By Al Lim

Unease: Life in Singapore Families
Teo You Yenn
Ethos Books (2026) / 264 pages / SGD 30

The Singapore narrative is familiar: a world-class city, orderly and prosperous, where hard work is rewarded and the family is honoured as its cornerstone. Teo You Yenn's Unease begins from the observation that something in this narrative is "off-kilter". Beneath the shiny façade of progress lies a persistent gap between how people want to live and how they feel they can live, experienced especially within an institution the state so loudly celebrates – the family. Teo proposes that this unease, found across social and economic classes, is a social phenomenon with social causes, arising from the disjuncture between their aspirations and the constraints they face in pursuing them. Inequality, for her, is more than an uneven distribution of outcomes; it forms the very context, or air, through which unease is produced.

This book is a sequel, of sorts, to This Is What Inequality Looks Like (2018). Her earlier book reached a readership far wider than most academic works, bringing inequality and poverty into public conversation. In the years following the book's publication and through subsequent discussions, Teo found that approaches that treat inequality as a series of outcomes remained inadequate to its significance and impact on collective life. She returns to this problem through Unease, drawing from ethnographic interviews with participants across the class spectrum. Teo places particular emphasis on the relationship between structure (policies and institutions) and culture (the norms, values and orientations through which people make sense of their lives). Neither is treated as fixed or self-contained. Structures shape the cultural orientations through which people act, while those orientations can, in turn, reproduce the very structural conditions from which they emerge.

The families in Teo's book are preoccupied with work, with little room for rest, play or pleasure. Three themes recur in their stories: the centrality of work obligations; the entanglement of work, money and family; and anxiety about an uncertain future. Money sits at the centre of family life, particularly the question of how it should be spent. Parents routinely defer their own needs in order to provide for their children, as care becomes a practice of calculated sacrifice for what lies ahead.

Education is a key locus of this concern, and of unease, as Teo dissects the familiar figure of the "kiasu" parent. Instead of treating kiasu competitiveness as a cultural trope, she shows how the fear of losing out is produced by structural conditions. Anxiety about children's education begins as early as preschool and is organised through an elaborate calculus of registration phases, distance from their residential address to schools, and volunteer hours accumulated in the hope of securing a place in a desirable primary school. Importantly, many parents are not necessarily trying to get their children into the very best schools; they are often trying to avoid those with poor reputations, knowing that these educational pathways play an important part in shaping their children's futures.

Furthermore, these educational calculations manifest differently across class lines. Teo draws on the stories of several mothers to show how unease is experienced through unequal resources, aspirations and forms of know-how. Annie, who left school at 19 when she became pregnant, raises four children on a low income. She keeps her hopes modest: that her children grow up independent and stay out of trouble, with basic material needs at the forefront of her concerns. In contrast, Shumin, an upper-middle-class mother, lives in a six-bedroom house with two children and works part-time. Her earnings give her some autonomy to pay for her children's activities without having to ask her husband, while her familiarity with the tacit rules of school admission helps her navigate policies such as the 1km priority rule. While Annie and Shumin inhabit very different class positions, greater privilege does not necessarily make Shumin's life easy or leisurely. Unease cuts across class, even as its forms and consequences remain uneven.

This Singaporean unease is also deeply gendered. A long history of social policy has feminised domestic care, with arrangements such as maternity leave encoding mothers as primary caregivers. The familiar contrast between "kiasu" mothers and "chillout" fathers is therefore far from an overnight phenomenon, but one sedimented through social policies and everyday practices over time. The widespread employment of foreign domestic workers since the late 1970s has further shaped this organisation of care, reinforcing the treatment of housework and care work, in practice, as "low-status, feminine labour".

It would be tempting to dismiss "unease" as a minor irritation, no more than a stone in one's shoe, and therefore hardly worth attending to. But Teo also asks us to take it more seriously, as a symptom of the social order that produces it. Singapore's global-city creed prizes self-reliance, holds that no one owes you a living, treats inequality as a natural outcome of merit, and leaves little room for imagining a collective future. This narrative moralises certain responses: tapping on public resources is seen as parasitical and damaging behaviour, while calls for the wealthy to give back are dismissed as harmful to the national economy. Against these discursive constraints, the book poses a set of questions: What happens to a parent's right to care? To a worker's right to decent work? To the idea that Singaporean fates are interdependent and bound together? These inequalities are not natural, Teo insists, and how a society organises care within families has consequences for all.

That the book is designed as a "sociology course", rather than a traditional monograph, is part of its appeal. Teo treats the general reader not as a passive recipient but as an active audience with a stake in the work. Scholarship, in this view, matters beyond reaching the government's ear. At 'States of Unease: From Critique to Collective Imagination', a forum in June 2026 organised around the book by Academia.SG and Ethos Books, Teo suggested that ideas can shift what becomes speakable and thinkable, and that a broad, demanding public can itself become a lever of change. In other words, writing for a broader public, with the aim of shifting perspectives and inviting participation, is itself part of her method.

So, what do we (the public) do? With poverty and inequality already established as subjects of public debate, what might Unease add to or renew in those conversations? One difficulty is that "structure" can appear as something large, distant and lodged in institutions, making change to seem like it requires intervention at the level of the state.

I wonder what a more capacious account of culture might add here, both to our understanding of unease and to the question of what might be done about it. Teo explicitly presents structure and culture as mutually constitutive, and shows how cultural orientations emerge through people's encounters with institutions. Yet the explanatory movement often runs more strongly from institutions to persons: structural conditions produce particular aspirations, habits and kinds of selves. What might come into view if the mutual constitution of structure and culture were pushed further? This would also mean loosening 'culture' itself: treating it not as a coherent set of national values but as something multiple, unstable and differently constituted across class, gender and social worlds. Taking culture seriously in this sense widens the sites at which inequality is made, and therefore the sites at which it might also be unsettled.

The dilemma of the "not-bad" school illustrates this. Teo establishes the institutional stakes that make school choice consequential: a good education is understood to improve one's chances of securing a good job, and with it, a good life. Yet those stakes alone do not explain why relinquishing the hope of a "not-bad" school becomes unthinkable for many parents. The process through which differentiated schools, admissions rules and prospects for mobility come to be experienced as obligations of responsible parenting is deeply cultural. Middle-class aspiration is an important force here, calibrated not only to Singapore's educational system but also to regional and global hierarchies of universities and jobs. Moreover, treating culture itself as a locus of power and change loosens the hold of policy as the primary avenue of social transformation.

Unease's popularity, reflected in its 19 consecutive weeks at the top of The Straits Times bestseller list, suggests that the book has touched a nerve. Many readers, especially parents, recognise their own frustrations in its pages. They feel seen by Teo's account. The book, however, asks for more than simply recognising unease: it invites readers to question the narratives that have come to feel natural, and to imagine how family, work, care and collective life might be organised otherwise.

Inequality, as Teo puts it, is the air in the room. The metaphor captures the force of her work: making palpable the structural conditions that produce family strain. At the heart of that strain is a persistent gap between everyday life and the good life people are told to pursue. The 2026 National Day Rally's renewed focus on the country's low Total Fertility Rate of 0.87 only sharpens the book's relevance. As the family is once again placed at the centre of Singapore's nation-building narrative, Unease poses an important question: what kinds of social worlds are Singaporean families allowed to inhabit, and what possibilities do they have for shaping or reshaping them?

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