Singaporean Writer in New York on Language, Identity, and Living Between Cultures: S7E2

​As a  writer and playright,  words are what Jeremy Tiang uses to share his ideas about the world and all of its ambiguity. 

In his prose he addresses issues of identity, culture, and the boundaries of what we think these things mean. His upbringing in Singapore was multicultural and yet it was not. So much so that when asked what his first language is he replies, “It is complicated” and it is easy to see why.​Singapore, very much like Jeremy and very much like most curious, discerning people such as yourself (yes, listeners, I am talking about you), is in a state of constant change. This change includes how it shares itself with the world and Jeremy plays a part in how we see both Singapore and its people, especially, if I understand it right, those who are not often portrayed in the national narrative. 

original publication date: October 9, 2018

More: https://linktr.ee/stephfuccio

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

I'm Jeremy Tian. I'm a writer and translator originally from Singapore and now I live in New York.

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Awesome. Which m I actually was born in Brooklyn, New York. Okay, cool. Yeah, but we moved when I was three to Long Island and then uh when I was eight to New to Pennsylvania. So I have very limited memories of New York.

SPEAKER_03 0:20

Oh, well, I live in Brooklyn now.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

That's where I was born. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:23

I'm in Sunset Park, which is the Chinatown of Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Oh, awesome. I actually have moved back since I was 20. So I have like very, very toddler memories of the area. Yeah. And even like parts of neighborhoods and things I don't like, people tell me, and I'm like, I don't know. I need to go back.

SPEAKER_03 0:42

Yeah, you should do a podcast there.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Oh my god, I should. That would be really fun. All right. So let well let's start at the beginning. So you have a long, rich language history. Was your first language or languages?

SPEAKER_03 0:58

Uh that's tricky. And I think um I'm in the same position as a lot of people in former colonies where my primary language or my working language is English. Um but I hesitate to call it my first or native language, because it there isn't quite that sense of ownership. So the very first language I spoke was actually Cantonese. But my parents made me stop because it's not proper Chinese and we had to speak Mandarin, which was the official version of Chinese recognized in Singapore. But neither of my parents speak Mandarin. So they sent me to a neighbor when I was four, yeah, before kindergarten, to just learn some Mandarin. So I would start kindergarten with at least a basis. And I started picking up Mandarin then. I've pretty much completely lost my Cantonese. I think I've got a vestigial memory, um, but I yeah, can't really speak or barely understand it.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

So what was your home language then?

SPEAKER_03 2:01

Because you're It was English.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

It was English. Oh, okay. So your parent both your parents spoke English.

SPEAKER_03 2:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

But your father also spoke Tamil, is that right?

SPEAKER_03 2:09

Yes. He's um of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage. Okay. He speaks a bit of Cantonese. Um, and sometimes he and my mother speak to each other in Cantonese when they don't want us to understand.

SPEAKER_02 2:20

Oh, my parents did that. Not in Cantonese in Italian. Right. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My parents are both from southern Italy and from two very distinct areas with very different dialects, but they would speak standard Italian as if there was such a thing to each other when they didn't want us to understand what was happening.

SPEAKER_03 2:36

Yeah, that's a thing with households like like ours.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:39

But also they're both English teachers. So I think it came naturally that we would just grow up with English.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Gotcha, gotcha. Wow. How long were they English teachers for? Forty years.

SPEAKER_03 2:50

I mean, they're both of that generation that you get a job and then you just do it till you retire.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Right, right. Those were the days.

unknown 2:57

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Wow, wow, wow. Okay. So do you have any conversations in Cantonese anymore?

SPEAKER_03 3:05

No, I couldn't. Um ironically, I've had to translate a couple of books recently that involved Cantonese. And I had to deploy a variety of strategies like putting it through an optical reader to hear the Cantonese. Because even though the script is similar, there are still particularities of the language that I wanted to capture. And I would like to improve my Cantonese and maybe spend some time in Hong Kong, but there just hasn't really been time. So no, I couldn't have a functional conversation in Cantonese now.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Going back to the neighbor that helped you learn Mandarin, do you remember any of the learning process of that?

