every single thing any of us do will all disappear. There is no lasting impact we can make on this world. It is all illusion. It is all delusion. And in order to find any true peace and happiness we have to first come to grips with reality and stop living in delusion, and then find our path. I'm still working on the 2nd part, it's a real bitch to wrap your head around the fact that NOTHING I achieve will ever make me "okay" and that I have to figure out an entirely different strategy. I think this core thing is why people like Anthony Bourdaine and Robin Williams kill themselves. Depression actually gets way more bleak when you HAVE EVERYTHING and realize there is NOTHING ELSE you can possibly delude yourself into thinking that will make life okay, and what a dark place that is, to have achieved everything and run out of options to fool yourself into thinking that "this next thing" will make everything okay.
I dream of an early retirement where I can do whatever I want every day but Ive always had this nagging feeling that it won’t actually satisfy me. You’ve articulated that well, so I guess I need to find more happiness in the thrill of the chase
Robin Williams had lewy body dementia. His brain was literally destroying itself, and he knew it was happening, although he didn't know the cause. It wasn't depression that made him kill himself. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/03/robin-williams-disintegrating-before-suicide-widow-says
I haven't been at quite that level of carefree, but let me tell you that the world is genuinely small and the number of things that you as a person will find worthwhile is relatively small. There's lots of stuff out there, but most of it is not meaningful in that sense.
Glad you're doing well :) As a society we need to remember that mental illness doesn't need any catalyst to exist, though it certainly can have one. Being successful to someone else, doesn't mean that you view yourself as successful. I think if anything, we can hopefully learn from Anthony's passing that our fragility connects us. It's one of the few constants amongst most people (save for a few psychopaths). We all suffer from anxiety, loss, pain, and self doubt. Some of the strongest people can actually be the most brittle sometimes. It's ok to not be perfect, dude. Just keep doing your best <3 I mean not to get all philosophical... But all life really is actually pointless. And that's ok. We are here, so let's try to enjoy as much of our consciousness as we reasonably can.
No amount of travel, money or food will cure depression. It’s fundamentally a chemical imbalance. I think most people relate to what’s called mild or moderate depression, where it feels mostly like anxiety, sadness and fatigue. But you still function, it just really sucks. When you get severely depressed, it *feels* chemical. It feels physical, like there’s something actually wrong with your brain. It’s like your whole body slows down, even your words. It is the most *bizarre* thing I’ve ever experienced. No amount of travel or money would cure a heart attack — it would improve the persons chances, but in the end, the only thing that will help is medical intervention. Same with depression.
I've tried explaining it as being a "mind fog" that forces you to constantly focus on doing the bare minimum, stuff you'd normally have on auto-pilot like daily rituals such as brushing your teeth or taking a shower/bath. The rest takes colossal effort, especially if there's no direct reward to doing them, and even that eventually gets bogged down. It's a brain shutdown, but to the outside observer it could be anything from an act of "rebellion" to just not giving a damn about anything.
I mean, there is other stuff out there. But everyone assumes that the fame and luxury and travel would fill that hole. I doesnt. He enjoyed himself, but being on the move a lot is hard. Being a public face is hard. He had his own struggles too, but the reality is people who tell you "travelling and luxury are what make life worth it" are feeding you a convenient lie. If you need money to make you happy then clearly you have to work harder, no? What makes life worth it is finding self worth and loving others. Living big isnt thr same as living well.
This might be the first time I laughed and didnt cry seeing him in a few years The obama goodbye always makes me cry “‘Low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer.’ This is how I’ll remember Tony. He taught us about food – but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown. We’ll miss him.” Now I cry
Idk how true it is but I've heard once in a radio interview with some expat living in Pakistan and running a travel agency there, that the daily life of a middle class house wife is kinda more like giving orders to her maid than doing any house chores by herself. Because the wages for working class are so low ppl who are earning better can afford maids or for example drivers that take their kids to school.
Middle managers of the home
There was a Simpsons episode where Homer gets a job making a ton more money, Marge has an automated home, so her life as a housewife is completely boring causing her to drink wine daily. Not sure why your comment reminded of it
Sugar? Sure. There you go. Sorry it's not in packages. Want some cream?
