'Jiang Hua Yu'!!

Has it ever got this hot 9 years ago? I can’t remember feeling so drenched when I was in secondary school. The temperature is around 32-34 degrees over here, still acceptable for someone who has survived summer that hit 43 degrees before, but I’d rather be in the hot sun of Melbourne, because the freakin’ humidity here is killing me! Dark thunder clouds had been gathering every single day here, though rain is sparse. It’s during those times that the humidity hits the highest point, & it’s happening everyday here! Grandpa is gonna pay heaps for electricity bill this month coz I switch on virtually every single aircon in the house, 24 hrs/day!

Complaints aside, I was going to write a post on the discrimination against Chinese speakers in Singapore. Mom was telling me that every time she went to the doctors in Mt E, she always gets that you-can’t-speak-English-so-you-must-be-poor look from the English-only speaking nurses. For those non-sgeans, Mt E is a private hospital for the foreigners because they can’t get the cheaper treatment that the government provides at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH). Therefore, it’s an expensive place to seek treatment. Lots of rich indos seek treatment there and most of them wouldn’t be able to speak English at all, so it’s a big surprise to me that the nurses hired there are so impolite to their largest contingent of customers. Someone really needs to tell them that RICH PEOPLE DON’T HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK ENGLISH! (Btw, I have to clarify here that my family is NOT rich. SG happens to be the nearest overseas location for us & my parents can’t be bothered going to cheaper but further places :). Why must we spend money in a place that treats us like 2nd grade customers when we provide the bulk of their income??

There has been a ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign in SG for as long as I could remember, & it’s painfully obviously that it’s not working very well, judging by how the so-called ‘educated’ public view it. Large proportion of the new generation thinks that it is a language for the old (read: not hip) people, & they only learn it because it’s forced onto them since their P1 days. Few realize the beauty of the language, one that is so cultured that many of its words/phrases contain deeply entrenched meanings which could only be fathomed when analyzed properly. I’m not saying here that it’s better/superior to any language in the world, & that is never my intention. Every language in the world, Mandarin included, carries an aura of mystery & could never be explored/understood fully as it has evolved over time to become what it is today, assuming that it still survives.

I have to admit that when I was still a kid in Indo, I used to hate learning Mandarin very much because it clashed with my baddie training session everyday. It wasn’t an intense course, & my absence record was definitely way higher than the attendance. Needless to say, I didn’t get much out of it at that time. The only reason I learned was through listening to conversation on TV (SG’s Chan 8) & figuring out what the actors said by looking at their expression. Over time, this built up my command of the language as well as my repertoire of vocab. I also learned to analyse the proverbs by dissecting the words apart and learning them separately, before picturing and finally putting them together in my head.

I can’t say that I’m good at it yet, but I’m definitely much more interested and amazed by the language compared to a lot of my peers in secondary school, despite not taking it as my 2nd language then. For some reasons, I’ve always been interested in Chinese drama series, & I don’t mean the Taiwanese soapies or the usually crappy Singapore versions. It’s the ones produced in Mainland China that interests me the most.

Yes, that’s right. Some people call it downright boring, & some label it ‘as exciting as the water running down the tap’, but I find shows like Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, & Journey to the West so captivating that I’d stay up late just to watch them during obscene hours at night, when it’s shown on TV. These Chinese classics, in my opinion, definitely rank up there with the English’s own, for it teaches values like heroism, valor and bravery, as well as educating the billions of people around the world, not just the Chinese, that Mandarin and the Chinese culture is a force to be reckoned with, & it’s definitely at least on par with the supposedly more worshipped/illustrious Western culture.

Seems like I’m sidetracking too much here. My point is, SGeans have to start to realize the importance of Mandarin because it’s soon gonna be as needed as English in the future. They have to get rid of the mentality that it’s a 2nd language that they would only learn because they are forced by their teachers @ school. Government really has a big part to play on this, because despite the repeated urges from the PM, it appears that they have not really been pushing the campaign far enough. More effort is needed to further spread the message across. It’s gonna be a Chinese-filled world soon (if you still don’t think it is now), and as Russell Peters pointed out, ‘You can run and hide, but sooner or later we’re (or rather, they're) gonna hump you!’