Searching for Singapore's soul (Part 2): A losing battle for our dialects

Searching for Singapore's soul (Part 2): A losing battle for our dialects

I am truly appalled by the recent speak Mandarin drive. It says two main things:

1. that dialects are a negative interference on the learning of English and Mandarin

2. that it is restrictive because it only confines us to our ancestral village, town, or at best the province.

And to compound the absurdity of this argument, the Straits Times published a letter in the forum by an Ong Siew Chey who said:

Chinese should forget about dialects and stick to mandarin. Language is a tool and we should use the best tool available. Cultural and other values can be dissociated from languages...we do not lose much if we discard dialects

These arguments are highly flawed.

Firstly, a person's ability to learn a language is not a zero-sum game. The government should give Singaporeans greater credit for their capacity to learn. Any doctor will tell you that we do not have a fixed number of brain cells for the learning of languages and should therefore conserve them for only the languages that matter. If anything, my learning of a second and third language helped me appreciate the different languages more.

Granted, with limited time, one may argue that we should be focusing on the languages that matter. But being able to speak a language well has less to do with the number of hours one spends STUDYING it, than with the person's opportunity to practice it and understand the cultural significance of the language.

Which brings me to my next point. How can a person say that: "Cultural and other values can be dissociated from languages"???!!! Language and Culture are intrinsically linked! Good heavens! Which planet is this person coming from?!

Chinese opera sung in Mandarin as opposed to Hokkien can NEVER be the same. There are idoms, terms and phrases used in Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka etc that you cannot fully translate into Mandarin, and which are unique to the historical development of the dialect. You lose the dialect, and you lose the legends, myths and folklores of these communities.

Language is a tool, yes! But who ever said we should only work with one tool. Different tools are designed for different functions, so why rank them as best and second-best? And what's wrong with working with more than one tool?

Lastly, to say that dialects restrict us to only our ancestral town, or province is to have a very limited understanding of the function of language. Can and should we measure the value of a language based on the number of people who speak it? Must everything be valued by a quantifiable measure?

So what if only a village of 20 people speak that dialect? If one of that 20 is my grand father, that ONE person means a lot to me. And he is a part of my history and my family, which I will lose if I don't speak that dialect.

I speak from experience because my late grandparents were from Guang Zhou (a city in China), but I never learnt to speak cantonese. And I grew up very much detached from them, and I never bothered spending time with them because - "What would we talk about when I don't even speak their language?"

Nothing can be sadder than being total strangers with your own family and even when they passed on, I didn't really feel like I had lost a close family member.

Is this the kind of young generation the government really wants to nurture?

Dialects, like language, are a means of communication, and along with communication, peoples' ability to form relationships, identify with each other, and express feelings to each other. You take that away, and you break more than just the language, but the social bonds, sense of community and one's roots.

Did the government not once advocate Singaporean's living overseas to value one's roots and come back to Singapore instead of deserting? We were labeled "stayers" or "quitters".

Do our roots only stop at 1979 when the Speak Mandarin campaign was launched in Singapore?

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Beyond dialects and languages

Beyond dialects and languages

Friday, 27 March 2009

Kelvin Teo

So the dust has now settled over Minister Mentor Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s provocative call to chinese Singaporeans to focus on learning mandarin instead of their dialects. From a personal perspective, I didn’t find Mr Lee’s call surprising, given the fact that he has always championed Singapore’s role as the gateway to China. There have been exhaustive discussions on the domestic cultural impact of Mr Lee’s remark but little attention is paid to the political economy beyond the dialects and languages.

Geopolitical shift towards East Asia

As the fallout from the current global credit crisis continues, there has been some talk of America losing its superpower status as it reels from a double whammy - the collapse of its financial system and the overstretching of its military in Iraq and Afghanistan. And naysayers have further rubbed salt into the wound by predicting that the US dollar will lose its world currency status. The writing is already on the wall when OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) countries started dumping the dollars. Iran transacts in Euros with Venezuela following suit. And after the dollars hit its lowest against the yen, the likelihood of the former being knocked off its pedestal seems closer to reality.