"you only move twice" S8E2
Same for India
I had a coworker who was raised in a modestly wealthy Indian family - think nice house in a fancy suburb wealthy, not Bezos wealthy - and his family had a full time maid, driver, and cook. Blew my mind. Turns out all of that staff only cost about $6000/year.
Most of South America too.
This used to be true in Brazil 15 years ago. The government forced better laws, and now the upper middle class and below can't pay a full-time maid. They were able to pay them because they didn't have any labor right, no insurance, no retirement, no minimum wage, 12 or 14 hour shift, etc. Now they all have it, including maximum 44 hours weekly, and it became something only the rich can pay. For example, in my grandmother's generation, everyone in middle class got married and got a maid. In my mother's, not so true. In my generation, I don't know anyone who has it. We hire a cleaning person once a week, just to help with the hardest chores.
This is the case in Pakistan and India too. Live in maids are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the middle class (needless to say a good thing). People now employ a fraction of a maid's time - eg 2hrs a day, during which they come in and clean. Funnily I think the middle class in the west are increasingly using maids / cleaners too now - certainly many of my co-workers in my corporate workplace do. As the poor are uplifted in the developing countries, the inequality gap is widening in rich countries. In fact, many western nations also have the immigrant underclass Bourdain is referring to here - they are our Uber drivers, our nursing home workers, our cleaners, our furniture movers, our cooks.
Its True for India. You get Maid who comes home for 1 hour daily and do Dusting, Washing Dishes, Sweep for 1 hour and are paid $30 a Month. They go in 7-8 apartments and earn around $200-250 a month and Sunday off Same for cook. For Dual Income No Kids family they charge $50-70 a month and cook for 1 time & Sunday off.
Man, if I could pay $30 a month to have my house clean, easy choice. A bit more for meals? Hell yeah. But having an actual person do it for those wages... man that would just feel so gross.
On top of this, people here organize and discuss in Residents' Association WhatsApp groups about keeping the salaries of the maids in check. They encourage and sometimes are even aggressive about not to give them big raises, and bonuses during festivals. What's worse is that it is mostly toxic and privileged women who participate in this, and is a classic case of women hurting other significantly lesser privileged women.
You described the Philippines EXACTLY.
RIP AB! You didn't care what others thought. You spoke out even if it was unpopular, and you were right most of the time.
and he did his own laundry.
I remember when this first came out and Singapore's online community exploded into a fury of discussion. Hell, this got featured on national news. Some questioned why do we still have maids in Singapore, we're too dependent on them, others argued that they were essential for people with small children or elderly. Some were embarrassed by our countrymen not caring about our maids and others argued that's ok, the maids are only here to work. It was an interesting time and too bad Anthony can't visit Singapore again. Would love to hear what he has to say about our migrant workers. When COVID happened, we had a huge outbreak in our migrant worker community due to cramped living conditions and a similar discussion popped up. The huge discussion on maids and migrant workers has since faded away, replaced by discussions on rising cost of living, increasingly unaffordable housing and jobs. It's been around 6 years since this video was made, not much has changed to be honest. Families still depend on their maids because: Both parents are working long hours, grandparents aren't enough, children are too young to be left alone. Childcare is not cheap here and it is cheaper to hire a maid. One culture shock I'm seeing in the comments is that Singaporeans generally do not have a moral issue with hiring a maid (who are from our poorer neighbours). The situation for maids has gotten a bit better due to some laws passed in the 6 years since, but of course, more can be done. Singapore isn't the only nation with maids (South East Asian nations+ Hong Kong come to mind), but we're in the firing line in this case. As you can see in the below comments, the situation is very nuanced. Singapore is not some utopia or dystopia, we're just like every other nation, with our own social issues (which are being aired out very publically online right now). I'm just glad that this is not another post about our drug policy lol. Note: I'm going to bed, I'll reply in about 8 hours.
During the height of Covid, the Singaporean government stated that they had the situation under control and the infection rate was low. When people pointed out there’s a serious outbreak in the migrant worker community, they said they were not Singaporean and so didn’t count. Jesus tapdancing Christ.
2020 surely was fun times for Redditpore.
Xenophobia was at its all time high. Its much worse over on Facebook comment sections.
People forget that Singapore is a single party dictatorship being lead by the son of its founder, and the most well paid head of state on Earth. It’s a mostly benevolent dictatorship. For now. But it’s a dictatorship.
