My Ah Ma would have loved watching Dear You

I have yet to watch Dear You, the hugely popular Teochew-language movie that has ignited such a furore about the restrictions on Chinese dialects in Singapore. 

I have only seen the trailer, which was largely incomprehensible to me and reminded me of the time I visited my distant relatives in Shantou and could not understand their refined Teochew.

Nor have I been particularly moved by speculation that it may be a front for United Front propaganda aimed at tugging at the heartstrings of ethnic Chinese outside of China. The Chinese Communist Party would have better luck targeting a populace that is actually fluent in Chinese dialects.

But what’s been on my mind is someone who, just like the key character in Dear You, was among the waves of Chinese immigrants who came from Chaoshan to Nanyang in the early 20th century.

Ah Ma arrived in Singapore in the 1930s as a young woman. Together with Ah Kong, they raised six children and lived through the Second World War. After the end of hostilities, they went back to China briefly before returning to the Republic.  

Desperate to have a son after giving birth to four daughters, she endured multiple miscarriages, and ‘bought’ a male toddler from another villager for seven sacks of rice — who then grew up to reject the family. 

She did have two biological sons eventually, but they broke her heart with their wayward ways.

“Your Ah Ma had a very hard life,” my mother told me many times. But she did have the joy of seeing nine grandchildren before she died in 1998.  

Based on interviews with my mother and auntie, I told her story in my 2023 short story anthology Seven Sacks of Rice And Other Baggage a few years back. 

Struggling to talk to Ah Ma

Even though we saw her almost every day of our childhood, Ah Ma never told me or my cousins any of her life story. While my cousins are far more fluent than me, my Teochew — along with an entire generation who could not communicate with their grandparents — was never good enough to have a proper conversation with her. 

This sometimes resulted in tragicomic situations, like the morning she roughly woke me up and demanded to know why I wasn’t in kindergarten. As I didn’t know how to tell her that it was a Saturday, and there were no mobile phones to call my mother since it was the 1980s, she got me dressed and rushed me to school in a heavy downpour — only to find the place empty. 

My teacher, who happened to be there, had to explain to her why there was no one in school. I can still remember her question: “Why didn’t you tell your grandmother you don’t have to go to school today?”

But my memories of of Ah Ma still fill my heart with a warm glow. 

“Hao seh kia (young man),” she would address me when I went to her flat after school. She made beh cai tng (cabbage soup with fishballs) and png kueh (steamed rice dumplings) for us, and doted on all the grandchildren.

I also remember her listening to her Teochew operas on the radio, and strolling to a nearby block to chat with friends. 

But my most striking memory of Ah Ma is of her rocking me to sleep while she sang a Teochew lullaby. When I close my eyes, it is clear as day in my head — but try as I might, I cannot sing it out loud.

The campaign that destroyed dialects

I often wonder what it would have been like without the Speak Mandarin campaign, and the draconian rules that meant dialects were largely absent from the media. 

Would I have become fluent in Teochew and built a proper relationship with Ah Ma? Would my memories of her be any different? And when she lay on her deathbed all those years ago, would I have been able to tell her how much she meant to me?

Perhaps I would still have turned out to be mediocre in Teochew. After all, I am one of those people derided as jiak kantang (potato eaters), speaking largely in English and with a middling command of Mandarin. The anti-dialect policy certainly didn’t do much for my linguistic abilities in the latter. 

It would have been nice to converse properly with Ah Ma.

Poor Ah Ma and Ah Kong must have felt so cut off from their own grandchildren and the world at large, the sounds of alien languages echoing all around even while Singapore grew by leaps and bounds. 

But I think they would have loved watching Dear You, and greatly related their own experiences of migration to it.  

I miss you, Ah Ma. 

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