Archive for the 'East v. West' Category

Working on the Malaysian English of my third novel has made me think about that peculiarly Malaysian word “-lah”. It’s not really a word, I suppose - more a suffix used from time to time in colloquial Malaysian English as an emphasiser. “-Lah” is used only in Malaysia, as far as I know.

There’s a great entry in Wikipedia about Malaysian English with a section on the use of “-lah”. The entry implies that it derives from Chinese rather than Malay, although there is a suffix “-lah” used in Malay. I believe that the usage and context of the sound in Malay and Malaysian English are different - the “-lah” of Malay is a grammatical element that is integral to the language whereas “-lah” in Malaysian English can be dropped without changing the meaning. This is my lay person’s understanding - if there are any linguists or academics out there who would like to comment or deepen our understanding on this point, please do add a comment!

There’s also long discourse on Malaysian English - aka Manglish to afficionados - at Malaysia Uncut.

I speak in Manglish with my family and Malaysian friends and happily slip into “-lah” this and “-lah” that. If an English friend is also present, I can switch to full English English in the same breath as I turn towards them. My English friends who have visited Malaysia use “-lah” when remembering the fun times they had on their visits - but it sounds weird when tacked onto a proper English English sentence!

I’d love to hear from Malaysians living in Malaysia or abroad about your emotional connection with “-lah” and/ or Malaysian English. And also any migrants to Malaysia from other English speaking countries - have you got the hang of Lah-Lah land?

Photo: thanks to gamleys .co.uk

I’ve been re-working the draft of my third novel Tianming Traviata recently.

The novel is an off-beat family drama with a cast of quirky, colourful characters. The main character is a 70-year old cabaret singer, Evie, who is still going strong in her sequinned gowns and feather headdresses. She owns the only nightclub in a small town in Malaysia and sings old show tunes, with the “grand dame” air of days gone by. Her neice Kit-Mei works as software programmer in Kuala Lumpur, a blogging, city-slicking modern young woman who is very much part of 21st century Malaysia. The family are thrown into crisis when Evie’s daughter disappears and the clash between the old and the new generations are brought to a head.

I had been writing it in Standard English using a third person narrative structure. It was zipping along nicely - but it just lacked “oomph” and I was finding that I was getting bored. The dialogue bits were fine when Evie was in the thick of the action. But the narrative was just lacklustre. Now, if the author is bored by the novel, there’s no hope that the narrative will be able to grip others!

So I put it away for several months. Then a few weeks ago, Evie’s voice kept coming back to me. In the dialogue bits, she is in full flow, loud and raucous and full of energy - speaking in Malaysian English. In contrast, the third person narrative was in measured, proper, sensible full sentences with proper syntax, grammar and punctuation.

And I thought, why not try writing the narrative bits in Malaysian English? Yah, why not-lah? So stupid I was before. This one is Evie’s story-lah so, of course, got to tell it with her voice, isn’t it?

Since then, I’ve had such fun getting the narrative down in the voice of a 70 year old cabaret singer who will not let her arthritic hip stop her doing high-kicks and whose language is full of verve and peppered with “-lah”s.

When I’ve got a bit further along with the text, I will upload a podcast reading of the first chapter so you can see what you think. In particulary, I would be interested to see the response of Malaysians to the use of our form of the English language in fiction.

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To hear what Malaysian English sounds like in contrast to Standard UK English, listen to my podcast “Two Voices” about my “schizophrenic” relationship with language.

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I will write more next week about “-lah” and its use in Malaysian English.

A young British-born Chinese guy based in London contacted me last week to tell me about his British Chinese Blog at http://british-chinese.blogspot.com/. He has posts on happenings in the news from a British Chinese perspective. He’s only just started out so let’s give him lots of support.

Photo from British Chinese Blog.

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I also came across Vicky Lee Wei Kay’s Irish-born Chinese blog at http://kaykays.com/. Vicky blogs about Chinese interest issues as well but this time from an Irish perspective. She has a forum/ messageboard on her site and is building a great network/ community.

