And I remember thinking—this is lovely. And also… something feels incomplete.
It wasn’t that anything was wrong. Everything was done with good intention. With care. With pride. But as I watched the children move from station to station, I noticed how often the language of this is and that is came up. This is Malay. That is Chinese. This belongs here. That belongs there. Culture, presented neatly, like items in a display cabinet.
And I wondered: if harmony is about living together, why do we keep teaching it as standing apart?
Every year, Racial Harmony Day invites us to celebrate difference. And difference matters. It really does. To pretend otherwise would be dishonest. Our histories are not the same. Our wounds are not the same. Our experiences are not interchangeable. But sometimes, in our eagerness to honour difference, we forget to talk about proximity. About overlap. About the quiet ways cultures rub against each other until the edges blur.
Perhaps what we need now isn’t a louder celebration of difference, but a braver acknowledgement of similarity.
Food is an easy place to start, because food never stays in its lane. Rice appears everywhere, dressed differently, named differently, but unmistakably familiar. Leaves are used to wrap sustenance across cultures—banana leaves, bamboo leaves, pandan leaves—as if our ancestors all agreed that food tastes better when held gently by nature. Spices travel. Methods repeat. Someone somewhere adapts a dish because an ingredient is missing, and suddenly a “new” cultural dish is born.
Anthropologist Sidney Mintz once wrote about how food reveals histories of migration, trade, and power more honestly than official records. In Singapore, our plates are already doing the work of harmony, even if our narratives haven’t caught up. We eat each other’s food daily without anxiety. We rarely stop to ask who it belongs to—until it becomes a debate.
And we do love debating ownership.
Take the kebaya. Few garments spark as much passionate discussion. Where did it come from? Who wore it first? Who gets to claim it now? The arguments are often framed as historical accuracy, but beneath them is something more emotional: the fear of erasure. The worry that if something is shared, it becomes diluted.
But what if sharing is not dilution, but proof of life?
The kebaya exists in many forms across Southeast Asia. Different names. Different cuts. Different social meanings. Yet the resemblance is undeniable. It tells a story not of cultural theft, but of cultural conversation—of ports, marriages, colonial histories, and everyday proximity. Cultures did not grow in isolation; they grew in dialogue.
Arjun Appadurai reminds us that culture is not a fossil to be preserved but a process constantly in motion. If that is true, then insisting on rigid ownership may freeze culture in a way it was never meant to be frozen.
The same pattern appears in our folktales.
When I was younger, I heard stories of clever animals outwitting stronger ones. The mousedeer—Sang Kancil—using wit instead of strength to survive. Years later, I realised similar stories existed elsewhere: the clever hare in Chinese folklore, the fox spirit who survives through intelligence, the monkey trickster in Indian and East Asian traditions. Different animals, different settings, but the same moral beating at the heart of the story: intelligence, not brute force, saves the day.
Or consider the story of filial piety. In Chinese folklore, tales like The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars emphasise sacrifice and devotion to parents. But similar values appear in Malay folktales, Indian epics, and even Japanese stories, where honouring one’s elders is not just moral—it is cosmic. The details change. The lesson remains.
Folklorist Joseph Campbell famously spoke about the “monomyth”—the idea that human societies, across geography and time, tell the same stories because we grapple with the same fears and hopes. If our stories echo each other, why do we insist our cultures do not?
This is where I begin to wonder if our approach to Racial Harmony celebrations needs reimagining.
What if, instead of stations that declare cultural ownership, we designed experiences that reveal cultural overlap? Imagine a station that presents similar folktales from different communities side by side—not to collapse them into one, but to let children notice the echoes themselves. Imagine conversations that begin with, “This story exists in many cultures,” rather than, “This story belongs to us.”
Psychological research on intergroup relations suggests that recognising shared identity reduces prejudice more effectively than merely learning about difference. Social psychologist Henri Tajfel’s work on social identity theory reminds us that humans instinctively categorise—but also that those categories can be redrawn. When the boundary shifts from “us versus them” to “we,” something powerful happens.
In Singapore, perhaps the most honest “we” is not built on difference alone, but on shared inheritance.
This doesn’t mean erasing boundaries. It means softening them. Letting them breathe. Allowing children to grow up knowing that cultures are not boxes but rivers—sometimes separate, sometimes merging, always moving.
I think about the children I saw that day in the hall. I wonder what stayed with them after the costumes were returned and the food cleared away. Did they remember what made each culture unique? Probably. But did they leave knowing how deeply connected those cultures already are?
Harmony, after all, is not achieved by memorising facts. It is felt when recognition happens. When something unfamiliar suddenly feels close.
Perhaps the future of Racial Harmony celebrations lies not in teaching children to say, “This is not mine,” but in helping them realise, “This is not as foreign as I thought.”
That feels riskier. Less tidy. Harder to laminate and label. But maybe that’s what real harmony looks like—messy, overlapping, unresolved, and deeply human.
And maybe, just maybe, the most radical thing we can do is stop asking where something comes from, and start asking who it connects.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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