Notes From an Even Smaller Island Read online

  However, Scott and I were eager to fit in. Although we could understand most of a Singlish conversation, we still tried to learn some of its non-English words. The result was a most bizarre linguistic concoction. It must be explained that coming from strong working-class backgrounds, Scott and I had seemingly unshakeable Yorkshire and cockney accents, respectively. Now I hope you will appreciate that it is not easy to completely change the way you speak. But we had no choice. To get by in the coffee shops and mini-marts in Toa Payoh, a smattering of Singlish had to come into play for both of us.

  At this point, you may wonder why we did not just learn Malay or Mandarin. I did learn conversational Malay to communicate with Saudita, my crazy old Indian landlady, but I never did discover the Malay for ‘Can you please put some bloody clothes on?’

  As for Mandarin, well, let’s just say that some Singaporeans can be a wee bit obsessive about it. I think it is the four different tones of the language that does it. When I first arrived in Singapore, I was naturally wide-eyed and keen and would try to pick up a few words in Mandarin every day and then test them out on the secretaries or the Chinese teachers at work. For some reason, they would jump all over me. Apart from being laughed at, which I did not mind, there would always be the cry of ‘Wrong tone! Wrong tone! It’s in the wrong tone, ha ha. You’re saying x not y.’ Fair enough if this response had been now and then but it was relentless and rarely constructive. My attempts to learn Mandarin were gleefully ripped to shreds so I thought, ‘Sod it, life’s too short.’

  Once we had decided to boycott the idea of actually learning a whole new language because we are lazy buggers, Scott and I decided to have a stab at Singlish. My God, did we sound awful. It was especially tough for Scott. In Britain, the demographic and sociological make-up is such that the further north you travel, the further away you go from Standard English and the more unintelligible the local tongue becomes. This linguistic phenomenon peaks at the top of the island in Scotland’s John O’Groats, where its residents are only understood by relatives, neighbours and the local sheep population. Being from Leeds, I suppose Scott was somewhere in the middle of all this. He once told me that people from other parts of Yorkshire could not understand him, so try to picture how he must have sounded to a typical Singaporean once he had added a Singlish slant to his strong northern brogue. He would approach some poor auntie in a fast-food outlet and ask, ‘Ellow, ken ye ge’ meh eh tool piss cliss-beh chickin se’, wi chips ’n eh cork, ken lah?’ Although I sympathised with the clueless auntie, it was a priceless cultural encounter. It was made even funnier by Scott’s attempt to localise his accent by throwing in ‘can lah’ at the end, almost as an afterthought. But if there was ever a monumental coming together of two great cultures, it had to be the first time Scott combined English and Singlish to pass a derogatory comment about someone pushing past him on the MRT. ‘What a kiasu cunt,’ he said simply.

  However, as time passed, language became quite a sensitive issue for Scott. Despite his commendable efforts to take the rough edges off his Yorkshire accent, he was struggling to be understood.

  ‘This is Singapore, not Leeds. You can’t expect them to understand you when you go onto building sites or meet other architects,’ I said to him.

  ‘I know that but I’m bloody proud of the way I talk. I’m not ashamed of it.’

  I had to agree with him. When we were at university, our accents, though completely different, were one of the things that bonded us. We were social lepers – no more than a tiny minority of working-class students who raised eyebrows every time we opened our mouths. Many in this situation reached a compromise and went for a more acceptable accent to fit in. Let’s face it, we have all met Singaporeans who have studied in the United States and miraculously developed impressive American accents within a year or two. Be deeply suspicious of these people. Having worked with speech therapists, I have been told that it takes considerable effort to completely reshape your speaking voice so I often wonder what the motives of these pseudo-American Singaporeans really are.

  As far as Scott and I were concerned, we were not going to change our voices for anybody at university. Instead we went to the opposite extreme and perfected the most common-as-muck style accents you could possibly imagine. I sounded like Michael Caine on speed and Scott spoke as if he had spent his entire life as a farmhand in rural Yorkshire. It was beautiful. We deliberately went out of the way to demonstrate that what we had to say was far more important than how we said it. And it worked.

  I tried to explain to Scott that we could get away with the whole accent thing in England because our audience had been exposed to various dialects. The majority of Singaporeans, however, have only really been exposed to two types of English – Asian English and Hollywood English – and we spoke neither. We had no choice but to do the one thing that we would have ripped our tongues out before doing in England: compromise. Eventually, we got by but Scott was never allowed to order a chicken meal again.

  Our predicament was a useful case study that I used to share with my secondary students. By all means speak Singlish at home and with friends, I would tell them, just as I would speak cockney in London, but, at the same time, they needed to have both the capability and the awareness to switch to Standard English when appropriate. Apply different codes of communication to different audiences, I said.

  The trouble was that I did not believe in what I was saying. I have to confess that in the first six months or so my Western prejudices came to the fore. I thought Singlish was a joke – a complete mishmash of a dialect that was awful on the tongue and ugly on the ear. The sooner it was banished from Singapore completely, I thought, the better for all those with eardrums. I believed that I was on a mission to correct the horrendous speech faults of every student I came across. Working with youngsters who said ‘one, two, tree’ and believed that words like siaow, meaning ‘crazy’, were actually English, I failed to understand how they were going to be taken seriously in a so-called globalised economy.