Photo from Vicky’s flickr profile.

On Tuesday, I posted a link to Hanzi Smatter, the site dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture, highlighting tattoos that don’t say quite what the owner thinks they say.

The counterpoint site is Engrish.com which highlights oddball uses of English - mainly from Japan, where it’s trendy to use Western words as part of a design pattern. Go see for yourself at http://www.engrish.com.

My favourite is this funky use of the lovely-shaped word “Dank” to sell bread ….

Photo: from Engrish.com

You know how some Westerners go East and get themselves a funky tattoo in Chinese or Japanese characters - or maybe they just go to another Westerner who’s offering the service out of their tattoo parlour just off the Brighton seafront. How do they know that the symbol their getting says “love and happiness” and not “beef and broccoli”? They don’t.

Hanzi Smatter is a blog dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture. There are pics of tattoos with the corrected character alongside and stories from the tattoo-ing trenches.

Visit Hanzi Smatter at http://www.hanzismatter.com/

So if you are thinking of getting a funky Eastern tattoo, take along a Chinese-literate friend! (In this case, not me - I no speakee or readee Chinese.)

Photo: from the Hanzi Smatter site.

I was telling Angie the other evening about a call and answer game I learnt at primary school in Malaysia. It was an English school (as opposed to a national Malaysian school) where there were many ex-pat kids from the UK, Continental Europe and the US. We would sit in a circle and each have a number. We would clap and click our fingers in rhythm, calling and answering:

~ Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

~ No. 4 stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

~ Who me?

~ Yes, you.

~ Couldn’t be.

~ Then who?

~ No. 1 stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

Angie cried that they played a similar game in South Africa. But the back story had a different, much more saucy twist:

~ Who stole the kisses from the girl next door?

Isn’t it weird how the exact same game can be reinvented on different continents? I want to know who made this chant up - and who changed it for the different countries. It’s the same curiosity that makes me want to know who makes up playground rhymes and games - and how they get made up - and also why some catch on and last for generations and some don’t get picked up at all.

Is the version I learnt the version without physical intimacy specially tailored for Asia? (In Malaysia, you can get arrested for public demonstrations of affection). Or is the version in South Africa liberalised for that particular society? Are there other versions? What do they say? I would love for someone to share their views.

This is a beautiful and romantic personal story from Rebecca Jane, who emailed me a few weeks ago.

She writes:

My English name is Rebecca Jane; my Chinese name is Zhang
Bei-qi. I grew up in an American town outside of Chicago, Illinois.
In the Midwest where I grew up, about the only association my
community made with China was take-out food and fortune cookies. When
I was 21-years-old, I met a man who introduced me to Chinese language.
Nine months after meeting, we married. Thus began my fusion journey.

My fusion story is a romance, so it contains fair doses of love
and disappointment. I can promise you the tension did not heat up
over different languages or crossing cultures. My husband and I
proved adaptable, wise, and agile in clearing those hurdles. The
tension heated up when I attempted to go where I discovered there are
no real boundaries or borders—I attempted to create art and beauty.

I had been married to Yong-xiang for less than a year when
we’d agreed that I would travel to China to meet his parents, whom he
hadn’t seen in eight years. He didn’t have a green card and was
attending law school. My solo journey was the best arrangement we
could make, and I wanted to meet my in-laws. They welcomed me to
Guangzhou in April 1999. I’ll never forget my first car ride through
those crowded streets. The gridlock. My intense desire to be able to
read every sign in every shop window. ‘I will stay in China,’ I
thought ‘until I become literate here.’

I fulfilled that promise. My mother-in-law read to me from
children’s readers. She read the romantic novel Hong Lou Meng and the
strange ghost stories of Pu Songling. I focused, practiced, and
labored, wrote Chinese characters every day, looked everything up in
my dictionaries thrice.

