Multilingual Experiment: the 5th Year Update

FINE MOTOR & COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Jumbo Jet, version 295

Our dear Ju will be 5 years old in a few months. He's asking me often, when he will have his birthday (May), which month are we now (January), and whether tomorrow will be February (no) and so on.

A child appears to have a nebulous sense of time until that magic moment that he figures out that there are 60 seconds to a minute and that when you say "10 minutes" it could actually mean 30 or 1 (well, many Singaporeans seem to think that saying 10 minutes will be understood by the other waiting party as 30 or more so who am I to talk). 

Acrylic on canvas "6 Trains", 2016

But apart from time, Ju has made leaps and bounds in so many areas of development that it's a real toughie to start this post! You can see from his latest pictures that he is something of a minor prodigy when it comes to drawing. If my memory serves me well, he started asking for drawings of trains at 2.5 years and since then he's been drawing non stop. I have enough drawing supplies to stock a small kindergarten. Ju pays very close attention to detail and for better or worse, he's a perfectionist. This means tantrums when he (or we!) doesn't get a particular turbine or cockpit done just right. Teaching him to manage his frustration with his perceived "imperfections" has been one of the main challenges since age 4. 

Christmas present for Oma, 2015.

While Ju can and likes to produce detailed and accurately-represented drawings, these are limited to his two favourite subjects: aeroplanes and trains. With some help from me, he learnt to include mountains, clouds and landscape features but not much else. It is an epic struggle to get him to add people in the trains much less anywhere in the picture. His forte: a train entering or exiting a tunnel. Ask him where the passengers are and he's got a good answer ready: "This train is going to the depot, everyone has alighted at the last station!" We are working on this. 

Ju's cognitive development is normal and his fine and gross motor abilities are developing very well. Since moving to Kuala Lumpur and transitioning to his new international school, Ju has made many friends and learnt to swim, play football, and most importantly read. The British national curriculum for the Early Years introduces phonics and early reading at age 4-5, known as the Reception year. This is early compared to the western European countries. In Germany there is no introduction to reading or even any formal education until Grade One (age 6). After 4 months of phonics training, Ju can now read simple sentences. The reading programme at his school is impressive and the children who finish Reception are usually literate by then and can spell. I'll devote a separate post on Literacy when I talk about school!

SPEECH AND COMMUNICATION

In my last update, Ju was 2 years of age and just starting to speak. In the last 2 and a half years, his speech has exploded exponentially in ALL THREE LANGUAGES. I cannot say this more emphatically and I feel a lovely kind of proud vindication every time I stop to wonder at how he has made it to this point!

People who discover that he speaks and understands German, Mandarin and English never cease to be amazed by Ju's ability. What is otherwise a normal day for him becomes an amazing thing to others watching him switch flawlessly back and forth from Mandarin Chinese to German in a conversation amongst him, his father and me. Family members are now used to Ju's categorical refusal to mix languages. He might be describing his train system to his Oma and Opa in German and in the next minute he would look up and inform me in Mandarin that Opa was driving the train wrongly. The only time he mixes in a word in the other language is if he doesn't know it in the current language. For example, "Mama, shen me shi Zug Schienen?" (Mama, what is "Zug Schienen" in Chinese?) He would actually ask for the term in Chinese if he needs to use it. Strangely, if he does not know how to translate a sentence to the other language, or if he doesn't want to take the effort, he prefers to say "I don't know" or "it's a surprise!" which is a euphemism for "I don't want to say". For instance:

Ju: 妈妈,今天我们在游泳池里跳进水里,然后浅下去地上抓一个东西!

(Mama, today in the pool we all jumped in and dived to the floor to pick something up!)

Oma: Julien, was hast du zu Mama erzalt? (Julien, what did you say to Mama?)

Ju: Ein uberraschung.... (a surprise....)

Of course, if you were constantly asked to translate what you just said, you wouldn't want to either, especially if you were 4 years old and had more interesting things to do! In fact Ju separates the languages so clearly amongst people that he would rather say nothing than speak the "wrong" language in front of the "wrong" person.

