Glass Castle: Born in 1965, you in essence grew up side-by-side with the nation of Singapore. Could you talk a little about the evolving expectations for women in society over your lifetime?

Sylvia Lim: I did not feel it in my family as my parents treated boys and girls similarly. But I have seen evolution outside of my family. These days, it would not be acceptable to ask a girl not to further her studies so that her brother can do so. Another phenomenon is that being a homemaker is now a luxury compared to the past, when economic pressure and the cost of living was not so severe.

Jolene, a long time blog reader, informs me that one of her new projects, along with collaborators Athena and Reine, has reached fruition. In Jolene’s own words:

We’re pleased to announce the launch today of a new webzine focusing on women’s welfare and gender relations in Singapore and the region. The inaugural issue includes an interview with NCMP Sylvia Lim and an explanation of the aims and aspirations for this new online community.

http://www.glass-castle.org/

Updates to the main zine are every other Monday, but the blog will be updated on a more frequent basis. Please have a look, and have your browser bookmark ready if you like what you see!

The quote at the beginning comes from an exclusive interview with NMP Sylvia Lim on her experiences in male-dominated sectors of Singapore society, from her early days as a police officer to her current portfolio as NMP.

Feminism to some connotes bra-burning fanaticism, but in reality it’s more about gender equality from the women’s point of view. While it may seem abstract and remote, and hence a non-issue to some readers, Jolene lists some common examples of inequity in her inaugural editorial in Glass Castle:

Here’s a few example of sex inequality in Singapore: poor women are purchased from neighbouring countries to be all-in-one cleaners, sex partners and wombs. When husbands force intercourse on their wives, the law does not see this as rape. Women are bombarded with advertising insisting that our bodies are problems requiring solutions.

(Glass Castle’s list doesn’t include one example too painfully obvious to mention: no national service for Singapore women. It’s not just about women when it comes to gender inequality.)

And yet it’s the women whom, all too often, get the short end of the stick. Glass Castle continues with this:

We do not accept that inequality is part of our culture that must be preserved against Western imperialism, modernity, or anything else. Women everywhere - in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, not just in the West - are facing down inequality. For thousands of years women in most places had almost no say in what the “culture” of “their” societies involved. The “cultures” of our immigrant ancestors included crippling women in the name of beauty, and throwing living women into fires when their husbands died. Culture does and must change.

If you care about changing our society for the better, do check out Glass Castle and say hi to Athene, Jolene and Reine, the team working hard to bring you news and analysis on the women’s welfare front.

Ah, for more days like this.

Somebody I knew died and I was involved with sorting up matters. At some point we found out that the ICA had recorded the wrong date on the death certificate issued to the family. (Yes, they handle those too.) Despite several attempts by the lawyer dealing with the estate to rectify the situation - even mailing out a copy of the obituary run in the Straits Times to prove that the death certificate was incorrect - the ICA stubbornly refused to admit that they had made a mistake. It took an extremely angry and upset letter by the immediate family to ICA - still grieving and in the middle of handling funeral arrangements - before they would even deign to fix the date of death. On top of that, ICA still charged the estate extra for corrected copies of the death certificate. I think it was $60 per certificate or total, I don’t remember.

Seriously, ICA, why on earth would you think that your date was more correct than the family? I mean, who would have known it better? Or cared more, for that matter.

That’s why I’m not at all surprised to hear that ICA screwed up again, by letting bureaucratic red tape triumph over common sense. Again. They’ve become so obsessed with their rules and regulations that they don’t even seem to want to think about why they do things the way they do, or whether or not what they do or say even makes sense.

This is why I hate Singaporean bureaucrats so much, and why I am never returning. I don’t ever, ever want to interact with heartless, soulless people ever again, or live in a country where such people are allowed to run it without any heed to accountability or responsibility.

[A]rticles like this [...] trivialize the difficulty of learning two extremely different languages. - Fox

Fox blogged about yet another holier-than-thou article in the Straits Times written by an English-speaking Singaporean, Lee Seng Giap (currently on the NTU faculty), who wrote about how he grew up speaking only (mostly) Hokkien, but strove really hard to learn Chinese and English in school and is now an experienced bilingual translator of both.

