Lingua Franca

Cher Tan

FUCK'S SAKE!

                                                          WAH LAU!

                                                                                                                           MY WORD!

WTF!

It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood when I learned that ‘chalet’ was a word in Franco-Provençal to mean ‘holiday home’ and not a word in Singlish to mean ‘holiday home’. Supposedly no emphasis on either syllable. By then, my brain had already been, as is wont to say, ‘internet poisoned’. Netspeak: the cadence of the extremely online, a cacophony of profiles hungry for community and connection. The internet was where I furthered my education in writing, discoursing and conversing and communicating and arguing and attempting, but not speaking aloud. Until recently I thought ‘banal’ rhymed with ‘anal,’ and until now I have to say ‘impetus’ twice to get it correct. Eem-pee-tss. Same goes for ‘euphemism.’ You-fair-mi-zm. But who cares. Everyone knows what I’m saying.

Think about it, some kinds of speech are pure internet brain. There, that was one example of internet brain. Let’s try again: internet brain is an affliction on the masses, a global vice we’re all complicit in, a playground of individuality and mimicry turned up to ten. Do you ever think, why me internet brain? And then the void answers. Me:              No one:        Of course that’s internet brain too.

As the unattributed saying goes, ‘The web was invented in Switzerland, and the computer was invented in the United Kingdom, but the internet was North American.’ Before it was to even begin, the premise of that story had already been set up; the English that the internet spoke would adopt a certain flair, directed by those with more visibility and reproduced by others to much affect. Some thievery too. I mean, MOOD. I’ve never said that out loud. But like I’ve definitely engaged with these ways of expression – pretty next level amirite? Shoot it into my veins. Open one window and are you able to block out these dates, see attached. Open another window and lol r u srs…tbh wild…but hmu l8r. The next window goes fucken stg why would I make this up man; and then the next window something like my bandwidth for this is low, but I suppose we can try and set this up for the next few weeks; and then in the next window sorry that sounds toxic as fuck, hope you’re doing – Congratulations! You Have Won! Inside yet another window, Patricia Lockwood writes[i], ‘It had […] once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other.’

                                                                  TALK COCK SING SONG

BLATHER ON

          TALK THROUGH YOUR ARSE

                                                                            TL;DR

I only really know English. Several words in Mandarin (from when I paid attention in school), a few words in Japanese (from all the anime I watched), some words in Malay (from when a few minahs allowed me to join their friend group at a McDonald’s we worked at), some words in French (from when I had a brief flirtation with a Belgian woman), a few words in Bahasa Indonesia (from when I picked it up amongst Indonesian punx), a smattering of words in German (from when I thought it was a lofty language to try and learn). There are other odds and ends (hygge, molto bene, mukbang, hiraeth), of which I gleaned as a result of being extremely online. But English is the language I dream in.

When they said ‘live the dream’ I felt it. Dreaming bleeds into speaking bleeds into writing. The English I know culminates in three established varieties: British (because Received Pronunciation, or at least its simulation, in an ex-colony causes people to cream their pants), Singlish (because it was a common English that migrants could use to understand each other as Asians united in a new colony) and Ocker (because it was – as a new settler-migrant – and remains spoken in the circles I move in). And the fourth kind haha it’s rather obvs but then you lowkey already know lmao. Not flexing btw.

So – liddat lor. That’s my story. You can say, eh why you never tell me earlier I was trying to figure out your accent. But I’ve never been fully compelled to. If you know, you know, you know? Sometimes silence means it’s such a non-event that you have accepted it and taken it for granted; sometimes logorrhoea means it’s something you still need to convince yourself what for. You can say, of course lah, you Chinese-Singaporean what, why would you experience shame at codeswitching when you’ve never had to try and be seen in your formative life? It’s true: I chose invisibility because I could. As a light-skinned anglophone, it’s easy to fall into step with it; there are no hard questions, only a convenient path that’s been pre-lit by centuries of dominance. That’s the thing I’m still working out – how to pursue shapelessness while concreting a self that is mutable? I don’t wish to wring my hands and be all like, ‘I go to the west become POC’, then even if I haven’t spoken Singlish for years, I suddenly make a performance of it, because it’s authentic, OK? Stay true to your roots.

Did you know that chicken rice originated from Hainan Island? And that roti prata was originally called parotta, from Kerala? And then you cross the Causeway to Malay(si)a and it kena call roti canai; no longer a round, flattened shape but cut up into slivers. That’s no croissant for ya. Within the routes of capital and trade lie a kind of evolution from the supreme-same, each iteration remade to its time and place. I’m a child of empire, but I’m also a child of my time. And when both crash headlong into each other willy-nilly and pell-mell, what ya reckon is gonna happen? It’s not supposed to be a mess; it’s supposed to be a comfortable disharmony. Five-foot three. 160 cm. Who can say? I don’t give two shits. You say I say who confirm? Two wrongs don’t make a right. You can believe in two things at once though. Bit weird innit.

