By South China Morning Post | Created at 2024-10-19 01:33:09 | Updated at 2024-10-19 04:38:24
3 hours ago
My preteen nephew’s fingers are racing ahead of his linguistic engine as he valiantly tries to give me a step-by-step Rubik’s Cube tutorial in Mandarin, but after the third or fourth ranhou (“and then”), his voice trails off. His little brother can’t bear listening any more and blurts out, “Why can’t you tell her in English?”
He can’t, he gently explains as I bite back laughter, because the aunt “doesn’t really understand English”.
That would be poor old me, the self-appointed guardian of Chinese heritage who has made a point of speaking Mandarin, never ever English, to the children in my family in the hope that they won’t lose Chinese as a first language, and thus easy access to a cultural universe. Yet, mine sometimes feels like a lost cause.
For the boys and many others of their generation, day care is a fact of life. When children have socialised in English, the lingua franca in multiracial Singapore, for as long as they have been able to speak sentences, it quickly becomes the language they feel at home in, and which they will watch YouTube, Netflix and television in when they are actually home. And once some of them get sucked into that anglophone rabbit hole of toddlers’ shows from preschool brands and animated series from toy companies, it’s seemingly only a question of time before they emerge as Disney-loving, Marvel superhero-worshipping, Halloween-celebrating fans of American pop culture.
Thus, even in a traditionally Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking family like mine, the children stick to English among themselves and with their parents. Chinese recedes into the background, less mother than grandmother tongue; it is spoken to be polite to older people, including me, if they can look away from Captain Underpants, Ninjago, Young Sheldon or whatever it is they are glued to on Netflix through the television, tablet or phone.
The adults have tried to intervene with doses of sinophone content, from Chinese animated titles to Japanese cartoons dubbed into Mandarin. The children prefer Japanese animation to Chinese, however, and have worked out how to stream anime series in English.
