Tongue Twisted

I've probably gone on long rants here about my misadventures with Mandarin Chinese while in school and the adverse effect it has had on my view of Chinese things today. And i'm sure that anyone reading this would probably also have encountered firsthand my, to put it mildly, tentative command of the language. So i guess that a little heads up that there will be more of the similar (or maybe the same) coming up here is in order..

A couple of days ago Dr Ng Eng Hen (doesn't sound quite right to call him NEH, especially since he's my minister eh) made a speech about the teaching of the Chinese language in schools. A choice quote of his which immediately caught my attention was this: "teaching a student Chinese language as a second language is fundamentally different from teaching a student whose mother tongue is Chinese. Hence, the teaching approaches must recognise this." Coming in the wake of LKY's admission that his insistence on bilingualism was wrong, i can hardly say that i didn't see this coming. Nevertheless the sheer reality of Dr Ng's words struck this permanently-scarred-by-misguided-and-draconian-methods-of-Chinese-teaching guy quite hard. While toiling under the weight of endless (and in my opinion, both then and now, meaningless) ting xies and mo xies, not to mention the many confusing cheng yus that i had to memorize, the prevailing rhetoric that underpinned everything about how and why i was taught this language was that it was my 'mother tongue'. As a naive young primary school boy, i grudgingly accepted my torturous fate of having to learn Chinese. This was even if when mustering every ounce of logical thinking and common sense within me, i could never come to terms with how the supposed experts in the education ministry could ever conclude that my mother tongue was Mandarin Chinese when my mother speaks no languages that are even remotely related to Chinese (for starters, all of the languages she speaks possess something called an alphabet). And for good measure, my father, while Chinese, can't exactly boast of Mandarin Chinese as being one of his 'tongues' either.

Bearing all of this in mind, to hear at present, within a span of a few short months, admissions that first i (and i suspect thousands of others too) had the language unpalatably shoved down my throat due to LKY making a (supposedly uncharacteristic) mistake, and then that the rationale behind why i was even subject to such an off-putting way of learning a language (that i had a secret mother unknown to everyone save the MOE, who warranted me learning her tongue) was incorrect have understandably piqued my interest to say the least. And if this wasn't enough, there was that other announcement a day or two before that they'll now let parents of children with mixed ethnicity choose what race (i've reservations about the S'pore government's use of this term too, as with its use of 'mother tongue', but that's another story) they are to be officially recognized as belonging to. Being officially regarded as 'Chinese', full stop, by the government myself, effectively disregarding one half of my ethnicity and conveniently opening the door for my second language to be involuntarily set as Mandarin Chinese in the process, i can't help but wonder what might have been had this policy been in place that many years ago (though admittedly i doubt there might have been much difference from how things have turned out). This especially since this unilateral labeling of me as 'Chinese' more or less started me down a long road, which at this current stage corresponds to me having lost touch with my rightful mother tongue, such that today the best that i can do is make monosyllabic utterances whenever the opportunity arises for me to speak some Tagalog.

So while it's unavoidable that, having grown up in S'pore, i've lost touch with much of the Filipino half of my cultural heritage, taking all these recent developments into consideration, it definitely makes what has resulted - both the aforementioned losing touch with my Filipino cultural heritage and also my general aversion to almost everything Chinese - be it in terms of the food, medicine, culture, political system, language, and whatever else you can think of - due to sheer Chinese language overkill back in those days that much more regrettable. And one thing's for sure - while in times when Chinese has to be spoken - e.g. speaking with people who want to better their own command of the language/ trying (usually in vain) to communicate with non-English speaking parents of my students, which usually results instead in their amused chuckles or puzzled stares, getting more in touch with my Chinese roots sure ain't a new year's resolution i'll be making anytime soon...