When I Was Young

Bilingual, that is; it's so hard getting the simplest things done in a foreign land

Tabitha Wang in Hong Kong

voices@mediacorp.com.sg

AS A non-Cantonese-speaking Chinese living in Hong Kong, I get lots of snide remarks from the locals. The occasional "banana" (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) insult gets flung at me but my peel is so thick now it hardly registers any more.

But what is irritating about not speaking the language is that the simplest task becomes almost as complicated as flying a space probe to the moon.

I don't take mini-buses because I can't tell the driver where to stop.

It's worse over the phone. When my Internet broadband service is down, it takes three calls before I can get someone to understand what the problem is.

I had to fill in my health insurance form four times because the agent could not explain what she wanted. All she could say was: "Account number wrong. You check with bank, okay?"

It's become so bad that I refuse to do phone banking or indeed conduct anything over the phone, preferring to do everything face-to-face. This becomes tedious because it means dragging myself from one customer service centre to another.

But so far, I have been spared the harrowing experience of one Singaporean woman here. Last week, Sinead Yeo was stuck in a lift so she asked her friend to call the hotline for the lift maintenance company - in English. The operator, unable to understand, hung up on her friend 17 times in half an hour. Eventually, he had to call 999 before Miss Yeo could be rescued.

Imagine if all non-Cantonese speakers had to call emergency services for something as simple as a lift problem. Already, the police in Hong Kong are claiming they are overworked and underpaid - how much more overworked they would be if they had to come to the rescue of every expat stuck in a lift.

Ah, silly woman, you say. If you move to another country, should you expect them to speak your language? If you go to Mongolia, you wouldn't expect everyone there to speak English, would you?

True. In my defence, I am learning Cantonese so I can at least buy vegetables at Graham Street Market and order iced lemon tea at a coffeeshop. And I know enough now to be able to exchange simple pleasantries with my neighbours.

But it isn't as if I am expecting Hong Kong residents to speak Malay or even Hokkien. I am talking about English, the international lingua franca of business, diplomacy, air traffic control, rock '*' roll ...

And I'm not looking at some tiny country with hardly any contact with foreigners, am I? I am talking about Hong Kong, which bills itself as Asia's top financial centre and has an estimated expat population of about 100,000. Why should they not speak English?

"We do," said my Hong Kong friend. "But most don't speak it well so they are embarrassed to try."

I find that the younger generation, brought up under the Cantonese-only medium of instruction in schools, are the worst. Most people over 40 that I've met are bilingual, switching from Cantonese to English with ease.

My English-speaking Malaysian colleague, who married a local, complains that his sons' English is the pits. He speaks English to them but they answer in Cantonese. "I worry that they're limiting their choices to only local universities when the time comes," he laments.

Even scarier is the fact that many of the young ones can't even speak Mandarin. They can read but not speak it. So they have effectively imprisoned themselves in a monolingual world.

This is where I believe Singapore has an edge over Hong Kong in attracting big multi-national companies.

I was speaking to a British expat who is moving to Singapore. After five years in Hong Kong, he is looking forward to going somewhere where "it's so easy to be understood". He wouldn't need to mime (or "chicken dance" as he calls it) every time he wants to do anything from business negotiations to getting from Point A to Point B in a taxi.

As I heard him wax lyrical about the many things he can do, I began to realise how something as basic as being understood can make a difference between feeling isolated and fitting right in.

I wonder what's Cantonese for "I'm stuck in a lift"...

Tabitha Wang finds that though useful phrases still come slowly to her in Cantonese, she has already picked up a lot of swear words.

From TODAY, Comment – Friday, 03-Jul-2009