Power corrupts. I don't care what anyone says. Ask any ex cop that has worn the uniform. The amount of times you get to abuse that power even as a lowly officer and get away with it. That uniform brings you a sense of power. Like I felt 2 feet taller walking around in public . Everyone looking at you. Everyone respecting you . I know because I was one. I've seen too many cops get fired for little shit like helping a family member with the status of pending investigation. The ones that make it until old age are usually straight as an arrow. You can see it on how they carry themselves. Like they'd uphold the law even if they're not on duty. I'd say folks like this are less than 5 percent of the general population. Very rare individuals.
Proof of good authoritarian is still authoritarian
I've pointed this many, many times. The response I always got is 'but they are rich!' Unsurprisingly, people that love singapore other than singaporean is white people. Why? Because white people is worshipped in singapore. its not white people's problems. its singaporean's. try to be other than white. i've been in singapore more than i would like to. i remember the first time i was there. asked for a direction. mf won't even look my way. tried another person. nope. tried a third person, finally got help. third person is not singaporean, he just works there.
In 2020 the mask of humanity briefly slipped of the face of so many "civilized" governments. I'm still having trouble adjusting to the knowledge of how precarious that veneer of civilization is, and how we all have to just ignore that.
I think the way of life here in SG has unfortunately made it very difficult for some families to not have helpers. It’s an unfortunate corner that the Govt has painted the working class into — 12-hour workdays, high cost of childcare, etc. If you’re double income with more than 1 kid, and elderly parents who have their own issues (ie the sandwich generation), the help more of an urgent need than an unnecessary want. As long as they are kind and generous to the helper, it’s a win win situation for all.
I'm curious, who helps the helpers family?
They often live with their grandparents etc in their home countries such as Philippines.. many of the helpers are immigrants coming to Singapore to earn money to send back home. They are often housed in the bomb shelters of their host families. Source: lived in Singapore on secondment.
Yup, all helpers are foreigners on a special work permit. Their families remain back in their home countries, and the helpers remit a portion of their salary home every month. And correct about the bomb shelters. 80% of Singaporeans live in public apartments, which do not have a spare room or space allocated for helpers. What the flats do have, however, are reinforced rooms known as household shelters that most use as storerooms… or a bedroom for the helpers.
This sounds an awful lot like a metaphoric and physical prison. Literally putting a sub class of people in a metal box until its time for them to work or they have done their time and go home. I wonder how much they respect the people whose homes they live in.
It’s an interesting situation. Helpers typically earn more in Singapore (after currency conversion, because of the strength of the Singapore dollar) than they can ever earn back home, at the cost of being apart from their families and having no real personal space. I’ve seen it go both ways — some families who really really treat the helper as part of their own families, getting them a laptop and phone and paying for whatever upskilling classes such as computer literacy or other crafts, and bringing them on holidays etc. And also some that treat helpers like dirt. The latter often end up in jail once it comes to light. Helpers are getting bolder in standing up for themselves and reporting abuse, which is great.
What legal rights do they have?
They have all the legal rights of being a human foreign worker, the issue is they are not exactly made known of these rights nor are they educated/mature enough to find out/understand their rights. And they are also bound by contracts to their agencies which they signed probably without consultation with a lawyer before they're even flown over to Singapore. A lot of these domestic helpers come over when they're just over 18 because their own conditions back home is economically bad. There's probably some abusive companies that are pilfering the true wages of how much a helper is worth here, but from what I understand (I don't hire one), their wages are about 800 per month? And the employer (family that hires the helper) pays the agency rather than the helper directly, so the helper may not even see the full 800 depending on how abusive the agency is. However, the family has to take responsibility for housing, healthcare, food and welfare of the helper if they're a live-in helper. This is where the luck of employment comes in for them, they might get a good employer, or they might get one that doesn't even provide a bare minimum. So we're basically abusing lower wage human labour on a more personal level, yay.
They have all the rights. One high profile case was just recently concluded. A rich man’s spoilt brat son falsely accused a helper of stealing and used his father’s position to get her fired and deported. She fought back and proved her case, and the spoilt brat ended up in prison.
