By expats, for expats

The move itself was not easy. Savitha Venugopal had been a busy journalist from Kochi — switching jobs, working for several publications, and even running a website with a friend on women’s issues. But then a time came when she had to move to Singapore. She was prepared to not find a job in a new land, but longed for a circle of friends. She got it, not a whole circle, but one friend she knew from more than 10 years ago — Sushmita Mohapatra, who was once her colleague in Bengaluru. They shared their frustrations at the difficulty of ‘recreating career graphs’ over cups of coffee, before they realised there were others like them — women who turned their situations around and made it big, living right there in Singapore, as proof to these young journos. They took their bags and headed out to find these women — not to replicate their lives, but to know their stories and to write about them. The stories of 10 such women they spoke to became a book called Dear Ms Expat.

“Sushmita and I moved to Singapore within a few months of each other. Sheer coincidence. We both came as 'trailing spouses', a term I detest!” Savitha writes in an email interview, adding a smiley at the end. The motivation for the book came, she writes, mostly from their own experiences after they got to Singapore. “For Sushmita, it was the realisation that recreating her career graph from back home in Singapore wouldn't be as easy as she had assumed. I mean, Singapore being the land of opportunities and all seem to fade into a distance when you land here on a dependent visa and realise how hard you have to work to even find those opportunities,” she says.

Once they decided to write the book, they remembered the many stories and references they had heard in the last few years.  “The first woman we interviewed was someone who ran a co-working space for women, which I had found in the first few months after moving here, on one of those days when the isolation of the whole work-from-home concept got on my nerves. Couple of the women were acquaintances or business associates of friends. Once we met the first few women, it was relatively easy to find the rest, because everyone had a story to tell us of someone else they found inspiring.” The stories would also tell you there is always someone going through worse and still managing to take it all, move on and get ahead. One of the women they featured is a Tunisian engineer who left her hometown after the Arab Spring started.

“She told us how they hid in their house, away from windows, with their three-day-old baby clutched to her chest, while there was firing outside. When her husband was offered a job in Singapore soon after this, they thought it best to move. Now, she runs a very successful crowdsourcing and networking platform for women entrepreneurs.” Mouna Aouri Langendorf — that’s her name — had often found herself the only woman in her professional circles. She had to abandon her career amid the conflict. “As an entrepreneur, she recognised that networking over beer on a Friday evening won't work for women like it works for men, and so she set up something to help other women. Motherhood wasn't what completed her, she needed an identity for herself that wasn't restricted to being someone's wife,” Savitha writes.

Savitha and Sushmita

The story of Danielle Warner starts like that of the authors, when at the beginning this New Yorker found it hard to set off a new career in Singapore. Quoting from the book: She says that there is an expectation that here you will be able to recreate what or where you came from. “Everyone expects it. But that never happens.” Danielle’s voice softens. She had seen this emotional upheaval in so many lives. She was just a girl with an idea, Danielle tells Savitha and Sushmita. But then the idea worked, and in 2010, she launched Expat Insurance.

This might be a book about expats in Singapore, but it is for anyone who is moving to a new country or lives in one, Savitha adds. “Much of the struggles and challenges are what you may encounter in any new country,” she says. Dear Ms Expat also tries to give a voice to women’s stories, because very few of those are ever told. “Of course, there is the ‘successful woman’ kind of narrative, but they are few and far between and success isn't all there is. We think the stories we have chronicled are stories of survival and overcoming challenges no matter how small.”