One of the questions we are often asked on government questionnaires is “What is the main language spoken at home?”. I’ve always thought it’s an insightful question to ask, because for most immigrant homes, one or more languages other than English are spoken, or some words are spoken in a language other than English. And it speaks to the connection between where you live, your culture, and how you connect with other people.
The other question that gets asked is “What is your middle name(s)?”. My middle name is En Hui (恩惠), and it is in fact a Chinese name that means graciousness. Actually, in Chinese, our names are surname first, then usually two characters as our first name, so my full Chinese name is Lin En Hui (林恩惠), lin meaning forest. And the first character in that first name is often something common to all the same gender siblings in the family (my sister’s is En Qing, or 恩情).
Growing up, my parents dropped in a sprinkling of Malay, Hokkien, and Mandarin, though not enough for me to carry out a conversation, and actually Hokkien was a kind of secret language for my parents to talk about us kids without us knowing what they were saying (though from context, it was always fairly obvious to me what they were saying). So my sister and I were sent to Chinese School on a Saturday. Although I wanted to join my school friends who played netball or soccer on the weekends (despite my lack of athleticism), I did learn to love the language and the history, even though it’s one of the hardest languages to learn.
That is, until I decided to choose Mandarin as a subject for my final exams of secondary school. Then I really regretted it, because I hadn’t realised it was so competitive. The thing about Mandarin in Victoria, Australia, is that there’s a first language stream and two second language streams, one advanced and the other not. There are different requirements for each, but even for second language, it is highly competitive because there are some students who don’t fit the criteria for how long they were taught in a Mandarin-speaking school and so are in the general second language stream despite speaking it perfectly well with their family at home, while other students are learning a second language from scratch, with no one at home to converse in Mandarin. I fell into the latter category (though I should point out that speaking the language at home will not be enough to maintain the language on its own).
And that’s aside from the stereotypical academic competitiveness of Asians too. I didn’t do well in my final year of Mandarin, and despite studying it for 12 years in total, I have never really grasped it and never really immersed myself in it either. I always teased my dad for failing Mandarin in Singapore, which is one of its national languages, but I came pretty close to failing too, though he does say I reached a higher level than he ever did. So needless to say, I lost a bit of love for Mandarin.
So much so that in my first year of university, I picked up French. French had been the language other than English taught at my primary school, and though we never learnt much more than colours and numbers, I’d always loved the Romanticism of French, plus it didn’t hurt that there are plenty of French words in English and so I found it much easier than the characters of Chinese languages/dialects. (I do recognise that my affiliation for Europe is at least somewhat rooted in a kind of wanting to fit my story or even identity with that culture, even if I don’t belong there, though in reality, and as this essay hopefully highlights, it is much more complicated than that. And interestingly, I did Japanese for five years in secondary school to a higher level and didn’t want to pick that up in university.)
And when I finally got to Paris (twice!) while I was overseas studying on exchange in the UK, it felt like it had been worth it when I was able to converse with shopkeepers, who really do appreciate it when you make an effort to speak the local language. (Though it may seem snobbish, I don’t think it’s a flaw to be proud of your culture.)
Over the years, my parents had often used Malay words at home: makan (eat), mandi (shower), tidur (sleep). My mum still calls me Jie Jie and my sister Mei Mei, the Mandarin words for older and younger sister. Our Hokkien remains of the interest type. ”How do you say, ‘Have you eaten?’” “You ask, ‘Jiak ba buay?’” was a conversation between our Singaporean cousins and my sister one time, which didn’t get much further than the question itself.
But being born in Australia, with parents who don’t have strong Malaysian or Singaporean accents, I ended up with an Australian accent and no ability to code switch or ability to switch off the accent when speaking Mandarin, Malay, or Hokkien. Actually, one of my Singaporean cousins in particular has a strong interest in our Peranakan Chinese heritage, and I love claiming to him that my sister and I are more Peranakan than the rest of our cousins despite us being born and raised in Australia, owing to the fact that we have Baba Nyonya blood on both sides of the family.
By the middle of 2020, with my full time law study load at university and lack of history subjects (history is my Arts major, but I am completing a law degree concurrently), I saw a friend of mine doing walking tours of some of the old Peranakan Chinese architecture that still remains in Singapore. Then I later saw with interest a webinar series on the Peranakan Chinese culture hosted by the NUS Baba House in Singapore.
It made me appreciate how complex our culture actually is—the origins of the Baba Malay language, for instance, a kind of bazaar or market dialect that used Hokkien and Malay words. But it has been largely forced out of existence by the use of Mandarin, especially in Singapore, but also the British influence through the use of English in the case of both sides of my parents’ family. Older Baba Nyonya continue to use it in the kopi tiam (coffee shop; kopi is Malay, tiam is Hokkien/Hakka) and other limited circumstances, but younger Baba Nyonya rarely do, and it is difficult to learn a language when not using it consistently.
Nevertheless, there are language courses and interest groups out there, and I decided to use an Instagram account to learn to chakap baba (speak Baba Malay). (https://www.instagram.com/chakapbaba/) I asked mum to help me with the pronunciation, and we would use dinner times over the course of a few months to learn words, and so it was somewhat informal. The interesting thing for me is the intersection between language and food, because that especially is what keeps Baba Malay alive for me when my mum and I cook traditional Peranakan Chinese foods. But that’s a story for another day.
But just after I started, my Kong Kong (my mum’s father) passed away. And I realised then that learning Baba Malay and the Peranakan Chinese culture was more than just an academic interest. It was something of a race memory, as the psychological experts would put it.
Kong Kong loved his Peranakan foods that Mama always made, and while he was very much an Anglophile, he was very much steeped in Peranakan Chinese traditions. My mum still brings up little things he would have loved, or little memories of him. But she also once said to me that Kong Kong would have loved talking to me about Peranakan Chinese culture. Although he only spoke English to me, rarely Baba Malay and no Hokkien (unlike my Mama, who speaks all three), and he might not have explicitly said it to me, I know he was proud of his heritage and his history.
For most of human history, languages have been going extinct. They have always changed and evolved, but many more languages have died than survived. Immigrants are an interesting case study because we hybridise languages, and young people in particular use slang uniquely to create their own dialects, dropping in words from other languages in a sentence that often starts with English or the country’s lingua franca. Linguists would call this a multiethnolects, which are not pidgin or creole languages.
I’m in a unique position in that my parents’ English is pretty impeccable, and they came to Australia as skilled migrants, though my dad still cannot (or refuses to) pronounce the /th/ sound, and my mum says schedule with a /sh/ sound. So we speak the same language, and fewer things are lost in translation. And although my parents cannot speak Mandarin, and my dad cannot speak Baba Malay, they have always been very sharing of our heritage and our languages.
There are a lot of complicated feelings when a loved one passes away, and no less in a year of a global pandemic when none of us could return home for the funeral or to be with the rest of our extended family. I was truly devastated by the idea that I’d thought I’d had time to learn more about my past and my family’s history, but I was too late.
I was never very close to my Kong Kong, not knowing what to talk about, but he always asked after my studies, loved listening to me play the piano in the years when they could still travel to Melbourne, and posted cards for birthdays and for Christmas. I’m so sad for what we missed out on by living in Australia, even though we travelled back more often than most, a privilege in itself. I feel like I could have done more, something I realised as I got older and saw how much my parents gave up, and now it doesn’t feel like enough.
But we keep going. We keep the memories and the culture and the histories and the languages alive.
