My Love-Hate Relationship with Chinese

Yesterday's Sunday Times featured an American billionaire who moved to Singapore just so he could give his daughter a 'Chinese-oriented' education. This guy, who can probably buy up all the schools in Singapore, is resorting to doing volunteer work at a school to chalk up the 40hours needed for him to qualify registering his daughter in an earlier phase instead of the usual Phase 3 for foreigners (by which time all places in good schools would have been snapped up).

They have a live-in nanny who speaks Mandarin to the girls, plays Chinese songs etc. The child, apparently can speak flawless Mandarin. Lovely.

I posted in AP that this man puts parents like me to shame. Here I am, praying and trying every means possible to get my kid out of Chinese for good and here he is, moving halfway across the world just so his kid could grow up immersed in Chinese! And for good measure, this man is American and I am Chinese! I think his household is probably more Chinese than mine!

But here's the difference between me and him.

He loves the language and the culture, he sees value in it, and if his kid does not do well in PSLE he has the moolah to hire an army of tutors or just pack up and go to a less punishing system. He's not doing the Chinese thing just so his kid could pass an exam and go to a good school. He is doing it because he genuinely sees value in learning the language. He's coming from a totally different perspective.

We, on the other hand, learn Chinese because we are forced to. We're stuck. We need to learn and pass the language (preferably with flying colours!) just so we can move up a notch in the education ladder. We don't see the value. Yes, we know China IS going to be the next big thing. I totally agree with the billionaire on this. But that does not drive us.

So what drives us? The near-sighted practical stuff. Like passing exams. Getting my kid into a decent school. Who cares about whether China is the next big economic superpower to dwarf the rest of the world? We study Chinese because we have to, not because we want to. And in the ever-growing numbers of households like mine, who are none-Mandarin speaking, the thrust into the must for Chinese is a big culture shock and stress point.

In all honesty, although my DNA says I am Chinese, culturally, I am peranakan and have grown up with Baba Malay being spoken all around me. I am more comfortable with Malay than with Chinese. So I think my 'mother tongue' is more Malay and Hokkien and not Chinese. In fact some have countered that Mandarin is an unnatural mother tongue for most of us, since more of us grew up speaking dialects (which is all but lost now). Even for KH, who grew up in a more 'Chinese' family than mine, speaking a combination of Cantonese and Mandarin, his Mandarin is worse than mine!

I would rather have been given the choice to do an Asian language - maybe Malay or Japanese, but not forced into Chinese just because my skin says I am Chinese. It was painful for me and my parents back then.

I see the same pain with my kids today - even as I work to lessen the stress with the Kumon classes, the Berries, all the enrichment classes in school, the CD-ROMs we buy, the Chinese books we read etc. Still painful. Some things never change.

Note though that I don't think Chinese is uncool in any way. I like the language - now. But not then. We are all different in how, why and when we warm up to the language. For me, I find a greater interest in Chinese now than I ever had in school. I actually derive pleasure in ploughing through a Chinese book, armed with a dictionary which I would painstakingly comb to understand the word/meaning etc. I find a great deal of elegance, beauty and poetry in the lyricism of its phrases, some phrases even the English language would find hard to convey in similar style!

However, as a parent, I wish the system would (1) allow our kids choice to choose an Asian language (Mandarin, Malay, Japanese, Hindi, Tamil), not just plonk us according to race and (2) make learning this fun and engaging and (3) if examinable, would not lump lang grades with English, Math and Sci in the final PSLE scores. IMO, it might be a better indication of academic ability if one took MT out of it. Finally, (4) not link MT grades with entry into institutions of higher learning.

The billionaire got it right - successful language acquisition stems largely from enthusiasm.

But of course, having the moolah to have live-in nannies from China never hurt too!