Quora Answer: Why are There So Few Eurasians & Other Mixed-Race People in Singapore?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why are there so few Eurasians and other mixed-race people in Singapore?” 

Actually, data over the last few years from the Registrar of Marriages and the Registrar of Muslim Marriages suggest otherwise.  This may be viewed at the Singapore Department of Statistics web site.  In the last few years, over 20% of marriage are inter-racial in nature, and that number is expected to grow.  From this, we can extrapolate that there are a lot of Singaporeans of mixed heritage.  The things is, until recently, our identity card only reflected the race according the race of the father.  I am Eurasian, and my entire family is Eurasian.  But I have cousins whose identity cards state they are Chinese, Indian or even Caucasian because of their father’s so-called ethnicity.  And this goes back several generations, in some cases.  Since 2011, we are allowed the option to put double-barreled races in our IC.  We are starting to acknowledge that many of us are no longer just Chinese, Malays, Indians and “Others” - (what my IC used to state). 

The problem here is people’s expectations of what mix-race people look like.  I am primarily Portuguese, going back 400 years in this part of the world.  A lot of Singaporeans somehow expect the Portuguese to look like Cristiano Ronaldo.  If they had bothered to look at the Portuguese national football team over the years, they would see that more of them look like me than Cristiano.  Mix race people are all around us. It is just that we look more often look like Chinese or Malay or Indian, than like Kate Beckinsale, who is part Burmese, or Kristin Kreuk, who is part Indonesian Chinese.