kiasuness

The Hokkien phrase kia-su, literally 'afraid to lose,' crossed from Fujian province to the Straits Settlements aboard immigrant ships in the 1880s and 1890s. Min Nan-speaking Chinese settlers brought it into the port towns of Penang and Singapore, where scarcity and competition were facts of daily market life. By the time Singapore became a self-governing state in 1959, kiasu was standard currency in the lexicon of anyone who had grown up eating at hawker stalls or queuing for a government flat. The word described not greed but a specific social anxiety: the fear that someone else is getting more, and you are getting less.

The suffix -ness appeared in Singapore English print by the early 1980s, transforming kiasu into an abstract noun with a formal shape. The satirical comic Mr. Kiasu, written by Johnny Lau and first published in 1990, became Singapore's best-selling local comic and fixed the concept in the national imagination. The strip's antihero hoarded bread rolls at hotel buffets and elbowed strangers aside for parking spaces, making kiasuness funny precisely because it was recognizable. The Oxford English Dictionary formally added kiasu as an entry in 2016, nearly a century after the word had already done its work.

Kiasuness shows up in recognizable rituals: parents registering children for primary school years before any deadline, students buying every past examination paper available, hawker center diners leaving a tissue packet on a table to claim a seat before ordering. The word does not condemn these behaviors so much as name them, with a mixture of exasperation and self-recognition. Singapore's meritocratic system, built on the Primary School Leaving Examination and university quotas, created conditions where kiasuness was not irrational but adaptive. The tissue packet is kiasuness made artifact.

English has FOMO, fear of missing out, a term Patrick McGinnis popularized in a 2004 Harvard Business School newspaper, but FOMO is about experiences. Kiasuness is about zero-sum resources: the last bowl of laksa, the scholarship slot, the better apartment on the higher floor. It assumes a world where someone else winning means you losing, and it responds with preemptive action. That logic was born in Fujian, sharpened in colonial Singapore, and is now Singapore's most traveled export.