The language question

This post was inspired by a question one of my sisters asked me the other day: “Why is it we have never really learned Chinese?”

I’ve been thinking about this on and off since then, mainly because this question can be answered differently, depending on what angle you want to take. Also because there is no short answer, regardless of which angle you want to take.

Some background might be useful too, because the question is a bit nonsensical without it.

My family is originally from Malaysia, from the ethnic group that calls itself Malaysian Chinese. The detail, as I know it: Dad is a Straits Chinese (Baba) with Cantonese heritage, Mum Teochew and Hokkien. I realise this is probably incomprehensible to those of you with little knowledge of the Chinese dialects/languages, and I’ll spare you the Applied Linguistics treatment of Chinese As She is Spoke; I’ll just say that speakers of Cantonese will not necessarily understand speakers of Teochew, or of Hokkien, and vice versa. For my Dad, being Straits Chinese means that he actually speaks better Malay than he speaks Cantonese or any other dialect, for that matter. Dad’s family, particularly on his father’s side, speak Malay at home. For much of my childhood I thought Mum’s family was Hokkien, because they usually spoke Hokkien to each other – recently Mum told me that actually her dad was Teochew, but they never ever spoke it because her mum insisted on speaking Hokkien! Despite all these languages in the background, English is the language we’ve always used at home, and we’ve only ever spoken very little Chinese, of whatever dialect.

Have I completely confused you yet?

Mum and Dad were educated in schools established by the English colonials and so English was the language they spoke to each other. Or maybe it was Manglish, that peculiarly Malaysian version of English…

As a child the Chinese spoken at home was usually just the odd phrase here and there, like:

“Daddy, stop the car, C wants to pang sai!” Hokkien: poo

“Mummy, where is the fung yau, I have a tummy ache!” Cantonese: literally wind oil; an oil with high menthol content for relieving headaches and stomach aches.

And so on. For much of my childhood, the only Chinese I knew was confined to the words used for various bodily functions. So I could say that I needed to poo, pee or puke in two dialects, or that I was hungry, but that was about the sum of it.

At school, I was educated in English and Malay. The other Chinese kids used to laugh at me because my Cantonese sounded very odd to their ears, and my poor vocabulary meant that I was at an extreme disadvantage in any conversation. (You can only say “I need to go poo poo” to certain people, and only at certain times of your life. After that you lose all credibility.) On the other hand many of the other Chinese kids found Malay hard, but it was never difficult for me, possibly because half my family spoke it whenever we visited them. English too was not difficult – after all we spoke it at home.

The peculiarities of the Malaysian education system, where each major ethnic group has its own schools, meant that my parents could have chosen to send me to a school where I could have been taught in Chinese (Mandarin probably). But I guess because they weren’t educated in Chinese and don’t speak it all that well (Dad can’t even write his name in Chinese characters, while the only Chinese characters Mum can write are the ones in her name), they chose not to send us to a Chinese school.

I had this weird I need to find out about my roots thing when I was in my early twenties, which led me to study Mandarin at uni. As a result I am the only person in my immediate family who can speak any Mandarin at all, and I can also read and write Chinese (although my writing is atrocious – Chinese wordprocessing has ruined me and I find I can’t remember how to write the simplest characters at times). My Chinese is a bit weird too. I mean, how many Chinese speakers would be able to talk to you in Mandarin, in some detail about the peculiarities of socialism with Chinese characteristics? I could tell you about my year living in China – maybe another time 🙂

We still only speak English at home, and I think the amount of Manglish we speak is actually decreasing, I think. The sister whose question inspired this post was actually born in Perth, so her exposure to Manglish, or Malay, or any Chinese dialect, for that matter, has been quite limited. I used to bemoan the fact that we didn’t speak our “ancestral language”, but I have gotten over that now – I accept the fact that my family is the way it is, due to the peculiarities of history and location. At least we can communicate with each other – I am thinking of families where the children are educated in a language their parents don’t speak and how that places stresses on the relationships within the family.

Culture and language evolve constantly and it’s pointless clinging to some idealised version of how you should behave or speak, although it can be quite interesting to ponder the What Ifs. What if the British never colonised Malaya? What if I had been sent to a Chinese school? What if I was writing this in perfect Mandarin? What if aliens landed on earth tomorrow?

Categories: family, language