The saying that "Life sucks and then you die" does not need to be true.

Joanne Leow, a former broadcast journalist and news producer for Channel News Asia, not only went on to greener pastures -- going from Mediacorp to Canada -- but she is now Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan.

She published a personal essay on Catapult -- a site that publishes narrative pieces and is part of the publishing house founded by Elizabeth Koch of that industrialist Koch family -- reflecting on what being in Singapore's mainstream media was like.

And this piece is already a literary gem -- part memoir, part fictionalised.

Leow, who worked in Mediacorp from 2003 to 2006 as a reporter and then as producer-presenter from 2006 to 2010, had covered Singapore's 2006 General Election in her time there, and even managed to meet Lee Kuan Yew.

Her insider knowledge are aplenty.

Take, for instance, one of the piece's most memorable anecdotes, where Leow recounted what happened when she got skewered by her Mediacorp editors -- for emailing a reply to a Cabinet Minister:

“Stop writing that email and go to the editor’s office.”

I look up from my desk dinner—lukewarm rice, vegetables and fried spam. These are long days and we often choose from the leftovers at the office cafeteria, sit in front of our computers, jamming food into our mouths as we push out our stories for the night news.

“I said stop what you’re doing and come with me.”

My editor, a tall, unnervingly soft-spoken man, repeats his demand.

I close the Styrofoam box that holds the remains of my meal and lock my computer screen before getting up to follow him to the head editor’s office.

Opening the frosted glass-paneled door, it is clear to me that she is livid.

“How stupid are you?”

She repeats this statement twice, once in low tones and another time screaming for the benefit of the rest of the office.

“No one replies to a minister’s email without following protocol! And especially not someone like you!”

She jabs a finger into the air near my head for emphasis.

Through her rage, I smell her fear.

“You’ll never get anywhere if I have anything to say about it.”

I imagine the filaments of power and influence uncurling from her slim, manicured fingers. I look carefully at her face, scarred as it is from a childhood accident, and now incandescent with her rage. The uneven, bark-like skin on her face a testimony to what happens when you stand too close to a flame.

This interpretation from an ex-mainstream media person's perspective articulates the feeling of an unshakable, breathless, claustrophobic restraint inflicted by the vice-like grip of a system that has tentacled extensions of power everywhere policing and disciplining.

However, it is a prologue to suggest it is still possible to manoeuvre around the long arms of the state with grace and bruising sweaty resistance.

Any entity that has gone full tilt and bent on dominating would have its weak spots -- during an adjustment in stance, a momentary pause for breath, a change in the grapple -- and anyone with the will, temerity, stamina and preparedness, or a propensity to forget to conform, can take advantage of to overcome.

Overcome what exactly?

This narrative was put in for a reason -- or so readers of her piece (like me) would like to believe. It is perhaps to highlight Leow's illustrious career after leaving Mediacorp, contrary to her ex-editor's charge she'll "never get anywhere"?

Regardless, here are the other highlights from Leow's essay that reveal much about how Singapore has extended and exercised its unwieldy apparatus of control:

The mainstream media's essential role -- serving the government of the day:

They speak; we record, faithfully transcribe. We edit only for clarity.

Selective censorship after a single member constituency (SMC) remained an opposition ward in the 2006 General Election (most likely Potong Pasir SMC):

We are hemmed in by the people on the streets. We have never seen people on the streets like this here. We are taught that people on the streets are dangerous—they might assemble, organize, riot. People on the streets happen in other countries, other climates, other nations on our screens. Yet tonight, there are bodies all around us, moving as if in unison.

An opposition candidate has held on to the only seat that a dissenting party has in parliament and the people in his ward have taken to the streets in a brief, joyous, anarchic celebration. He has held this seat for more than two decades and against all odds. In recognition of this feat, of their own stubbornness, really, the people come pouring out of the stairwells and corridors. In the humid tropical night, their faces jubilant under the ubiquitous orange street lamps, they bring traffic to a standstill. Hundreds, thousands stream out of the orderly blocks of flats. Car horns sound. There is cheering.

