Today I am going to climb out of the box that is my Unbearable Lightness of Unthinkingness and write an essay that is long overdue. This concerns the latest anxiety attack gripping our postindustrial yet pre-postmodern nation.
The malady?
Mandarin.
I kid you not. For the past couple of weeks, since Dear Father LKY admitted that he had "made a mistake" with Singapore's bilingual education policy, our pseudo news broadcasters have been gleaning views from the Chinese language educators and the Straits(jacketed) Times has been publishing views from two opposite and equally neurotic camps on the fate of Mandarin (or Chinese as a second language for the 85% ethnic Chinese majority) in Singapore's less-than-flawless education policy.
For those of you who have not been au fait with the "debate" (we all know "debate" really means state-sanctioned airing of views in order for the New Policy to be instated shortly after), let me catch you up on the latest social hoo-ha.
In my usual pedantic style (worsened of late by my socialisation into the civil service), I will structure my essay in the following parts:
1) The issue - Mandarin and how it became such a stinker2) The real problem - my perspective 3) The way forward - not a solution, but my take on how this will play out1) The issue: Mandarin and how it became such a stinkerIn 1978, Goh Keng Swee, then Education Minister, unveiled the new Bilingual language policy to be instilled in all students starting in Primary School. For the next 30 years, Singaporean students are schooled in the primary mode of instruction - English - and learn a Second Language (later renamed "Mother Tongue" which for most Singaporeans is in no way a Mother Tongue at all) based on their ethnicity, which in our system means either Chinese, Malay or Tamil. If you are of mixed parentage, you get a choice of the three.
For the first ten or twenty years, the policy rolled along and thousands of young Singaporeans came out of the system ostensibly "bilingual" - proficient in two languages. You got almost equal number of classroom hours for both English and Chinese. But of course, all subjects were taught exclusively in English, so Singaporeans' linguistic palate was fast transforming into a largely Anglicised one. Add to that fact, English has been the working language for business and government and has had the somewhat dubious honour of being the "superior" language due to its connection with our colonial subjugation by the British Imperialists until recently.
I might be waffling on the dates, but to my knowledge, in the late 80s to 90s, as baby-and post-baby boomers' levels of education attainment increased, cracks started appearing in the social milieu as the Singaporean Middle Class expanded. Middle class equals English-Speaking nuclear families above the average income bracket of the national population. Children from these homes differed from the (still) majority families in which Mandarin and/or a Chinese dialect was the predominant mode of communication. Children from English-speaking homes felt increasingly stymied and stressed by the mandatory Passing Grade they needed in Chinese language, a prerequisite for advancing to higher education institutions such as the coveted National University of Singapore. The Chinese language became the bane of many children's existence as their parents scrambled to mitigate their kids' plunging grades with extra tuition lessons in a language the Government deemed their "Mother Tongue", but was no more their Mother Tongue than was German or Swahili.
The millenia brought the problem to its head, worsened in a way by two developments: (1) English As Predominant Household Language was no longer the domain of the Middle Class, which had further expanded as education levels increased and a new generation of Polytechnic/University graduates schooled in the Bilingual system formed nuclear families. (2) The rise of China propelled Mandarin to a new place in the agendas of the policy-makers, who regarded the Chinese language as an economic and political asset. Meanwhile, the malaise that was the Bilingual Policy loomed like a spectre of doom as more and more kids struggled with passing Chinese. Stories of disgruntled parents who had to ship their kids off to British and American universities (which did not care if you had passed A Level Chinese) are aplenty, and so were resentful immigrants to Australia who had "turned their backs" on an unwieldly and unyielding education system.
And so we are here. 30 years on, it became clear to all but the most staunch of "Chinese chauvinists" that the Bilingual Policy has not produced bilingual Singaporeans. To their credit, the Education Ministry had tweaked the system along the way, customising the curriculum to cater to those with neither the "proper ethnic/linguistic environment" nor the ability (read: IQ) to survive the original Chinese syllabus (Primary and Secondary equating to 10 years) that was the bugbear of many. High school level Chinese was split into 3 streams of instruction - Chinese B for the hopeless, AO Level Chinese for those of normal IQ and Advanced Chinese (Higher Chinese or A Level Chinese) for students deemed to possess superior intelligence, measured by the standardised Primary School Leaving Examination (at age 12) and Primary Four Streaming examination (at age 10).
Tweaking did not produce a solution to the Mandarin muddle - that of sub-par Mandarin speakers and a curiously new social problem afflicting Singaporeans: Singlish - instead it produced a new generation of barely-proficient Mandarin speakers and a tiny proportion of students with excellent proficiency on paper who would never go on to use the language because they end up in English-speaking civil service jobs and other professional occupations. Chinese had become the tool which either got you an overpaid government scholarship to an Ivy League university, or the sledgehammer which obliterated your chances of making it to any university in Singapore.