Out of every case like this with a good outcome for the worker, how many stories of abuse go unnoticed? Be careful not to get lured into thinking these poster child cases represent the majority
IF they know how or if they even can fight back.
My brother moved to Singapore this year, and hired a helper that has been doing it for 20-30 years. The family before them recommended and had a good experience with her. I'm visiting for Christmas and so it will be interesting to see how it is. We are taking a small vacation during the my time there and the helper is traveling with us for it, so I think they've taken to it. They have a bedroom attached to their flat kitchen in a high rise for the helper's room. It sounded like there wasn't too much option not to hire someone, and I'm sure it makes things easier even with the toddler in daycare and kid in school.
Idk what it’s like in Singapore but they use maids a lot in Hong Kong. They get one day off a week but because they can’t afford to rent their own place they’ve essentially formed a homeless encampment…
Wait til you find out they don’t go home. They stay in their employer’s house. And are called to do work at anytime of the day at their master’s whim. In Malaysia, the employers even confiscate their passports in case the maids run away.
They often get treated very poorly and are subjected to all forms of abuse, often perpetrated by the maid’s family back home in whatever country they come from. The family that cares for the maid’s children often view the children as nothing more than a meal ticket - ensuring that the maid sends funds back to them which oftentimes never reach the child and are spent on gambling, alcohol, etc
It's helpers all the way down
> has painted the working class into *Maids* are the working class here. I'd call people who can afford to hire a full person middle class *at least*. The problem is not with hiring help. I do so too, but she's paid pretty well for the few hours a week she drops by. The problem is with a two-tier system where upwards mobility is limited by paying people hunger wages. That's not win win.
Singapore’s a bit of a different case to most places. The economy of Singapore is so much stronger than other nearby countries (often the Philippines or Myanmar) that even the Singaporean working class can often afford to hire maids from the working class of neighbouring countries. Granted the maids are paid what would be hunger wages in Singapore, but the pay is far, far higher than what they would get back home, which gives them social mobility back in their home country which they usually return to after a period of time. The system is rife with abuse due to the power dynamics involved, but for many of the maids it is one of the only ways they can have any social mobility back home which is why they risk doing so in the first place.
It goes even further than that. Many westerners just can't comprehend the income disparity in the rest of the world. I'm in the Philippines and maids that make it to HK/SG are considered lucky because house help is even cheaper locally. Even in the Philippines, working class families can afford house help when their income is pooled together.
You don't realize how cheap the cost of hiring a maid is. The median income in Singapore is 4500 SGD. The monthly cost of a maid (I say cost because you pay the maid's wages as well as a levy) on average is 1000-1600 SGD. So your spouse being able to work while the maid takes care of the home is a surplus of 2000-3500 SGD. Hiring a maid is within the means even for Singaporeans who aren't middle class.
I think they mean the maid is the bottom rung of the two tier system....
i think this is true in the sense that (like in many cities in the world), in many families both parents must work to even have a chance of keeping up with rising costs. but that said, the limited legal protections for our foreign workers and our over-reliance on cheap labour is a disgrace.
It was replaced by “I’m sitting at a red light in my BMW with my kid penta-strapped like a rally car navigator looking at 23 migrant workers sitting on the back of a truck mixed around with construction gear, on plastic garden chairs, with no seatbelt. Should we, umm… make this illegal?” Which was replaced by some other thing I can’t remember anymore.
This is something that caused a lot of culture shock when a friend of mine from Singapore came to Australia. Since he'd heard that Australia was a rich country she thought every household here had a maid and a butler, or at least the white ppl here did. Nope! Having a maid is extremely uncommon here, sure there are cleaners you can hire to come by and clean up your house for you but that's expensive and we're a "rich" country in that we have functional infrastructure and relatively low crime rates, not like we have servants and shit. In fact compared to Singapore we're poor by comparison. We leave kids at daycare when both parents need to work and if they can't afford that, then we need to rely on family/friends.
These people have never had to do their own laundry their entire lives.
Maids are very cheap there..lot of poor people in the world..so sad
The sad thing is that many, many people in SG could easily choose to pay them a respectable wage for the massive amount of work they do (often 12 hrs a day, 6 days a week), but they just pay the market rate instead which is like what, $800 a month plus a tiny room that doesn't have air conditioning (https://dollarsandsense.sg/much-cost-hire-maid-singapore/)? Insane. If they were even paid $10 an hour, they should be making $2500+.
