From the guy's accent, I figured he was an American-born Chinese (often acronymed as ABC). There are an increasing number of them in Singapore as we draw more and more professionals from all parts of the world.

The woman seemed to be a Singapore-born Indian or of mixed parentage. Her accent was identifiably Singaporean.

Just as they had decided on the table to their left and were about to sit down, a waitress went up to them.

"I'm sorry?" ABC said.

"Nimen shi liang wei, zhuo nabien." The waitress pointed to a smaller table with two seats. The table the couple preferred had four.

By her gesture, ABC could guess that she wanted them to sit at the smaller table. "This table is taken?" he asked in his unmistakeable accent.

"Zhuo nabien; nimen shi liang wei."

The couple got up and walked out.

The waitress didn't seem to care. She then turned to another customer, a silver-haired Caucasian man who had been gesturing for service for some time.

"Order already?" she asked him. She’s evidently able to speak English.

* * * * *

6.30 pm, A food counter at People's Park. A young man came up to the counter, and while waiting for the customer ahead of him to be served, looked closely at the food on sale. There were a 3 different types of fried noodles, and 6 to 8 kinds of toppings, from diced chicken to fishcake to sir-fried vegetables.

He was about 27 or 28, medium tall, quite well-built and looked to me Korean. He was alone.

When his turn came, the server, a middle-aged man in a greasy T-shirt, said, "Chi? Bao?"

"What?" the Korean guy said, softly.

"Chi, huo dabao?" repeated the older man, a little louder.

"This one?" The Korean guy pointed to the fried udon among the 3 noodle choices.

The older man raised his voice some more: "CHI? BAO?"

* * * * *

Outside of the Central Business District and the Orchard Road stretch, almost everywhere in Singapore, if you look Chinese, you're spoken to in Chinese.

A generation ago, the restaurant server would likely open with Cantonese, the taxi-driver in Hokkien, the shopkeeper in Hokkien or Teochew, for these occupations were associated with distinct dialect communities.

Today, however, it is mostly Mandarin (occasionally Hokkien if the seller or service-provider belongs to the older generation). There are probably a number of reasons for this; I can think of three. The first must be a 35-year long government campaign to make Mandarin the default version of Chinese in Singapore. The second is the result of making Mandarin the compulsory second-language for schoolchildren identified as Chinese, a policy in place for some 30 years. The third is the unceasing immigration of Chinese Malaysians into Singapore.

Many have argued that the government-enforced privileging of Mandarin over dialects has meant a severing of our connection with our social history. This is certainly true to quite an extent, but I have quite a sanguine view of social change and we have to accept that the needs of the present often overrule the preservation of the past.

I am more concerned here about the future. Of course Chinese (and Mandarin as its standard spoken form) is essential to our future, for who can ignore China? But I will argue here that the way we have promoted the language has brought on some nasty side effects that cannot be ignored. They hurt rather than help our future.

 
The 'Speak Mandarin' campaign

Originally, the government campaign was formulated as "Speak more Mandarin, less dialects", with the hope of making Mandarin Chinese the common language among Chinese, rather than a babel of mutually unintelligible dialects. That was a time when few Chinese could speak any English. I have never disagreed with that.

However, for most of the past 30 years, it has been shortened to "Speak more Mandarin", but in this truncated form, it leaves unsaid what that should be at the expense of. As dialects disappear from the linguistic landscape, Mandarin increasingly faces off against English, and you can hardly blame people, especially the younger ones who do not recall the original formulation, for subconsciously thinking that they ought to be speaking more Mandarin and shunning English.

Officially, the government only admits to the original idea, which is to promote Mandarin in place of dialects. But the reluctance to make this clear unless forced to suggests that two other motivations are at work.

One is to buy political support for the PAP from the Chinese culturalists – the segment of our society that wants all Chinese Singaporeans to be as Chinese as the people of China. The authorities’ deliberate silence on what more Mandarin should be at the expense of allows them to think that the government is sympathetic to their agenda, and helps the PAP blunt any appeal the opposition parties may make in this regard.

The other is to create a politically acquiescent population. For a long time, the government has feared the absorption of Western political ideas by our people. They see Western-inspired arguments for freedom of speech and human rights as threatening to their model of control. Keeping the Chinese majority from being too westernised would be seen as a useful defence against such risks.

For a decade or so, there was a campaign to promote a Confucianist ideology, which stresses deference to those in power in return for benevolence from rulers. It coincided with the period when the standard for Chinese in the school curriculum was set high and university admission depended on passing one’s second language. Considering that it would be difficult to instill Confucianist ideas without facility in the Chinese language, it was certainly helpful to the government’s grip on power to push Mandarin and downplay English, even if it was not originally intended to be the case.

 
Mandarin Chinese as the mandatory second language for Chinese schoolchildren

Fortunately, the Confucianism classes are gone, but compulsory Chinese is still on. The second language that the child takes in school is determined by his "race" as defined by the State. If you're Chinese, you have to take Chinese. If you're not Chinese, you can't, even if that's what you or your parents want.

