Listen to this episode and get more information about it at theallusionist.org/singlishsinglish
and hear/read the previous episode about Singlish at theallusionist.org/singlish.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, break the glass to use the emergency language.
Previously on the Allusionist: Bibek Gurung talked about growing up in Singapore speaking Singlish with his family and his peers while teachers and the government of Singapore tried to suppress the language. There was so much to say about Singlish and we’re returning to it this episode.
Just before we get into it, I wanted to remind you of the excellent times you can have if you become a member of the Allusioverse. Not only are you helping fund the making of this show, you get behind the scenes information about the making of this show - usually a glimpse into me at my most beserk - plus regular relaxing livestreams with me and my dictionaries, plus the company of your fellows in the Allusioverse Discord community, where among other things, like sharing knitting advice and book recommendations and how to cook baguettes, we watch things together, like the current British and Canadian seasons of Bake Off, and Taskmaster featuring my brother Andy. And on the agendathe film What We Do In The Shadows, we’re deep into our Merchant-Ivory season with The Bostonians, Howards End, Mississippi Masala still to come; then mid-November we’re going to be watching the BBC miniseries of Pride & Prejudice! Yes, the one with the wet shirt scene that was deleted from the book. And when the Winterval season hits, we’ll be watching the film Carol together. Join us! theallusionist.org/donate.
And while you’re there on the website - I usually mention this at the end of every episode but it’s worth noting at the start too: at theallusionist.org, every episode has its own post with links to the guests and more information about the topics, and there are transcripts of every episode, and there’s always a photo of the dictionary entry for the randomly selected word, so if you’re ever wishing for a readable version of this podcast, you’ve got ‘em!
On with the show.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: I have made so much pie crust listening to the Allusionist.
HZ: Incredible.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: I've baked so many of pies in my life, listening to your voice, which is like very, very wild.
HZ: This is basically the proudest moment of my career.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: That's so nice to hear, because, truly all my friends laugh about it, because I won’t ever shut up about how much I love your podcast.
HZ: Well, I appreciate it.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: They're like, “Okay, it's just about language.”
HZ: “Just”!
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: And I'm like, “Yes, but it's like so much more!” And then I was like, “Oh, also there's like a word of the day that you like try and use during the day,” and they're like, “Okay, Stace…”
My name is Stacey Mei Yan Fong. I am an author and a home baker, and my book is called 50 Pies, 50 States: an Immigrant's Love Letter to the Country She's Chosen to Call Home.
I made, I'm going to say, probably at least 48 out of the 50 while listening to the Allusionist.
HZ: Whoa! No way!
HZ: Stacey’s book is recipes for pies as well as a kind of journey through the USA, in the form of a different pie for each state.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Yes, I have a pie for every state in America and some bonus pies for all the places that I grew up, like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.
HZ: What did you put in the Singapore pie?
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: The Singapore pie is a pandan custard pie with Khong Guan custard biscuit crust. It's like a crushed cookie crust. Khong Guan is basically the Nabisco of Singapore, and they used to make these like custard crackers that my grandpa would give me all the time so I would shut up. Because I would just want to talk to my grandpa - he was my favorite person, and whenever we would visit Singapore, I would just talk his ear off. One of my favorite kid photos is from my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary and I'm in the most beautiful pink frilly dress with a flower crown on my head, but I'm sitting there with like fistfuls of biscuits that my grandpa had given me so I would like not talk during anything that was happening.
HZ: This is one of the cutest things I've ever heard.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: So it's an ode to them. And the book is dedicated to my grandparents too, because I wouldn't be here without them.
HZ: Stacey was born in Singapore and raised in a Singaporean family. I'm speaking with her because while she was baking a pie, with a persimmon filling, she was listening to the previous episode about Singlish and it made her very emotional, hearing about this language she had grown up speaking.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Before it used to be a thing that was very triggering and frowned upon for me. And now it's like, with growth, and understanding its context and everything, has become a huge comfort of mine. And when I do meet someone that like speaks Singlish or is from Singapore, it's a nice gentle reminder of where I'm from and how wonderful it is to be a from a place that's so small, but has such an impact, and their own special language.