It’s a really touching story, to be honest, but it’s one containing a good admixture of “I can do it, therefore it’s not hard, and hence so can you”, and even perhaps a touch of hagiography. Fox has already written on why this article annoys him, and much of Fox’s post is relevant to this discussion. I’ll just point out the logical fallacies not pointed out so far.

First, the ”I can do it, can you” argument is a fallacy of overgeneralization, and is most clearly expressed in this paragraph:

Based on the misconception that Chinese is a difficult language for those from an English-speaking background - and that English too is difficult for those from a dialect-speaking environment - I should not have done so well in these two languages.

It’s clearly a non sequitur, and if anything is a testament to just how hard the writer had to work in order to learn Chinese and English when they weren’t spoken in his family at home. It’s great to hear that someone was so successful in learning a language when starting out from nothing, but that doesn’t mean that therefore learning Chinese is easy.

Second, the faint-hearted appeal to authority by quoting a theoretical linguist is hinted on by this quote:

Vili Maunula, a theoretical linguist, writes: ‘All languages are, to the best of our current understanding of human languages, equally suitable for conversation. No language is more expressive or less expressive than the other, neither is one language easier or more difficult.’

However, the appeal is lackluster and weakened by the fact the source appears to be a comment left in this blog post.  If Maunula wasn’t quoting himself from another source, then clearly this is a statement that isn’t really meant to be authoritative anyway. Even so, the quote is taken completely out of context - the original quote quite clearly referred to the utility of languages in expressing concepts, whereas the letter-writer simply shoehorned it into his exposition of why learning Chinese for English speakers shouldn’t be difficult.

Third, the analysis on the average rate of language acquisition is completely absurd. Lee uses character counts as a proxy for learning chinese, and long-windedly writes:

The Ministry of Education (MOE) announced last year a list of 1,600 to 1,700 Chinese characters for CL (Chinese language) pupils, and 1,800 to 1,900 characters for HCL (higher Chinese language) pupils in primary school.

There are 52 weeks in a year and 312 weeks in six years. If one divided 1,700 and 1,900 respectively by 312 multiplied by seven days, CL students would have to learn 0.78 character a day, while HCL students would have to learn 0.87 character.

This accounting is faulty on at least two counts. First, this accounting ironically does not account for school holidays nor for the blatantly obvious fact that schoolchildren don’t spend every hour of the day learning Chinese. A more realistic accounting taking these two factors into account yields instead approximately 6 yrs x 36 weeks/yr ((The primary school year has 40 weeks, but I’m taking out a few weeks per year for things like exams and falling sick and lessons wasted scolding children and making them behave and things like that.)) x 3 hours/wk = 648 hours of Chinese instruction, in which to learn 1,700 or 1,900 characters. That works out to 2.6 - 2.9 characters per hour in class, or 8 - 9 characters per week on average.

Second, learning Chinese is hardly the neat and linear process that this calculation suggests. Chinese is far more than memorizing an arbitrary set of characters. That’s what students have to do on top of mastering the basics of reading, writing, grammar¹ and vocabulary. That’s just the extra baggage on top of learning the language due to its singular orthography² that in theory wouldn’t exist if Chinese switched to an alphabetic orthography. Consider that of the major languages that had at one point or another made use of Chinese characters - Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese come to mind - all but one have given up entirely on Chinese characters.³ Even in the one exception, Japanese, there has been significant pressure to reform the language to limit the number of kanji to be used in that language. That, more than anything else, says a lot about how hard it is to learn the Chinese writing system.

Yet somehow this is all to cognizant of how Chinese is taught in many schools in Singapore - as lists of characters and words to memorize. Often students are trained on rote learning, and to be able to distinguish 辨 from 辫, and mostly useless vocabulary like 珊瑚 or 打喷嚏. And even when there is some faint attempt at some discussion of Chinese culture, it’s hardly ever presented as an exposition of how things like Confucian philosophy 儒家思想 permeates contemporary Chinese societies, but rather on factual matters of traditions like “for the Duanwu festival 端午节 people eat zongzi 粽子”, or just simply thinly-veiled morality lessons. Why, then, is it not surprising that few students express an interest in the language when in school?