We are disoriented and I can see the confusion in my colleagues’ faces, even the ones who have spent long decades balancing their machines on one shoulder and then the other, eye to the lens, faithfully recording the nation’s history and the politician’s banality.

This is an old, defiant ward. Its refusal to disavow the lone dissenting voice in parliament clearly punished with its aging elevators, peeling paint, and the chipped concrete of its high-rise blocks. Each nick and imperfection a sign of a space bypassed in the nation’s march of progress. There is a certain makeshift quality to any improvements that have been made. Improvisations to make the living easier. The grass is just a little overgrown, the trees just a little under pruned—little errors in the overall algorithm of our island life.

We are pushed through the streets. My crew stays close to me because we aren’t popular here, after all. Bits of state machinery in a part of the state that is in open revolt, refusing to slip into the proper gear.

“Hey! I bet you aren’t going to film this!”

A high-spirited youth taunts us with an obscene gesture before sprinting away to catch up with his friends. They return as a group, hamming it up for a camera that—he's right—isn’t recording. We know that even if we let the tape roll, there is no way an editor would approve this footage. There is too much glee here, giddiness almost, which would be wholly inappropriate for the late night bulletin.

With great difficulty, we make it back to the live feed point. We dutifully file the report. We wait for our slot in the news cycle. We frame the shot, carefully hiding the magnitude of the crowd on the streets. We do this wordlessly, because after months, years of this work, we know without knowing how, what he wants. I wait for the lights to be angled properly on my face. I wait, holding the microphone, ignoring the crowd and watching for the red light of the camera to blink on next to its eye. I wait for my cue.

Her meeting with Lee Kuan Yew (Leow has confirmed via email that she met the first prime minister of Singapore before a television forum on the elections that she was moderating):

He’s a frail man when I finally meet him to plan our first and only interview together. The words “authoritarian regime” seems flimsy when associated with the liver spots on his face, the wisps of white on his scalp, his slow stooped gait.

But his beady, combative eyes remain the same ones that we were all accustomed to from posters and television specials. Those eyes unsmiling and calculative even as he planted trees, kissed babies, eulogized late colleagues, and cut ribbons.

As I look at him across the boardroom table, I understand how the nation is obsessed with brief moments of his supposed anguish—so much so that we chronicle the moment of our independence by showing his televised tears on loop.

[...]

My orderly progression through the educational ranks seems to please him; he notes with relish that my credentials have slotted me into the correct position in his hierarchy of things. That I have taken his well-known admonishments to study in both in the United States and in China seriously, that I have not broken my bonds or the Official Secrets Act, that I am working assiduously with the national broadcaster to ensure that his government’s press releases are transmitted accurately to the general populace, that I have learned to cross my ts and dot my is and line my eyes with kohl just so. I am a powdered, rouged, sleekly groomed cog in his giant machine.

[...]

“I want this to be a conversation between us. I want you to ask me anything. Ask me anything.”

It is at this moment that I realize, more thoroughly than at any other moment, that I have always lived in a dictatorship.

Mediacorp office culture, Part 2:

Once, on air, my co-host makes an inappropriate political joke. I feel his skin redden beside me as he realizes the magnitude of his gaffe. I remember my own performance, my quizzical turn to the camera, as if trying to cover his out of place body with my own. We are so vulnerable in that studio space, the three automated cameras moving up and down their hydraulically powered stands, each a black glassy eye that reflects our foundation-caked faces. For a moment there he had laid bare the mechanisms of power, how the man and his family were connected to the money, in this, the most incorruptible of states.

“Do you want to get us all fired? Don’t ever do that again!”

The head editor screams from her desk just outside the clear panes of the studio wall. Apologizing profusely, my co-host unbuttons his suit, his skin clammy from the shock of the truth. I hum in wordless sympathy. I open my compact. I powder my nose and check my lipstick.

The essay has received praise and widespread attention, and all the more invigorating coming from a fellow ex-mainstream media practitioner-turned-don:

Reading this, it is a good time to be alive.

You can read the full article, Journalism and Jiujitsu, here.

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