HZ: When you say that it was triggering, what kinds of feelings were you feeling?
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: I guess embarrassment, that someone in my family sounded that way. Like it wasn't the proper way for them to speak.
HZ: What would happen if you weren't proper?
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Mostly it was just be sitting in a corner in silence.
HZ: damn.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Yeah, I know. We were very well behaved girls.
HZ: Could you just talk about where you use Singlish and with whom? And what kind of role it had in your life growing up?
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: I feel like I fall back into it when I'm with my extended family. And I feel it was like only ever in casual conversation that was just the family. Like if we were at a restaurant or something, it wouldn't happen. But it was a very much like when you take your jacket off at the end of the day kind of situation, like you no longer have to be like a proper upstanding person in society, you can just talk freely. That's when it would come up. Singlish is so casual to me. It always felt like not proper to use. I always remember my grandmother being like, "Speak properly, like speak in proper English." And it would be like, oh, okay. Sorry.
HZ: How did you feel when she would say things like that?
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: You know, it felt really weird, because I am a very casual person; but also with my grandmother, she was a really like stern lady and me and my sisters were the last set of grandkids. So by then she kind of had it. It really just added to the shame of speaking that way or sounding that way. It was like, okay, this is not the proper way to speak. I have to speak in a full sentence in a nice way in the same way that they do in the movies are on TV. Because we never ever heard anybody speak Singlish on TV or in any movies. So it was like, this is not the right way you're supposed to speak. Like you need to speak properly.
HZ: And then when you're older, you're like, what is proper, really?
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Exactly. What does that mean at all to anybody? And like, what's the standard of being proper? And the standard was like British English, those manners. You know what I mean? Obedient - trying to be obedient, is the like right word I think. That was like the bar that was set. And then we had to uphold ourselves to that bar.
HZ: Someone who has been working to demonstrate that Singlish is not “improper English” but its own language, and that it has literary worth, is Gwee Li Sui.
GWEE LI SUI: Hi, I'm Gwee Li Sui. I am a Singaporean poet, but also a translator of many Singlish books. And I write in and on Singlish, and I love it a lot.
HZ: Have you always loved it?
GWEE LI SUI: Consciously or unconsciously. You see, it's one of those things that I've grown up with. I've used it casually at home with friends and all that. But I never thought that I love it until I am forced into a corner. But I think when I realized that there's such a huge sector of - such a big group of Singaporeans who are misunderstanding this thing that is so much a part of me, I think, I can't let it go on. I cannot let the ignorance and the falsely stirred up feelings be the thing that deny what I understand as a truth about Singaporean life.
HZ: Gwee has published more than 20 books, including poetry, graphic novels, and Singlish translations of English language fiction. And he has also written books about Singlish. In 2017, Gwee released a book called Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to how Singaporeans Communicate.
GWEE LI SUI: It's not just a few words here and there. It has its own grammar, it has its own syntax. And those are, I think, mostly not talked about. So I wrote a Singlish book explaining Singlish.
HZ: There had been books about Singlish before. The first were by the humourist Sylvia Toh Piak Chu: Eh Goondu! in 1982 was followed by Lagi Goondu! in 1986; these books compiled some Singlish terminology and were the first to put this spoken language into print. And more books have followed, like 2002's Coxford Singlish Dictionary by Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo, that emerged from their humour website TalkingCock.com. Yes, Coxford is portmanteauing 'cock' and 'Oxford', talking cock is a Singlish term for bantering. All these books use English to talk about Singlish, but in Gwee's Spiaking Singlish, he is writing about Singlish in Singlish.
GWEE LI SUI: Which people say: “Isn't it defeatist? Because anyone consulting your book would be wanting to learn Singlish but you’re writing in Singlish.” But you see, my response is, if you look at English dictionaries and English encyclopedias, they too are written in English, explaining English words. If we can't go to that level, then we are not really developing the language.