There could be a shift in the balance of world power, a transition from one dominant entity to a few powerful entities. The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations seem the likely candidates. China is poised to overtake America in terms of GDP by 2040. For ASEAN nations, trading volume with China is set to rise with the establishment of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area by 2010. The value of ASEAN-China trade was forecasted to hit $200 billion in 2008.

The Kra Canal Project, which is the planned waterway link between the Indian ocean and the South China sea and cutting across the Isthmus of Kra is in its revival stage. The Chinese will be providing assistance for the project, and it is a move to increase Chinese commercial and military presence within Southeast Asia, particularly in facilitating trade and enhance Chinese energy security. So the geopolitics shift and anticipation of increased trade links with China within the region might make learning mandarin an attractive postposition, no? Perhaps, there is use for learning mandarin after all. However, wouldn’t it seem a little premature to place the learning of our dialects into the backburner?

Mandarin alone offers no comparative advantage

Cantonese speakers amongst us might have a strong case for argument here. Cantonese makes up 15% of the Singaporean chinese population. Cantonese is spoken as a medium of communication in Guangzhou, a major business centre in China. And it will come in useful when interacting with business people from Hong Kong too. However, it is a fallacy to think that being chinese and able to speak mandarin would eventually lead to a comparative advantage. The failure of the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) serves as an important reminder to all of us.

SIP was initially conceived to the epitome of Singapore-style Industrial Township - a showcase of Singapore’s way of managing an industrial set-up. That wasn’t to be, and Singapore transferred a major part of SIP’s ownership back to the Chinese. What happened was that SIP was outgunned and outfoxed by the Suzhou New District, despite the former enjoying advantages ranging from initial political support from the Chinese Communist Party to freedom over planning and land use. The experiment to clone Singapore in China failed. Thus, what the SIP failure has taught us is that common language is no substitute for the appreciation of local political, social and economic culture. While learning the language or dialect involved in trade communications is important, but the key to survival is to be able to adapt to the prevailing business conditions.

Keeping Singaporeans at home

Last but not least, the very notion of home is increasingly diluted in Singapore. The Asia Research Centre of Murdoch University reported in December 2007 that 53% of Singaporean teens would consider emigration to greener pastures. Singapore’s outflow of 26.11 emigrants per 1000 citizens is ranked 2nd highest in the world, after Timor Leste. Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng also publicly acknowledged that Singaporean applications for overseas residency have already exceeded 1000 per month since 2007.

While many have attributed the emigration trend to better economic opportunities abroad, there are other push factors in Singapore that contributed to it. The growing disconnect between Singaporeans and their social environment, the OB markers keeping Singaporeans from taking ownership of their own identity in Singapore are among the push factors. Dialects play an important role in not only building a strong sense of identity towards one’s community, but also encourage Singaporeans to take pride of our own cultural diversity. If we cannot be proud of our own cultures, why would we even hold allegiance to this country by staking our individual economic futures here?

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Speaking dialects helps build rapport

Speaking dialects helps build rapport, even in business

Saturday, 21 March 2009

Bng S C

Perhaps we may wish to consider the role a dialect plays in building rapport and leading to business opportunities.

I refer to the Straits Times article, “Mandarin drive starts in the home”, on March 18, 2009.

When I was in secondary school, I agreed wholeheartedly (presciently, it appears) with MM Lee’s statement that with Mandarin, “We can connect with the whole of China and its 1.3 billion people. Dialects will confine us to our original village or town or at most, the province of our ancestors”. I even took that line of reasoning one step further – I thought that with English, I could connect with the whole of the English-speaking world. Mandarin, I thought, would confine me to China and its 1.3 billion people – a large percentage of whom would eventually learn to speak English anyway.

Along the way I realised, however, that I could not build rapport easily with English speakers who did not speak English my way, the Singaporean way.

In university, I made it a point to brush up my Mandarin. However, I discovered that I still could not build rapport easily with Mandarin speakers who did not speak Mandarin my way, the Singaporean way.

