We in sunny Singapore pride ourselves on our unique talent for straddling both sides of the cultural divide: East and West, oriental and occidental, Asian and Western. Armed with bubble tea in one hand and a Starbucks latte in the other, we can happily settle down to a night of binge-watching that includes both the latest season of The Walking Dead and episode reruns of Chinese singing competition I Am A Singer. Well, maybe no one actually drinks Gong Cha and Starbucks at the same time, or jumps back and forth between zombie mayhem and rousing Chinese pop anthems at the drop of a hat, but you get my point. We’re all cultural pastiches, for better or worse.
Lately, I’ve been inclining towards the view that it’s for the worse, if all the annoying and downright humiliating incidents I’ve experienced are any indication. This East-West sensibility is supposed to make me feel good about how I’m equally immersed in the cultural milieus of both sides, but instead I’m left feeling like a shallow dilettante without adequate knowledge of either. Sometimes I’m even made to feel like I’m not Singaporean enough. Perhaps a few examples will serve to better illustrate my point.
Singer in question was Mandopop stalwart A-Lin, whom I’ve been listening to since 2008. While my partiality for her doesn’t extend into creepy just-lost-the-love-of-my-life territory, it still came as a mild shock that I could have been unaware of something that happened before I even knew she existed (she got married in 2007). But that’s what happens when you only listen to the music, but don’t read the gossip mags, watch the variety shows or check Chinese Wikipedia. It’s like my love of Mandopop existed in a vacuum, isolated from all the other parts of me that read 8 Days, watch Ellen and obsessively check IMDB for the acting credits of every actor in every US TV show I watch. Speaking of which…
I faithfully follow about ten US TV series on a regular basis, occasionally watch three or four more, and know about at least a couple dozen others. So naturally, I considered myself pretty well-informed and was all prepared to impress my American friend with my encyclopedic knowledge of US network television. I was disappointed when it turned out she didn’t have the same favourite shows as I did, but I was even more flabbergasted when she did list her favourites, and the only one I’d even heard of was Parks and Recreation. Go figure.
I forget exactly what word it was, but it wasn’t one of those terms that can’t be translated without the loss of a significant portion of its meaning. I knew the Chinese term, and I knew there was an exact English counterpart, but I could not think of it to save myself. I blame my increased consumption and usage of the Chinese language in the days immediately preceding my writing of that essay. Apparently, my brain finds it difficult to switch between different linguistic frequencies on a rapid basis, which resulted in a full-blown internal translation crisis. My Chinese isn’t even that good, which made the situation even more absurd.
This was when I was on holiday with my family in Korea. I’d recently developed a craze over Korean dramas and Girls’ Generation, with a fervour that even extended to knowing who the current head of state was. The majority of non-Korean Hallyu Wave devotees could probably care less about Korean politics, but there I was, being a smart-aleck and assuming I knew a lot about Korea from just a couple of dramas and an introductory language course at the neighbourhood CC. I ended up making the same mistake as all those suaku angmohs who pronounce Asian names exactly as they are spelt in English.
In my defence, I’m a Mandopop person who doesn’t listen to English radio stations or watch MTV. On the other hand, this was only one of the most overplayed songs of the year and I happened to be in Ellie Goulding’s part of the world when this occurred. Must be the ear wax.
This is what happens when you don’t speak Mandarin on a daily basis for years on end, or at least Mandarin that doesn’t have a random English word inserted at regular intervals. By the time I’d finished mentally translating my question in my head, everyone had already moved on to another topic. The feelings of inadequacy generated by this incident subsequently contributed to a short-lived attempt at reconnecting with my mother tongue that terminated abruptly when item number three (see above) occurred.
OK, this isn’t really a failure per se, but a case of something working too well. Just because I’m slightly more comfortable speaking Chinese than the average angmoh-pai local undergraduate and don’t dip into Singlish that often when I’m conversing does NOT make me a Chinese national. Has it now become so unnatural for a young, tertiary-educated Singaporean to speak passable Mandarin to the extent that his or her nationality comes into question? I’ve had this reaction both from people my age and from people my parents’ age, the latter of whom have apparently been disappointed by the younger generation’s inability to converse in their mother tongue so often that they no longer believe any of us can.
This, as you can probably tell, is a sore point for me.
I rest my case.
One off submission by Leslie Wong