HZ: One of the things that really caught my eye reading the book was the table showing how the meaning of a short phrase could be changed significantly by different particles being on the end.
GWEE LI SUI: [refers to book] Yes. Yes I think it's, it's here, right? This one, that kind of went viral.
HZ: There are ten examples in the table, including “I dun have leh” which translates to “For some reason, I don't have it,” whereas “I dun have lor” means “I wish I had it, but sadly I don't” and “I dun have hor” means “Don't look at me; I don't have it.”
GWEE LI SUI: They come from different languages, interestingly. Interestingly, ever since I came up with this, I found some more of these end particles - it just kept growing!
HZ: So many particles that one of the pocket size follow-ups to Spiaking Singlish is all about particles.
GWEE LI SUI: And just that last word alone will change the entire meaning or how to treat that statement whether you should see as spoken out of spite or spoken out of just a sense of fun is entirely dependent on that particle at the end.
HZ: People often talk about just what a good language Singlish is for being funny in - you've got a lot of wordplay, lot of puns - but there's more that you want people to know about it, right? Like, other qualities it has as well.
GWEE LI SUI: Yes, you're right. I think basically people tend to just laugh with Singlish, because it sounds so, I guess, cute, quirky; it has an interesting rhythm. And we mostly often use Singlish in Singapore to cajole, to mock others, as well. And so in that sense, it tends to be attached to humour. Also it's tied to the history of the performance of Singlish on the media and in theatre and all, you know, it's often tied to humour.
I also partly wonder whether the reason why Singlish has an affinity on the popular circuit with humour is because it did not want to get on the wrong side of politics. It didn't want to make itself out to be a potently dangerous, divisive thing. So it treated itself as something you can afford not to pay attention to, and just laugh off. And because of that, we tend to forget the aspect of Singlish that is about common life, where we use it to express ourselves, feelings of frustration, feelings of boredom, conversation that you try to have with people on the street and all that. We use that in non-humourous context as well. So this is one thing I thought my translations are able to do better, to show that it is not just about humour.
HZ: Gwee’s first full-length Singlish translation was published in 2019, and it was the first time an literary classic appeared in Singlish. It was The Leeter Tunku - The Little Prince.
GWEE LI SUI: If you're just reading this book for the humour, it's not going to last very long because the philosophical content of the book will just take you in and then you, I guess, experience a story on a different level. It's still funny, I guess, in a way, but you also feel a bit sorrowful in relation to what is going on in the story, and also start to realize that Singlish can be used for making a point, for arguing, for understanding parables and all that, symbolic meanings. Singlish is able to do these other things that I feel is not properly explored. We don't do that much, and I think we should.
HZ: Gwee has also published translations of selected Grimm's fairy tales, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and Winnie-The-Pooh.
GWEE LI SUI: I got a book just out today! It just arrived. It takes a long time for books to move from Germany to Singapore and finally it's here after it cleared customs. So, it's here. And also, in Singlish! [holds up book]
HZ: It’s Gwee’s translation of George Orwell's Animal Farm, in Singlish the title is Kaka Farm.
GWEE LI SUI: Kaka: that's the way we say it in Singlish. It's a kind of kid word. I mean, when we were young, you know, anything that bites, you say, “Oh, that's a kaka,” so it just becomes, for me, I think an easy way to talk about in relation to animals.
HZ: It's interesting that you've had to do so many talking animal books.
GWEE LI SUI: I’m hoping to move away. But I thought, I'm still trying to build bridges. So we are slowly moving into a different terrain, more adulty books. But still, I think Animal Farm has enough of that fable elements to make it feel a child can join.
I came to Animal Farm as a kid. I remember watching the movie version in the 1970s and had no idea what it was. I know it was a terrifying show, on the same level as Watership Down.
HZ: Hmm!!
