One tongue, many hearts
Sim Kwang Yang
If a mother-tongue is the language one learns first from one’s mother in infancy, then my mother tongue is Teochew, a Chinese dialect that has its home in about 12 districts in the Southern Chinese province of Kwang Tung.
Teochew is a colourful language, especially when it comes to cursing and swearing. My late father could, when he was irritated by someone, deliver an eloquent torrent of obscenities at the object of contempt in his native tongue.
Fortunately, Teochew is also a refined dialect. I have watched old timers reading ancient poetry or play scripts aloud in sing-song Teochew. The dialogue and the lyrics in the famous Teochew opera are fit for any emperor’s royal court. Reading the Chinese script in my mother tongue is one skill that has eluded me all my life.
In Malaysia, in the early days, the Teochew speaking Chinese were mostly operators of sundry shops and traders in primary commodities. That seemed to be what they did best in Southeast Asia, notably in Thailand and Vietnam, where they dominate the Chinese migrant community.
|
Today, you still find them in all towns and cities in Malaysia, with more than a few engaged in the business of selling daily provisions against the onslaught of hypermarkets. If they survive, they do so on the strength of their legendary frugality. As one Teochew saying goes, when times are hard, one simply make do with thin porridge and soya sauce.
With them speaking the same mother-tongue, you would expect them to be very united. That is not the impression I got from my late parents. Growing up among the Teochew community in Kuching, I discovered them to be rather quarrelsome, and at times snobbish. That was probably due more to their occupation as petty traders rather than their linguistic or physical genes.
When I found myself in the Chinatown in Bangkok a few years ago, I was delighted to hear the Teochew tongue in this exotic land. The memories embedded in my mother tongue warmed my heart. I tried happily to strike up a conversation with the shopkeepers, on the false belief in our common atavistic bond. Unfortunately, I was snubbed over and over again. I turned to the Thais for conversation instead.
‘Huang kek’ in China
A few years further back, my brothers and I returned to our ancestral village in China, where my father was born and bred and where he married my mother. This was a congested rural rice-growing hamlet, not far from the city of Teochew, or from the Teochew-dominated seaside metropolis of Swatow. All the inhabitants in that village had Sim as their surname.
It was an alien landscape, and it did not feel like home-coming at all. As we picked our way through the narrow alleyways, bystanders doing various boring-looking chores would announce our arrival by hailing down the hall, Huang kek! In Teochew lingo, that meant “visitors from the barbarian land” or something to that effect. The sense of alienation was both haunting and surreal! I then longed for the eclectic ethnological landscape of Sarawak. Home is where the heart is.
The Kuching of my childhood was a Chinese town, where no single dialect group predominated. Like may towns in Malaysia at that time, the different dialect groups were involved in different specialised trades. The Teochews were shopkeepers. The Hakka were farmers and miners. The Hokkiens were traders. The Hailams kept coffee-shops and restaurants. The Henghuas were fishermen and bicycle shop owners. There were very few Cantonese.
Going to a Chinese primary school to learn Mandarin, I picked up a very limited vocabulary in all these dialects, especially the obscene words. It was a confusing world. The Hakka tongue alone has three or four different versions, with vastly different phoenetic structures. Fortunately, we had Hokkien, which was, and still is, the Chinese lingua franca all over Kuching.
It was important to know Hokkien in Kuching. Many Chinese there were educated in the English medium, and so unable to converse in Mandarin. Often, two Chinese from two different dialect groups had no recourse to a conversation, except through speaking Hokkien. I believe that is so still in Sarawak, and Hokkien has become the unofficial official language of the Chinese people there. Years later, I was to discover that my Kuching Hokkien is spoken very differently from that in Johore or Penang,
If Teochew is my mother tongue by birth, then Mandarin is my mother tongue by enculturation.
What is known as Mandarin refers to the standardised Chinese speech common to the entire Chinese speaking world. It is the national official language for people in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, although it is spoken in different parts with a blinding variety of accents. I am given to understand that the Mandarin as we know it today started out as a mere dialect around the old Chinese capital of Beijing. The rise of the modern Chinese nation-state has since elevated the status of this dialect to the exalted position of national language.
Completed phoenetic system
Learning Mandarin usually means a matter of learning to read and write in the Chinese script, which has to be one of the most difficult languages in the world to master. I certainly find it more difficult than English and Bahasa Malaysia.
It has no alphabet system. Each Chinese character evolves from a pictogragh that has its origin in some distant past millenia ago. Being literate in this language means committing to memory thousands of individual Chinese characters. Its ambiguous grammar lacks the structured logical orderliness of an Indo-European language like English.
It has an extremely complicated phoenetic system. There are four tones in the pronunciation of individual words, denoting four different meanings, and giving the Chinese speech its sing-song quality. This totality makes Chinese poetry impossible to translate into other languages.
The writing has two formats of composition. The classical format has been the official format for administrative, literary and official usage for quite a few thousand years. Almost all philosophical and historical texts have been preserved in this form. To the great majority of Malaysian Chinese to-day, this classical form of highly-condensed and highly stylised Chinese writing is as incomprehensible as Latin or Greek.
Fortunately for the Chinese, the May 4th Movement at the early part of the 20th century popularised the widespread use of the conversational plain Chinese that is the written form of the Chinese language all over the world to-day. Even so, learning to write this relatively simple form of Chinese language has its snag.
First, there is the orthodox way of writing each individual Chinese words. The word for ‘zero’ requires 14 strokes of the pen, or brush. This is the system still used in Taiwan today. Mainland China, however, has been working hard to get rid of this system to make writing easier. They have invented a simplified version of the written Chinese requiring far fewer strokes. The two different ways of writing still confuse me to no end, because I was educated in the old school.
At least I learned to read and write the Chinese language through six years of primary Chinese education. Therefore, you would think that, with my workable knowledge of the language, I would have instant access to the inner soul of the Chinese world, and can easily participate in an invisible spirit of an universal Chinese community. If nationalist orthodoxy has its way, why, I would even feel united with all the Chinese of the world!
The concrete world of day-to-day living is vastly different from the imagined world of nationalism. I have since conversed with Chinese from China, Taiwan and many other parts of the world. I have discovered this truth about speaking the same language: we may have the same tongue, but we have many different hearts. Most of the time, I feel a greater affinity to the Ibans of Sarawak, than to these Mandarin speaking Chinese all over the world.
Language of instruction
The situation is no better in Malaysia. The Chinese language has now established itself firmly as the language of instruction in the system of Chinese education. It is the language of choice for the political, cultural and business elites. Given the dominance of the Chinese newspapers in the life of the Malaysian Chinese, the language has indeed allowed them to imagine themselves as a homogeneous community.
Again, the situation on the proverbial ground is vastly different. The dialects persist. In the region around Klang Valley, except Port Klang, stretching to Ipoh to the north, and Seremban to the south, everybody speaks Cantonese. North of Taiping, and south of Malacca, Hokkien reigns supreme.
Living and working in the Klang Valley as I do now, I am made to feel very much like a foreigner. Very few people here whom I have to deal with in the business of everyday living seem to wish to speak either Mandarin or Hokkien. Since my command of the Cantonese tongue is far less adequate than that of Bahasa Malaysia or Iban, I may as well be living in a foreign land. And if my inexperience is worth anything at all, even if I add Cantonese to my collection of linguistic skills, it would still be a foreign language to me.
This business about one language uniting all the people speaking it is suspect. Could the same conclusion apply to Bahasa Malaysia?
