Personal Monologue - KELVIN

Why so Cina?

I hate mispronouncing my words.

 Deaf, death. Deaf, death. The man is deaf. Death has come for the man. I hate it, this genetic predisposition for a short tongue. Palallel, I mean, parallel! I’ve learnt phonetics, why is this so hard? Ah,be,ce! Pronunciation, it’s simple really; just know what you want to say, and how you wanna say it. Teater! Th-ea-t-re. Still I can’t help saying it Cina.

            Faris likes making fun of me. He’s a stickler for pronunciation; it just floats his boat that I can get words wrong. His favourite is menu. He will never let that go. The first time he noticed me say meh-nu. He did a double-take, stared at me

 “Say that again.”

“Say what again?”

“What you just said.”

“Menu?”

He wouldn’t stop laughing; I had no idea what he was laughing about.

“Its men-yoo”

“Men-yoo? Its meh-nu isn’t it? Everybody says meh-nu. I’m pretty sure it’s that.”

“Nobody says meh-nu, its men-yoo.”

“Well I say meh-nu!”

“Haha Meh-nuuuuu boy.”

I’m not that Cina am I? I’m not even fluent in Mandarin; I slipped out of the womb crying in English ok. Chinese babies cry in Chinese, English babies cry in English.

Faris and I aren’t all that different. We’re sitting in our favourite pub, eating pork burgers and sipping Strongbow cider. Faris is Malay but he is not. Pork munching and booze guzzling aside he can’t even speak Malay properly; I swear my Malay is better than his. He was speaking to his driver on the phone the way a gweilo expatriate would speak. I have never let him live that one down.

Really I believe it’s about choosing your influences. When I was younger, in the afternoons I’d watch MTV, and at night, Cantonese TVB Dramas with Poh Poh. Raised with American influences in an Asian context, we have to choose. To me, to be Chinese is to be closed-minded, to be without imagination. Go to school, go be an engineer. Be a manager, be a CEO. Buy a house, buy a Mercedes Bensi. Do what you are told to, and don’t ask why. Is that all there is? Where is the room for dreams and imagination?

My uncle once asked me:

“English? What for? I speak English, you speak English. Study what?!” 

I am tired of explaining myself to all the aunties and uncles who stare at me incredulously. All of them asking me the same questions:

“Can get a job ar?”

No. But McD is always hiring anyways.

“How you going to make money?”

I don’t know. Male stripper la.

“Aiyoh like to read also good la, but that one can do as hobby mar. You have to consider a career.”

This is really about the only thing I’m halfway competent at.

Que sera sera. What will be will be.

Call me straight, call me naïve. I want to believe that if I keep doing the things I love, the things that feel right to me, then everything will turn out for the best. I love to read and I love knowledge. I want to learn more about language, to understand how we create words and words create ideas. Maybe even become a writer; to craft and sculpt thoughts into words.

Education has become a process, to achieve that A, to achieve that Degree. I, however just want to learn.

English they ask:
“What kind of work are you gonna get after you’re finish?”

Nobody asks “what will you learn”?

I knew I had to choose my lot in life. Take me away! There is no place for me among the culture I had grown up in.

Take me away.

Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly.

I hate it when I mispronounce my words.

I am reminded that despite my very best efforts, to be liberal, to be imaginative, to be eloquent and articulate; to be progressive, and for lack of a better word, Western. I am after all, Cina. There’s no escaping that. Born into such a context, when removed I lose my meaning. You can change, adapt, but you cannot remove that aspect of you; the bat who is both mammal and bird, unaccepted by either. Take notice of the plight of my generation, of Faris and me. Lost in the continuum between East and West, between tradition and modernity; we must find ourselves knowing we are never of either side. We are thesis, anti-thesis and the synthesis of a blave new world.

 Brave I mean. Br-ave. Fuck.