  Eventually though, I changed my mind for various reasons. The most obvious being that I actually started to learn Singlish, thus eradicating my ignorance. I had noticed that good friends like David and Victor tried to standardise their English around me, assuming that I would understand them more easily. The only way around this artificial, uncomfortable situation was for me to speak Singlish back to them as and when I could.

  Then, I came across one or two middle-class, well-to-do Caucasians who spoke impeccable English and revelled in mocking Singlish at every opportunity when Singaporeans were not around. They would say things like ‘Shall we go to the cinema, lah?’ or ‘May I have a cup of coffee, lah?’, placing heavy emphasis on the ‘lah’ and sometimes even punctuating the word in the air, using their fingers to mime quote marks. For me, the annoying punctuating alone ranks right up there with incest and warrants a lethal injection.

  At first, I would smile politely but it soon became apparent that it just was not funny. Largely because I knew that these same arrogant arseholes would have been ridiculing cockney or some other localised accent had they been in England. These wealthy wankers were the same people I had rebelled against at university and I was buggered if I was now going to sit with them in Orchard Road and take the piss out of the average Singaporean on the street.

  Therefore, I did a complete 360 degree turn and began to champion the use of Singlish in everyday situations. I still reiterated the importance of speaking Standard English to my students and banned the use of Singlish in class but the trick is knowing when to switch from one to the other. Even my old boss, Juliet McCully, who set up the Speech Therapy Unit at Singapore General Hospital and one of the first speech and drama centres in Singapore, spoke positively of Singlish, explaining that communication was, in essence, all about transmitting your message successfully. How you did it depended entirely on your audience. Even now when I visit England, I revert back to cockney when I am speaking to friends, partly because it is my natural a
ccent and mainly because I do not want them to assume that Singapore has transformed me into a rollneck wearing, Volvo-driving, suburban-living twat. When I go shopping or eat at a coffee shop, I throw in a bit of Singlish and when I am at work, I spontaneously use this bizarre Singlish/English concoction that is neither one thing nor the other.

  Then along came the government’s Speak Good English campaign, which has the potential to wreck everything. If it was called the ‘Speak Good English When Necessary’ campaign, you would not hear a peep out of me but it is not. Being a former teacher, I initially thought that the campaign could not do any harm. Although I admire Singlish, I still come across countless Singaporeans who cannot speak anything else. Thus, I thought the campaign could be a success if it could raise the awareness of Standard English in conjunction with its many varieties. The campaign, however, used a sledgehammer to swat the tiniest of flies.

  Before you could say ‘kiasu reaction’, Singaporeans across the nation were encouraged to speak Standard English as often as possible. Television and radio presenters were asked not to slip into their local tongue. Local English-speaking actors were redubbed to remove any traces of a Singlish accent, which served only to make them sound bloody awful. Finally, and most ridiculously, Phua Chu Kang was sent for English lessons – a course of action that raised, for me at least, memories of taking fun seriously.

  Phua Chu Kang is the name of the lead character in one of the local comedies. A money-grabbing building contractor, he is an over-aged Ah Beng who plays the fool and speaks nothing but Singlish. He often reflects the attitudes of the man in the street, albeit in a farcical way. The powers that be were concerned that, among other things, impressionable (and supposedly stupid) Singaporeans would be duped into thinking that his awful English would be interpreted as the standard version and adopted around the island. Thus, it was advised that the character be sent for English lessons in the show. Although the show remained quite funny, I found the storyline depressing. It missed the point of Phua Chu Kang’s humour. To understand many of the show’s jokes, you must know the correct pronunciation for unusual words. For instance, Phua Chu Kang always gets a laugh when he says ‘façade’ because he pronounces it ‘fer-car-day’. Now if Singaporeans did not know how to say this word correctly, how on earth would they find it funny?

  The infuriating thing is that the English campaign came about at a time when Singaporeans, I feel, were beginning to take a real pride in their version of English. Like Changi Airport or the Merlion, Singlish is something that is quintessentially Singaporean. It is a dialect that everybody speaks and understands and is something that could provide the cornerstone for a unifying cultural identity. For the first time, movies like Money No Enough and 12 Storeys were not only being shown on the big screen but, more importantly, their characters spoke the language of the Singaporean on the street. Their mix of Hokkien and Singlish made the jokes and situations seem funnier to Singaporeans because they were more identifiable and realistic. Other local movies like Liang Po Po soon followed. Although they were not as successful as Money No Enough, it became evident that Singlish and the average man on the street was becoming hip. Forget Tom Cruise, actors like Jack Neo and Gurmit Singh were speaking the language of their audience. It was cool to be like Phua Chu Kang. The cynical side of me suggests this trend shift was one of the factors that prompted the government to act. Speaking like Jim Carrey was one thing but speaking like Liang Po Po, well, that was a different mouthful of words altogether.

