01 May 2006

I worked at my Aunt's shop today. The manager was telling me about poor sales in April, which she accredited to the traditional chinese festival of Qing Ming. It is a period where we, as chinese, visited the graves of our ancestors as an act of respect and rememberance. The younger generation would, hopefully, have an inkling of where they came from.

This Qing Ming, I visited my grandmother's grave. I saw election banners all over the place and thought she'd be so delighted if she were alive. Elections were the only period where she had entertainment she could understand. She spoke the Heng Hwa dialect, a language which I've lost over the years in Good English and Speak Mandarin campaigns. Being illiterate, she could only write her own name, and I remember her practising her own name (three squarish chinese characters) dutifully and with full concentration before the cooking gas man came to replace the gas tank. (She had to sign for it.)

And then there were people speaking in dialect while I was at the cashier at the shop. I thought they were 'loud' and 'uncouth', almost 'vulgar'. But as soon as the thought struck me, I was ashamed I harboured it in the first place. Why have I suddenly, this supposition that English or (Unified) Chinese was 'superior' and a sign of apparent 'higher' education? And even if it meant superiority or education, does it really mean anything?

I've been educated wrongly all this while. The schools have been teaching the wrong things. And even now so, when Chinese is introduced as Hanyu Pinyin. It's like us learning french or japanese - like a third language.

And I find it odd that my friend can speak in Japanese, French and (of course!) English. But not Mandarin to his mom, or Hokkien to his grandmother. From there, it's simply charades.

D woke up at 5/01/2006 11:38:00 PM [comment]

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