I surprised myself when I started writing my own creative
fiction in the Chinese language. While living in Guangzhou, I secured
a job teaching English at a nearby university. My students submitted
impressive English essays to me. I was astonished by their expressive
ability with the English language. As a gesture both humble and
proud, I showed them my efforts to write a short story in Chinese.
Sitting in a circle with nine Chinese students who helped me edit and
rewrite that story was the most profound collaborative experience of
my life.

To this day I have not found another audience or institution
interested in my efforts to write fiction in Chinese. I have only
written a couple of stories and have given up the pursuit to focus on
writing in English. I have put the idea on the back burner. But I am
hoping one day to return to my bi-lingual creative writing.

Here is a prose poem I wrote while living in China. It is
called “Raindance in Guangzhou.”

The rain echoes; it falls in strings that vibrate forever. I am
listening for your notes. Do you stretch toward me and wrap around
like the wind? Or do you strum in the heart of the rolling thunder?
But what of these wordless sounds? I want to write to you; I want to
write with you, but I want to speak to you in a language no one
understands. Even more, I desire to listen to you. I sit on my bed
with my legs crossed, my head drops. I have closed my eyes. My hands
cover my ears. When my elbows touch in front of me, my knees also
fold into my body as naturally as hands folding together in prayer. I
am curled up in this way, and all noises wash over me like water
around a rock: brooms lifting dust, people breathing behind dust
masks, men spitting out nicotine throats, buses hiccuping fuel, a
shirtless beggar crying at the road’s edge with his body curving
toward a hole in the center of his chest, a motorcyclist avoiding a
pothole and just missing slamming into a busload of people who worry
about pickpockets, the voice-over on the bus shouting out the stop and
more people shoving in and pushing their way out, a guard standing
watch at this gate shouts something to the guard watching that gate—he
removes a lighter from his pocket and tosses it to his comrade—another
man lighting a cigarette, children’s running feet carry them to the
shade to cover them from the fiery sun, bicycles clapping their tires
over hot pavement, a crowd cheering for an approaching parade:
millions of wild rabbits jumping followed by a dancing dragon
swerving, the clashing, the drum beating—a sweet voice calls to me,
“Beiqi, Ni kan yi kan!” Look. I see sun flickering in the dragon’s
eye, white fire swirling around a dark spot, the drum sends tremors
through my entire body; Mama says, “Beiqi, ni e la ma? Wo men hui jia
ba!” Hungry? Let’s go home. We follow some stray rabbits down the
narrow lanes, and then comes the rain with drops as bis as dragon’s
eyes. Our hair sticks to our necks and we drip with the sky’s grief,
so at home Mama combs through my hair until it is dry. Then she makes
soup with flowers and green vegetables; we drink rice wine and eat
bitter melon, winter mushrooms, grass mushrooms, cabbage, corn, white
gourd, sea cucumber, rice, snow peas, carrots, bai cai, and turnips.
Then Baba’s hand wraps around the bottle and he pours me another glass
of wine saying, “He jiu! Drink wine.” As if those two words are an
epic poem. He tells me a story about the wine being brewed in some
far off northern place. My mind wanders, and I think of his enormous
hands, hands that can tell a thousand stories far better than his
words can. I wish I could use his hands as pillows at night and fall
asleep to the sound of the blood rushing through them—and I am still
as a rock, listening, hearing thunder within, hearing you.

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You can visit Rebecca Jane’s blog at http://rjaneflashfiction.blogspot.com

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Find out how to tell your story on Fusion View - go to the Announcements section in the middle sidebar of the Fusion View homepage at www.fusionview.co.uk and click on Tell Us Your Fusion Story.

David Grey is a filmmaker and former sociologist, psychotherapist and teacher. He is the founder of Village Film and the Dog and Hat Film Society, based in South London. He contributes this thought-provoking piece to the Fusion Stories series.

David writes:

This is a great project. What fascinates me is the assumption that people have “a” (sic) “culture from their country of origin” and that they can “live in another culture”. How does this apply to me?

