The Popular Bookshop lady was weird. I was at a queue waiting to pay for a marker when a PRC in front of me started querying the lady about some textbooks, in English. She replied to him in Mandarin and they conversed in Mandarin after that.
After like 5 mins, the PRC finally finished his questions on the edition problems and when the books were coming in blah blah. Being a nut in stationery section, I asked the lady to confirm that the double-pointed tip pen in my hand was indeed a marker, in Singlish, "这个是marker hor?"
"Yes, you want a double tip one right?" She replied, in the most perfect Engrish an auntie could articulate.
At that moment, I was thinking, how come she talk to me in English when I spoke Singlish and talk to that PRC in Mandarin when he was speaking in perfect English, albeit the sentence structure, not the pronunciation.
Over here, it was a well-known fact that the PRCs prided themselves for being able to speak English. A yaya-papaya not-a-SG-guy who had been travelling in China also slashed out this point during his HRM, in a not so good way and offended some PRCs in his class. Anyway, whenever a PRC speak English, I always have the tendency to speak in Mandarin, even to the professors. I remembered asking questions in Year 2 to a prof in Mandarin and he replied back in English although he was having problems with it, but he had to because he's an educator and we are in a school and subjects are taught in English (But they are some who communicate in Mandarin to fellow PRC students though). Not that because I couldn't understand their accents, which yes, sometimes were the cause of it, but it was because I prefer to speak Mandarin, and knowing their Mandarin is like the best among us, and I would take note of my pronunciations too. Talking to fellow Singaporeans by default is Singlish lah!
And so, while they were trying to fit into our society by speaking English, in formal situations, we talk to them in Mandarin? Clearly and subconsciously, I think there is a imaginary line that we divide between them and us. If I were a bit more immature, I probably thought they were trying to act high class, although they do thought speaking English made them any more high class, which actually averaged them to be just like normal Singaporean. My mum who was only secondary educated in Chinese could speak English too. Oh yah, she improved it the most when we had an Indo-maid. She chided the maid almost everyday in English, hence, this proved that you need to use languages often in order to learn.
Anyway, with all the PRCs flooding into our tiny island, this language problem had never seemed to surface out, or we are ignoring it? Some of my PRCs friends were totally converted and speaking Singlish now, with a Chinese accent though, which sounded very cute, I supposed youngsters adapt very quickly. It was the older batch of people, who came in straight to work here, definitely, I think they do have an issue with our deformed Mandarin and we with their CMI English.
Just that whenever we were slashing out our unhappiness with it, neither party was around.
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