  The question is: Is Singapore trying to build a cultural identity or not? With so many races and cultures all living under one roof, it is extremely difficult to draw out unifying features but Singlish is certainly one of them. It is the language of Singapore and something to be proud of, just like cockney is for Londoners. As long as Singaporeans are aware that they must switch into Standard English when conversing with foreigners, as Scott and I had to, then frankly I do not see what the problem is.

  Chapter Twelve

  One Saturday morning, Scott and I decided to play football. We purchased one of those cheap, plastic balls at the mini-mart and set off to find a football pitch. After an hour, we had found only two pitches and they were both private school pitches. Out of sheer desperation, I did something that I am still embarrassed by to this day. I went into the school looking for a teacher, which was quite difficult as it was a Saturday, to ask if we could use one of the pitches. As bold as could be, I strolled into the gymnasium and, I am blushing now just thinking about it, approached the PE teacher who was working with a group of teenage students.

  In the middle of their gymnastics lesson, I said, ‘Hi there. I’m sorry to bother you but I work here as an English teacher and my colleague and I were wondering if we could use your football pitch for a while, just to get some practice, you know.’

  ‘Er, yes, I suppose so,’ the stunned man replied. And as calm as you like, I went back out to tell my ‘colleague’ the good news.

  Since becoming familiar with the local education scene, I realise how bizarre I must have looked that day. In a small neighbourhood school in Toa Payoh on a quiet Saturday afternoon, a 1.92 m Caucasian wearing Bermuda shorts and holding a plastic ball that only nursery kids play with walked into the middle of a Co-Curricula Activity (CCA) and asked if he could have a kick about on their pitch. If you had been that young teacher, what would you have said? Whenever I pass that school now on the bus, I always recount the story to whoever I am with and they cannot believe what a prat I was.

  Playing football that day brought it home to both Scott and me that you can take the man out of England but you cannot take England out of the man. We both grew up in an environment that had a dominant football culture and we are both extremely passionate about sports in general. Thus, we were delighted to discover that Singapore has a professional football league known as the S-League, which meant that we would be able to attend football matches here. Like most things in Singapore, our local team, Balestier Central, was virtually on our doorstep. The team’s first match was away to Geylang United over in Bedok and we decided, quite impulsively, to go. Just as we used to do in England, we found out where the stadium was, plotted our route and decided where we would eat before the game. We subconsciously re-enacted all our prematch rituals. Strangely, I had no expectations whatsoever and I ended up being impressed despite the match being an anticlimactic 0-0 draw.

  Aside from the football, we were both struck by the same negative observation. There were non-Singaporean football shirts everywhere. To be more specific, there were Manchester United and Liverpool shirts everywhere and hardly anyone was wearing Geylang or Balestier shirts. On entering the stadium, Scott and I had been given Geylang United polo shirts as free door gifts. We went straight to the toilet to put them on even though we were there to watch Balestier. Yet as we proudly stepped onto the terraces in our new Singaporean football shirts, we were greeted by the sight of more United jerseys than we had seen in Manchester’s city centre.

  To our astonishment, the Geylang-Balestier match was not a fluke gathering of English football fans. Take a walk down Orchard Road on any given day and look out for the English Premiership jerseys. They are everywhere, both on people’s backs and in shop windows. Many shops even stock West Ham United shirts, which amazes me, although I have noticed that they are usually quite dusty and covered in mothballs.

  Being an Englishman, I have to put my hands up and admit that my knowledge of the English Premiership certainly did me no harm when I began to teach in Singaporean secondary schools. In the beginning, it was comforting to know that I had something in common with many of the students. Furthermore, it was most convenient, initially at least, for both Scott and me to be able to pick up a newspaper or switch on the television and find out how Leeds and West Ham had performed the day before.

  After a while, the apathy towards local soccer began to irritate us a little. We watched Balestier on a semi-regular basis and took quite an interest in the S-League. We
bought a couple of S-League shirts and began to look forward to our Saturday night football match ritual. However, we were in the minority. We asked many of our Singaporean friends to join us but no one was interested. Furthermore, many of my students could name the girlfriends or wives of the Manchester United players as well as recall the date of Ryan Giggs’s birthday but they could not name more than half a dozen S-League players. The ones that they could name were always the usual suspects such as Fandi Ahmad, V. Sundramoorthy and Nazri Nasir; in other words, seasoned national players who had been around for years.

  The reasons for such a lack of interest in local football and sports in general are painfully obvious. Singaporeans want winners. For many years, football gave them just that courtesy of the Malaysia Cup (formerly the Malaya Cup). Started in 1921, it was a Malaya tournament involving Singaporean and Malaysian football teams. Just like the old home internationals between England and Scotland, there is nothing like a contest between two rival neighbours to set the blood racing. The best part was that Singapore won the Cup several times and tens of thousands of Singaporeans turned out on both sides of the Causeway to see it happen. At the end of 1994, however, both the Malaysian and the Singaporean soccer bodies decided that they should go their separate ways and focus on building their own leagues.