SPEAKER_03 3:44

Well, she gave home tuition, which is quite common in Singapore and I think here as well, where education is such a pressure cooker that you have extra classes. She didn't really know what to do with me because normally as a tutor you reinforce the school system, you sit with people as they do their homework. But someone who was preschool, mainly it was working a lot with flashcards and a lot of repetition.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

That's a whole lot of flashcards for mentors. Sorry. It's a great tactic.

SPEAKER_03 4:13

Because when you're starting out, the big thing is just acquisition of vocabulary. And I think she just wanted to throw lots of words at me. And it's like he can learn to make sentences later and eats the words.

SPEAKER_02 4:25

Do you remember? I think this is going back to a young part of your childhood, and not not a lot of us remember these things, but was there anything that sticks out to you that you liked or didn't like about learning Mandarin?

SPEAKER_03 4:36

Well, I think because of the format it felt quite isolating that she often just saps me with a bunch of a stack of flashcards and said, go through these and then went to tutor someone else.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 4:48

And four-year-olds can't really do self-directed learning.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

No, we're no, we're doing I've got something to tell you. Are you ready? I've got a special tip today for the Americans out there thinking, planning, actually in the process of moving abroad. Can I just tell you how much stress I have alleviated by using a product called traveling mailboxes? Oh my gosh, the snafu that we got into at one point when we got audited by the IRS. If it wasn't for traveling mailbox, it would still be an ongoing issue. What they do is they give you an address in the US and you have all of your whatever's left of your paperness going there. And trust me, you think you're all digital. There's some stuff that isn't. And I am reminded of this every time I get an email from them. So what happens is they give you the address, all your mail goes there, they open it and scan it and email it to you. And then you can decide if you want it forwarded, if you want it deleted, or what have you. I've even had a couple of checks come through there and they forward it to me overseas. So I mean, there's a lot of stuff you can do with this service, and it has really, really saved me time and time again. So I've got a link for you in the show notes so you can sign up with the service. And I am happy to share the information about them because this is a really useful tool. Enjoy. I feel like it sometimes, but yeah, no, four-year-olds. I feel I just had a flash to like a reading class in elementary school, in primary school when you said that. And that that sit-alone kind of quiet reading time in when you're like five, six, seven, eight years old. And I I felt the same way.

SPEAKER_03 6:43

Right.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:44

Yeah, no, I think you need someone to show you. And I guess that was the start of it. I always felt a bit behind. I think most of my classmates, when I got to kindergarten in the primary school, most of them had parents who spoke some Mandarin. So they weren't starting from scratch as much as I was. Right. But because my mother's Malaysian and my dad's of Sri Lankan descent, it was quite unusual in Singapore for people of their generation to speak no Mandarin at all. So I really was starting out from base of zero, whereas most of my classmates, some of them have Mandarin as their primary language and spoke to their parents in Mandarin or Mandarin and Hokkien. But even the ones who used English with their parents would have some ink. And Singapore's education system is quite it's a bit one size fits all. So there wasn't really anything in the system for people like me who were coming in cold. And I eventually caught up. But for a while it felt as if I wasn't as good as everyone else, which I was the sort of kid who worked really hard and, you know, did well in exams and everything. So this felt somehow like a personal failing.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

Yeah. I I totally understand why you were coming from a slightly different flavor. But uh I I heard a lot of Italian and some English at home. But when I got to school, putting the the letters, like the visual, the the orthographic part to it, I was like, oh, it doesn't sound like that at home when people say you know, it was it was a bit of a shock at first. And to the point where they wanted to put me like in a slow reading level, like almost the um the handicap kids level. Oh wow. Because I was I was just kind of processing, okay, that's where that that's how it sounds at home, that's how it sounds here. And it's just taking me a little while to adjust.

SPEAKER_05 8:35

Right.

SPEAKER_02 8:35

And they were just like, well, clearly she just can't handle it at all. So they tried to do that. And although I never taught in primary or secondary school, I did teach university students who came in from other cultures, a lot of them in Arizona were from Mexico, and they still had stories like that, like 20, 30 years after I had mine, where they just there wasn't anything in in the system for them. They were just either streamlined, like if they could keep up and and act native speaking like, then they they'd be fine. Otherwise, they get pushed into really, really low levels. Yeah. And kind of get stuck in a place that didn't that city didn't belong. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:12

Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

It's so crazy. Has it changed at all in Singapore?

