What constitutes an “authentic” Singaporean representative of his or her ethnic community?

Singaporeans usually use three criteria to categorise and evaluate an individual according to race: Where were you born? What race are your parents? Do you speak your race’s language, and how well do you speak it?

Conceived in this way, our diverse cultural and linguistic practices become a dichotomy: That is either one is a good Chinese/Malay/Indian, or if one does not fulfil the criteria, one is “not Chinese/Malay/Indian enough”.

Let us take a look at the diversities in reality, with the Chinese as an example.

In 1979, a review of Singapore’s bilingual education (aka the Goh Keng Swee Report) was more concerned with the fact that too few Chinese students were making the shift to Mandarin from other Chinese languages that they spoke at home.

Less than 40 per cent of the pupil population managed to attain the minimum competency level in two languages.

The report proposed a series of changes that emphasised language learning in the early years of education, including academic streaming.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the Chinese population in Singapore never homogeneously used Mandarin as an exclusive home language. Our lament today over its “declining use” obfuscates the fact that we had similar problems in the 1970s trying to make individuals learn a language they did not speak at home.

This struggle to attain high proficiency in Mandarin will continue, because Mandarin has always competed against or co-existed with other languages in our social lives. These other languages used to be what we know as Chinese dialects.

Today it is English.

A CASE IN POINT

Born in 1981, I am very much a product of the changes implemented by the Goh report. My grandparents spoke Foochow and were hardly conversant in Mandarin. I cannot speak Foochow, because my parents never used it with me.

However, I am blessed with a father who went to an English-medium school and a mother who was Chinese-educated.

I picked up both languages naturally as both were in use in my family life. I took Higher Chinese till my O-Levels and scored a distinction for the subject, which meant that I was exempted from studying Chinese in junior college. It also meant that my schooling in Chinese stopped at the age of 16.

As much as I am still effectively bilingual in speech, other aspects of my Chinese literacy have suffered from lack of use.

I can read Chinese essays and newspapers fine, but have forgotten how to write particular characters unless I type with a computer.

I can write academic papers in English, but will have much difficulty doing so in Chinese due to a lack of technical vocabulary. And yet, I would like to think that my Mandarin and Chinese proficiency is as good as most Singaporeans can expect to achieve.

I count both English and Chinese languages, including bits of Malay, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Foochow, etc, as intrinsic to my identity. I love red-date chicken (a traditional Foochow dish) as much as I do laksa and prata, though I do not see myself as territorially linked to China where my grandparents were from.

I consequently think of myself as more Singaporean than Chinese.

Am I still ethnically Foochow? Am I too rojak and anglicised to be Chinese?

BEING COMFORTABLE

It is difficult to say if any of us constitutes an “authentic” racial-Singaporean. But one thing is certain: The diversities that we encounter in our daily lives are much more complex and heterogeneous than the dichotomy posited in mainstream notions of racial identity. It just so happens that the diversity in my own life is largely valued in our society.

Other linguistic practices considered “unauthentic” have become disadvantageous and may even invoke accusations of cultural duplicity: Peranakans who have never been exposed to Mandarin at home; my grandmother who only speaks Foochow; my Chinese friends who use Cantonese and English; individuals whose parents never spoke to them in their official mother tongues for a variety of reasons.

Language use in Singapore often transcends monolingual and monocultural frameworks. It follows that our language proficiencies, modes of learning and even identities should not be measured against the yardstick of an idealised educated monolingual.

Before we think about how to stop the decline of official mother tongues, we might be better off being comfortable with our own forms of bilingualism, pedagogy and standards.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Luke Lu is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, King’s College London