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A Malaysian woman known as Shikin, 34, was at a laundromat in Bedok, Singapore, when a passer-by approached her.
The woman seemed friendly enough.
Then she asked if Shikin was doing laundry for her boss.
Shikin said no, the clothes were hers.
The woman said: “What boss now? It’s your boss’s laundry.”
Shikin is a senior account specialist.
She was doing her own laundry, at the end of a long day, in her own clothes, but none of that was visible to the stranger; what was visible, Shikin said, was that she was brown.
Not the Mistake, But The Certainty
“You think people who look like this can only work as a domestic helper? We cannot get a good job, is it? We are not educated, is it?” she said in an Instagram video, which drew widespread attention online.
She acknowledged, almost pre-emptively, that she “looks like a domestic helper.”
But she asked the question that the video was really about: would the same assumption have been made if she were Chinese, or white?
The passer-by, she noted, did not seem particularly troubled by the exchange.
Shikin told Singapore media Stomp that a security guard at her own condominium had once stopped her to ask if she was a resident; she reflected on why she, specifically, had been singled out.
It did make me wonder — maybe as a brown person, I couldn’t possibly afford to live there.
The encounter, she said, left her feeling triggered and sad — not because a stranger made a wrong assumption, but because the stranger was so certain she was right.
The Kindness She Did Not Owe Anyone
What Shikin wants people to take away is simple: you cannot tell someone’s story from their face, their skin, or the load of laundry in their hands.
Someone who looks homeless or less put-together might actually be more well-off than you’d assume.
The assumption did not come from nowhere.
A viral Threads post had asked: “How to spot a Malaysian in Singapore?”
The answer, apparently, was a backpack and a certain kind of face.
She was careful to add that she was not generalising to all Singaporeans.
That carefulness — the instinct to protect the feelings of the people who had just othered her — may say as much about the experience of being brown in Singapore as the laundromat incident itself.
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