Language & Identity — How Do Our Languages Define Us?
Contributing Writer | Derek Hum
Photographer | Sangam Paudel
I think I have a love-hate relationship with the Singaporean education system’s approach to Mandarin Chinese. Throughout my primary and secondary school years, I struggled with the language in class, and probably because it was tested in exams I still associate my rudimentary Chinese standard with feelings of inadequacy today. Oddly, the sense of shame that I was not holding tightly enough to my heritage through my “mother tongue” sterilized my relationship with the language; English became the liberating means for me to babble, gabble, bubble over in self-expression. It was the language that mediated my adolescence and navigation of the world in its socio-politico-economic glory. Chinese was relegated to the burdensome anchor that prevented me from fully being able to slip un-self-consciously into a wholly English perspective. Derek writes of the same experience of an identity scattered between the two languages:
“I linger a second over “Languages” on my resume. “Mandarin Chinese (Conversational)”. I imagine a scenario where I would need to actually prove this. But I move on quickly, thinking, what kind of Singaporean would I be if I didn’t put Chinese on my resume?
I am an ACS boy, so I have more or less grown up being expected to have poor Chinese speaking skills. I laughed whenever my friends said that I jiak kan tang [to be very Westernised, literally to eat potato] (and this too, had to be explained to me the first time). After all, English is good, right?
But then I went to NS. I opened my eyes (and ears) a little more. I interned at the Speak Good English Movement. Soon it was clear to me that language demarcated social milieu. A linguistic amorphousness thus began to emerge. Sometimes I am proud that I can code switch so easily. Yet pride suggests that it is something I set out to achieve, whereas in reality it is not something I control. It is with some instinctive promiscuity (and privilege) that I speak (and thus am) all things to all men. And so as I present on Marx in school, order shao ji fan jia dan [roasted chicken rice with egg], ask my mum eh sai jiak liao bo [can we eat yet]?, tell my friend to “don’t liddat leh”, or comment on how rabak [messy, unpolished] outfield is; I find myself asking, am I all those things, or am I none of them?”
