EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD student Sarah Lin Ting Al-Idros, classified as 'Arab' on her identity card, bristled at the suggestion that she might change her race to 'Chinese' for pragmatic reasons.
'I'm proud of my ancestors,' said the daughter of a Saudi Arabian father and a Singaporean Chinese mother.
Instead, with a new proposal to allow double-barrelled race classifications, Ms Lin will change her race to 'Arab-Chinese', putting 'Arab' before 'Chinese' for alphabetical reasons.
'It's only fair to reflect both parents in the same identity card,' she said.
Children of mixed marriages will soon have greater flexibility over how they want their race to be recorded on their identity cards, where before they had no choice but to take their father's race.
However, for a double-barrelled race classification, they and their parents must decide which race is listed first. Administratively, the child will then be identified with that race, Senior Minister of State for Law and Home Affairs Ho Peng Kee told Parliament on Tuesday.
More details will be announced later.
Sociologists interviewed say it will be difficult to choose which race comes first, as the child is more likely to identify with both his parents' ethnicities, or see himself simply as 'Singaporean'.
Practical considerations like which mother tongue to take in school could be the deciding factor in the choice.
In successive years, one unintended consequence could be 'an increasing amount of negotiation and challenges by parents and their growing children seeking variously to get out of any constraints resulting from this policy, or to extract the maximum personal advantage from it', said Nanyang Technological University sociologist Geoffrey Benjamin.
Sociologist and Nominated MP Paulin Straughan, however, welcomed the option as a mark of Singapore's 'appreciation of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic identities'.
It also signals a shift away from a paternalistic notion of race as something inherited from the father, said Associate Professor Straughan, a Chinese married to an American.
Her view was echoed by Mr Silva Nathan, 46, parent of two teenage daughters who are one-quarter Indian and three-quarters Chinese.
He liked the idea for being 'more equitable across gender and race', and will leave it to his daughters to decide if they want a double-barrelled classification.
Critics, however, say the move is an exercise in futility. With growing intermarriage, the multiple ethnic identities cannot be captured sufficiently even in double-barrelled race classifications.
In Singapore, mixed marriages made up 16.4 per cent of all marriages in 2007, compared to 8.9 per cent a decade earlier.
Analysts believe a good number of these parents are likely to adopt a hyphenated race classification for their child, as a better reflection of his heritage.
Singapore Management University (SMU) assistant professor Hoon Chang Yau, who studies ethnicity, argued that race and ethnicity can never be 'neat and watertight categories'.
'Especially with globalisation, we shall see more and more mixing. The CMIO model seems too restrictive to accommodate the proliferating complexity,' he said.
CMIO refers to Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others, the four race categories used widely in government administrative measures.
Mr Edward Zaccheus, a counsellor of Indian ethnicity who has a Chinese wife, said the identity of his two teenage daughters is not based exclusively on race.
'Our religion, Christianity, plays a part in shaping their identities,' he said.
'Moreover, when curious Chinese aunties and uncles ask them for their race in public places, they describe themselves as Singaporean, rather than Indian or Chinese,' he added.
Doing away with racial categorisation will be a more accurate reflection of diversity in Singapore, he said.
For the record, however, his 21-year-old daughter Melody would like to change her racial identity from 'Indian' to 'Indian-Chinese'.
'It would be more accurate,' she said. 'People keep asking if I'm Malay.'
Other observers are concerned that the flexibility that children of mixed parentage enjoy may create envy in those whose parents are of the same race and thus cannot 'pick and choose' their race.
National University of Singapore (NUS) sociologist Tan Ern Ser gives an example of a Chinese-Malay child. 'If Chinese is considered a more difficult language, and he is allowed to choose Malay as a second language, would his 'Chinese-Chinese' friends feel unfairly treated?'
And for the adult Chinese-Malay, 'what if he chooses to be Chinese to maximise his chances of buying a flat in a particular HDB precinct?'
Other analysts think, however, that these concerns are overblown. They believe that the authorities are likely to restrict the number of changes a person can make to his race classification, and that once decided on, that classification will have to be used for all situations.
On ethnic quotas in Housing Board estates, NUS sociologist Chua Beng Huat thinks those with a double-barrelled race classification should not be given a choice. For example, a Chinese-Indian should be placed on a Chinese quota, rather than given a choice to use 'Chinese' or 'Indian' to purchase flats, which could give him a strategic advantage over others.
What of candidates in a general election in a group representation constituency (GRC)? The law requires at least one to be from a minority race. Will a Chinese-Malay count as one, or will he be considered a Chinese?
SMU law lecturer Eugene Tan believes the first listed race will continue to undergird the GRC policy.
Overall, the debate stirred up by the change is healthy, Associate Professor Tan Ern Ser believes.
'It forces us to think about whether race is indeed something we should continue to emphasise,' he said.