For that matter, many Mandarin speakers in China find it difficult to understand the Mandarin spoken by people from other provinces. Although the Chinese Government has made it mandatory for Mandarin to be taught in schools, Mandarin is still not the mother tongue for most Chinese - their hometown dialect is. Northerners find it hard to understand southerners and the Shanghainese often gleefully mix Shanghainese words and pronunciation into their Mandarin. Does this sound familiar?

Building rapport

Building rapport is the first step to developing the all-important Guanxi in China. Building rapport is about seeking common ground, about getting the other person to treat me as one of “Us” and not as “Others”. In China, it is prevalent for family-run SMEs to have one price for Us and another higher price for Others. It may be surprising for some that many Chinese do not consider the Chinese from other provinces as Us, but rather as Others. So whom will a Chinese consider as Us? Someone with a nexus to his hometown, perhaps. Someone who enjoys the same food and speaks the same dialect, perhaps.

We all like to feel like members of an elite fraternity, and sharing a common dialect, even if it does not open as many doors as a Masonic handshake, still does wonders in building rapport. Perhaps we may wish to consider the role a dialect plays in building rapport and leading to business opportunities. After all, as the Teochew say, “Ga ki nang, pa si bo xiang gan” (If you are one of Us, it does not matter even if we die for you).

Just look at the facts - the Cantonese-speaking Hongkong-ers have made many successful investments in the predominantly Cantonese-speaking Pearl River Delta of southern Guangdong Province , but do not have investments of a similar scale in north-eastern Guangdong Province , which is predominantly Teochew-speaking. Similarly, the Hokkien-speaking Taiwanese have made many successful investments in predominantly Hokkien-speaking southern Fujian Province, but do not have investments of a similar scale in northern Fujian Province , where the Min Bei dialect (which is mutually unintelligible with Hokkien) is prevalent. Can Singaporeans, who have been trained to speak Mandarin and not dialects, boast of a similar presence and as many successes investing in China?

The Hokkien spoken in Singapore is not the same as the Hokkien spoken in Taiwan or in Fujian Province . Nevertheless, speaking a variant of the dialect is often sufficient to build rapport – after all, it is a standing joke in Fujian Province that every village speaks a different variant of Hokkien from the next village across the mountain.

Leveraging on dialects

One does not have to be extremely proficient in a dialect to build rapport. From personal experience, it is sufficient to be able to conduct a simple conversation in a dialect to draw attention to the commonality of the ancestral homeland. Further negotiations can be carried out in Mandarin. I have oftentimes been able to leverage on my dialect to obtain better prices from Hokkien vendors than my non-Hokkien Chinese counterparts.

Furthermore, the use of dialects is not restricted to China. The Chinese Diaspora began long before Mandarin became the official dialect in China . As such, there are approximately 30 million Overseas Chinese, originally from Guangdong, Fujian and Hainan provinces , who may not be able to communicate fluently in Mandarin. It would not be a far stretch to assume that it would be easier to build rapport with an Overseas Chinese by speaking to him in his dialect, rather than struggling to carry on a conversation in Mandarin. This might prove difficult in two generations’ time, if, as MM Lee predicts, “Mandarin will become our mother tongue”.

With regard to Mr. Chee Hong Tat’s comment that “it would be stupid… to advocate the learning of dialects, which must be at the expense of English and Mandarin”, I would like to introduce him to some Malaysian Chinese friends of mine. Speak to a Malaysian Chinese, and chances are, she can speak English, Mandarin, Malay, Cantonese and Hokkien well enough to carry on a conversation in all of the abovementioned languages. As MM Lee rightly pointed out, English and Mandarin are two “manifestly different languages”. The dialects that we are referring to, however, are merely spoken variants of the Chinese language. Surely, learning to speak a dialect must be easier than to learn Malay along with English and Mandarin?

I agree with Ong Siew Chey’s letter on March 19, 2009 that “in spite of our claim of being bilingual, some of us are actually non-lingual, hovering between Singlish and substandard Mandarin.” The Speak Mandarin Campaign started 30 years ago. If Singaporeans, after 30 years of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, are still “non-lingual”, can anyone be certain that not speaking dialects is really the cure for “non-lingualism”?

