My Roots, My Language

I found myself conversing more in Cantonese, my Chinese dialect, with my friends and colleague nowadays. And enjoying every moment of it! It is peculiar because I hardly spoke the dialect at home except with my paternal grandmother who had migrated from Hong Kong with her father when she was very young. And I only met her once in a blue moon when she visited my home. I had no sense of belonging at all to the language and would resist speaking it with my dad who insisted that I should master it because of its usefulness when we are overseas. After all, majority of the Chinatowns in the world are populated by Chinese and Hong Kongers who mouth the language. I always replied him in Mandarin which I felt more comfortable with, thanks to the propaganda and innoculation by our "concerned" paternalistic government.

My parents would be amused every time I returned from overseas, spewing Cantonese with amazing ease and natural flair, only to gradually lose it again when I switched back to Mandarin. "Wah, how come you speak Cantonese now?" they would ask in the language in a teasing manner. Perhaps I sounded rather queer and off-tuned with it.

I have always been enlightened and inspired by MM Lee Kuan Yew's speeches. His contents were accurate, far-sighted and informative. He has never failed to be my one and only idol all my life because of his valuable contributions and decisions as a statesman. Although he spans two generations ahead of me, his policies, especially that of his advocacy of bilingualism in Singapore, had far-reaching effects and benefits which shaped and determined the future of even my X-generation. I beamed with pride and appreciation whenever I was overseas, whether on holiday or at the job.

While tending regularly to my patients at ED one day, a month after I started working in the land of Oz, a senior registrar who was from New Zealand but had stayed here for a good many years, approached me and asked inquisitively: " Liz, why is your English so good? Where did you learn it from? Do you speak English at home? Do you speak other languages as well?" I would not have been more astonished if the pigs were flying then. I had least expected him to pop the question, having been an avid traveller round the globe himself and left his foot prints in Singaland in the 1980s. Surely the whole human population should have known by now that English had been our master language all these years and that we were a multicultural society, not part of China as some closet acquaintances claimed.

"Well, we learned English in school from young, as our first language. But we also have our mother tongue as our second language, depending on our race. By the way I know a bit of Cantonese as well which is my dialect, although I speak Mandarin mostly at home." I hoped I had not confused him with my carefully-worded reply, but nothing could have described my immense pride and sense of nationalism at that moment. As a representative of Singaland in another country, I would consciously ensure that I speak proper eloquent English as much as I could at the workplace, meticulously veering from the 'lahs' and colloquials of our trademark Singlish. I was able to translate Mandarin for the Chinese patients with reasonable standards, and converse with homely familiarity in Cantonese with my HK or Malaysian friends. Studies have concluded that females are stronger language learners than males and I would not refute that based on my personal experience, but I believe all these would not have been possible without the implementation of the bilingual education nationwide.

Being laid back as ever, I never bothered to pick up other more popular and "posh" languages like French or Italian as my friends and cousins did, and had only minimal knowledge of the usual 'Arigato' or 'Sayonara' of the Japanese lingo. It did not matter to me because I am Chinese and I am proud of my language. It is my root and culture. I wanted to learn it well. At the end of the day, I cannot change my skin colour and pretend to be Japanese or Spanish. It would be interesting to understand another culture better through the mastery of its language, but it would have defeated the whole purpose if we could not even ascertain our own identity through our language.

One article in the Straits Times (our national papers) about the nation's struggle with the learning of Mandarin caught my attention: A young father in his early thirties (my contemporary) decided to actively learn and speak Mandarin with his young daughter because she claimed that she was English and therefore refused to speak any other languages. Somehow I suspect that this has been a lurking prevalence for a long while and is now slowly revealing its tail with the exasperating attention brought up in Parliament. I was not utterly surprised since I had close encounters at home with my little brattish cousins who would wildly articulate almost perfectly grammared English and not a breath of Chinese. And their mother, my delusional aunt, who could hardly write her own Chinese name.

It is always a pleasant surprise to hear our 'kan-tang' ( westernised Chinese)friends and classmates singing or strumming Chinese songs during their wedding dinners, and the touching speeches they made in Mandarin for their family and elders. It pulls at our heartstrings even more when we are in a foreign land, away from our hometown and family ties. The language is largely preserved in us despite our working and social language being English. We are one breed who truly benefited from Mr Lee's insightful commitment.