SPEAKER_03 9:16

I think because we've had quite a lot of immigration in the last couple of decades, there are more and more children who come from different linguistic backgrounds. So there's a greater understanding that people have different needs. I don't know how this translates to actual what happens in schools, but hopefully just because of the numbers, things are changing.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

Yeah, yeah. Education's tricky. That could be an entire other whole podcast. But yeah, it's tricky. Well, a lot of us get kind of messed up in the system. For me, it was reading that kind of got me to a quote unquote normal level. I s I noticed I I started to read for fun and the other stuff fell into place. Was there anything that that inspired you when you were first in school to like reading and writing and eventually becoming a writer?

SPEAKER_03 10:13

Well, a lot of this was in English. I mean, it was apart from having parents who were English teachers. Uh my grandfather also ran a bookshop. And then when I was I can't remember exactly, I think maybe eight or nine, the bookshop shut down. He got bought out. Um and we inherited a lot of the books. Like he just gave us a lot of his stocks. So I grew and and my parents were, you know, off the buy your kid lots of books school. And they taught me actually at home I got flashcards in English quite early on, so I could read when I was three or four. Wow. So my English was always ahead of my classmates and my Chinese was behind. Which well, it's a bilingual society, so you are going to have different abilities, but I think I was a at a bit of an extreme. But because I'd grown up so surrounded by English books and always set an advanced reading level, and I would, you know, go to the library, come back with stacks of books, read things like Jane Austen before I was remotely ready. Like I I probably didn't understand all of it, but I read it. Yeah, and it it sunk in a lot. And I think that kind of paved the way for me eventually doing a degree in English, going to the UK. And then that sort of became well, I work really well with language.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

Right.

SPEAKER_03 11:41

So I didn't really start writing seriously till later on.

SPEAKER_02 11:46

When you were a young reader, were there certain things you liked to read in one language and certain things you liked to read in another?

SPEAKER_03 11:52

Or it was really primarily English. Partly because there's a lack of good children's literature in Chinese. I think it's better now. But in the 80s there was kind of nothing or what there was was very well, it was inclined towards moral education. Sure. So we got a lot of that. And it was it was not fun to read. Whereas the English books were designed to be engaging and interesting in all of that. Yep, yep, yep. So yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

We wrap our moral tales up in more uh colourful cloaks sometimes. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 12:29

Subtlety.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

Um so when you got to school, were was Mandarin and English taught equally or was one emphasized?

SPEAKER_03 12:45

Uh so the working language was English. And it was partly because Singapore's multi-ethnic. So the population is about 70% Chinese. But unless you have racially segregated schools, which do exist. My primary school was mixed, so we would use English all the time. And then maybe three hours a week we would have what what were called our mother tongue classes. And then the class would separate along ethnic lines, and the Chinese kids would go learn Chinese, and the Malay kids would go learn Malay, and the Indian kids would go learn Tamil. Even the Indian kids who weren't Tamil, they had to. It's got better these days, and there are more Indian languages on offer, but in the 80s it was Tamil or nothing.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. The English language classes in primary or even secondary school, were were they conversation-based? Were they reading-based? Like what kinds of things went on in the classrooms?

SPEAKER_03 13:40

Mostly grammar and vocabulary. It was it was more writing than reading in my memory. I feel like we spent more time writing stories and reading and then answering questions rather than talking. In secondary school, I went to a Chinese school. So that was racially segregated. It was like all ethnically Chinese, which is actually kind of weird now I think about it. But you just go with it. So we had more classes that were taught in Chinese.

SPEAKER_05 14:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 14:12

So things like art or music or physical education were taught in Chinese, which wouldn't have been the case in a more mixed school.

SPEAKER_05 14:20

Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 14:21

So and the Chinese classes were taught at a higher level. So we read simplified versions of Dream of the Red Chapel. And I kind of, I think, got my first grounding of Chinese literature around then.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Right, right, right. Uh the the local Shanghai folks that I've interviewed so far, when they talk about their Chinese language education, it is incredibly literature-oriented. At least the folks I've talked to so far. They it sounds like in first and second grade, they're really reading some pretty mature literature and memorizing it and repeating it and and copying it and kind of mimicking it when they write their own stuff. And I'm wondering if your No, we didn't have that.