In 2005, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Robert Kuok, the “Sugar King of Asia”, together with a delegation of NUS students. Mr. Kuok (then a sprightly 82 year-old multi-billionaire) took the effort to greet us individually when we first met. Upon hearing our surnames, he would first make guesses at our dialect groups, and greet us with a few words in each of our own dialects. This left a deep impression on me, and I hope that one day, with proper training, my “5GB” brain would be able to replicate that feat.

However, I understand that I should not be too hard on myself if I cannot learn to speak several dialects. After all, Mr. Robert Kuok’s unique. He’s Malaysian.

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A Dance for All

A Dance for All

The dialect debate is getting interesting in Singapore. On one hand you have the official stance, which promotes the idea that our primary identity is that of being Singaporean Chinese and the only language that we need to speak other than English is Mandarin. The other side of the debate says that we still need to keep our dialects because they are part of our heritge.

I tend to agree with the later. Although I am all for learning Mandarin and promoting the use of the language and it's implications in interactions with Mainland China and Taiwan, I find the idea of the State trying to impose an cultural identity on people to be highly offensive and disturbing. I don't need a legal system to tell me that I am ethnically Chinese. Despite an upbrining in the West, I cannot escape the colour of my skin. Even if I only procreate with a woman of a differnt race, the Chinese genes will take sometime to wear out within my genetic stock.

I take pride in being ethnic Chinese and I enjoy many aspects of Chinese culture and part of that culture is accepting that it's a not a monolithic block as some would suggests but many cultures moving about in a dynamic fashion. The same can be said of any culture. I am Chinese but I am also Cantonese and part of being Cantonese is being comfortable with the dialect. Without this dialect, I would not be able to relate to people like my grandmother. Although I do speak English with my Uncles, understanding the Cantonese dialect allows me to understand them better.

But my attachment to dialects goes even further. It allows me to relate to people I'm most naturally inclined to deal with in a better way. Learning Mandarin opens doors to the entire Chinese market but opening up a market involves more than just being able to say a few words in the "National Language," (Guo Yi as Mandarin is often known as outside Singapore). Opening a market involves building relationships at the ground level and that involves getting to know people at their cultural heart. Hence knowing local dialects in places like China help.

Lee Kuan Yew is correct when he says profficiency in Mandarin makes China more accessible. But his comparison between being fluent in Mandarin and being open to a billion people in China but being fluent in say Cantonese limits one to 100 million people in Guangdong and Hong Kong reflects simple minded thinking which insults the intelligence that Mr Lee is known for. His statement reflects the thinking of a Citizen of Caucasia rather than that of an intellectual (collect name cards and social network site friends to become well connected).

It's not how many people you know, its what you do with the people you know that counts. The Cantonese are a chauvanistic lot, pretty much like the French when it comes to language and being predominantly Cantonese, Hong Kong Businesses people tend to deal with the people from Guangdong Province rather than China as a whole entity. A good deal of Hong Kong business people speak Mandarin but prefer to deal with their fellow Cantonese speakers in Guangdong. Real relationships are built between people in Hong Kong and Guangdong and you get real economic results. On the superficial level, people in Hong Kong are limited to Guangdong province rather than the rest of China. However, if you look lower, they have real relationships with people and leverage on that those to develop them further a field in the rest of China. - China, like other big nations is not one country but many. The real economic record of Hong Kong Businesses in China is darn good.

Compare that to Singapore. Yes, the Beijing Government has fabulous relationship with the Singapore government. The Communist love the PAP for being able to develiver economic goodies while keeping political power. If only a gazillion Singapore's could flourish accross China. However, Singaporeans are not encouraged to develop real relations with people on the ground. Just follow the government and what do we get - Shouzhou Industrial Park that beacon of Sino-Singapore joint ventures (shhhh, the Chinese own majority share after Singapore pumped in endless billions). The record of Singapore business in China is not exactly something to shout about .... the only benefit for Singaporeans is that we got Kuan Yew flying up to Bejing to "Tell the Chinese" how its done. The Chinese as always listened politely and nodded extra hard to what he said, particularly when extra cash was thrown at them. Bravo, Mr Lee for leading another commercial success for the nation - too bad you ended up throwing so many resources at it that you actually wasted our money in the effort to prove yourself right.