WHY YOU SO LIDDAT?

                                                                  WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU?

         YOU RIGHT MATE?

                                                   U OK?

It depends on who I’m speaking to. No one goes into the meeting room and then switches over to their party voice unless they already hold some kind of power. No one goes into the kopitiam begging for pardon either. I mean, some do - but that’s their prerogative. What I’m trying to say is you’re not the same to your drinking friend to your lover to your colleague to your internet friend to your casual acquaintance to your dog. But equally, we are living in a time of context collapse where these boundaries are becoming superfluous, which ironically prompts a chase for that one single self. Cannot lah. Absolutely impossible. When I’m on LSD I can’t speak because I can’t decide which voice I’d like to use. Blimey! And when I do try it’s kinda all of them. I wrote this essay dead-set sober though.

Originally this essay started out as a plea for understanding. Whose understanding? Some kind of centre. I wanted to explain, oh, here’s how it all began and how it evolved. Straight-up pulp to the shithouse. Then I didn’t look at it for three years and realised my understanding of the centre had collapsed. Which is to say I no longer give a shit. You know that Marilyn Monroe quote: I don’t even know if she actually said it. But chuck it on my Pinterest gravestone in Comic Sans font size 20 when I die.

Now I’m being facetious. There’s no good side or bad side. As if I needed to spell it out hey. Sucked in. I could write some pithy thing about this sort of self-discovery being a part of the human condition. Which isn’t to say that I think I’m above or below it; rather it’s that I would be more happy to not try and peg it as either a universal thing or an individual thing. Verily, as Aimé Césaire once wrote[ii], ‘I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the universal.’ Ya I don’t think it’s really that simple.

Sometimes I watch too much Peep Show and my inner monologue begins to adopt a comic Britishness. When I binged on Seinfeld, a generic New York accent filled my mind, its irritating lilt and vocal fry taking over my consciousness. As a kid, I watched Masters of the Sea and remember its clipped Singapore Standard English as an aspirational marker, then flicked over to the next channel where the zany Animaniacs screamed at me, also aspirational. Same goes for Aussie dramas. New to the Yabba? Best place in Australia. God be a useless cunt! Why put it on the internet for every hairy dick and fanny to see? The linguistic hegemony will be televised. In an essay interrogating what he describes as the individualist yet homogeneous ‘Kinfolk aesthetic’[iii], and which he later developed to call ‘Airspace’[iv], Kyle Chayka wryly notes his own inclination towards the same: ‘Lined up, they seem like the punchline of a joke at my own expense, the reduction of an identity to a few arbitrary objects, and yet I feel an unjustifiable loyalty to them as mine.’

                  ANYHOW ONLY

                                                                                        HELTER-SKELTER

                                      SLAPDASH

                                                                       CHAOTIC ENERGY

I once put on my Ocker voice to a Singaporean friend. Another time, I put on my Singlish voice to an Australian friend. Both remain vivid in my mind: the concurrent feeling of pride and disgust. I felt dirty in different ways - decadent and debased. Neither felt good. The responses were different too. Wah, can lah. And: he he he. It’s damn odd when you have to choose. What if they were both (and all) an amalgamation? But everyone loves a linear story.

My lover has heard them all. He has experienced his own version of codeswitching too. Years ago, I remember drunkenly explaining to one of my chosen brothers - who has also known me both in the old country and new - that I would like to not stand out as much as it is humanly possible. Yet still be myself. A performance of sorts that arises from reaction. You know, we live in a society. His silent assent spoke volumes. When we chat, we defer to internet lingo anyway, our respective histories bleeding into the tone, unifying and discordant; a solidarity through difference. He has his own voice too, a combination of old and new. The borders of the nation-state are intractable between us, thanks to the thing (punk) that saved our lives.

If this preoccupation with linearity isn’t the pursuit of purity I literally have no idea what it is. It incorporates a sly sleight of hand: everyone loves deviating from the script until it becomes incomprehensible or unaspirational to a centre. Why should we want to understand unbelonging? Why should we strive towards an indistinguishable separation? There’s a sense of hypothetical loss – like a thing you keep imagining will disappear, so your actions cause it to disappear. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym writes that ‘this points to a paradox of institutionalised nostalgia: the stronger the loss, the more it is overcompensated with commemorations, the starker the distance from the past, and the more it is prone to idealisations.’ History’s influence is strong; it stunts the imagination. I don’t feel myself wanting to reach towards that original Wenchang chicken rice because I know it’s not there - it’s become nasi ayam, cơm gà rau thơm and khao man gai. Who knows what else. But the unsullied past is like a healing wound: even if the present is worse, how many people actually remember? It’s the feeling of invincibility that’s being sold, an untouchability that makes for a fixation, a fixed unmoving stasis. And as the past envelops the present, I feel the future slipping from my grip.