SPEAKER_03 15:03

Okay. I think my Chinese teachers, some of them had had that, and they talked about it almost nostalgically. And I can see, you know, the English equivalent would be if you made eight-year-olds memorize all of Shakespeare's sonnets, which is everyone did that. And it it was like it doesn't matter if you don't understand it, you will, and then you'll have it in your head. So no, we never had that. We we memorized like maybe the ten most famous ones.

SPEAKER_05 15:26

Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:27

But it was it was very watered down. So I I'm I I'm kind of blown away when I'm talking to my Chinese friends, and they just have such a thorough knowledge of Chinese literature and classics and all the big names. And I don't have that in Chinese for sure, kind of filled in the gaps, but there's a lot of it. There is. And even with English, I definitely acquired that at a later age than them. I mean, I got it by doing an English degree, not like just at school.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

Sure, sure, sure, sure. We on some level, depending on the school in the US, you well, and the years that you were in school. Like for me, I apparently was just at the edge of a certain kind of m method of teaching primary school. And then my husband is just on the other side. And so we have very different uh educational systems. I did I did more like grammatical labeling of things, like verbs and nouns and parts of speech and those kinds of things, whereas his generation didn't. And I did more like memorizing of poems, not so much long literary pieces, but more of like poems and like the Declaration of Independence and like kind of long government kind of texts, like historical texts that I remember memorizing and I remember not understanding. So in on that regard, I do I do relate. But that also makes me question, why do we keep doing this? Globally, not just here or there or here anywhere. It just seems interesting to what do what do adults think they're doing when they have children memorize things that are so far out of their reach?

SPEAKER_03 16:57

I think it's partly that it's something that's easily testable. I think that is that element of schooling where you incline towards things that you can measure and mark.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:08

But also I feel like that's from a world pre-the internet when it was useful to just have vast amounts of things in your head and and now no one would, you know, you don't even need to know your times table.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

That's a really good oh gosh, but it'd still be a little handy too. I I do and I used to. Sure, sure, sure, sure. No, that's a good point. It's more of a memorized memorization uh like building activity than about the content itself.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Oh but then there's all kinds of scientific stuff that they could actually memorize instead that might be actually useful on science classes later. I don't know. Anyway. I often get stuck in the educational part of it. Your grandfather had a bookstore. Did were there did you go to the library very much?

SPEAKER_03 17:50

Uh yes, not as much as I would have liked because there wasn't one near us. We we lived in the northernmost tip of Singapore and the nearest library was about an hour away, which was Whoa. Yeah, like these days Singapore has the MRT, which is like this high-speed subway system, and everything's very fast. But back then it didn't we had to take a bus or like my dad did have a car, but he didn't always feel like driving us into town, understandably.

SPEAKER_05 18:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:18

So we would go and I would borrow the maximum number of books. I think that was eight. Um and then, you know, whenever my parents would take me, or as soon as I got old enough to take the bus on my own, then I started going more often.

SPEAKER_02 18:30

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. Uh for me, when I started learning about a year ago, uh Madarine Chinese about a year ago, the trying to explain in my head, because I'm a former language teacher, trying to explain in my head what a character is to people that I was talking to who aren't learning the language, who don't speak the language, was really challenging. It can be a word, it's not always a word, it's part of a word, it could be squished down and changed forms when it's in some other word.

SPEAKER_03 19:02

I mean, I did briefly teach Chinese. Um I've taught I've actually taught both Chinese and English. Because actually they were good freelance things to do. Sure. And my explanation was that it's a syllable. So a s a syllable can be part of a word like war in water, or it can be a whole word, like man, and the Chinese characters do the same thing. And that seemed to get people's minds working along the right lines. Yeah. I tried to stay away from the slightly exoticized thing of oh, they're little pictures.

SPEAKER_02 19:35

But most of them aren't and that pictures pictograms anymore. Yeah, they've morphed the ones that were morphed so much. That's a really clear comparison. But because you grew up with both, uh did you did you find yourself struggling to switch scripts as you were learning or using them at all?

