Be inspired by Granny and her English

“Yao bu yao mai si-tic-ker?” Cannot understand that? This is a very common question that my maternal grandmother asks my daughter every week. She is asking her great-grandchild, “Do you want to buy stickers?” in a mixture of Chinese and English.

My granny single-handedly raised 4 children when her husband passed away some 30 years back. She worked hard, cooked and sold food at the 5-feet Path (a walkway under Singapore’s HDB flats that typically measures 5-feet wide) at the void deck (the ground floor area of high rise flats). Sometimes, she washes dishes and serves food for a coffee shop (A small shop which sells coffee and cooked food) just so to put food on the dinner table.

Tolling through hot and humid Singapore, an uneducated single-parent, earning her way through manual labor, she managed to raise her children up and keep the family intact till this day. She is indeed a person we all look up to in the family. Besides the family, she is on good terms with her neighbors, be they Chinese, Malays or Indians. In Singapore, where many races and cultures are blended into close proximity through staying in high-rise flats, it is a case of live well together or quarrel and be at war with one another.

We need to understand a little about the culture and differences of each different group. Besides that, we also have to try at communicating so that everyone can live harmoniously together in a close-knit community. My granny is a professional at this as she speaks 3 different Chinese dialects. She speaks Hokkien, Cantonese and Teo Chew fluently even though she cannot read and write. She can speak some Malayu and chat with her Malay neighbors. She had an Indian neighbor who picked up some Hokkien phases just so that he can chat more with her.

In Singapore, the education system uses English as the main language and allows each student to take a Mother Tongue subject as their second language. When my siblings and cousins try to communicate with our grandmother, we find it difficult to as schools drill us only on English and Mandarin. To talk to us, my granny started picking up phases of Chinese words slowly and in no time, she can talk to the youngsters in the neighborhood.

Coming to her great-grand-daughter, she faces another problem. My daughter’s primary language is English. Undaunted, my granny starts picking up phases of English just so that she can communicate with my kid. For that, I am so proud of her. Being able to say “Si-tic-ker” is already a major feat for an uneducated 69 years old great-grandmother.