#6 Baggage collection: INTERVIEW AND THOUGHTS

6.1 Interview with Miss C (not to be named), former Singapore Girl

Interview Date: 23 October 2014

Age: 36

Why do you want to be an SIA girl?

A: I want to travel the world, and the pay is quite good.

How long have you been flying?

A: 5 years

What made you stop?

A: I wanted to start a family and being an air stewardess will hinder my family plans as I would be travelling a lot.

What are some of your job requirements?

A: Basically we welcome the passengers on board, prepare and serve food, attend to passengers’ requests, take care of young children, the elderly and passengers who are unwell, and ensure passengers have an enjoyable and safe flight.

Wow is this a difficult job?

A: Yes it is very difficult, because passengers can be very demanding and unreasonable sometimes. Especially during long-haul flights, we have to keep our composure and sanity [laughs]. The most difficult part of it will be the serving of meals and drinks, but not only that, we also need to ensure an upholding of image by touching up our make up, constantly putting on a smile no matter how terrible the day may have been. It’s also a physical toll on the body as a result of inconsistent working hours and jet lag. But other than that, it’s a job I enjoyed.

We can see it’s a difficult job, hard to get, so can you tell us about your interview process:

A: Wow that was such a long time but yes let me recall. So there were 5 stages.

First stage was an interview just asking us to introduce ourselves and some simple random questions, so they will hear our response to determine if we pass or not. i can’t really remember what was my question since there were so many stages.
Then after I passed that stage, the second stage was a physical body check to measure our height and weight, and to see if there were any visible flaws or scars on our skin.

After passing that stage, the third stage was a more formal one-to-one interview asking about our background and our knowledge on SIA. The fourth round was much more tedious cos it was a group interview, so imagine the competition. But yeah, I guess I answered fairly well as compared to the rest, which got me to the final round, which was the Kebaya fitting. So basically it was the least stressful round because there was no more interview, I just had to put on the clothes and after that, I had a body check. Oh i remember the first time I wore that kebaya, it was really tight and it felt hard to breathe actually. but after a while I got used to it. But yes they were very particular this round about looks and scars, and they found fault with some of my fellow interviewees, so they did not get through. After passing this round, we had to go through a battery of medical tests, before we commenced our four month intensive training on team building training, life-saving training such as saving a drowning person and deliver a baby. Of course, most of the training was on etiquette and beauty management skills, to ensure that we look our best at all times. After that I was a trainee for 2 years, before sigining a 5 year contract.

Are there any male flight attendants?

A: Well there are but a lot less comparatively to females. Like about 2 or 3 per flight?

So do they fulfill the same role as the female flight attendants?
A: well, yes and no. They will usually take the initiative to handle the heavy stuff that requires lifting or moving, maybe to appear more gentlemanly [laughs]... although they will also have to go out and serve the passenger’s request as well.

6.2 Our Thoughts - Reflexivity on our Positionality and Emotions

According to Lobo (2010), feminist geographers place great emphasis on the need to practice self-reflexivity that is attentive to emotions, because one might overlook the knowledge offered on differences in different situation, especially since a person’s embodied experience is constantly shifting between being in the center and margin (Valentine, 2007). There is also a exercise ‘self-critical sympathetic introspection and self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self as researchers’ (England, 1994). Therefore, we wish to reveal our positionality and emotions that arose during the interview and participant observation that was carried out on 20 October 2014, and in order to avoid missing out on insights that could help us understand social phenomenon better. In several instances, we have subconsciously shifted between the boundaries of researchers, women, locals, racial majority/minority and young students.

The body is an integral part of a human’s daily activity, whether in conversation, or how one dresses and presents himself or herself. Likewise, as two Chinese and two Malay Singaporean young women ranging from the ages 19 to 21, the body is an interesting topic which we were interested to embark on. However, while we understand the normative ideals tagged to women’s body, at times we couldn’t help but feel self-conscious about the way we look vis-a-vis the highly polished and very attractive Singapore Girls when they walked by during our participant observation. This was brought up in our conversation while we observed the Singapore Girls. Adjectives like “pretty”, “neat”, “flawless” were commonly brought up in our conversation, suggesting how the description of a Singapore Girl is very often tied to her physical appearance, fitting the normalized ideals of beauty in media representations. Thus, in comparison to these girls, we shared with each other about the instances when we wish we could have their physical traits. We approached 8 Singapore Girls during our fieldwork, all who declined politely to be interviewed as they were in a hurry or due to ‘company policies’. This made us feel dejected and discouraged at times, making us wonder if it was because of our position as students that made us less worthy of consideration of their time.

To get an insider’s perspective, we managed to interview a former Singapore Girl, Miss C (name not disclosed to protect her identity), whom one of us had connections to. Miss C was surprisingly forthcoming in sharing with us in detail the intricacies of the Singapore Girl selection process, despite most of us appearing exclusively as ‘researchers’ to her. And we postulated two reasons with regards to our positionality. Firstly, it could be because of the mutual contact between Miss C and one of us, thus there was a sense of trust built. Secondly, perhaps our positionality as a researcher was analysed by her to be a “neutral” party, which was why she was more willing to share, to aid us in our study to the best of her ability.

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