For instance, he speaks only in Mandarin with his friend and neighbour, Mia, who is Chinese. Conversation proceeds normally with Chinese speakers (Mia's parents and myself) but if Daniel enters the picture and everyone switches to English, Ju will not use English at all. He will answer Daniel exclusively in German. 

In another example, Ju will not speak any English at school in my presence. Getting him to say even a simple "Hello" or "Good morning" to the teacher feels as painful as pulling teeth if I were standing next to him. Mind you, he speaks English just fine, I have video footage from school to prove it. In fact he speaks English with a crisp German accent that is hilarious. He says "Ool of them" instead of "All (Orl, as locals like to drawl) of them" and he stretches out his "here" with "heeya" like you would say the German "hier".  

Strangely, Mandarin tones have not messed up his English or German tones. Ju maintains German and English closely to the native tones. Because German and English are much more monotonous compared to Chinese, Singaporean and Malaysian English has a sing-song quality that matches our Chinese tones, much like how a Hong Konger who is bilingual would speak. My early theory to explain this had been that simultaneous bilingual speakers like Singaporeans and perhaps Hong Kongers who learnt both languages at the same time tend to apply the Mandarin or Cantonese tones to English. This would be more pronounced in later generations who are taught English by non-native speakers and who grow up communicating with Singaporean parents who already spoke more tonal English, or "Singlish" as we call it, replete with lah's and lor's! 

The reason Ju does not speak in the distinctive "Singlish" manner could be down to two crucial factors: 1) I very rarely communicate in English with him and 2) His only English communication in the last 2 years have been primarily in international school where teachers are either British or European. 

First, English in the home is only spoken between Daniel and me, the parents. In terms of air time, Ju has had very little of it compared to the amount he hears in school mainly because Daniel is home after 7pm and Ju goes to bed at 7.30pm. In Brussels, he heard even less English spoken by us because Daniel only came home on weekends from Germany where he was working. Don't get me wrong! I am not in the least ashamed of my Singapore accent, hell, I would be the last person from whom you will hear a fake American or British accent. These days I inject a lot more English when I speak to Ju, but specifically only in cases for scolding or in an emergency like "Get down from there right now or you're going to break a leg!". But since Ju is way past the point for mixing languages, he never ever replies in English. 

Second, English communication for Ju is restricted to a clear social setting: school. Since age 2.5, he had gone to an English nursery in Brussels, then an English international school until he turned 4. His nanny who took care of him between the weekday hours of 3.30 and 7pm was Polish and so they communicated in English. (Interestingly, he hardly spoke to his nanny in my presence as he would be forced to use English! So I would often duck out of the room and spy on them talking just to hear Ju speak in English) After moving to Malaysia, we continued Ju's education in a British international school where he gets all instruction in English and 3 hours of Chinese lessons per week as his foreign language. 

The earlier Singlish influences in Singapore (between birth and age 2.5) were arguably minimal. He had begun basic utterances in English before moving to Belgium, but they were rudimentary and he was far from fluent. The video footage I have show a definite predisposition to Singlish tones, but this was to be expected as he spent close to 12 hours per week day primarily with my parents while we were working full time. 

It does sound rather bizarre for a parent to say that she has no idea how her kid sounds when speaking English. But this is our daily reality. Our son absolutely refuses to use anything but Mandarin and German in our presence. You can imagine the problems we have getting him to do his required reading practice at home. But here's the funny part: Ju has no issues accepting us reading to him in English, but it is an insult to his sensibilities if you expect him to read to us in English. 

Suffice it to say, our multilingual experiment has produced results far exceeding our expectations at the start, and it has also produced unintended consequences that we are just learning to deal with!

Away From The Toxic Playground

Of course I'm talking about Singapore, lah!

After giving much thought to the content of my very first post after a 2 year hiatus from writing anything else besides internal emails and shopping lists, I've decided to talk about the answer to a question that I've been asked by several people: What has changed?