GWEE LI SUI: Those two - why are they showing kids those shows! But I remember growing up watching this and it kind of traumatized me, but it stayed with me, that movie, Animal Farm, and so I thought, hey, it's a good story to bring to the consciousness of not just children, but also adults, I think. And of course, the whole story is really based on the Russian revolution. That history is more or less not remembered by the current generation of people. They don't know about the USSR right now. I grew up with it, but there's still so much about Orwell's ideas that I find still relevant to the story, aspects like, you know, revisionist history, for political reasons. Propaganda. All these are still with us. Animal Farm just gets those ideas through. And I hope that if people read these books, they are able to see this in a very localized sense as well: not just to say, “Ah, this is a book about the past,” or, “This is a book about England,” but also, “This is a book about here.”
HZ: Even though most of Gwee’s translations so far have been of children’s books, he wants adults to know that reading Singlish is for them too, not just for children.
GWEE LI SUI: And we're slowly moving there. Especially with Animal Farm. One of the things that has developed in relation to Singlish is that it has with the internet becomes something that is written as well. Previously, it's primarily spoken. And so, we have actually much excitement about how to write certain words, and also debate on - let's say, words in Malay are always spelled a certain way, but people who don't know Malay would have tended to spell it according to how they pronounce it. So there are debates on that level as well. That's very exciting because we are kind of like coming to some agreement on how to write it. I'm still being taught by Singlish. I'm still being taught by Singlish speakers. So with each book, my spelling can change, my choice of words can change. Me making errors and all is not as important as there being historical documents.
HZ: Something you've talked about with your translations is that you aim to have a mix of different languages in a sentence, which seems like it's adding an extra level of difficulty on top of everything that is already complicated about being a translator.
GWEE LI SUI: Yes. I realized by changing the mix for each character, I can actually define the character's quality. So with, for example, Winnie-the-Pooh: Winnie's Singlish is a bit different from Piglet's Singlish. If I can do this, I can use the mix to define the character. And I thought, that's wonderful! That's something I can do with Singlish. I can do this uniquely with Singlish, precisely because he has this mix of different languages.
HZ: That is magnificent. That is such a good idea.
GWEE LI SUI: This is something only I realized when I was starting to do the Grimm's because I realized if I want to give the different characters, or the different stories, different settings, different background: some are set in castles, some are set on the beach. Considering that I need to give a sense of a universe, I can with each story give a different quality of Singlish. If I realize that it's too difficult, it requires people to know too many words from different sources, then I will play it down a bit. But the point is to get the right balance. And the point is also not to avoid having multiplicity of languages, because that is central to Singlish. What I find interesting is people getting back to me and say, why do you use this word and not that word?
HZ: Feedback I get all the time too!
GWEE LI SUI: Of course, yes, with any language, even in English, you have a choice of words when you ask to find a substitute for a particular word. And that happens to Singlish, you know? And so if I choose one word, someone will say, “Why don't you do this?” Or the complaints I had originally would be like, “Oh, there are too many Malay words in your Tunku” meanwhile, the other side would say, “There are too many Hokkien words,” or too many Mandarin words, Chinese words… And then there'll be another side that says, “There's so few English words, we need more English words.”
HZ: Wow.
GWEE LI SUI: I say, look: why don't you guys do the translations yourself, and see the challenges I have to face, right? It cannot be this is my community's way of speaking Singlish and the rest of you, you find your own book;. I'm not doing that kind of Singlish translation, you know, I'm trying to find a kind of Singlish that respects everyone's version of Singlish. And it provides that window in which they can hear themselves, but they can also hear other people's Singlish. You have different communities having their own Singlish, and I hope my translations help to bring them together again, help them to listen to others and not just their own. And I think we are losing the multilingual aspect of Singlish, which I think is powerful, because it is about people from different communities trying to connect.
HZ: How do you feel it has shifted in your lifetime?
GWEE LI SUI: It's a dynamic language in a way. My parents’ Singlish would have a lot more Malay words. Pasar Melayu, street Malay, was the kind of dominant lingua franca spoken on the streets before independence and, so a lot of this actually went into Singlish initially, the Malay phrases are picked up less from our parents than from being in the army for the men, and that's where a lot of the Malay phrases come in. And also a lot of Hokkien phrases. For some reason, Hokkien is a preferred Chinese dialect if you want to swear or say something really vulgar.
