I am not a scholar of English or literature nor I am a linguist. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language.
I am a student. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language–the way it can evoke an emotion , a visual image , a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all–all the Englishes I grew up with.
Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was talking to a half dozen of my classmates while I was waiting for the elementary school bell to ring, to return home from school together with my sister. The chitchatting was going along well enough, until I remember one major difference that made the whole chattering sound wrong. My mother was next to me. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me converse one sole language , using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “The style is the person. We can’t change…” and “A winner never quits , a quitter never wins and that thus-to-thus”– a talk filled with carefully thought grammatical phrases, burdened , it suddenly seemed to me , with nominalized forms, past prefect tenses , conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
Just a few days ago, I was in the car with my family, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about children who don’t appreciate their parents and I heard myself saying this, “Now children always like that la” My sisters were with us as well and they didn’t notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It’s because over the ten years of my life, I’ve often used the same kind of English with my family, and they use it with me. It has become our language of intimacy , a different sort of English that relates to family talk , the language I grew up with.
So you’ll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I’ll quote what my mother said during our recent conversation. “I sing the song, you angry. Like I sing like some chicken at the cheap hotel. You sing song, I listen to you. People hear you , their ear break off. Sound so horrible,” and ” Now people like you , very hard to them listen to me. You all like big man. All need to be serve. Chores all I do.”
You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads Lime magazine, Astro guide book , watch Ellen’s show, catching up with the latest news update at CNN and even watch BBC’s entertainment show–all the things I can’t begin to understand. She stayed with a family of five which all four family members converse entirely in English. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some understand up to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she was speaking pure Chinese. But to me , my mother’s English is perfectly clear , perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue. Her language , as I hear it , is vivid , direct , full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things , made sense of the world.
Lately , I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others , I have described it to people as “broken” or “rojak” English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “fractured English” or “limited English”, for example. But they seem just as bad , as if everything is limited, including people’s perception of the limited English speaker.
I know this for a fact ,because when I was growing up , my mother’s “limited English” limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is , because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in shopping lots , at banks and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good advice, pretended not to understand her , or even acted as if they did not hear her.
My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. She used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to an office in Kuala Lumpur. She needed to find a bank report of cash out money. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convinving, “This is Mdm. Liu”.
And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why they don’t send me the paper report, we need to see got money or not to get out. So mad they don’t tell properly, losing me money.”
And them I said in perfect English, “Yes , I am getting rather concerned. You had agreed to check the bank record two weeks ago, but I received no reply what so ever.”
Then she began to talk more loudly. “What they can’t find, I go to KL tell him front of his boss, you no serve customer?” And I was trying to calm her down , make her quiet,, while telling the customer service officer, “I can’t tolerate further excuses. If I don’t receive any reply of this matter immediately , I am going to have to speak to your manager when I am in KL next week.” And sure enough, the following week, she got her bank report sent directly to our home.
I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologist or linguists probably will tell you that a person’s developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that it affected my results on achievement tests, SPM 1119 and my Cambridge O-level English. While my English skills were never judged as poor , compared to math, English cannot be considered my strong suit. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
So I wrote this–and she read of my early drafts–I began to write essays using all the Englishes I grew up with : the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of better term might be described as “simple” ; the English she used with me , which for lack of better term described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese , which could certainly be described as “watered down” and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English ,her internal language , and for that I sought to preserve the essence , but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal : her intent, her passion , her imagery , the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother would certainly give me her verdict : “So easy to read.”
