My father in law often bemoans Rockstar’s lack of grasp of Hakka, and speaking not a stitch of the dialect myself, I recently came up with what I thought was a best effort at trying to facilitate some learning of it. (You might guess I was rather pleased with myself, given my own knowledge of all things Chinese-language related is quite bad. Not from lack of trying, I tried to pick up Putonghua on maybe 3 separate occasions through the years but chinese literacy is one of the (very) few things that continually eludes me <hangs head>)
Ta-daa
I located some of Rockstar’s old Putonghua picture books from when he had a personal tutor as a baby, and suggested Kings or my visiting inlaws could use the same picture books for Hakka words, all of us being of the race of “Malaysian Chinese” who are illiterate in Chinese.
(User’s Guide For Dummies: Apply as needed to various Chinese dialects spoken by the grandparents – from Biggest Dummy a.k.a. Me.)
I don’t know if this helps or hurts Rockstar’s Putonghua learning; English is very much my (and therefore his) primary language (I should probably mention Cantonese speaking local mummy friends have expressed to me this is a desirable trait for schooling purposes – and then at least half my Malaysian mummy friends living here will then express a similar opinion re Putonghua literacy – talk about Grass Is Greener Syndrome haha) plus I don’t know anything about Putonghua or Hakka to be able to tell, but Kings’ has a strong leg up over me in spoken Putonghua from being a native Hakka speaker (apparently Putonghua roughly sounds quite similar to his Hakka – though he’s had complaints about his pronunciation, my thinking is at least he can understand/ be understood in his Putonghua, which is wayy better than me).
I’m also not sure if the Hakka spoken in this village in Malaysia is similar to what we might be able to find in Northasia – certainly the Hokkien is different, our Hokkien has some Bahasa thrown in – I learnt that when I tried to impress Taiwanese RMs: major FAIL – but we’re not trying to win any awards in Hakka oratory here, just scratch an itch, appease a grandparent. It’s CNY, after all.
Inside one of the books - I figured the pictures would help for any dialects grandparents would like to teach the kids, they can actually go around the home pointing/ searching out stuff and make a game of it right?
Well at least I’m certain (and intend to be pleased with, thank you very much) the effort will help Rockstar’s Hakka.
On an aside, I happened to come across some discussion chains on Northasian blogs about Chinese and Western culture recently, and some of the intolerance and erm, seemingly visceral anger was quite an eye-opener. Hong Kong at a glance has a lot more Western-Asian mixed-race couples than say, Malaysia, Singapore or what I can see of various parts of Australia that we’ve visited, so I hadn’t thought there was intolerance to mixed-race children (I guess they mean the obvious Western-Chinese mix, I did not spend a lot of time on the web pages)…
And well HK in general being wayy more outspoken than say Malaysia or Singapore, I guess I shouldn’t have been as taken aback as I was. No I am not linking you there because I don’t want these people to know I exist – not that I think anyone would care though, me being neither Chinese (by Northasian definition) nor Western and not having much knowledge on the intricacies and histories of some of their arguments…
Anyway. Because we attend one of several churches in HK that are led by American (white/Caucasian) pastors, it’s a fair guesstimate that the number of obviously mixed-race couples/ kids might even occasionally outnumber the non-mixed ones in the congregation. (Rockstar of course being considered “100% Malaysian-Chinese.” On an aside when I was pregnant previously I was drooling over that gorgeous coloring you only get from mixed races and then Kings would go, “Uh, you know our child is not going to look like that right?” My then-boss even guffawed, “You better hope your child doesn’t look like that or you’re in trouble!”) Other than that it was something we’d kind of barely thought about, it was just always there, the entire 7.5 years we’ve been attending these churches after Singaporean friends brought us when we first arrived.