Ya lah exactly - you say I say who confirm? The all-seeing internet, to a certain extent, and then we re-release it to the trappings of amnesia. A habit is a habit is a habit, or ‘a stitch in time saves nine.’ I can rattle off a series of these idioms and then I’ll unthinkingly say ‘all’s well that ends well’ to someone I’m washing dishes with and they’ll be like, ‘stop talking like a fucken book mate.’ But what to do, I read more than I talk. Also no one trained me. How bay-nal.

       NOT HERE TO FUCK SPIDERS

DON'T WASTE TIME LEH

                                                                                                   STOP FAFFING ABOUT

  MONUMENTAL WASTE OF TIME

It goes without saying: the English language has a persisting colonial legacy; each vernacular with its specific violences and multiple enduring dogmas baked into its core. Could they possibly exist on their own? When the desire for empire was set in stone it sought to annihilate anything that was in its way. It’s still happening, of course, albeit in subtler ways. Nah, you’re alright, mate. Tsk. Why you get in my way? I am super not alright, but whatevs.

Yiyun Li poses a similar question[v]: ‘Can one’s intelligence rely entirely on the public language; can one form a precise thought, recall an accurate memory, or even feel a genuine feeling, with only the public language?’ In the old country, someone who can code-switch between Singlish and English is regarded as more educated than someone who can only speak Singlish. Yet those who only speak English are perceived as hifalutin, their authenticity as Singaporeans doubted - go to angmoh school then come back damn up and kantang you know? In the fifty-six years since Singapore’s formal independence from the British colony, Singlish has similarly been discouraged and frowned upon, as much as it has been appropriated by the educated to signal a fetishistic closeness to culture. It has evolved from being ‘a handicap we must not wish on Singaporeans[vi],’ buttered over with a Speak Good English Movement, to a recent wave of local ad copy reflecting Singlish words and sayings, all in the span of the last two decades. You can bloody read a book full of Singlish poetry now sial. They give him prize somemore.

Nearly one billion people in the world speak English as a secondary tongue. At the time of writing, 60.7 per cent of all web content is in English. And then 25.9 per cent of internet users use English as their primary language. How like that? In Rey Chow’s Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience, she writes of an ‘interlinguality’ in which ‘there can be no pure linguistic practice because the use of one language is habitually interfered with by the vying availability of others.’ Slip slop slap. The pool of the self just keeps pooling around our feet, influenced by its speaker’s many living languages that, despite their pre-existing structures and rubric, continue to reinvent themselves over time. Don’t gostan please – if you said the phrase ‘social distancing’ to me before 2020 I’d be like wtf you going on about, and before that you tell me to chillax I tell you to stop your microaggressions.

As Chow posits, ‘How [does one] strive for self-recognition even as one is forced to efface oneself in the process of speaking and writing?’ It must be noted that much of what is perceived as Singlish in the popular imagination often uses Chinese as a starting point. Here, another kind of hegemony presents itself: in a discussion surrounding the creole, Alfian Sa’at points out that ‘any authority on Singlish needs to be fluent in at least four languages so as to avoid any kinds of biases that might arise from their own linguistic background[vii].’

Bloody oath. I said ‘strewth’ once, in earnest, and someone laughed at me. Nek minnit a White Kiwi acquaintance said ‘grouse’ and it was ironically cool. All of which is to say these sayings involve an affectation that eventually (dis)integrate into a newer form, like a Pokémon evolution. But here’s the paradox: this entirely depends on how one is perceived. Do your own thing hey, or as James Baldwin once opined[viii], ‘The range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else.’

What would the history of language be if not for its malleability? See it trend hard enough; revived from the dusty annals of history; invented, fade away, come back, disappear again. I could tell you I was ‘solastalgic’ for home in the ‘Anthropocene,’ a digital abode and abyss forfeited to gentrification and adulting – no more already – but there’s never been a home except the one I made for myself. Tell you what though: the secret is always relearning, a certain scrim that seems indecipherable until an expansive vortex opens up. Sounds cooked but it’s like the sea; very on-brand but open, open, open, to whatever that falls alongside it. A jumbled reconfiguration that insists on imperviousness. We glimpsed a window, we jumped through it.

[i] ‘The Communal Mind’, London Review of Books (February 2019)

[ii] ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’ (1956, translated from the French 2010)

[iii] ‘The Last Lifestyle Magazine’, Racked (March 2016)

[iv] ‘Welcome to Airspace’, The Verge (August 2016)

[v] ‘To Speak Is to Blunder’, New Yorker (December 2016)

[vi] The Straits Times (August 1999; source, original)

[vii] Facebook post in response to ‘Do You Speak Singlish?’, New York Times (May 2016)

[viii] ‘If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?’, New York Times (July 1979)