ABSTRACT
Singapore has in recent years greatly altered its demographic profile, opening its doors to a range of non-resident migrants and permanent residents who now make up almost 40 percent of its 5.4 million populations. This chapter explicates the two texts, delineating how they exemplify and engage increasingly "super-diverse" features of the Singapore social formation. It argues that the concept provides a productive prism to appraise contemporary processes of inclusion and exclusion. Beginning with The Inlet, the chapter argues that it responds to super-diversity by trying to shore up the dominant mode of enculturation in Singapore, one that privileges a middle-class, strongly English-monoglot habitus. Bai He, in contrast, allows insight into alternative domestic and transnational lifeways side-lined and marginalised by the above group. The chapter suggests that, there is a need to reconcile local identity markers with these "emergent" possibilities, to rework and rethink the relationship between attachment, place, and mobility.