Our church lai see... Strange coincidence, we'd been so busy with the grandparents we hadn't been to church in weeks, and then we bumped into a friend who gave Ryan one yesterday and so when I was out blogging I happened to have it with me and took a pic
Yes Really, our pastors are white/ Caucasian. Sigh the number of whites/ Caucasians here who know more Chinese than I do is just not funny anymore 🙁
Yet the funniest thing to my mind was, as I watched Rockstar occasionally play with some of these kids, on the inside I’d often felt like part of a mixed race couple myself. In the sense that coming from several generations of Straits-born Chinese who love their Nyonya kebayas (funny story – I recently discovered a very traditional Korean friend living here goes to great lengths to order the handmade ones, with no idea I’m Nyonya and happily buy from Gurney Plaza when I’m in Penang – I like to wear them with cargo pants and nice heels, preferably Prada) marrying into a Hakka family from a very traditional, conservative small Hakka village community makes me feel we are a mixed race couple.
(It’s why I loved watching Dharma & Greg and Kings used to go to great lengths to obtain their old episodes when we first started dating – they’re both white, but Dharma is from a crazy hippie family and Greg is from an uppity lawyer family… There’s this one episode where Dharma gets drunk and tells her Taiwanese friend who’s marrying a white Jewish guy that she and Greg are so different she doesn’t know how she ever thought the marriage could work… OK – Do I just have this giant “L” on my forehead for totally cracking up?)
Well those curious auntie shopkeepers from the Mainland who used to approach me, dangling baby Rockstar from a harness on my front, with “Is the father Chinese? Because the baby looks very Chinese,” were closer than they could’ve guessed, to sussing out our own little “mixed marriage.”
To some Northasians, I apparently don’t look “very Chinese.” When I don’t dress nice enough, apartment guards have mistaken me for a domestic help haha. Especially when I have a tan. I’ve had senior Taiwanese RMs stare at my face thoughtfully, then blurt things like “You sure no one fooled around a long time ago? Because those really aren’t pure Chinese features..” (No offense taken – none was intended, some of the RMs I served could be really wild, I mean they do entertain the rich and occasionally famous and all, a lot of them can be really “happening” – during a party that was kind of my final meet-the-RMs-interview, I watched a couple team heads on the floor gyrating away as their team members slipped HKD notes folded length-wise into their belts.)
Anyway, they were just random thoughts. Along the lines of I just think it’s getting harder and harder to stereotype based on what we think we know of certain races, their traditions and so on, because the world is continually becoming a smaller place and it’s hard for cultures not to be influenced at least a wee bit by each other… I mean, I’m still taken by the whole “Lo Yee Sang” thing… (Seriously, can no one tell me why Yee Sang is a huge thing for Malaysian CNYs and almost non-existent in HK? Where did the Yee Sang thing come from then? Ok thank you, Wikipedia.)
But it was interesting to hear fastidious 4yr old Rockstar explain his heritage to us, “I’m Malaysian and Hongkong-er,” when asked. “Because my parents are Malaysian Chai-nese but I was born here.” We haven’t been able to come up with an improvement on his statement of fact yet – it was either that or “I’m a talking potato. Hee.”
Ps: Bearing in mind the Law Of Averages (i.e. the most people I’ve ever encountered would’ve been from my own race and therefore that increases the probability I will meet more mean people of my own race), I find it hard to be very intolerant of other races because the meanest things ever done to me have been by people of my own race.
So did the grandparents teach Rockstar Hakka using the books you located? I am a Hakka (father side). I can only speak a few Hakka words though I can understand spoken Hakka. There are many different regional dialects even within the Hakka dialect. I believe the Hakka spoken by HK Hakka people is a bit different from the Hakka spoken in M’sia.
Ohh your dad’s Hakka! Thanks for telling me, it’s a revelation as you have mentioned having a Tiger Dad before.. Haha I actually thot Nyonyas were the biggest Tiger Parents (ref the play Emily of Emerald Hill about all the bibiks..) To answer your question, I think my inlaws did attempt to use the books one evening, but I have to tell you the lure of HK tv is quite something, my mum also loves to watch it late into the night if Rockstar has not tired her out…Kings might do it around his grueling work schedule, I can always come up with more games.. Rockstar can understand Cantonese, which my inlaws do speak quite well, because he says his local schoolmates do revert on the playground when not doing school work in English or Putonghua, but he can only speak some Putonghua. However I have been refusing since his birth til now to leave him several months at a time in their village for their Hakka language/ culture submersion – for one thing, following this plan I would have to go months without seeing him, not to mention I really cannot speak/ understand/ anything in Hakka 😛
About the Hakka language/culture submersion thingy, Rockstar could do that when he is an adult wanting to get in touch with his roots. I also wouldn’t want to be separated from my spouse or child (if I have any) for 3-4 months at any point in my life.