The crux: the enlarged Middle Class (beneficiaries and traumatised survivors of the Bilingual Policy) now want the Government to "de-emphasise" Chinese language as an examinable subject and pre-requisite to University. The Chinese apologists are calling on the Government NOT to accede to the English-speaking whingers, warning of the already spiralling standards of Mandarin in our country.
2) The real problem - my perspective I was born in 1979 and started my bilingual schooling in 1986 when I entered Primary school. In my household, my mother spoke to me exclusively in English, my father in Mandarin. My parents spoke Mandarin to each other as their respective mother tongues are Cantonese and Hainanese. My first spoken language as far as I remember was Cantonese, which I never completely forgot due to constant contact with my Cantonese-speaking maternal grandparents for the first 18 years of my life. My baby-sitter spoke to me in Mandarin and my cousins and their parents spoke mainly Mandarin. In primary school, I spoke English to some friends (from English-only families) and Mandarin to others in order to fit in. My paternal cousins made fun of me because I spoke no Hainanese and my Mandarin was not quite "authentic". I had one of the best Chinese teachers in the country who is responsible for my almost-perfect Mandarin diction to this day.
In high school, everything changed, and it was as if I had found my element. In my semi-elite all-girls school, everyone spoke English (proficiently and predominantly, not the sub-par mish-mash of English/Chinese/Singlish) and in the next 4 years, Chinese to me became the Foreign Language that it has become today. My grasp of new vocabulary became tenuous where it used to be effortless. Little by little, Chinese language which used to be second-nature, something I hardly thought about because I approached it as I did English, became as onerous as the hated Chemistry lab lessons I loathed. It had become another subject I had to do well in to ensure a good enough grade point average to enter Junior College. My mother hired me a tutor whom I barely tolerated and who could hardly tolerate me. I aced my oral exams (remember my fantastic Primary school Chinese teacher) and scraped through the O Levels with a B3 in Chinese. By then, I was speaking very little Chinese apart from conversing with my father, buying food at the market and coffee shops and once I got a B3 in the AO Levels (in Junior College) with 18 months of memorisation, I discarded Chinese once and for all. Never again would I have to memorise hundreds of proverbs, nouns and connectors to write an essay and never again would I have to read infernal passages of Chinese words I couldn't understand.
I had been liberated.
My story of Bilingualism is a common one, but for many more who had not managed to pass Chinese, theirs end in tragedy.
What is the real problem? Why can't Singaporeans excel in two languages? Did the Bilingual Policy really fail us? Or is there something else to the muddle aside from linguistics?
I am no sociolinguist, nor am I a scholar in language acquisition. I have, however, some idea of the current literature on Bilingual education from a developmental perspective. We all know a child has unlimited potential to acquire languages before the age of 9 or 10 (depending on which school of thought you prefer). We also know that a child quickly loses the ability to use multiple languages once its brain synapses has settled into one dominant "frame" or code as early as one or two years old. But code-switching is possible, as you saw in my case, where I was in fact trilingual until 8 or 9 when I "lost" my Cantonese mother tongue as English became the predominant language at home (since I saw my mother more hours of the day, spoke more to her, and read only English books).
So the problem is not one of intellect (as LKY has gallantly admitted) but more of environment. Daniel's mother tongue is German, he learnt English as a second language (as I did Chinese) most of his schooling life and was probably as proficient in English when he first arrived in Singapore as I was in Chinese. In the two years he's lived and worked here, his English has improved by incredible leaps and bounds, and so has his dialect and Singlish acquisition. He thinks and sometimes counts in English and even dreams in English from time to time. That is a true test of the nurture argument.
Language is a living thing. If you don't live it, you lose it. I'm not pontificating from a podium nor lecturing from an ivory academic/ policy tower. In a country where most of the natives excel in no particular language, butcher the English grammar like an amateur wielding a meat cleaver, and whose diction resembles nails on chalkboard - excruciating - SOME of us managed to get away with a decent-enough command of the language because we read voraciously as children, spoke to adults who learnt English from qualified teachers (none whatsoever exist since the 1980s when English was taught minus the rigorous grammar-drilling of the 70s under the colonial system) and immersed in a sociocultural environment of English-only mass media and popular culture. Daniel had none of the above while learning English in Germany (his German English teacher taught him "shade" as "shadow") and you really can't blame Germans for having an appalling proficiency in English although most have received instruction for many years as we had in Chinese.
But some say we CAN blame ourselves for our dreadful standards of Chinese because we have the three environmental pre-requisites for language proficiency here in Singapore. The only problem: it's there, but it's virtually useless. The English Middle Class Singaporeans do not read Chinese books and newspapers, do not speak it to anyone but their weary Chinese teachers and certainly have little interest in watching Chinese movies, listening to Mandopop and watching the Chinese news. It's like the Germans and French who learn English - as a very foreign and unimportant language as far as social and cultural value is concerned. If our Mandarin abilities has been relegated to Pasar Mandarin (market Mandarin), it's because there is no social or cultural imperative to master it. Children do not need it for their most basic communication needs - their families speak in (half-baked) English; adults do not need it in their jobs- they work in (half-baked) English; indeed Mandarin has become the sub-culture that Purists have always feared it would be.
