What We Speak and Who We Are: What It Means to Be Chinese
华人讲华语 合情又合理
“Chinese People Speaking Mandarin Are Both Fair and Reasonable”
— A 1983 slogan from Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign.
Several years ago, I went to a party held at the kos (boarding house) of a Japanese friend studying batik in Solo, Indonesia. With her, as with all the Japanese friends I’ve met in Indonesia, we converse in Indonesian. There I was introduced to a local student studying Chinese at a nearby university.
“Oh great! A native speaker!” he said, meeting me — a Singaporean Chinese — and then insisted that we converse in Mandarin.
Half-amused and half-terrified, I tried to tell him that my Indonesian was more fluent since I had been studying there for around a year by that time. But he refused to believe me, speaking in Mandarin that was not only fluent and accurate, but had the final Rs that suggested a teacher from Beijing. Struggling to keep up, I could only listen in horror as he suddenly said (in Indonesian):
“Oh, that’s interesting that you used that term there!”
“Ah, if it’s different from what you’ve learnt, I might have made a mistake-”
“But you’re a native speaker!”
I am not alone in feeling embarrassed at not speaking Mandarin despite being of Chinese descent — thereby “unfair and unreasonable”. Ien Ang, in her examination of identity politics in the Chinese diaspora, also includes, early on, an “apology” for speaking in English.
Meanwhile, Charlotte Setijadi, in an article exploring the “revival” of Chinese usage in Indonesia today, interviewed many young Chinese Indonesians who felt embarrassed at being — or being seen as — cina palsu, a “false Chinese”, because of their inability to speak Mandarin.
This happens even though this isn’t their fault: after all, as she writes, during former President Suharto’s 33 year New Order regime, ethnic Chinese Indonesians had to change their names to “Indonesian-sounding” ones, could not display the language publicly, and saw Chinese medium schools and printing presses shut.
Thus, as Setijadi writes, while many of them learn the language to access the educational and business opportunities in China and Taiwan, there is also an element of reconnecting to a “homeland” and recovering an identity that was once taken away. I am thinking of a comment made by one of my Indonesian language teachers when I was in university: that we — her Chinese Singaporean students at least — were lucky to have studied Mandarin in school, something that she herself was not able to do in Indonesia when she was growing up. Being in Indonesia and learning more about its history allow me to appreciate that remark much more.
I have to admit that I actually found it slightly odd the first time I heard it, as at the time I had never really thought I was “lucky” to have to learn Mandarin: when I was growing up I saw it mostly as a troublesome subject taught by nagging teachers through moralistic textbooks. My parents spoke English at home to me (and dialects to each other), I rarely used it with my friends, and all other subjects were in English.
Nonetheless, because it was my assigned “mother tongue”, I had to do at least passably well in it — which meant extra classes and endless memorisation. Thus, speaking Chinese never felt a part of who I am, though it remains a useful skill to have in restaurants and hawker centres, which gives one a sense of the kind of vocabulary I am limited to. A practical tool, rather than part of my hand.
When I think about it further, perhaps another reason I never quite linked Mandarin to my Chinese-ness is because I don’t do it for any other language I use: though I speak, write and dream in English — it is my hand, not just a tool — I can’t say that this makes me “English” in the same way that speaking Mandarin can make one more Chinese. I wonder if this is because — inheriting English as a post-colonial subject far away from its homeland — I’ve never really had to declare myself an Englishman: I can imagine the situation might be different for a child of immigrant parents to the UK.
In the end, no matter how we might personally connect what we speak to who we are, the world around us often imposes its own ideas: thus the banning of Chinese languages in Indonesia to erase the sense of “foreignness” in that community and reinforce a national identity, as well as the lingering embarrassment at being regarded by others as a false Chinese because of what one doesn’t speak.
I have sometimes wondered if I should brush off the dust from those 12 years of compulsory Mandarin lessons. Perhaps with some prodding, I could feel reasonably confident enough to teach it in Indonesia — after all, I already look the part. But a part of me feels that would be hypocritical: people might assume I’m a real Chinese by speaking the language, but I’ve put it on purely as a pragmatic, calculated move aimed at earning a living and getting a work permit.
Or would doing something so practical make me the most Chinese I’ve ever been?
Written by Thow Xin Wei