I have changed.

FROM TOXIC PLAYGROUND TO TOXIC REALITY

To be sure, no one remains definitively the same from moment to moment, or year to year for you skeptics out there. Imagine an emotionally high-strung person (such as myself), we swing from mood to mood in a single morning, and emotions, which drive decision-making, create the multiple realities that we experience in a single day. I might be calmly drinking my coffee and having breakfast with Ju thinking what a blissful time I am having despite being a weekday single Mum (more on this below); 15 minutes later I am sitting in my car stuck in a gridlock between my apartment and Ju's school (it is a 4 minute drive) cursing the Brussels traffic system, the gold standard of Belgian  government inefficiency. 

Chateau de la Hulpe, Autumn 2014

When people in Kuala Lumpur sympathise with me for having moved here from Brussels, I inform them wryly -- to looks of astonishment and disbelief -- that life in Malaysia is not much worse than that in Belgium. The same uncontrollable traffic snarls, the same ISIS types lurking in the vicinity, in fact the weather here is preferable and with the lower cost of living I get more bang for my buck. 

Daniel thinks that when your expectations are not matched by reality, your subjective judgment of how good a place is to live in fares more poorly. This is especially true for Brussels, a place most people mistakenly imagine as a First World city. Being included in the same continent as Germany, I am sorry to say, does not help foreign visitors at all when it comes to first impressions. The phrases "rude shock", and "utter disappointment" sum up one's experience more aptly, particularly if one has to live there. In fact I have never seen my former boss show more emotion than his sighs of resignation when he is talking about the Belgian state. In fact my boss had about a total of 6 facial expressions and 4 of them were of resignation with how things were run over there. Oh, one is eye-rolling, we did a lot of that in Brussels. No wonder Singapore is warmly labelled "Asia for Beginners" by Western visitors. The opposite logic holds true for Singapore and Southeast Asia. 

But this isn't a smackdown of Brussels, I've done enough of that on Facebook and with friends over the last almost 2 years living there. Away from the toxic playground of Singapore (also poorly-nicknamed "Disneyland with the death penalty"), I was able to think about ideas I had long taken for granted living in one place for over 30 years. Living in Brussels then Kuala Lumpur, I was forced to examine my ethnocentric views* and most important of all, take stock of my own flaws. 

I changed in small and monumental ways. I had to make changes to my beliefs, and then to my behaviour, which were really adaptive responses to the external stimuli that I was experiencing and the challenges that threw me off kilter. It was not only about the places we were in. It was about the choices we made and the attitudes we chose to use in making our choices. Singapore feels toxic because of the many taken-for-granted axioms that its citizens go around with about the country, which can be summed up in the following adjectives: convenient, safe, orderly, efficient, predictable, comfortable. Away from these safety nets and devoid of familiar friends and family, one has to evolve a new set of mechanisms with which to manage the tasks of daily life. You never really get to grow in your thoughts and beliefs because they are hardly ever challenged in the uber-comfort zone that's Singapore.

SLOWING DOWN

I realised that the biggest gain I had made away from the sanctuary of a well-planned state was to Slow Down. This was as much an adaptive response (because it is necessary when everything shuts down on a Sunday, your entire staff are out the door at 5 sharp every day, and the check-out counters at every Carrefour are designed for the patience of people aged 50 and over) as it was a personal choice.

I slowed down when it came to Getting Things Done. First discovery -- I could be as efficient as I wanted, finish as much as I could, but I couldn't get anyone else to work on my time schedule or fit themselves into my deadlines. Getting things done depends entirely on the 10 or so people you rely on to finish the damn task. Second discovery -- it's not about how quickly you get it done, it's how many mistakes you avoided. We love being the fastest and the first in Singapore don't we? But when things seriously cock up, thumbs get stuck up asses and fingers pointed more quickly than it took to build the Marina Bay Sands. I had to really push out the Big Picture Ending in many cases in order to  zoom into the tiny details we all hate to "waste time" over. I had to oversee and check on the people who were helping me (in other words "supervise") just to prevent little preventable errors. It could be a matter of minutes scanning through a quotation and finding a small detail in calculation (that blew up into a long and costly battle 2 months later); or reading a 5 page contract for a line that would come back to bite you. It would be easy blaming the staff for not doing their due diligence, an excuse we like to trot out, but as we also say, it was my neck on the chopping block. 

