Renunciation of Malaysian Citizenship (Stage 3)

So I returned to the High Commission of Malaysia to submit my documents.

Documents To Be Submitted:

1) Borang K ( Yellow Form) - 2 Sets (duly filled) 

2) Form (MY-RN1) 

3) Letter of Approval from ICA Singapore - Original & 2 photocopies

4) Malaysian I.C / Temporary Malaysian I.C - Original & 2 photocopies

5) Singapore Pink I.C / National Service I.C / Permanent Resident I.C - Original & 2 photocopies

6) Malaysian / Singapore Birth Certificate - Original & 2 photocopies

NOTE: Applicant who was born in Singapore is required to produce:-

i) Borang W (Malaysian Citizenship Certificate) ; OR - Original & 2 photocopies

ii) Pengesahan Taraf (Confirmation of Status) issued by Malaysian National Registration

Department; OR - Original & 2 photocopies

iii) Perakuan Taraf (Certificate of Status) issued by Malaysian Immigration Department

- Original & 2 photocopies

7) Applicant who was born before 31 August 1957, - Original & 2 photocopies

(Malaysian Citizenship Certificate)

8) Singapore Citizenship Certificate & Passport, - Original & 2 photocopies

(If applicable)

9) Malaysian International Passport - Original

10) Three (3) recent passport - size photograph - White Background

Note: i) All photocopies of documents must be in A4 size paper;

ii) Forms to be hand-written or typed. Mistakes to be cancelled neatly. Do not use Tipp-ex;

iii) Original Malaysian birth certificate to be laminated before submission;

iv) To photocopy front and back of Singapore Citizenship Certificate;

v) Applicant who do not have Borang 'W' / Pengesahan Taraf must produce 2

photocopies of parents' documents ie: identity card, birth certificate, citizenship certificate,

passport and marriage certificate

vi) Processing will take three (3) working days

vii) Registration fee SGD 10.00 (cash only)

viii) Additional documents may be required whenever needed

The bolded ones were the ones I had to pay attention to or submit. Do take note of the time for submission and collection:

Submission of application: Monday - Friday: 8.15 am - 11.30 am

Collection : 2.30 pm - 4.00pm

I reached at about 8.30am and this was the queue that greeted me

My younger sister was surprised. She said only 2 or 3 people were there when she went to submit her documents about a year ago. I commented that perhaps Covid makes people think harder about what they want in life.

The lady behind me said that she had been in Singapore for 27 years before she decided to convert. She's married with a 20-year-old daughter and her siblings and parents are living in Malaysia so it took her so long to decide to change. In my heart, I was thinking: ya man, people have valid reasons not to convert. What reason do I have not to convert? None of my family is in Malaysia. Don't know what the fish I have been thinking about! I literally was just born there and have nothing to do with Malaysia at all. I know nuts about Malaysia, its history, its language, its culture and its people. I don't even have Malaysian friends! I am just about the only Malaysian I know besides my own relatives. What identity am I talking about? I don't have a Malaysian identity besides that bit of Malaysian accented Mandarin only when I speak to my own family members. And it's not even half as strong as a native Malaysian. Nobody could tell I am a Malaysian if I don't tell them about it since we learnt to code-switch between Singapore-accent Mandarin and Malaysian-accent Mandarin since young. Yes, all these literally went through my mind after the lady spoke to me.

So I continued to queue till a man at a cart outside the Consular Office asked me to show him my documents. He checked through them, took out the extra copies that were not needed and put my thumbprints on the documents and asked me to return to the queue to get a number.

When I entered the office, I proceeded to get a queue number and waited again. There were about 20 people in front of me.

When my number was displayed on the LCD screen, I went forward to submit my documents and I was asked to wait to make my payment and get the date for collection at another counter. The wait to pay was quite fast, about 10 minutes. I was given a pink collection slip and asked to come back 3 days later.

Collection will be 3 working days later between 2.30 pm and 4.00pm. 

If you are not able to make it, you could write a letter and pass the pink collection slip to your family member to authorise him or her to collect it, or come on another day other than the given date to collect it. There is no need to give your IC or any form of identification to your family member for the collection.

All in all, I spent 2.5 hours (8.30am to 11am) at the High Commission of Malaysia just to submit the documents for the Renunciation. 

Aside from the submission of documents, I actually met the couple I sold my flat to at the embassy! What are the odds of that happening? They were just a number right before me at the counter. I thought they looked like the couple but I dismissed my thought as I didn't think it could be that coincidental. Then when the guy saw me, with my mask on no less, he smiled at me! They were not there to renounce their citizenship. Instead, they were there to register their marriage as Malaysians.

