Woman wearing a floral dress claims she was kicked & scolded on the MRT, asks if there’s a dress code

SINGAPORE: A woman looked to Reddit users for answers after an encounter on the MRT when another woman kicked her leg and scolded her and then just left. While she didn’t fight back, the woman wrote that the incident made her feel ashamed.

u/Time-Sunn wrote in an r/askSingapore post on Wednesday (Jan 8) that she was confused as to what she could have done that provoked the other woman, whom she described as Singaporean Chinese, to attack her. She wrote that she had been wearing a floral gown when the incident occurred, and wondered if her attire had anything to do with what happened.

“Is there an MRT dress code I missed? Or was (the other woman) reacting to something else? I’ve faced similar moments as an Indian here, but this one really shook me,” she wrote.

She decided to share the incident in a Reddit post as she feels that she can’t tell her husband about it, since he “feels bad” that he brought her to Singapore, which has caused her to suffer. Back home, they behave decently, she added, and her husband has a hard time seeing her being treated with disdain. On her part, it pains her to see her husband feel so helpless.

She shared the encounter to help ease her mind and asked if anyone had experienced similar situations and how they handled them. She clarified that she had no intention to “create any hate or negativity” and did not want to turn the incident into something divisive.

Commenters on her post were quick to assure her that she had done nothing wrong and that there is no dress code on the MRT, and people may pretty much wear what they want. One urged her to call the police if something similar occurs, especially since the woman may hurt someone else.

Others told their own stories of individuals behaving badly — many of them older people — on the MRT. Even some pregnant women encountered rude commuters.

A Reddit user pointed out that, most of the time, rudeness has nothing to do with race, and that people with poor manners behave badly with everyone. Others, however, said that it might have been an incident of racism since this is not unknown to happen in Singapore. /TISG

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