Thank you. Very grateful for the suggestion and affirmation.
I’m pure Hakka (both sides of parents and grandparents are Hakka) but am now in Australia married to a Vietnamese / English speaking family. It is going to be hard teaching my future kids any Hakka seeing that I am the only Hakka speaking person. I have decided that maybe Vietnamese, English and perhaps Cantonese would be better for the child as mostly the Asian community here speaks Cantonese / Mandarin (but I could not speak Mandarin well enough) But my parents insist that my future children speaks Hakka… we shall see huh?
Also, Hakka has many regional dialects. Even different parts of Malaysia has different dialects of Hakka!
Wah both parents n all grandparents? That is really pure Hakka.. To b absolutely accurate I m three quarters Nyonya, my late grandmother is Cantonese from Northasia..
Thanks for the input – now that you mention, I don’t remember the Hakka community in Sandakan where I lived 8 years as particularly similar to what I encounter now in this village, my friends used to vacation in HK a lot n seem more similar to here..
My mum is Hakka, dad is Filipino. English is my mother tongue but I went to a Chinese (mandarin) kindergarten, primary AND secondary school. Married a french. Lived in Shanghai, Luxembourg and now Istanbul – I think I am most definitely a talking potato! :p
Oh, oh, oh, oh! And my mandarin, hakka and cantonese is soooooooooo good. Never liked being forced to learn as a kid, but it’s all paid off. All the old chinese people love me because I look so ‘malay’ yet can talk to them properly. *proud* And it also helps when ‘our’ people want to talk about me right in front of me because they never imagine I could understand. And, and, and, reading and writing chinese gets people so impressed. Oh, and it helped a lot when I was working in China too. I thank my tiger mum for her insistence that I not change schools – because I did so terribly want to go to the other international school where only English was spoken and all the cool kids were at.
Erm… Not sure your definition of tiger parent, it’s not really meant to be complimentary.. I don’t know any true products of tiger parenting who want to inflict it on their own children..
Interesting, your remark re international schools, studying in Malaysia n Singapore like, 99% of the kids I knew were all public school kids – I thought back in our day the top academic performers were almost all public school kids anyway..
Blessed are you to be able to appease the older generation with your grasp of Chinese dialects… I try with Rockstar, (tho in my own family I arguably speak some of the best Chinese haha can u imagine, even compared to my grandma tho not counting my Canton grandma who passed away almost 2 decades ago) but know I can never truly please all, because command of language aside, I refused from the beginning to have Rockstar raised predominantly in the village with primary language as Hakka.. Still, I will do all I can to the best of my ability that I have a clear conscience.. It’s all we can do, isn’t it..
🙂 i can call her tiger mum because she wasn’t really. My chinese education was about the only thing she insisted on, and after, it was ‘it’s your life, you decide’.
And I can’t imagine having rockstar living in a village 🙂 And even that doesn’t guarantee language skills – in my family, my brothers have atrocious hakka, brought up same same, end up different.
In KK, the performers went to my Chinese secondary school. Public schools were not that great, so all of us who had dreams of becoming ‘something big’ took the entrance exam of my school, prayed that we could get in, jumped for joy when we finally did. Then year to year, we had incredible pressure to do well, or, if like the dreaded ‘them-who-our-teachers-warn-us-about’ we failed to pass (at 60/100), we would have to repeat the year again. Our classes were 7am to 4pm, and we always seemed to have exams of some sort. It was 6 years of lots of stress (yes, 6, because we did SPM, LCCI, and UEC in our final year – that’s the chinese for you! 3 different major series of exams, in 3 different languages, all within months of each other). And like the perfectly trained sheep that we were, our year had a 100% passing rate and 97% A in SPM.
It wasn’t a life I’d wish for my kid, and in fact, my mum tried to dissuade my sister from going after seeing what I had to go through, but the young girl knows her mind, and just started her first year there.
