Dear Chinese People...

Dear Chinese people,

When did it all begin? Maybe the Speak Mandarin campaign, which was first designed to demote the use of dialects and which gradually expanded to guilt-trip the English-speaking Chinese and ultimately hard-sell the idea that Mandarin was a global language, if not an economically-useful one. But gradually—and perhaps this is something more noticeable to us minorities—Mandarin became some sort of default public language; MP’s would quote Mandarin proverbs, TVmobile would screen Chinese drama programmes, MRT station announcements were made in Mandarin, public roadshows would be conducted in Mandarin, and even a New Year countdown ended up looking as if all Singaporeans consumed Chinese pop culture.

Of course you don’t need me to tell you that these occurrences alienate us non-Chinese people. I’m sure you know this already. So the question is, why then do you keep doing it? Is there some sense that English is some elite or ‘cosmopolitan’ language, and that using Mandarin affords you a more immediate and ‘authentic’ connection with the ‘heartland’? But surely you’d know that there are ‘heartlanders’ who don’t speak a single word of Mandarin and for whom English is their only means of access to the public sphere? Do you think that by ‘pandering’ to us minorities, it means elevating English at the expense of Mandarin? Are you still stuck with the mindset that Mandarin is considered inferior to English and that some ‘proper’ decolonisation should involve Mandarin eventually displacing English as a lingua franca? If so, what do your East/West, cheena/kantang identity anxieties have to do with the rest of us who are not Chinese?

If your intention is not to exclude us, then perhaps you’re trying to encourage us to pick up the language by saturating the linguistic environment with Mandarin? Is this supposed to be some kind of retaliation for the fact that Chinese minorities in our neighboring countries have to learn BM and BI? But here’s the thing: the more strident your attempts, the more repulsed we become. You only end up politicising the language by making it look like an instrument of coercive assimilation. For a long time, whenever I heard Mandarin, I only heard something that was hostile, oppressive and imperialistic. All that celebration of the hegemony of Chinese-ness had robbed the language of its innocence. It took a while for me to even want to look at a Chinese character and have some curiosity about its meaning, and this only happened because I had friends who took interest in the richness and mysteries of my own mother tongue. Ultimately, the shrill campaigns and the market forces are going to end up being counter-productive, breeding resentment and resistance. The surest route to unpopularity is overkill.