Publications

Since the 1990s, Singapore has been recruiting students from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to study in Singapore’s education system as a part of its foreign-talent recruitment strategy. Through ethnographic fieldwork in two urban cities in the PRC and Singapore, International Mobility and Educational Desire records and analyzes PRC students’ experiences of marginalization, identity transformations, and struggles in a different education system. The cultural dissonance in a diverse classroom leads to feelings of social exclusion. This highlights the lack of institutional resources in urban classrooms and calls for more attention to marginalized students’ psychological well-being.

The analysis used data from Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey. Matching methodologies controlled for confounding variables including age, sex, living sites, access to tap water and financial support. Illiteracy was found to have a significant impact on physical health, exercise habits, anxiety, loneliness and happiness. On average, illiteracy decreased physical health by 19.9%, decreased exercise habits by 7%, increased anxiety by 11.56%, increased loneliness by 17.6% and decreased happiness by 11.3%. Findings confirm the past literature in which illiteracy has been found to be adversely associated with physical and mental health. The analysis uniquely found that illiteracy had a higher cost on mental health as compared to physical health for elderly people in China.