In Singapore, it is natural to order in Chinese at canteen if you know how to speak it. I felt that there was no communication problem at all until one day.
On that day, I was at business canteen ordering my dinner before class. I planned to order shrimp noodles at the noodles store. When the uncle asked me my order, I said in Chinese: “I want a bowl of ‘Xia Mian’.” The uncle looked at me, and asked: “Ha Mian?” I shake my head and repeated my order: “I want ‘Xia Mian’.” The uncle frowned at me and asked again: “Ha Mian??” I felt very puzzled, and repeated: “Xia Mian.” Then the aunty who is cooking noodle came and said: “you want ‘Ha Mian’ or not?” This time, I told her in English “I want shrimp noodles.” Then the aunty whispered: “eh, ‘Ha Mian’ loh.”
After this incidence, I felt that although I have been here for almost five years, there are still a lot of intercultural differences I haven’t found out. Although most Chinese Singaporeans know how to speak Chinese, The ways we speak, and the words we use are very different.
I also have the feeling that English have played an extremely important role in today’s world. If I don’t know English, I could never have that bowl of shrimp noodles ordered.
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Hi Danhua,
ReplyDeleteI have to say that the uncle from the noodle stall seems to be an interesting person who had mixed up his different vocabulary. Luckily you were able to use a common language to get your message through to him, if not you might have wasted your time queuing up and end up with a empty stomach. A staving person is definitely not a happy person.
From your predicament mentioned above, I guess many a times, especially for Singapore context, we tend to have a hotchpotch of culture, mishmash of underlying innuendos and medley of languages being used daily amongst different groups of people. What and how we conserve and interact has become more informal and more colloquial. Using your experience, the uncle was probably using a dialect to confirm or order (or could be bad Chinese too), assuming that you would understand since you looked Chinese. Such expectation is quite normal and can happen to just about anyone and this is usually the fuse for other intercommunication conflicts to come. The false assumption we made while interacting in our multicultural society, will lead to dire consequences if left unrestrained. Imagine, if you waited so long in line yet cannot get your order through just because the uncle could not understand you, wouldn’t the person flare up and start to shout. (Though it might be trivial and you would not do it, but others might just be the rare outlier, could not resist the link to your field - statistics).
One thing lead to another; if cultural miscommunication evolves out of hand, a small spark of tension could lead to a bush fire of conflict. One small bowl of prawn mee could result in a hawker brawl that might be prevented if we were more accommodating and understanding of each other’s way of behaviour and life.
Regards,
Wei Xiong