No doubt, this leaves minority-race Singaporeans disgruntled, compounded by the government's annual Speak Mandarin campaigns that promote a language which effectively excludes them.

While there is no gainsaying that Chinese is going to be useful, the way the policy has been applied -- along the lines of race -- has the effect of promoting race consciousness. Children are reminded every schoolday when they go off to different language classes that they are defined by race.

Coupled with the fact that many Chinese families use Chinese at home, a whole generation has grown up using Chinese automatically whenever they're in a social or a school/work setting. They are able to speak English (or the poor colloquial cousin, Singlish), but they only do that when they consciously decide to, which is generally because they have to speak with a non-Chinese person. That conscious decision is once again race-based. Quite surely a whole generation has cultivated the instinct, every time they see another person, of registering that person's race in his mind, since that piece of information is key to everything that follows with respect to communication.

 
Malaysian immigration

The third major factor that has kept Chinese very much alive (not that it's bad that it is alive) is steady immigration into Singapore of Chinese Malaysians.

The education system in Malaysia is quite different. Unlike Singapore where the main medium of instruction is English (with loads of second language, as discussed above), in Malaysia, the state schools use Malay. Many Chinese Malaysians resist sending their children to state schools for a variety of reasons, preferring private, Chinese-language schools instead, at least for the first 6 years of schooling. The result is that a generation of Malaysians has grown up fluent in Chinese, mostly fluent in Malay, but with no command of English.

For economic reasons, many come to Singapore to work and then stay on. Since Malay is virtually useless in Singapore, they get by with Chinese. The brighter ones pick up or brush up their English in no time, but many Malaysian work-permit holders or permanent residents, e.g. shop assistants, electricians, cooks, bus drivers, stay within their comfort zone of the exclusively Chinese-speaking world.

As I said above, there is nothing negative at all about speaking Chinese, but there is something negative about how it is associated so strongly with race. In Malaysia, like in Singapore, Mandarin and dialect Chinese is the preserve of the Chinese community, and many Chinese-Malaysians, by being sent to Chinese-language schools, grow up in an even more race-segregated milieu than Singaporeans. It seems to me that those who come from Malaysia make an even stronger association between a person's race and his expected ability to speak Chinese.

* * * * *

For these three reasons, we have become, as a society, too conscious of race. We cannot avoid being of a different colour, but instead of deploying language to compensate for that and unify us, we too often use language to divide us.

Every now and then, we see letters in the Straits Times criticizing the way Chinese Singaporeans use Mandarin among themselves in social and work situations even when, within the conversational group, there are non-Chinese present. This is rude, not to mention unproductive, for one will need to repeat everything in English when one realizes that the non-Chinese friend or co-worker has missed some important detail.

I am embarrassed -- I am dismayed -- about our future as Singaporeans whenever I see how the Chinese here have an unacceptably insular and self-sufficient attitude about their language and culture. They speak to you in Chinese and they make no allowance for the possibility that you don't.

The event that the Rosli Abdullah complained of was organised by, presumably, a large organisation with multiple layers of management, all of whom are paid to think and apply some sense in the planning. It was part of our National Day celebrations, for goodness sake! Yet nobody in charge thought anything about the exclusionary effect of using so much Mandarin in the proceedings.

More yet, what about the ABCs and the Chinese Indonesians who are readily welcomed here as part of our aim to boost the talent pool in Singapore? Generally they don't speak Chinese and we have no right to expect them to. Yet too many Singaporeans make no allowance for them, and the State, which has invested so much in attracting them here, does absolutely nothing to remedy the daily grating they suffer.

Do we understand what it means to be cosmopolitan? It means we're going to have people whose identities are an infinite variety of permutations and combinations. It means we're going to have people here who may look Chinese (like the Korean guy in my second anecdote) but who are aren't. Or people who are racially Chinese, but culturally not. 

The very provincial idea that if you look Chinese, you must be racially Chinese, and you must perforce (a) be culturally Chinese, (b) speak Chinese (c) be Taoist/Buddhist (d) subscribe to Confucian morality (e) appreciate Chinese pop songs... and so on and so on....is not just limiting, but will be so off-putting to new migrants, we may even be driving them away. Our insensitivity, our ignorance of the cultural diversity of the wider world will handicap our own future as a knowledge economy.

I have nothing against the Chinese language. I have everything against the insensitive use of it in ways that cause offence and hurt our future.

* * * * *

Or you can look at my two anecdotes another way, quite apart from the language mindset. The servers at Han's and at the People's Park food stall, by not switching to English when the customers indicated they didn't understand, were being more than just language fascists, they were downright uncivil. And that opens another big issue – the dismal standards of customer service in Singapore! 

© Yawning Bread 

(Do read the comments from readers below)