I think you’re a super duper great mum and that Rockstar is such a lucky lucky boy. You know, I keep reading your blog and try to absorb as much as possible in hope that if and when the day comes that we have our ‘fishes’, I could be as conscientious and good a parent as you. xoxoxo
No, no, no – I meant the UEC (not SPM) qualification can normally be used instead of STPM or A-Levels to gain entrance into many universities overseas, but not Malaysia.
:)) I think Wikipedia explains it better than me:
UEC-SML is recognised as an entrance qualification in many tertiary
educational institutions internationally, including those in Singapore,
Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China and some European
countries, as well as most private colleges in Malaysia, but not by the
government of Malaysia for entry into public universities. As the
government of Malaysia does not recognize the UEC, some Chinese
independent high schools provide instructions in the public secondary
school syllabus in addition to the independent school syllabus, thus
enabling the students to sit for PMR, SPM, or even STPM.
O…I….C..! 🙂
Heather, this is more for your reply below which I can’t seem to reply to…Thanks, I did not know about the international school in KK and anyway i passed too mich of a blanket statement.. I’m not familiar with some of the exams you mentioned either, and what did you mean by 97% As in SPM please? I assume you mean for Chinese language since 97% A for SPM overall based on my vague recollection of public school SPM standards is something like 7-8 SPM subjects comprising arts and science stream subjects and would be quite fantastical – the one guy I know with an ASEAN scholarship who attended a private school might not even meet 97% A ie he has like, 1 credit.. And he’s an investment banker..
Also did you learn Tagalog?
SPM: A meant that we had a combined 17 (or below) aggregates for all subjects – meaning a combination of A1, A2, B3 and such for 7-8 subjects. Best were those with only 7 aggregates la – the straight A1s. So having that many students with combined aggregates of A (could be A1, or A2) was what made my school pop.
UEC: A recognized qualification for entrance into Universities (in lieu of A-levels and STPM).
LCCI: London Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Many (top) grads from my school (I’m def not one of them high flyers) are surgeons, aeronautical engineers, scientists, lawyers, inv bankers – and quite a few of them got scholarships from Oxford (straight out of graduating from our school) and a few other unis in the UK.
Unsurprisingly, only Malaysian (public) Universities didn’t accept our school’s qualifications, and those who wanted to study in msian public unis still had to sit for STPM.
Hihihihi. This walk down memory lane is giving me the shivers. It was the best and worst times of my life. The amount of studying that had to go into ‘just surviving’ everyday was not funny at all. I mentioned 7am-4pm daily classes before, but I forgot to tell you bout the 7pm to 9pm tuition classes. And the homework. Oh! The homework. It wasn’t unusual for me to sleep at 11 or 12, and crawl up at 5 in the morning to wait for my school bus. I started drinking black coffee when I was 15 and having to sit for PMR and Junior UECs so I could stay awake all night to study, and spit out everything I memorized (yes, memorized) the next day. Don’t ask me anything about what was in the syllabus of those 6 years in my life – I forgot it all after the exams. That’s what happens when too much is crammed into a teenager’s brain. the only thing I took away and am proud of is language. :-/
and no, sadly, didn’t get to learn tagalog – dad doesn’t speak a word. I wish so much I did learn though.
Okok so “A” u were referring to is basically aggregate 17 or lower for best 7 subjects which basically allows for credits or B3.. That’s similar to Singapore public JC when I went for A levels, I think theirs is best of 6 tho no definition of A as below a certain number..
Ure saying Malaysian public Unis require u to sit for STPM n don’t recognize SPM u took even tho it’s the same SPM as public schools sit for? Did I understand correctly? Well do they recognize public school SPM for entrance then, when same exam is sat for in public school? I don’t know the Malaysian Uni system cos I left after SPM n did Cambridge A levels and Uni in Singapore, but I would not b allowed into Uni in Singapore after SPM, I still have to do A level which is kind of STPM equivalent anyway, ie no jumping from SPM to Uni.. u mean yr school not allowed but other public schools were allowed? Cos I didn’t think (but could b wrong) anyone gets to jump from SPM to Uni, private OR public school, do they?