HZ: Interesting.
GWEE LI SUI: Yeah! They all have their role in Singlish.
Also partly relating to the history of language policies in Singapore, because I guess in the 1980s, when they started to have this Speak Good Mandarin campaign trying to encourage all the different Chinese dialect groups’ speakers to all speak Mandarin: what happened was that a lot of these dialect speakers, like my parents, my grandparents: they do feel increasingly unable to connect with the newer generation that grew up speaking Mandarin taught to them in school. And so they created this kind of generation gap between the generations, and as a result of that, Singlish played this very interesting role. It's where all the dialects escape into. And so people speak Singlish as a way to connect between generations.
I think my generation, the younger generations these days, the Singlish has become very skewed to be dominantly English. And also because of the internet, they have picked up a lot of these phrases from elsewhere and kind of like weave them into their Singlish as well.
HZ: Yeah, it seems like so many new terms are being coined all the time.
GWEE LI SUI: Well, you know this as a linguist, that there are words that will go out of fashion and then come back in again after a few years; for some reason, something that triggered the relevance of that word or phrases, and it'll come back in again. For example there's one like “stylo milo” that was used during my father's generation, you know, as a way to describe something as being very stylish. and it's all Stylo Milo.
HZ: The Milo in “stylo milo” refers to the chocolate malt drink powder.
GWEE LI SUI: And Singlish loves rhymes. So it's just not enough to say stylish, it's stylo and milo. And so that was big during that time. I remember hearing that quite a lot and somehow, sometimes in the 1980s and 1990s, it kind of disappeared. Nobody used stylo milo because it's not stylo milo to use “stylo milo”. It went out of fashion. But I don't know, there's this retro thing, and the last few years, it's come back in fashion again.
HZ: I guess it's like each generation revives the clothing styles of just before they were born.
GWEE LI SUI: Yeah. I guess. There are words that will always be around, like shiok, lah, and all that, those are standard Singlish. But also, I guess all the Singlish speakers being able to feel, I mean, somehow, whether words are relevant to their current reality and current experiences.
HZ: How are people learning Singlish? Are there any formal classes anywhere? Or is it all from their peers and their families?
GWEE LI SUI: Good question. I think the best way to learn Singlish is to live among Singaporeans. If you watch YouTube, if you watch Instagram, on social media, they will have these clips that will promote Singlish. Those are not, not necessarily correct. They tend to simplify Singlish for laughs, and I guess to get clicks and all. There is certain meaning, of course, in what they're doing, but they are also not entirely accurate.
HZ: Another way people acquire or expand their Singlish is while doing national service in Singapore’s military, because it crosses the different linguistic backgrounds of all these young men who have been brought together.
GWEE LI SUI: There's no formal classes for very good reasons, because I think the state hasn't really come to a position of accepting Singlish officially yet. There are years in which Singlish has gone into really the bad books. But then I think in recent years, it seems like they have used Singlish to promote their own programs, their own websites.
HZ: For example the Government of Singapore advised citizens to get the COVID vaccine via a comedy song in Singlish, 'Get Your Shot, Steady Pom Pi Pi' - sorry for this earworm:
Clip of the song 'Get Your Shot, Steady Pom Pi Pi': “Singapore, don’t wait and see. Better get your shot, steady pom pi pi!”
The song is performed by Gurmit Singh as his very popular sitcom character Phua Chu Kang - “Steady pom pi pi” was one of his catchphrases, it means something along the lines of being calm in a crisis. We talked about him last episode because the government targeted him as a Singlish-speaking example of spreading bad English. But here they are two decades later taking advantage not only of his popularity, but Singlish as a way of communicating with the populace.
