Language links and breaks

Just picked up a book about the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (SEA) and that got me thinking...

For those who have done a bit of travelling in Southeast Asia, you would have realised that Chinese can be a very useful language in the region. If one can speak the native language, that will be the most ideal. But many a times, i feel that Chinese comes a close second to English as the next widely used language in the region.

The Chinese influences on Thai language and culture are aplenty. For instance, as many Sino-Thais are of Teochew origins, the Thai language has absorbed many Teochew words into the language system, such as tâwkay, tâuhuay, suai... If you are familiar with either Teochew or Hokkien, i am sure you will be able to figure what these few words mean.

I have had several amusing encounters with the Thais. Once my friend and i stopped by the roadside to buy some street goodies to fill our rumbling stomachs in the middle of the night. As i was still speaking in halting Thai then, the hawker could not hold his curiousity and asked where i was from. So i replied Singapore. He continued to ask me if i have heard of a guy called Kim Yõng. At that moment, i was thinking inside my heart "there are so many Chinese in Singapore, how would i know a guy called Kim Yõng?" Seeing the blank look on my face, my friend went on to tell me that the hawker was actually referring to a writer. Then it struck on me that he was referring to the famous wuxia (martial arts & chivalry) author - Jin Yong (Louis Cha).

And then there was another time when i sat down for coffee with a couple of newly-made Thai friends at a local cafe. Knowing that i am a Singaporean Chinese, one girl was very interested in the Chinese language, so she enquired if i have read sãam kok. I was once again lost for a few seconds until they said curiously "don't your know that book? It's a chinese classic." It then dawned on me that they are talking about Sanguo Yanyi (or widely known in English as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms).

Last December, a group of friends and i decided to take a trip to Cambodia. There, we also had quite a few instances of talking to Cambodians of Chinese origins. There was one evening where we stopped at a roadside stall for supper in Phnom Penh. When the young girl delivered noodles to our table, we asked her the price of the food in English. She then surprised us by replying in Mandarin! That really piqued our curiousity, so we enquired about her background and found out that she learnt Manadarin from her mother and she had a keen interest in learning the language.

Isn't this interesting? The Chinese has a popular saying - wherever there's water, there will be Chinese. (Just a side note at this juncture: Hey, i am no Chinese chauvinist, just like to ponder how the identify of the SEA Chinese will differ from society to society, and time to time).

In SEA, the Singaporean population has the greatest proportion of ethnic Chinese. Elsewhere in the region, some of the Chinese have successfully assimiliated into the local society, adopted local names, etc. but there are examples where they still stick out like sore thumbs from the so-called indigenous majority. There were also periods in recent SEA history when the Chinese were labelled Communists, suspected of disloyalty to the native country, suffered discrimination, etc. With the exception of Singapore, the Chinese diaspora in SEA are often viewed as having immense economic power but lacking in the political power.

Sometimes, i wonder how differently our lives would have mapped out if our grandparents and forefathers had not chose to sink their roots in Singapore.