The result is nothing short of tragic - many Chinese speaking Singaporeans don’t have true monolingual proficiency in Chinese. I mean this in the sense that the vast and overwhelming majority of Chinese-speaking Singaporeans that I know, even those from “Cina” backgrounds, are not entirely comfortable forming a single sentence in pure Chinese for anything other than the most trivial of statements. For example, even something as simple as “I want to shop at Takashimaya” is most often rendered as “我要去 taka shopping”. Saying the correct “我要去高岛屋逛街” would sound strange and overly pendantic to them.

All this masks a simple, unavoidable fact that Lee attempts to refute: for English speakers, Chinese is really, really difficult to learn compared to many other languages. The differences between English and Chinese are considerable, such as:

1. the different orthographies (ways to write the language),
2. the conjugation of nouns and verbs in English but not Chinese,
3. the tones 阴阳上去 in Chinese that don’t exist in English,
4. the different word order for prepositions (especially 的 and “of”),
5. the use of “measurement words” 量词 in Chinese,
6. the use of mood particles 呢、啦、咯、etc. in Chinese,

and many others. And that’s just the technical aspects, excluding things like cognates, the more prevalent use of ellipsis in Chinese, idioms and implicit cultural norms. English and Chinese simply have much less in common than (say) English and French.

In reality, each difference represents yet another obstacle to gaining proficiency, and it’s only made harder by the lack of common ground for the speaker of one to grasp the other. A truly bilingual speaker of both must be cognizant (if at a subconscious, if not fully conscious level) of the similarities and differences.

Perhaps by being Singaporeans, we naturally underestimate how hard it is to attain bilingual aptitude in both English and Chinese. Consider how rare it is to find examples of such bilingualism anywhere else. Both English and Chinese are notoriously difficult to master for anyone who’s not a native speaker. English speakers trip over tones and get exasperated with writing “let’s eat breakfast” 吃早餐吧; Chinese speakers famously stumble over the many pronunciations of English vowels⁴ and forgetting to conjugate verbs.

That there are true bilingual speakers is a great thing, but anyone who pretends that there isn’t any difficulty is learning both is just either ignoring the facts, or could even be deluded as to his or her true proficiency in either. One just needs to get some experience in teaching Chinese or English as a second language to discover how hard it is to teach one to a speaker of the other.

References

1. Lee Seng Giap, Straits Times, Who says it’s hard to learn Chinese?, 2008-06-04.
2. Fox, Next Stop Wonderland, ST: Who says it’s hard to learn Chinese?, 2006-06-03.
3. Vili Maunula, comment dated 2007-09-18 in Lingformant, Number of languages in the world to be cut in half in a century, 2005-10-11.

1. Thankfully, Chinese does not have verb conjugations, which are the bane of learners of Romance languages.
2. The arcane nature of the Chinese “alphabet” is probably goes a long way toward explaining why spelling bees in Chinese are nonexistent. Intriguingly, China apparently holds contests for kids to look up words in dictionaries, although neither of the PRC students in my lab have ever heard of such a thing.
3. The one remaining exception in Korean is in names.
4. The most egregious example from PRC students that I’ve encountered is “usually”, which they often pronounce YOO-ral-e.

The first time you do something, it’s science. The second time, it’s engineering. A third time - it’s just being a technician.

- Clifford Stoll

It’s been a long time since I sat here under an old aspen tree and whittled away the afternoon looking other people enjoying the sunlit foliage and sun-dappled grass. Right now there’s a wheelchair-bound grandma walking her giant Rottweiler, a three-year-old playing frisbee with a gaggle of glamor girls, and several dozen semi-nude sunbathers lying on the soft carpet grass.

Somehow munching on a few Chick-fil-A nuggets and sipping my Diet Coke never seemed more decadent.