We Got to The Part Of
The Mass Where The Archbishop Does
The Homily

Stephanie Dogfoot

I mentioned I’d never heard an accent like that before.

My father said it was because archbishop is Teochew
and went to Montfort School. As if that was an explanation.

Isn’t it funny to hear what the accent of your dialect group sounds like
for the first time at 33. 

My father claims he can tell if a person is Teochew
went to Catholic school and grew up in Hougang

in the 50s based on how he pronounces certain words.
Once, an old woman came up to him in a waiting room, said 

she could tell he was from Serangoon from the way he spoke
into his phone: how accents evolve to fit districts,

how plants evolve into species even on the tiniest of islands
to fit the hundreds of tiny landscapes they find: the forests, the swamps

all the ones that disappeared long before they declared the first patch
of forest here reserved once they had cleared all the Chinese squatters

At the foot of Bukit Timah Hill there is a picture of the church
near my mother’s childhood home, started by a French priest

who knew enough Teochew to preach sense into them.
I am told that it is a rough-sounding dialect.

How they only saved that forest because the rest of the country was on fire,
soil sucked flammable by cash crops. My mother tells the story of the lalang

next to the kampung behind her childhood bungalow bursting into flames:
it took three hours to put it out. When you rip out old roots

and replace them with species that feast on everything left, the soil
may take centuries to recover. She misses the attap roofs and roosters

but still blames herself for marrying someone who grew up in a kampung
Our family’s dirty secret: my father spoke only Teochew until he was seven.

We still laugh at him when he says ‘broad-walk’ and ‘O-lump-pics’.
I still call myself Teochew when I order the porridge.