Tabitha Wang
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When we kids came along, though, they made a pact to speak to us only in English so that we would get a headstart in the language.
Thanks to that POLICY, my siblings and I have a native speaker’s fluency. We think, speak, read and write in English.
So why do I feel a bit CHEATED now?
Because I wish they had allowed us to pick up every possible language as children, when it was easy to learn new tongues. Being monolingual makes me feel handicapped.
Thanks to my Nyonya maternal grandmother, I speak a smattering of Malay. But all my Mandarin has been, in Hokkien ah-beng speak, given back to my teachers.
If only I had my father’s facility of languages. He can easily switch from Teochew to Cantonese to Hokkien in the course of one conversation and has even been known to try out some Hockchew (a Fuzhou dialect) words on my sister-in-law’s family.
Not being able to speak Hokkien meant I couldn’t communicate with my paternal grandmother and later, I couldn’t be one of the cool Ah Lians in university.
Not being able to speak Cantonese makes me a language pariah in Hong Kong.
Recently, I was speaking to a Singaporean who had the same problem. She had an Indonesian mother and a Chinese Singaporean father but was fluent only in English.
Her parents had imposed the same rule on her and her siblings: Speak English only so that they wouldn’t be confused by too many languages.
Now, in her 30s, she is trying to learn Hokkien. But it is a hard slog.
Like her, I am finding my Cantonese lessons slow going as I’d never been exposed to the dialect as a kid. I may have diligently studied music at school up to grade eight, but I’m tone deaf when it comes to languages — which is a big handicap for a dialect with up to nine different tones.
It’s a frustrating struggle which could have been avoided if only my parents had been less dictatorial about language learning.
It’s not their fault. They are a product of their time, an age when dialects were seen as old-fashioned, and English (and later Mandarin) seen as good.
The ’60s and ’70s were a time of nation building, so it made sense to have a lingua franca to help tie the different Chinese communities together.
But like it or not, language does have a lot to do with culture and identity.
Take, for example, the protests on July 25 and Aug 1 in Guangzhou. The government’s proposal to increase the number of Mandarin broadcast programmes in the area did not go down well with the Cantonese-speaking population.
“Every Chinese should know how to speak Mandarin,” Guangzhou native Kevin Kong, 29, told
“But everyone has the right to speak their native language. There shouldn’t be any conflict between the two languages.
Just because you speak Mandarin doesn’t mean you should give up your mother language.”
His argument inspired me to pick up my MOTHER TONGUE. Problem is, which is it?
My dad is Cantonese but he speaks mainly Penang Hokkien, having been brought up on the island. If pushed, my mum would plump for “Baba Hokkien” as her mother tongue.
Strangely enough, I find I adopt different personas depending on the dialect I speak. In my 5354 (also known as half-past six) Cantonese, I feel I am a streetsmart, city babe like Maggie Cheung in
I am actually quite happy to stay schizophrenic after decades of being a well-mannered “English girl”. Scones with dim sum and Hokkien mee, anyone?
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