It's as if a message to tell me that everything was 'predestined', that everything happened in its good time. 

I returned 3 working days later at about 3pm to collect a white document ('Application for Renunciation of Malaysian Citizenship (Processing only)') that I had previously filled up for the purpose of showing to ICA that I had submitted my documents for renunciation. It states that I will only be able to collect my original birth cert and other documents 8 months later when the embassy sends me an email to inform me about it. 

There was no waiting this time. I just proceeded to the Consular Office where I had submitted my documents to and the guy at the counter gestured for me to go to him and he exchanged my pink collection slip with the white document.

So my next step to Singapore Citizenship is attending the ICA appointment.

Futile Trip to the High Commission of Malaysia, but not that Futile

The Final Stage includes renouncing my Malaysian citizenship and attending an appointment at ICA after the renunciation.

At the advice of my sisters, I wrote in to High Commission of Malaysia to book an appointment for the renunciation after I completed Stage 2. This is what it replied:

There are no appointment slots available in June 2022.  You may walk in for Consular services (except passport and visa matters) without prior appointment from 1^st July 2022 onwards, Monday - Friday (8.00 am to 11.00 am).

I had heard that the appointment could take months so this piece of news made me a happy woman.

I meticulously prepared all my documents required for the renunciation and went on a school holiday early in the morning.

As I was walking towards the High Commission of Malaysia, I was filled with a sense of melancholy. Well, this is a part of my identity after all. Am I really going to give it up now? Sigh! Yet I know I have to. There is no reason for me to hold on to it anymore. 

As I was walking into the lane leading to the embassy, a steady stream of people holding a set of yellow documents was walking out. I wondered a little what they were there for. Passport-making didn't seem like it.

Guess what?

At the gate of the embassy, I was asked to join a long queue near the guardhouse to get the Borang, which was a piece of yellow document which I had to fill up.

I didn’t think it was too much to ask, until the lady who gave out the Borang told us to return on another day! I was shocked. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one who was indignant about it. I guess everybody there received the “no need for an appointment. Can just walk in to submit the documents” email. When enquired “what if I can’t make it on this date you have given?”, the lady simply replied, "Then you have to queue up again to get another number for the appointment." 

I persisted,"Can I submit my documents today?"

The lady said,"No. The appointment for today and tomorrow is all full."

With that, she went behind the gate and closed it after her, leaving me standing there feeling like a fool.

So it’s not “no need for appointment” but “have to come to the embassy to get a stupid number for the appointment”!

I was beyond angry within. What backward system is this? And an inaccurate reply too!

Do they think we are like the majority of the population in their country who don't need to work and can jalan jalan anytime they feel like it?

I was literally a picture - no, a playing video - of an super active volcano spilling lava, molten and ashes all inside me! It instantly made me regret not renouncing  my citizenship more than 20 years ago! What was I thinking all these years?!! No bits of the initial melancholy about having to renounce my citizenship was left. 

Still, I had to leave the embassy and come back another day.

Sigh!

Trauma of a Marriage

I woke up troubled and scared.

I had a long dream of myself remarrying my first ex in a haste. In the dream,  I was already remarried to him. It was a nightmare as everything was a replay of my life with William. There was shouting in the dream, endless doing of chores and the empathetic expression on his face. The Hong Kong show from three decades ago '大时代' ('The Greed of Man') was playing on the television in the background. It was so real, so real.

In the dream, I was scared and angry that I was entrapped in the same snare. It could not have been possible! How could I have got myself into the same trap again, and so soon too? What's going on? I was filled with the fear of having to divorce yet again, with the same person too. I literally saw the divorce cert in my mind in the dream.

I woke up with my eyes widened. I checked the time. 5.55am.

I sat up. I was part-relieved, part-scared. I tried to get it out of my head. It's not true. It's not real. I will not let it happen to me again.

But I was still scared.

I went to bathe.

I closed my eyes and buried my face in a towel to calm myself down.

I opened my Facebook and saw a cousin titled an album 'happy family'.

I looked at her pictures with her husband and two sons and wondered in resignation why a marriage comes 'easy' for others yet never for me.

She hashtagged 'everythingwaspreparedbymyman'.

It's a luxury that I would never know. Not even in my dreams would I understand what that means.