I was born in (French-speaking) Senegal, first went to a (French) school in Finland. Grew up alternating between London and parts of France, where I was educated bilingually. I could have taken French nationality having been born in Senegal. “France” was of course a construct based on conquest and the repression of languages and cultures in Brittany, the Languedoc, Provence, and Corsica. Judging by my grandparents, I am 3/4 Welsh and 1/4 English, yet I think of myself as English, as in the Cricket Test.

English being a linguistic fusion of several different peoples speaking similar but different branches of the Germanic languages, themselves a branch of the Indo-European languages, linking peoples from India to the Atlantic in a common linguistic tradition. I grew up within a family divided between Lancashire and Yorkshire / Derbyshire parents. At school I was mocked for having a “northern accent”. When visiting relatives on Merseyside, I was mocked for being a “Cockney”. Whatever I “am” now, I also think of myself as a “South Londoner” and a “European”.

My son has me and an “English” mother. Her father was a Polish Jew who fled to Russia then London in the last war. Her mother is a Swiss of Germanic background, but also Jewish, and of intermediate Russian origin. And speaks French. And has dual UK / Swiss nationality, not to mention the right to settle in Israel via that country’s law of return. (As does my son and his mother)

Please can you tell me what is the “culture from my country of origin”? And am I or am I not “living in another culture”?

Ditto my son? As a Jew he is rooted in a 3,000 year old middle eastern culture. And would doubtless qualify for extermination in any future Nazi state. And he supports Chelsea and says “wicked!” and eats bacon ‘cos he likes it.

My conclusion: MOST if not ALL of us have “fusion” stories to tell.

During the Third Reich a large number of people were killed who had not even known they were “Jewish”, because grandparents or parents had converted and they had not been informed of their origin, hence a bit of a dual shock on the train to Auschwitz. Being inclusive, the Nazis exterminated people with a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, even though within the Jewish tradition that made them “goyim” or non-Jews.

“England” (formerly Wessex, Mercia etc.), “Great Britain” (formerly England, Scotland and Wales) and “United Kingdom” (GB + Northern Ireland - itself a fusion of Irish, Scots and British, with some Viking genes thrown in) are ALL fusion concepts, BEFORE anyone comes here from anyone else. And many Cornish people argue they do not belong in any of those constructs.

Then, to take you as an example, you don’t have to spend long studying “Chinese” history to discover that “Chinese” is also a fusion construct, even before people migrate to Malaysia etc., and on elsewhere. And which is your country of origin - China or Malaysia?

Did you know that Icelanders reveal overwhelming mitochondrial DNA (passed from the mother) with Scottish origin, indicating that the original Icelanders were made up of Norse men and Scottish women. But then “Scottish” is a concept that refers now to an alleged nation North of England, but originally “Scottii” was the Roman / Latin name given to a tribe from the Irish island who conquered what is now Argyll.

Humans have been a fusion species since we started wandering out of the Rift Valley. Palaeontologists are still arguing whether or not we used to mate with the Neanderthals!

Written by Fusion View Guest Blogger: David Grey

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You can view the 5 minute version of David’s film about political prisoners the Grenada 17, Here’s Some They Locked Up Earlier, at the Channel 4 documentary site:

http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/film/film-detail.jsp?id=8061

A comment posted by Lydia on my podcast What Makes a Good Story? about how very English I sound started me thinking about my two voices - my English voice and my Malaysian one - and how they express two different parts of my personality.

I was going to write a post about it but then I realised that a podcast would be the best way to show what I mean - so you can hear the two sides of me.

You can listen to the podcast with the player below.

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Or, you can listen to this and other Fusion View podcasts by clicking here.

You can also receive this and future Fusion View Podcasts free via iTunes.