Koblenz, Spring 2014

I slowed down to live life. No, there were not that many roses to smell (nor time to smell them) on the dirty, dog-poo littered streets of Brussels, but Europeans are generally happier in large-scale surveys compared to us islanders, and there's a good reason for it. Besides forming the new habit of sorting my trash (I actually found it therapeutic to sort my garbage into the 3 trashcans in my kitchen) and rushing for shopping on Saturday before the supermarkets closed, we learnt to use those sacred weekends to do something other than retail shopping and eating at new restaurants. It was enjoyable to simply bask under a rare spring sun on the grass of the Bois de la Cambre (they let their dogs shit everywhere except the park) while Ju cycled along the Sunday car-free lanes that wind through the expansive park in the middle of the city. We could spend a slow morning at one of the outdoor markets, meandering through the stalls buying our supply of French saucissons (dried sausages), olives and my favourite fresh chicken innards, or an afternoon at Brussels' popular Tram Museum riding a vintage tram through the woods of Terveuren. 

Brugges, Autumn 2014

Oh yes, Europe can be an inefficient mess with most  of the bureaucracy (wait till you hear how I dealt with my export taxes on my car), but it doesn't cost much to be happy, if your idea of happiness is the simple joy of watching your kid build a sandcastle, eat an ice cream or take walks through old cobblestone streets and sip wine in the evenings as the sun set at bedtime in summer. Since we had no babysitter, we took Ju with us everywhere. Ju at 3 and a half years could sit quietly at a restaurant through dinner without much drama. 

I slowed down most of all in the way I viewed the world and its inhabitants. I had been cussing and swearing in frustration while driving my entire adult life. After moving to Belgium and Malaysia, I wondered why on earth I had found it necessary to complain about Singapore roads and traffic. There IS NO TRAFFIC in Singapore. What you would call a jam is a minor congestion in KL or Brussels. While the proportion of idiots driving in KL is certainly larger than that in Singapore (by simple fact that there is no pricing control on automobiles or prohibitive road-use taxes in Malaysia), the level of road courtesy here is miles apart from that found in Singapore. In fact I would go so far as to say you should not expect any sort of courtesy from Singapore drivers. It's as if the rat race which they view as symbolic of their lives permeates the manner in which they react to those who jostle with them on the roads. Malaysians are terribly patient about things they cannot change: rush hour congestion, people cutting into their queue and taxi-drivers who mostly drive as if they are drunk or high on drugs. I had to learn the same. There is no other way to live without going insane in KL. 

MAKING CHOICES

The biggest change I had to make was to decide what kind of mother and employee I wanted to be. Daniel had taken a job that moved him to Hamburg so I was home alone with Ju on weekdays while Daniel would visit us on weekends from Germany. Even with a part-time nanny who looked after Ju after school till I got home, it was never lost on me how I was juggling two roles by myself and how heavy this responsibility was. While every one of my Singaporean colleagues (who were childless) worked past 7 or 8pm, I left at 6pm, 6.30pm latest every day to go home to my son. In Singapore, I hardly ever worked late even with Daniel around all the time, but in Brussels I was Ju's only constant parent most days and I simply could not arrange my son around my workload, which was in fact endless. I often drove three hours with Ju on weekends over the border to Germany so he could spend time with the grandparents or Daniel when he was in the western areas of Stuttgart or Freiburg. Planning our family meetings became as normal as planning my calendar of work events. It was not normal, and the toll only showed itself when Daniel was offered a posting to Malaysia. 