I thought of the friend who told me he would not marry to risk giving half his fortune to his ex-wife. 

He's probably right. He would never have to go through the trauma of a marriage.

Journey of My Singapore Citizenship (Stage 2)

My youngest sister, who was the latest family member who applied for the citizenship, told me that her approval did not come even after 1.5 years. She applied via her spouse (which we have quite an opinion about) and her husband went to meet the MP (Member of Parliament) to enquire about the outcome. “After that, things moved very fast.”

So I thought I ought to do the same to expedite the application. I wrote in to the MP at the height of the Covid situation when meeting in person was out of the question. It was 8 months into my application. The reply from ICA was that an application usually takes 1 year to process.

So I waited. When May came this year, I got Coco to go to the Meet-the-People session to enquire about the outcome. This time, my in-principle approval came in during early June in the early hours through my SingPass app.

My elder and third sisters who had converted decades ago told me that they were invited to go to a session for half a day to do a mini tour of Singapore and listen to some talks about Singapore before taking the pledge. Obviously, my experience was not going to be the same. 

I was given 3 online tasks to complete:

1) Singapore Experiential Visit

2) Community Sharing Session

3) E-learning Journey

The first two tasks were completed in a jiffy through watching a video about living in Singapore and its community (including its belief in community projects) and filling up a survey with an open-ended question about why you want to be a citizen and what you appreciate Singapore about.

The third one was indeed an E-learning experience. It requires one to watch a series of videos divided into 7-stage. Each stage consists of about 7 to 10 short videos that last between 2 minutes and 6 minutes. After the video-watching at the end of each stage, there would be an MCQ quiz based on the videos. The passing mark is 8 out of 10. For the first quiz, I thought it must be chicken feed and didn’t take it seriously. I got a 7 and had to retake it! Lol! Subsequently, I paid more attention to the videos so that I could complete the task more quickly. 

For someone who had taught Social Studies, I actually learnt a few new things via the videos although I definitely had fewer things to learn compared with a “new” citizen. The videos are made succinct and use infographics to make the viewing more palatable.

After I submitted the last survey, I waited for the next letter which came a few days after. 

Musing about My Journey to Singapore Citizenship

After close to four decades of being a PR, I have decided to become a citizen.

I do not have any reason to retain my original citizenship anymore. I am the only one in the family who haven’t switched sides. My kids are Singaporeans. It doesn’t sound plausible for me to retire in Malaysia alone in a place I am unfamiliar with, with nobody I know. 

Looking at how Malaysia has degenerated with each generation of politicians (if you can even call them 'politicians') who are just interested in lining their pockets with billions, you feel that Malaysia is a hopeless place. The 20/20 Vision I heard about in 2003 - whatever that means, never came to pass and I have no doubt it ever will. Putting a monkey or a pig up there is anytime better than putting some corrupted people on the seat who are always thinking of how to pocket big money with their cronies. 

The biggest push, or pull, factor is I need to get a place of my own after my divorce.

Sure, I can put Coco as a co-buyer and buy one with her. However, I am just not comfortable using her name. As far as possible, I hope not to implicate her in property ownership at this point in time.

Besides home ownership, I am starting to feel the impact of being a non-citizenship as age catches up with me. There are many real and practical concerns that citizens would not know or feel the impact of. I am not even talking about the right to vote, which has been the salient difference between a citizen and a non-citizen. Something as simple as:

- being able to be the first buyer of a BTO flat

- being able to buy a resale flat in the open market

- being able to qualify for all sorts of grants

- being able to qualify for HLE

- having a 30% discount off the polyclinic medical charges

- getting $9000 for the self-employed Covid grant versus $1200 for PR

- getting GST vouchers, CDC vouchers and whatever vouchers

- some jobs are only available to Singaporeans

All these add up. I am not even talking about school fees for a degree or post-grad programmes.

As I am journeying to become a citizen, I am starting to understand why new citizens, especially Malaysians, could or would vote for the ruling party.

There's just zero benefit to be a Malaysian, as compared to being a Singaporean, if your family members are in Singapore. Zilch. Zee-loh. In fact, we pay to hold onto this useless citizenship. Every five years, we pay to renew our re-entry permit, not to mention the hassle involved if it's expired. And it's super easy to have it expired without you realising it as the date is no longer stamped on your passport. It's an invisible date only available on the ICA website. Well, you can print it out but you tend to keep it so well you forget where you kept it.

So I submitted an online application via the ICA website for the Singapore citizenship in June 2021.