GWEE LI SUI: They themselves have gone into using Singlish understanding that that's the best way to reach Singaporeans. So it's unclear to me right now until they say something official where the position is on Singlish. And I'm not going to go make the mistake like I did when I wrote that, that New York Times article that got me into trouble.
HZ: Writing a New York Times article got Gwee into trouble?!
On 13 May 2016, the New York Times published an op-ed by Gwee Li Sui. He wrote: "Is the government’s war on Singlish finally over? Our wacky, singsong creole may seem like the poor cousin to the island’s four official languages, but years of state efforts to quash it have only made it flourish. Now even politicians and officials are using it." Gwee’s article included some Singlish terms, and a brief account of language policies in Singapore along with the status of Singlish. "Finally grasping that this language is irrepressible, our leaders have begun to use it publicly in recent years, often in strategic attempts to connect with the masses."
Ten days later, the New York Times published a letter from Li Lin Chang, who was then press secretary to the Prime Minister of Singapore. She refuted Gwee's article and said, "Standard English is vital for Singaporeans to earn a living and be understood not just by other Singaporeans but also English speakers everywhere. But English is not the mother tongue of most Singaporeans. For them, mastering the language requires extra effort. Using Singlish will make it harder for Singaporeans to learn and use standard English."
GWEE LI SUI: It was unexpected, because I don't think anything I said in that article was untrue. Also with a form of argument that I thought was passé, which is to equate Singlish with bad English. It was inherited argument, it’s a way of thinking that they had always stuck with, even though things have changed, and a large portion of society understood that Singlish is really a strong part of our identity, and to come down hard on it is to come down hard on part of ourselves. And when that happened, what is more immediately traumatic for me was that at that time, there were people who felt like this was a time to stick their voice out and speak out against Singlish. For about one or two months, it was a discussion in the press. People were writing in, complaining about Singlish. And I do get even hate mails; people would write to say that, "Because of you, my kid can't speak English properly.” “Because of people like you, it's creating all this social divide” and all that - I get blamed for all sorts of things!
HZ: Yeah, everything’s your fault.
GWEE LI SUI: Yeah, everything's my fault! And it's nothing to do with the kids that your kid go out with, the programs your kid watch, nothing to do with whether your kid actually studies hard, whether schools are teaching English correctly, all these are central to whether your kid learns his English or not. Singlish is a separate matter altogether. Even if a person speaks zero Singlish, there is no guarantee the person can speak good English.
At some level, I felt it's not really about Singlish, really. It's for certain people feeling that they need to show their support for government policies, or opposite people who feel like they need to say something against official ideas and all that. And so they take this as a way to have a kind of hostile discussion with each other. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do my own thing. I'm just going to write my Singlish books and, and you see for yourself. We can have all this discussion, but until you see a textual version of Singlish, you will not start to see that there is grammar - there is its own grammar. There is a certain integrity to the way we speak in Singlish, and that we are dealing with a young language. We are dealing with something that we ought to be protecting and not attacking because we have not yet known what it's capable of. Singlish is one of those things the potential of which we're yet to tap in properly. There can be so many things you can do with it. And with the translations themselves that I'm doing now that is to highlight that these were things that we could have been doing for decades and we did not.
The younger generation, I think, are more forward-looking and they're more enlightened on this issue, which is great, because a lot of the young people actually feel that it's not a conflict between speaking good English and Singlish.
HZ: You mentioned that there had been this negative response to your New York Times piece. Did you get anything like that when you published Spiaking Singlish or any of the translated novels?
GWEE LI SUI: Yeah, well, Spiaking Singlish, because of the humorous content, I think people, even if they don't agree with my thoughts on Singlish or don't like Singlish, they are willing to just close one eye. I’ve just felt like I don't want to have to talk about the debate or the issues about the debate, I just want to show them what it is. Showing is better than talking around the whole issue. So I did it, and people enjoyed it, they laughed about it. That was fun.