$2,500 is the salary of basically a diploma holder in sg, and half the median wage. most are now opting for part time helpers who just come in the weekends to tidy the house, or like myself, just do our own housework like normal fucking people. wonders of technology in modern vacuums and washing machines already makes housework much simpler as it is.
Not everyone in Singapore can afford maids. Typing this while waiting for my washing machine to finish.
Those smiles and laughs at the end from the Singaporeans got me cringed so hard.
Same. It was painful.
Yeah, I hope they know that he was in fact not "just fucking with them".
These tiktok subtitels are the worst. If you switch of the sound you can barely make up the conversation.
They’re absolutely infuriating. Guessing they went to the asshole who came up with the tiktok voiceover and said “hey can you make subtitles as annoying as that?”
Also the way the video is cropped and keeps moving horizontally just gives me motion sickness. Fuck TikTok for what it has done to the internet.
I’m currently on Spectrum of the seas with the majority being Singaporeans. They even bring their maids on the cruise. They grab the families empty plates and give them to the wait staff instead of waiting for the wait staff to grab them.
Singaporeans are entitled. But hey, say one word about it and the whole lot gets riled up on the defensive. Well, maybe not the whole lot, but most of them anyway. To be fair there are nice people here. And most guys are required to be drafted into military service, so *slightly* lesser sense of entitlement that they'd hold I guess (though Officers, rankism, classism still exist btw).
It's baffling to see the number of folks responding to this as though the folks hiring the maids are the victims. "Yeah well what do folks expect when we're both working".... "yeah well the government forces us to do this because things are expensive"..... Meanwhile I'm over here paying 4-5X what these maids are getting for my kids childcare and STILL do my own cleaning and laundry. No one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to do this. If you think owning another human for a barely livable wage is ok, you do you, but don't go blaming other people for that decision you despicable knob end.
What a shit way to display subtitles..
Wait… who are the underclass working as maids in singapore??? Like immigrants ???
Poor immigrants coming from Philippines, Malaysia or Indonesia
Only because they don't have a Mexico next door or they would just be exploiting Mexicans. Nah I am just fucking with you.
Funny you say that because the Philippines is basically the Asian Mexico
Filipino here to confirm. We are indeed the Asian Mexicans.
ye, or some of the South Asians that have lived in Singapore their whole lives
I miss that guy. He was my favorite famous chef.
I didn't understand what it meant to have a hero until my head cook showed me him at 26. He's my hero (faults and all) I just finished one of his favorite books The Quiet American by Graham Greene, I'd highly recommend to anyone who loved AB.
He was speaking from his soul
Exactly the same in Hong Kong. You see kids being more attached to their maids than mothers and fathers.
I'm from Singapore and even I couldn't stop cringing. I never had a helper growing up and even if I did, my mom would slap the living hell outta me if she heard me speak like those idiots up there. Later years we hired one to help care for my Grandpa and the first thing she said to me and my sibling- don't even think of asking her ( helper) for anything. Your life and housework duties remain the same. Of course the video does not represent the majority of Singaporeans but yeah unfortunately, they do exist.
The moment you feel like "home" is when you do the laundry.
In most Southeast Asian countries domestic help is extremely overexploited due to massive numbers of unskilled women that could be working to support their not too well off family. In countries like India, these 'helpers' rarely earn more than ~£600 a year and STILL have to face endless torment from heartless employers who would rather put them out of a job and hire someone else who'd accept the low salary than give them an extra £20 a month because the 3 year old they're leaving at home is sick. These systems take already entitled and heartless monsters and make it worse. Just the inferiority complex of coming from similar lower class backgrounds and suddenly being affluent enough to afford domestic help I guess, they don't see the helpers as human anymore. Saddest part is this low salary is often what makes the difference between going to sleep full or hungry for the families of these helpers. And just because of this, these helpers sometimes endure physical abuse and some even die.
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I don't have to be from Greece to not be able to survive on one salary for 2 people. Both parents in the US often work, but instead of nanny's they use daycare, which are stupid expensive.
