The World is a Big Place

 The Stupidity of Linguistic Chauvinism  

I ran into a British Born Chinese girl at an event organized by my sister tonight. The conversation inevitably turned to the topic of growing up between East and West. Both of us admitted to being Chinese illiterate and she talked about how everyone in Hong Kong called her a Banana (Yellow on the outside but white on the inside), which was a moniker my mother takes pride in when describing us.

Where we differed was in attitude. She expressed frustration that people in the Chinese speaking world couldn’t accept that someone who looked Chinese wouldn’t speak Chinese. She said, “Can’t they understand that you could have been adopted by a White Family and therefore wouldn’t know Chinese. I explained to her that while Singapore is predominantly English speaking and I am most comfortable in the English language (and admittedly not comfortable in Chinese), there are situations where I need to use Chinese because the people, I deal with a more likely to reveal things to me in Chinese than they would be in English.

I do get where a lot of Chinese kids who are born in the West come from. Why should they speak Chinese when they identify as American, British or wherever they were born. Chinese was at best a language that they spoke to old folks and only when forced to. As far as these guys are concerned, their entire life is going to be in a Western environment and there’s no earthly reason for them to look at the Chinese language.

The reason why I get this, is simple. I grew up in a similar situation. I only maintained enough Cantonese to order food in the take away (the quality of food is inevitably better when you order in Chinese) but other than that, there was no reason for me to use a Chinese language.

However, I believed and I still believed that the future would inevitably be outside the Western world and so I returned to Singapore. It turned out that my affinity would be the other Asian Giant as well as the Arabian Gulf and so instead of being in more Mandarin speaking situations, I found more value in picking up a phrase or two of Hindi from Bollywood movies as well as the odd Arabic phrase here and there.

Still, I understand that I will be in situations where I have to deal with people that will only respond in Chinese. Like it or not, China is a huge market with an increasingly well to do class of consumers. Many of the “good ones” will learn English but their main language will be Chinese and to reach them, you must have some knowledge of Chinese.

Then, 2016 happened. The Americans voted for Trump and his brand of self-serving nationalism and the British decided that they needed to protect themselves from people who do work and voted to leave the EU. The problem was both sets of nationalists had no plan to get things done. The “strength” they promised turned out to be nothing more than chest thumping. You’re talking about people who love to provoke fights but when the other guy says “boo” they suddenly discover the ability to fly.

The best tell tale sign of how well Brexit has turned out can be seen in this sign in Margate with Nigel Farage, the genius who championed Brexit:

 

 The fact that someone like Farage can sell a bad idea so successfully by appealing to the worst in people, should be a sign that depending on a single world for survival is plain stupid.

This is not to say that the BRICS countries are paradise. They also have plenty of issues. However, the Western world has shown that it can change for the worse and if you don’t fit into the mainstream, you can find yourself in a sticky situation.

I remember being a supermarket promoter at an NTUC and having to communicate in Chinese to the heart landers. It was really tough for me to do it but I kept reminding myself that I better get used to operating in Chinese because Trump was President of the USA and the British had allowed nationalism to triumph over economic pragmatism.

This is not to say that English will be replaced as the world language anytime soon or that the English-speaking world will collapse. However, one should always be prepared to operate in a different environment than the one grew up in. The world is constantly changing and if you are only able to work in one type of environment, you’re begging to made extinct.