I think the real transgression happened when I was doing the translation. Because it felt, to them, wrong. Wrong that I am, instead of elevating Singlish, I'm making a mockery of these classics. I cannot be doing it right. That's the thing that I hope will go away with time. Once they realize the amount of thought and sensitivity I've put into the translation, with time, I think that will go away. But I do have people reacting quite badly to it, saying things like “burn the books” and all that. Yep. I do have people calling them to be burned.
HZ: It doesn't work if the books are electronic, so they're going to have to rethink that.
GWEE LI SUI: Except for Spiaking Singlish, the translations are not yet in electronic form. Might be at some stage. My hope is that they are saying this only because they have not actually opened the books, and not actually realizing if they were to give the book time, they will experience something they've never felt.
HZ: Maybe that's what they're scared of.
GWEE LI SUI: Maybe. But with the translations: once you see it as literature, once you see that Singlish can approach high literary language, once you realize that it is not something to be ashamed of, and that it is something that can even elevate literary texts or make it relevant to your own experiences in a powerful way, then we can take Singlish to the next level.
We constantly in Singapore always want to think about things that we can bring to the world, bring something productive, positive to the world. And yet here we have something that we are constantly trying to hold back, control, make less of, when it could have been so much more. Singlish, among other things, is a connecting language. It is highly absorbent. I think the reason why Singlish is so popular among tourists and also among people in different parts of the world is that they can find an entry point to Singlish. Whether you're in Pakistan, China, Southeast Asia, you can always find an entry point to Singlish.
When you go into Singlish, you go into a very heavily nuanced language that has connections directly to what is happening in social political world here. And in that sense, every word recalls something that happens in the past of the country, and it also shows a very creatively trying to make sense of their existence. When the dialects got into trouble, when they were not allowed to be spoken publicly, officially, they escaped into Singlish. Singlish becomes the refuge. There's so many things that Singlish does for the history of Singapore, in the history of Singapore, that I think one day when we excavate it, we will learn properly to love it.
HZ: Stacey Mei Yan Fong learned to love it, after she moved to the USA for college.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Because that was the first move that I did completely on my own. It wasn't dictated by like my dad's job or like anything like that; I made the choice to move here on my own. And, you know, when you come from like a Chinese family, you never really think of yourself as a one. You think of yourself as a part of a bigger whole and like all of your actions also dictate how the rest of your family is going to be seen or like what you're going to do. And for me, I was a pretty rebellious kid, and so I was always made to feel shame that I wasn't like going to be a doctor or like going to do as well as the rest of my family, my siblings or my cousins. So when I moved to America, I felt such freedom. And in that freedom, it allowed me to acknowledge and explore parts of my childhood, like being from Singapore, in a fresh set of eyes and really own who I was as a person. I am my own version of what a Singaporean person or a Chinese person is. And that doesn't make me less than or more than anyone else. And before, when I would go home and visit my extended family, hearing Singlish felt really triggering because I was just like, “Oh God, I'm not like these people. Like, I moved away. I'm not going to sound like these people or talk like this at all, because it's like not the correct way to talk.” And then, now when I hear it, or if I hear it by meeting people in the city or people I've met, like on book tour and stuff, I find it so comforting. I think it's this weird shift I've had as an adult where I'm no longer embarrassed by the fact that I'm not white, which is such a sad thing to think about, but I'm so comfortable with my identity now and who I am and how growing up in all those different places brought me to where I am now. Singlish now is very comforting to me.
HZ: Today we heard from Stacey Mei Yan Fong and Gwee Li Sui. Stacey Mei Yan Fong is the author of the delectable cookbook 50 Pies, 50 States: An Immigrant's Love Letter to the United States Through Pie. Gwee Li Sui is a poet, editor, academic and translator of books including The Little Prince/The Leeter Tunku, and Kaka Farm. He also wrote Spiaking Singlish: A Companion To How Singaporeans Communicate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
jobbery, noun: the practice of using a public office or position of trust for one's own gain or advantage.
Try using ‘jobbery’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Thanks to Y-Lynn Ong.
Martin Austwick provided editorial assistance and also the music; listen to it with lyrics via palebirdmusic.com.
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