Everybody’s into tracing their roots these days. But given my somewhat rojak history, I find it hard to identify exactly which root to follow in my genealogical investigations. Should I try Penang baba, Myanmar Chinese baba, or mainland Chinese Chinese? Being a 21st c Chinese of diasporic descent, things can get a little tough when you’re trying to pin down that elusive and slippery salamander called identity.
Where my main cultural base is concerned, I have to confess a few glaring inadequacies. I have never been able to speak Chinese with any facility or proficiency, and I can barely read the most elementary characters, even in simplified form. I can do a pinyin-style thing, but I would have no idea what I was reading.
When I was a child, my family vacillated between a determined effort (on my father’s part) to be entirely and traditionally Chinese, and the obvious westernised things we did/watched/read/said (on the part of my siblings and me). My father’s attempt to establish identity through preserving tradition and culture didn’t succeed all that well. We turned out to be hopelessly anglicised …
These days though, I envy my Singaporean nieces for their bilingualism. They speak and write both English and Mandarin effortlessly. Also, my mother has noticed that everytime their parents hover, they change their keyboards from English to Chinese, which their elders do not understand. There is refuge in language …
I have tried twice in my lifetime to learn Mandarin, and twice failed. I managed quite nicely the first time round, and pretty well mastered the pinyin. But I guess a lot depends on the kind of teacher you get and the kind of learning style you have. I would rather my teacher start with grammar, and systematically describe the rules to me. It makes for mental tidiness … I guess my brain needs orderliness, which is why I’m convinced that several steel grey cabinets sit inside my skull with files and papers appropriately tagged.
I have noticed though that Chinese lao shi (teacher) have a thing about ‘spontaneity’, inspite of their external and very evident stuffiness. And they do not like describing grammar rules at all! They make an unfortunate assumption about their students: if you’re Chinese, you should already know how Chinese works. Therefore, there is no real need to explain grammar. Just learn the words. What they forget is that people like me begin with a half-baked sense of a dialect (say, Cantonese) and proceed into the regions of confusion where Mandarin is concerned. Do they even take the trouble to tell you that there are many times when Cantonese grammar doesn’t work the way Mandarin grammar does? Or that Cantonese has many more tones than Mandarin’s four? NO! They assume–and wrongly!–that you know this stuff! My question is, if I know it, why should I bother to pay you to teach me? Alas, the question remains unanswered …
These efforts at touching base with my culture and ancestry did not bear fruit that lasts. I once told my lao shi about my great-grandfather, who was an aspiring scholar before coming south and becoming a tin mine owner. Now this was something of family pride to have a Chinese scholar tucked away in one’s genealogy. My great-grandfather had passed his district exams and was duly called a xiu cai. He even had a name change then: it was customary to give yourself a scholarly name. My lao shi looked at me tellingly, screwing one eye almost shut as he pronounced authoritatively: “Form Three!” Of course I quickly added that great-granddad had gone on to study for his provincials, at which Yao lao shi shot back with an uncompromising: “Form Five!” Well, family pride punctured, there was little left to do than to agree to learn a few Chinese songs much sung at karaoke joints. From thereon, I slip-slided down the path of tardiness in doing my homework … and soon, Chinese receded into the distant horizon of forgotten things.
After the failed language study, we made contact with my great-aunt from China, who was a veteran soldier of World War II. Or rather, she made contact with us. She impressed my parents’ Malay neighbour greatly by speaking Malay, which she remembered from her early life in Malaya. During the war, she was in Chinese Intelligence, which probably accounts for my secret desire to be a PI! She sent many pictures to us about the ancestral home. It is mainly mountains and hills, we being Hakka. The house that great-granddad built for his family in China more than 100 years ago has been divided up into different compartments. I cannot recall if it is now the location of some extended Wang family business, or if my cousins I-don’t-know-how-many-times-removed live there. But the house is really still standing, and they still call it the “new house”! Of course, it’s enough for me to look at a few photos … I don’t think a trip down the ancestral memory lane is anywhere on my list of things to do. Apparently, the home village is so isolated that even the WW II Japanese soldiers missed the turn that led to it. Everyone was spared during the war!
Of course, my then 79 year old great-aunt wrote out from memory the entire list of generations of the family back 500 years. That was when we first turned up in Chunghua, Guangdong from Fujian. So in theory, I know half a thousand years’ worth of Wang ancestors. That sort of impressed me until I realised that 500 years in Chinese history is a mere inch in a mile …
One would imagine my confusion, therefore, being cast upon the gloomy tide of many cultures and racial links … drifting hither and thither amid the flotsam and jetsam of woebegone histories … The truth is, sometimes that hits you for a while. But living in such an annoyingly colourful and unashamedly epicurean world like Malaysia, the uncertain tide gives way more often to the sublime happiness that pure rojak spells! When some identity mist surrounds me, threatening annihilation, should I stare at the night sky wonderingly, asking such profound questions as: “Who am I? What am I?” or, in the more pragmatic realities of the day, sidle down the street to the nearest mamak stall for some good old pasembur?
All my “roots” wanderings have led me to a conclusion. It is a good conclusion because I like it. The thing is, being rojak and living in a rojak country like Malaysia really appeals. I like the heat and the silliness, the ignorance and the cincai-ness of things, and of course, the unending stream of cuisines that come from more countries and cultures that I could ever trace in my blood! In the end, I like the mixed-upness of life as a child of the dispersion. Would I ever try learning Mandarin again? Maybe. But Malay sounds just as good.
