As I am revising for the GEK1058 Language and the Preservation of Culture exam, I come across Wendy Bokhorst-Heng's article titled Singapore's Speak Mandarin Campaign. The arguments brought up in the article present the government's position regarding Mandarin as being more complex than how they frame it. It makes me think of the project that my group had to do for the class. While interviewing my aunt because of her role as caregiver to my cousin, Melcher and I brought up the issues of Mandarin, Hokkien (because that's my family's dialect), and our ethnic and clan identities. The conversation went like this:
P:
What do you feel about Mandarin? Do you feel it's important for JY (my cousin) to learn Mandarin? If someone doesn’t know how to speak Mandarin, you don’t feel like he or she counts as a Chinese?
Aunt:
You can put it like that... Because her parents, her ancestors, whatever, are also Chinese, then you as – you can’t even speak a little bit of Mandarin, it’s not right
P:
But for our family, we are Hokkien, shouldn't it be that our ancestors speak Hokkien, not Mandarin?
Aunt:
Mm, I guess. Because if she knows how to speak Hokkien it would be better for her. But, in school you don’t learn Hokkien so it doesn’t benefit her in term of studies. If she wants to learn it as something extra, we are willing to teach her.
The government's position regarding Mandarin (and Chinese) is that it is a lingua franca for the different Chinese communities in Singapore (Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Hainanese, Cantonese, so on and so forth), that it holds 5000 years of collective wisdom and it is our cultural ballast. However, as you can tell from my aunt's reply, there really is contradiction in that, she feels that us children should speak Mandarin because it is the language of our parents and the language of our ancestors, but in fact, the language of our ancestors should be Hokkien. Knowing how to speak Mandarin really wouldn't accord me with 5000 years of collective Chinese wisdom, because language issues aren't that simple. More often than not, language issues are political issues; we have to be more aware of the engineering that is being done to influence our attitudes and beliefs.
Furthermore, in governmental rhetoric, Mandarin is always framed in opposition to dialects. Why should that be the case? Why must there exist a binary relationship? I think what we have to also keep in mind is that language issues are complicated, and instrumental and sentimental values can be attached to languages. From my aunt's answer, you can see that she's selective regarding whether the learning of a language by her child should be justified or not. To her, Mandarin holds a sentimental role in tying us to our roots, while learning 'extra' languages is acceptable if there's additional pragmatic benefits in the domain of school. To a large extent, we ought not simply accept the government's position regarding Mandarin and dialects. I cannot even begin to describe how upset and frustrated I get with myself when I'm unable to properly communicate with my grandmother. It is a very real consequence, of generations not being able to communicate with each other. Of late, I have been working really hard on learning Hokkien. Recently, my grandma told my mommy that my Hokkien has improved a lot, and I'm really glad to have received that stamp of approval from my granny. But how often do you hear of grandchildren trying to learn dialects just to speak to their elderly? It's quite rare, and to be honest it's really difficult, because there really doesn't exist proper support for the speaking of dialects.
I'm not saying that everyone should be like me and start learning their dialects. I'm saying that everyone should be more critical of any official rhetoric they hear regarding language policies, and be more aware of the multiple values each language holds for them - only then will they make informed and educated choices. For me, I really feel strongly that it's ridiculous that I cannot speak in Hokkien partially because my parents were affected by the Speak Mandarin Campaign and chose to speak Mandarin to me while bringing me up, and didn't speak to me in Hokkien; I honestly want to speak well in Hokkien to be able to speak to my grandmothers, and I would have learnt it a lot more easily when I was younger.
Sigh back to revising
PS I respect my aunt very much and have only used her words to illustrate the complexity that surrounds the issue of language learning. I am not attempting to shed any negative light on her in this entry.
Labels: EnglishLanguage, language issues, speak mandarin campaign, studies
