Work in Singapore

Singapore is a tropical city state surrounded by the 21st century's potential superpowers such as China, India and Indonesia. Singapore has been making a great effort to attract highly skilled workers from overseas and try to build its economy based the knowledge-intensive industries such as finance and information technology.The future of Singapore economy looks bright.

While I'd really like to work in Silicon Valley, the possibility of me getting US visas is very bleak. A backup plan would be to work in Singapore.

There are three reasons:

1. English is an official language in Singapore. All business activities are conducted in English. Doing business in English is becoming more and more common practice all over the world nowadays, and working in Singapore helps me to acquire and keep the ability to conduct business in English.

2. Singapore has a multicultural society. It consists of people with many different ethnic background - Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Indonesian and so on. I can speak
Chinese(Mandarin) and would like to learn Indonesian.

3. Singapore is tropical. I do hate cold weather.(That's one of the major reasons why I got away from Canada) The hot weather does not bother me at all...I'd rather love it!

The potential pitfalls of living in Singapore are:

1. Political system. Singapore is not a perfectly democratic country yet. The newspaper and TV are controlled by the government and critism to the government is prohibited.

2. Micro-management. Singapore is also called a "fine city". There are so many rules in public space to force residents to behave themselves. This could be strifling.

Sigh. I wish Singapore would be a truly democratic country soon. Although I do understand its complicated historical background, Singapore society should be stable and mature enough to embrace democracy now.