Melissa Chen is a Singaporean journalist and activist. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Yascha Mounk : You're a scientist by background, and you grew up in Singapore.
How did you get drawn into politics? Melissa Chen : Singapore is a very unique country, mostly because of its exceptional success story, which by now everybody seems to know about, because it's a little red dot on the equator that somehow surpassed so many other nations in GDP per capitaβeven Norway, which I think is remarkable for a country that doesn't have any natural resources.
The Singapore miracle by now is quite well studied and it's a really interesting model for a lot of other countries around the world, especially in the Global South.
I came to America about I spent all of my primary and secondary education in Singapore and realized I really needed to get out, because it's such a punishingly conformist culture. I left to go to university and studied what I knew would bring me immediately closer to getting a green card, which was STEM. And that's how I ended up in Boston. I went to Boston University and studied computational biology.
The Human Genome Project was just done, I think, in And at that time, I knew there would be very high demand for that particular degree, which didn't really exist yet. And sure enough, right after graduation, it was in high demand.
