Pins from the Deaf

Yesterday I was having lunch at a KFC outlet. This man came in and started walking around to all the patrons. At each table, he would make certain gestures with his hands and show the person a little printed card. Each card had a little pin on it (with a Mickey Mouse or Winnie the Pooh or other cartoon design). The card said something along these lines:

"Hello! I am a deaf person. Would you buy this pin for $5?"

Of course the pin was not worth $5. But it was one of those charitable sorts of things. If you bought the pin, you bought it not because you really wanted the pin, but just to help the poor deaf guy.

And of course, on many other occasions, I've seen other deaf people (or people with other kinds of physical disabilities) go around the tables at hawker centres or other public places asking if you would buy some grossly overpriced soft toy or tissue paper pack or some other thing from them.

Now the unusual element is this -

this particular deaf guy in the KFC wasn't a Chinese. He wasn't a Malay or an Indian. He was a Caucasian. He was a white man.

He looked like he was in his late twenties or his early thirties. He had a waistpouch with lots of pins in it. He would take them out to show you the different pin designs he had.

Mr Wang has this general impression about white men in Singapore. Either they are tourists, or students on foreign exchange programmes, or are expats. If they are expats, then they are either well-off, or very well-off. They play golf, drink wine and talk about the high taxes in Europe. They do not go around in public asking for $5 charitable donations or purchases.

So I was a bit surprised to see this deaf white man in KFC selling pins for $5 a piece. Not sure what to make of this. A new kind of social phenomenon, perhaps. I guess it's a bit like white men drinking cheap beer at the local kopitiam (an increasingly common, if still infrequent, kind of sight).


A famous deaf white man.