The man simply cannot accept that building lasting commercial ties with countries is hard work and it involves more than just him "telling" the world what to do. The rest of the world nodds politiely - why shouldn't they - Mr Lee comes bringing cash and a philosophy that he has to throw money at things he declares just to ensure that he's right. Too bad the Singaporean tax payer is politely screwed in the process but then again, who honestly gives a shit about the average Singaporean?

Contrary to what he may think, the ability of the nation-state to direct culture rather than to provide for its infrastructure has proved pretty grim. If there's one thing that makes government planning and directing of the economy look like a success, its when the government directs culture.

Can one think of an example where government direction has made a significant impact on culture creation?

On the other hand I can name a few positive examples of culture succeeding when people are simply allowed to interact. In Singapore, I think Singlish stands as a good example.

Another great example I like the Hakka. I love watching the Hakka, a traditional Maori War dance, usually played whenever a New Zealand sports team is about to play someone. You have Caucasians mixing freely with Polynisians, each performing the Hakka with a frightening intensity - believing in what everyone believes is their heritage. Now that's what I call real integration.

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Dialect Murderer

Dialect Murderer

"If you speak Hokkien or Cantonese, you reach some 60 million in Fujian and Taiwan, or about 100 million in Guangdong and Hong Kong. With Mandarin, you can speak to 1,300 million Chinese from all provinces in China," - Lee Kuan Yew.

Yes, Sir!
We learn to be able to speak to 1,300 million Chinese in China while we make our grandparents mad because we cannot even communicate with them in our real mother tongue!

Yes, Sir!
We learn to be able to speak to 1,300 million strangers when we can't even say hello and be close with our fellow Singaporean living next door!

Call me stupid or lesser mortal, but just where is the opportunity for most Singaporeans to talk to 13,000 million Chinese?

Maybe promoting good neighbourliness and community care instead of language would have built a nation sooner. It is the same reason that the obscene salary of mintsters has marginalised the lesser and greater mortals in my country. It's a pity that one step forward is always two steps back where initiatives in "staying together moving ahead" are concerned.

"Hua wen, shei pa shei? [Chinese, who's afraid of who?]" is funny because I'm too dumb to understand their scare tactics. However, I find the tag line for 2009's Promote Mandarin Campaign ridiculously apt when converted to Hokkien in another way, "Hwa boon, si, kia si? [Chinese, die, scared to die?]".

In view of SPH's publishing and sale of the new book , I'm no longer surprised by Chee Hong Tat (Principal Private Secretary to the Minister Mentor) saying, "It would be stupid for any Singapore agency or NTU to advocate the learning of dialects, which must be at the expense of English and Mandarin" . I'm no advertising genius but promo breeds promo and nothing sells like controversy!

I have no complaint of making Mandarin the common dialect (putong hua) in Singapore but to dumb down the learning and use of other fangyi (regional language - dialect) by stopping radio and TV broadcasts was a little over the top. Many seniors were outraged by such high-handedness while younger ones were perplexed by their own different-from-father bastardised surname. Maybe it's only in Uniquely Singapore that a family named Tan can become Chen overnight. Weird!

I'm glad that my children still bear my ancestor's family name on their birth certificate and NRIC. They need not do a deed poll to change their family name or surname like some of the kids whose parents were tricked into changing. I still remember the 70's and 80's when school made my children feel bad because their surname was not what the teachers (due to instructions from decision makers & followers) expected. Yes, nurses in KK those days did ask me why I did not put Hanyu Pinyin surname on my children's birth certificate as if I was a criminal. It was 'kana sai' kind of 'seow'!!! ['Like faeces' kind of 'craziness'!!!]

Many rulers are remembered by their good or evil deeds. When the time comes, I will know of one who did his damned best to kill my real mother tongue!

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