The melodramatic third culture kid in me likes to say that culturally homeless is how I grew up. Unlike my sisters who were born in the Mount Elizabeth Hospital at the center of Singapore’s Orchard Road, I, like my mom, was born in a small clinic in Beijing. I was brought to Singapore shortly after my birth, and the city was my home until I was five. My parents then moved our family to Shanghai and enrolled me in a Taiwanese-American school.
In Shanghai, my American teachers found pleasure in correcting my English pronunciation. I struggled with curling my r’s and stressing my th’s, syllables that were foreign to most Singaporeans. I was constantly embarrassed next to my peers, who laughed at the way I pronounced three as tree and also mocked my Mandarin, which was a strange hybrid of Beijing and Singaporean accents.
Over time, as the sharper edges of my accents dulled, I began to sound like the rest of my peers. But this proved problematic during Chinese New Years, when I visited family in Beijing and Singapore. My relatives, who knew each other well from family gatherings that I had never attended, saw me as a foreigner — too American to be Chinese, and too Chinese to be Singaporean. During the New Year’s Eve celebrations, when the whole family gathered around to toss the colorful yusheng salad and chant huat-ah! to one another for prosperity in the New Year, I would retreat to the bathroom to quietly practice the strange accents I had already forgotten.
Some days, I still feel deeply ashamed that I often have to ask my dad to translate when I talk to my mom. Other days, however, I am amazed by my own ability to knife in and out of languages and accents with ease. The truth is, as much as I wish I could say that there was a definitive moment when I understood that the beauty of growing up across cultures lies in its tragedy, that moment never arrived for me. It is a lesson I am still learning.
Alysha and Ivan share below what learning a new language has meant for them:
I am pretty bad at Hindi. It’s not a stretch to say I’m the worst in my class. Everyone goes through a learning curve, but mine seems to be taking a little longer. When people ask me to say something to them in Hindi, my mind blanks out, and I forget all the vocabulary words I repeat to myself at night (chair, table, banana, family). Instead the Chinese words (椅子，座子，香蕉，家) rush in to fill their place.
It annoys me so much that the language I try to run from is the one that feels most natural. Growing up Indian in Singapore, my parents made the decision to have me learn Chinese because it would make my life easier. And it has. I can make small talk with kopitiam aunties and impress my friends’ parents. They tell me that I’m “different”, not like other Indians.
I started to learn Hindi because I did not want to be different. I did not want to give anyone license to determine that I was similar enough to them for them to not discriminate against me. I figured that Hindi was a language I should know.
But that’s not quite true. My mother speaks Bhojpuri and my father speaks Gujarati. The language they use to talk behind my back is Malay. Hindi looks different, sounds different. Struggling through conjugating verbs for the past few weeks has taught me that what I speak will never make me any one thing. I will never be Chinese, nor will I ever be Indian.
Alysha is a second-year YNC student from Singapore.
I took French up as a personal challenge in National Service after seeing a Facebook ad by L’alliance Francais de Singapour, committing to weekly Thursday-evening classes that regularly stretched till 10.
Learning French was difficult at the start. Things like the case system, the pronouns, and genders for every single object forced me to consider nuances that did not exist in English. Every week meant new tenses and vocabulary to memorize, with more things piled on with each other.
I remember being so frustrated each time I messed up the conjugation of the verbs. It was always the mix-up between vous and toi, the two forms of the pronoun you. I would address someone formally at the start of the sentence, and by mid-sentence, I would have started speaking informally.
Nonetheless, I welcomed this challenge and put in the work, crunching my conjugations whenever I could find a short break in the work week. I started to listen to some French podcasts to develop a better ear for the language. I also experimented with many different tools like Duolingo, learning completely impractical sentences like ce livre est presque logique (This book is almost logical), just to shout them out throughout the day for the fun of it.
Soon, when I had learnt enough to be able to express myself, learning French became much more enjoyable. Each lesson represented an opportunity to learn new vocabulary and discover more about the French language.
I will never forget the day I was able to have my first conversation in French. Something clicked in me that day, and from then on, I have never looked back.
My love for French has stuck with me till today, and I still try to speak it whenever I can, mostly at the Yale-NUS French language table. I am confident that it will only get better from here.
Ivan is a freshman at Yale-NUS who is dreading the end of the ungraded semester.
