Born to immigrant parents from China but growing up in Singapore meant that I am effectively bilingual, and as a child, the language I used was highly context dependent. If I was at home, I spoke Mandarin Chinese casually; if I was in school with my Singaporean peers, I spoke primarily in English and a “modified form” of my usual Mandarin. Translanguaging to me is intricately linked to my relationship with my identity, and as a kid I so desperately wanted to be a part of the in-group, the “true-blue” local Singaporeans.
Language is a signifier of identity and belonging. If you spoke a different variety, you may be treated differently. I was very conscious of this as a child and did everything I could to mask my foreign accented Mandarin. As a primary schooler, I monitored how I spoke Mandarin Chinese in public, changing how I pronounced retroflex sounds. An example I can think of is “二” (pronounced as “eer”), Mandarin for the number two. In public, I never rolled my tongue when pronouncing the “r” if I could help it as Singaporean speakers tend not to – and this was one of many strategies I employed to fit in. English on the other hand was my safety language because I spoke a similar English variety as my peers, or at least an English that did not reflect my mainland Chinese roots. I struggled with reconciling the natural language that I shared with my family, and the local identity that I wanted to construct for myself.
In my teen years, I had a brief rendezvous with French, studying it for a brief two years. Now the only French I speak is censored. I also learned the Sichuanese dialect, a variant of Mandarin. Sichuanese, or Sichuanhua is the only language my paternal grandmother, or 奶奶 (nai-nai), speaks, and to communicate with her I had to understand it. Like my mother, I can understand Sichuanhua but speak it poorly. Both of my parents are from the Sichuan province, a Southern part of China, and Sichuanhua is the language we use exclusively when communicating with relatives. My father is adept at switching into it when speaking to his cousins and back into Putonghua (the official variety of Chinese Mandarin in China) when talking to me and my mother. Thus, Sichuanhua is both familial and foreign to me, being a language spoken by my family but not one I can readily use. Perhaps an interesting side note is that I address my maternal grandmother as 姥姥, lao-lao, and my maternal grandfather as 姥爷, lao-ye. This is because my maternal grandmother is a Northern girl through and through and she wears the pants in the family (rightfully so). These terms are not commonly used in the Mandarin spoken here in Singapore.
As cliché as it sounds, I now love the languages that I speak. Maybe there will never quite be a label that’s a perfect fit for my identity, but that’s fine. To me, speaking and living a language comes with an appreciation of its culture and people, and that is a beautiful experience.
This post was written by Shifan, our #SGUnited intern. Shifan is a 3rd year Psychology major and speaks English and Mandarin Chinese.
At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!