Continuing from Part One of his Fragment of Japan last Thursday, Andrew writes:

Surreptitious Snake

Summer 2004, sitting on the grassy bank of the Arakawa river, Tokyo’s impressive grey mass smoking quietly in the distance, when a snake decided to pay me a visit. Impromptu to say the least. I was expecting the odd sparrow, possibly a crow or two but a long, black snake had not been on the agenda. I’m still not certain what business he had with me, was it amicable or hostile? I think it was a ‘he’, the flanking maneuver he executed smacked of masculine fourberie. Though the female snake is also known for her guile. In the Chinese folk tale “Baishe Zhuan” (The Story of Madam White Snake) it is said:

“A young man encountered a beautiful maiden attended by a maid during a festive outing near a lake. He followed her and was invited to her fine mansion outside the city, where he dined and stayed overnight. After that one-night stand, the young man became visibly emasculated, his vital essence being slowly drained. The suspicion that he had been bewitched was confirmed by a revisit to the mansion – in reality, a graveyard. A Taoist monk was called in to perform an exorcism, and, sure enough, a white snake and an otter were driven out. Upon this skeleton, though, other elements were soon added to give it flesh and substance.”

(Whalen Lai, Folklore to Literate Theater: Unpacking ‘Madame White Snake‘ Asian Folklore Studies Vol.51 No.1 April 1992 pp.51-66)

To my knowledge, there was no beautiful maiden hiding in this snake and if there was she certainly didn’t invite me to her mansion outside the city because I cycled home afterwards.

Why do we fear snakes? Is it a visceral, physical repulsion to the idea of a flask jaw sinking into our flesh and injecting its venom? Or is it more psychological, the fear of a slow and impotent death? Perhaps the snakebite is a taboo, a deep dark desire and the chance of a flirtation with death. But it’s one desire I wasn’t ready to satisfy.

Ikebukuro Station, West Exit

Twice a week I used to help a volunteer group distribute food, clothes and medicine to the homeless population of Ikebukuro. We’d usually meet at the north exit, split up into groups and each take a wing of the mammoth station. At 8pm the tunnels and halls were full of restless commuters, office workers and secretaries, students heading for night school etc. The rhythm of that hour was intense. Here and there you’d see dark faces peer out of the woodwork. Men in their forties and fifties tucked away behind vending machines, concealed in alcoves, a community bound to the shadows. Many of them were victims of the economic slump of the 90’s, excess fat on a body that had grown too large too quickly…they were laid off in droves. I got to know one man quite well, his name was Kobayashi. He seemed to trust me from the beginning.

One evening I found him sitting in between two plant pots next to a row of drink dispensers. He’d taken his shoes and socks off, and I could smell the sour odor before I even saw him. We went through the drill, asking about any particular illnesses or concerns for that week before handing over a ration of rice and biscuits. He never seemed pleased or disturbed to see me, it was always in pure nonchalance that our exchanges took place and no matter how many times I corrected him, he was convinced of me being American. He’d been there once in the 80’s on company business so sometimes he liked playing the name game – that is naming all 51 states of the USA. On that occasion he didn’t say much at all. He complained to the doctor about chest pains and he was scheduled for a checkup in a nearby practice at the end of the week. As I listened to the doctor, my eyes turned to the flow of commuters. From time to time, oepole would stop to observe, I remember one young man in a suit who stood there shaking his head, I couldn’t make out what exactly he disapproved of, whether it was Kobayashi, the doctor or me. I think people were often curious as to what business a foreigner might have with a homeless man….

But the lines were very clear. In a country where children begin vying for the best position in society from kindergarten age, the pressure and energy that goes into reaching the top crushes those who happen to fall. I often wonder about Kobayashi-san, whether he’s still living in his cardboard cut-out. Perhaps he was lucky, perhaps he moved somewhere else. But I’m sure If I met him again tomorrow, he’d still think I was American.

And -

If you are thinking of moving to Japan, going off to teach or study, and you would like to know more about places and institutions mentioned in this article, then please do get in touch with me via this link. Thanks very much for reading - Andrew Eglinton

Written by Fusion View Guest Blogger: Andrew Eglinton

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To find out how you can contribute your cross-cultural story to the Fusion Stories Series, go to my post “Tell Us Your Fusion Story” in the Announcements section of the middle sidebar on the Fusion View homepage.