And so here I am now, fast forwarding to the present. I no longer work for my previous company, a choice I didn't make without pretty heavy soul searching. The time away in Brussels gave me an insight into changing the way I used to think and behave, about time, about parenting, about what quality of life means. And the time now in Kuala Lumpur has given me a much-needed pause to reflect upon the direction of my future: how my thoughts have changed, how I choose and decide on a daily basis, be it my behaviour, my emotions or my health. It is ironic that you feel your responsibility most acutely only when you have ultimate freedom with which to use your time each day. 

Hamburg, Summer 2014

You will have  probably noticed that I have dealt quite effectively with my decision to quit my job. My current vocation? On Sabbatical. One of the most toxic parts of life as a Singaporean is the norm that one needs to label how one spends her hours between 9 and 5. I certainly do not Stay At Home even though I am only called "Mum" now rather than "Boss". After all that I have gone through, I can safely say that the people who couldn't understand my decision and who asked me the rather condescending "are you just going to be a full time mum?" might never see a perspective beyond their prescribed roles within their organization or chosen profession. 

Finally, I could describe my life now as something akin to recovery in a mental health spa retreat. While Ju is in school, I am doing the things that fulfil only the needs of my own physical and mental health: swimming, reading, playing the piano, thinking. Yes, it sounds like a luxury only the moderately well-off might afford, but it's not true.  Daniel and most Type A personalities, even many of the Type Bs, who likely only see the inside of a swimming pool while on holiday in Bali would find my life now quite aversive ("but, but...what do you DO with your time?!"). 

We all have to do the same things with our limited time -- learn something new and be a better person (oops, if you disagreed with that, then just skip to the end of the paragraph). Making a living, carving out your career, bringing up your children or taking care of your parents,  finding self-fulfilment, these are choices that are laced with preferences, mostly culture bound to where you grew up and formed most of your identity. At their most fundamental, they mean nothing more than or as much as the next person's choice. How toxic you wish each aspect of life to be depends on the importance you place on a choice. I guess Singapore is about as toxic as the next city, the next country. We each create the reality that we are a part of and the meaning that's in it. It wasn't easy digging myself out of my old attitudes and changing my view of the world. 

Life is about as meaningful as you want it to be, whether you're in Singapore, Europe, Malaysia, being gainfully employed or bumming like a low-maintenance tai-tai. 

*  *  *  *  *

*Ethnocentrism refers to the belief in the superiority of one's own culture or cultural practices and beliefs. It also describes the negative appraisal of foreign cultures against the yardstick of one's own.

Knock Knock, anyone home?

Dear Readers,

If there are any of you still following, that is, I'm back!

Where have I been? Down the rabbit hole, into a real piece of work called Brussels, Belgium since January 2014. Life there has been more like a black hole, since I found myself sucked into a vortex of work, culture shock from the most inefficient country in the northern hemisphere and riding an emotional roller coaster until a premature departure in mid 2015 from the city that brought you macarons, a pissing dwarf and the orchestrators of the Paris terror attacks.

Writing about the 1.5 years in Belgium would read something like Eat Pray Love meets Stephen King's Misery. Or just Misery, haha. Come to think of it, I could be more positive and actually write it like a self-help book from Tony Robbins except I won't be repeating the same phrases every few paragraphs. And there would be a sort of happy-fucked-up-ending.

The ending would be where I am presently writing this post: in my very spacious apartment in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Yes, from one ISIS hotspot to the next. How I ended up here is the stuff of chapter 23, The Short And Lurid Affair With Brussels.

To sum up my brief re-introduction, it's been 6 months since our family installed ourselves in KL. Life has settled into a routine: I've settled into a semi-expatriate life in Malaysia, Julien is almost 5 years old and goes to school; he speaks 3 languages fluently and counts 1 to 10 in French. It seems like I have come to the end of the last circle of my middle aged life.

What now?

I am figuring that out as I speak to you, dear Reader, and I promise (as much to myself as to you) that I will revive this blog if it is the last damn thing I do*. Till next time!


*Unless there is an actual attack on my neighbourhood by the now infamous terror organization, in which case I will be slightly inconvenienced with subsequent posts.