3) The way forward - not a solution, but my take on how this will play out
You may have noticed that this is turning into a not-so-subtle critique of our dismal English standards. I will save that for another day. The problem, I reiterate, is not one of mere linguistics but one of an entire social and cultural milieu. Society has evolved, so has our nation's linguistic milieu. Politics had shaped (bilingual) policy which had not managed to evolve with the nation's cultural and demographic changes.
Many see the problem lying with the examination requirements of Chinese, they argue that exams take the "fun" out of learning Chinese. Others see the curriculum as outdated, outmoded and unsuitable, aka it's "too hard" for their predominantly (half-baked) English-speaking kids.
I see neither as the crux of the problem. We are forgetting that there is a very significant part of the population that is neither purely English-speaking nor Chinese-speaking - they are the Underclass. This fact has been lost amidst the vitriolic and righteousness of the Straits Times-reading Middle Class. More than anyone else, the Bilingual Policy has left the Underclass behind.
There is one more group: the Foreign-born population and their first/or second-generation Singaporean kids. These people hail from China and from the minute they enter Primary School and the Bilingual System, their linguistic disadvantage is even more pronounced because they speak no English, the primary medium of instruction in schools. And yet we do not hear this segment of society moaning and groaning about how difficult it is to master the ENGLISH language. The top PSLE student hailed from China, beginning Primary school here with no English ability. In 6 years years she attained a perfect score.
How? Pure hard work, she said.
Let's not nitpick whether mastering English in an all-English environment poses a slighter challenge than passing your PSLE Chinese. It is clear that what works for the foreign-born Chinese cannot work for the Singaporeans (pure determination). The only way is to
a) stop pretending that for Chinese Singaporeans, Mandarin is their "mother tongue" and teach Chinese as a Foreign Language or
b) re-orientate our entire national focus to de-emphasise English or bring back "Chinese schools" (which will never happen)
c) take a truly Multicultural approach to education - rebalance the English-Chinese emphasis in schools by either (i) conducting some subjects in the second language (which will mean protest from other ethnic groups) and (ii) doing away with Chinese as a prerequisite for education advancement.
The Bilingual Policy did not fail us so much as it was premised on a very flawed notion - that ethnic Chinese Singaporeans (and Malays and Indians for that matter) would take to Chinese (or Malay or Tamil) as naturally as fish to water. This is the essentialist "mother tongue" assumption which is stupidly ignorant of the fact that the environment and not your genes support your "mother tongue".
The Bilingual idea is a good one which we should keep. I cannot think of many other developed countries in the world with such a policy, and I think that it's something that has given us an edge and will continue to do so if we refine it properly. But we cannot do it without acknowledging the changes in society, in linguistic demography, and the fact that our society is truly a "multicultural" one - the authorities would be glad to know that nationhood has perhaps begun to take shape in Singapore - albeit at the alarming price of the decay of the "Purity" of English and Mandarin.
Japan, land of the rising sun, of Mount Fuji, temples, cherry blossoms and geishas. That is the Japan of popular culture and the tourism industry of course. But for uninitiated rookies like Daniel and I, we were happy to go forth and experience what Japan had to offer us.
Buddhas galore....but the best part of Japan for diehards like us was really...
Come to Japan ready to taste, otherwise, it would be a complete waste of your time and money. Tasting Japan is opening your senses to a whole new dimension of euphoria....and yes, even from a slimy LIVE oyster curling resentfully about on your plate. Rice wine, or sake in Japanese, is the other ecstasy you would not want to miss. It's smoother than vodka with none of its smelly turpentine fumes, it melts down your throat like an easy song and it never gets to your head till you're ready to leave the table.
Eating and drinking were the things we enjoyed most in Japan, and after that, the only other thing is onsen!
Daniel said I should post my overall insights on our trip, so that people can get an idea of what Japan could be like for total aliens (yes, us) to this unique culture. I've already put up several posts on eating in Tokyo, and I will post several more, especially on some superb finds we made on our eating spree.
If you have patience, walk around until you find something that appeals to you. There is no dearth of restaurants, cafes and sushi bars in Tokyo. We didn't find pubs though, not the kind you would expect in a Westernised city or a resort beach like Bali. You would find instead nightclubs (varying degrees of sleaze and kinkiness) or karaoke lounges. But the search for food is well worth the effort if you want to avoid touristy joints and sub-par cuisine.
At night, the onsen is open too. This open air one is unisex. Yes, that means naked men and women.