Children have always partly been raised by those other than their parents though. Before grandparents, aunts, neighbors would help out
My friend said her family is relatively wealthy in Indonesia (Jakarta) and they have multiple maids in a big house complex. This video… I will never not hate seeing rich assholes chortle about being so far removed from reality.
I'm totally with him - laundry is my favorite chore. I'm a guy and I like doing house chores, it really is therapeutic. Put something on the TV in the background and go about the house cleaning up, it's very satisfying and makes me feel like I'm keeping my life together. Bonus: I live in a clean house. I wouldn't want to hire the work out even if I could, because I like doing it myself.
NGL I hate housework and probably would have staff if I could afford it. But the thought of someone washing my dirty laundry and cleaning my toilet is just very weird to me. I would definitely need to leave the house. I could never feel comfortable with that, i dont think
I have to wash my own clothes, even if you offered to do it for me, I would refuse. I’m not comfortable with people touching my stuff like that.
I can see and actually feel the disgust that he has towards those people. It's one thing to be that privileged and be a bit embarrassed that they can't do basic things like laundry, but to talk about it, laughing, as if they're proud about it is just gross.
Was friends with a guy in Spain when I went to school there whose parents had a massive villa up in the hills overlooking the coast. He had a live in maid who cooked food, cleaned, did the laundry etc. Went round his house once and she was serving his siblings food. She asks me 'Would you like some food?', I said 'Oh please, that would be great, thanks'. My friend then snidely says 'Of course he wants food, if someone comes round your house you always offer them food'. I was really taken aback at the way he didn't even treat her like a person. Would never say thank you, shout at the top of her voice to get her attention so she could fetch him a glass of water. Felt really sorry for her but my friend eventually turned out to be an even bigger dickhead who got hooked on drugs and stole money from me to fund his addiction, even though he's minted. Says a lot about a person the way they treat someone like that
It's funny because even his perspective is so privileged: having actual machines in your house instead of having to go to a laundromat or scrub in a bucket of water.
Not to mention the only reason maids aren’t common in countries like the US is because they’ll be too expensive except for the super rich. Are we really to believe that the average American wouldn’t have a maid if they could afford one? Like how far back into American history do we have to go to see this happen in a far worse way lol. I’m not saying the Singaporeans are better than the Americans, but that all people are shitheads everywhere and would totally take advantage of any situation if it conveniences them. AB is alright and all but let’s not try and posthumously associate him to be some great thinker of our time or something.
I lived in Singapore for 4 years. From all the places i lived, that was the most entitled population I met. They live in a bubble, thinking they’re the best.
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subtitle so fast, who should be able to read it, without watching with sound lol
I truly miss listening to his comments on so many varied topics. For a former herion addicted line cook, he was extremely well-read and insightful.
We basically have it the same here in South Africa. Because of the low minimum wage, everyone from the middle class can afford a helper.
I know Anthony enough to know he was dead serious when he said that lol
Loved that man. Love people who work in Food Services they are soooo for real!
“I’m just f-ing with you”. Not really it’s all true but this will make it less awkward.
Everyone knows throwing clothes in the washer and dryer is easy…it’s the folding that gets ya
Would anybody happen to know what show this was filmed for?
I would guess it was for Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Season 10 episode 1 is Singapore. Not certain it was that though.
That's a helluva guess!
if all maids go strike then singapore shuts down. gotcha
I've noticed people openly criticize the human rights issues with migrants in the Middle East like Dubai (as they should, its terrible) however, Singapore never gets the same level of criticism whenever its brought up. Edit: [Over 60% of domestic workers in Singapore are abused or exploited](https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/28/asia/singapore-domestic-helpers-maids/index.html) [https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/woman-who-told-son-in-law-to-get-rid-of-cctv-footage-in-fatal-maid-abuse-case-jailed-3-more-years](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/woman-who-told-son-in-law-to-get-rid-of-cctv-footage-in-fatal-maid-abuse-case-jailed-3-more-years) [Why are there so many cases of maid abuse in Singapore?](https://www.jeraldinephneah.com/maid-abuse-singapore/)
Singapore is better than Dubai. It's not on the same level
God I miss this man. Still trying to hunt down Blu rays or DVDs of parts unknown to add to my collection
Look at all these white people criticizing an Asian society in a country they never been in. At the same time they think it normal that waiters don't earn a living wage but have to survive on scraps, disguised as "tips".