SPEAKER_03 19:52

No. I I think the good thing about having both is that the tracks in my head developed separately. So um No, I I have trouble with other languages when I try to learn them, but not with English and Chinese. I think those are just like foundational.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

I'm so jealous you grab bilingually. Oh, everyone should, because it's just absorbed. They do, yeah. Yeah. And I think it does make it easier to learn other languages later on, even if it's challenging. Do you have heard so many different descriptions of how people feel when they're using different languages? Do you some people see colors, some people feel differently, some people feel like they're more expressive in one versus more emotional in another. Do you have any differences between your English and Chinese self?

SPEAKER_03 20:36

I'm probably more polite in Chinese. I think just because I'm more sensitive to nuance in English. So you know you can be a bit edgy in English and you can be like joking around and you know how far you can go. Sure. And I don't really have that in Chinese. Okay. So I I err on the side of politeness so I don't offend anyone.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 20:58

And also just because formal structures are easier and I think it's easier to make myself understood than if I try Yeah, I'm not always up to date with the latest slang, and it's just easier to be more standard.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking of that earlier. When did slang come into the English or the Chinese that you were learning in I'm guessing primary or secondary school?

SPEAKER_03 21:23

Yeah. Um well, all along. Because, you know, we used to mix both quite often. And that, you know, with primary school kids, that was slang.

SPEAKER_02 21:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what because it was such a diverse student popul, in primary school it was different. The Chinese only language school that was secondary school. Secondary. Okay. So in primary school it was a pretty mixed population. Yeah. So what language was with or languages were this sl was this lying in?

SPEAKER_03 21:52

Um It's well in Singapore, it's it's quite a mixture. So there's a bit of Malay in there as well. Not as much Tamil.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:59

But um Um, you know, you might say want to go machan, and machan is the Malay for eat, and you just drop that in there.

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Oh, okay. So there's a lot of blending too of the different languages. Nice. Did the teachers ever get grumpy about that?

SPEAKER_03 22:14

The Chinese ones did, because I I think because because English was the dominant language, is the dominant language in Singapore, um, there's a kind of security that they didn't need to worry about it. But the Chinese teachers could feel their language eroding. So there was a sense of we have to keep this pure and you have to learn the language of your ancestors. Um they would get quite grumpy, especially if we mixed in English, because how dare you.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

It's so funny sometimes how territorial languages could be, but on some level I understand it too. Especially if you don't know the languages that are getting played with, then it's it they could be turning into a bit of an outsider, I suppose, in the right.

SPEAKER_03 22:56

And I mean it's you know, the history is complicated, right? There was you know, in the 80s when I was in primary school, we'd only been independent as a country for less than twenty years.

SPEAKER_05 23:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 23:08

And China was just this big unknown thing. It hadn't really opened up yet. So a lot of people, even the ones who still had family in China, hadn't spoken to their family or hadn't really been in contact because China had been so closed off in the 60s and 70s. So now it's very different. But back then i the politics around whether you used English and Chinese and how you use them, I wasn't really aware of that, but I could sense that it wasn't just language. There were definitely complicated things going on.

SPEAKER_02 23:39

How how young do you think you were when you first kind of picked up on that?

SPEAKER_03 23:44

Probably secondary school. So maybe teens.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

That's pretty early, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wow, wow, wow. And did you, after you realized that was happening, did you ever rebel with language to kind of fight not fight back, but kind of be rebellious towards people that weren't particularly nice in any situations or anything? I'm thinking of teachers from my high school, sorry.

SPEAKER_03 24:09

I'm just gonna project over into I mean I I guess I I spoke better English than some of my teachers. So I I definitely like not in a nasty way, but I think I would just use very proper grammar. Sure. Um in a kind of I've got this way.

SPEAKER_05 24:27

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:28

But no, I I think language in Singapore is such a mixed bag that um I don't know, it just felt messy to get into that.

SPEAKER_02 24:36

Well, let's leave your childhood. So after Mandarin in in English, when did you learn your next language?

SPEAKER_03 24:45

So when I was 13, we had the option of doing a third language. Weirdly, the choices we were offered were French, German, and Japanese. I think in hindsight, I wish we I had been able to learn Tamil, because I still don't I've I am still attempting to learn Tamil, but like it's difficult. So I picked German.

SPEAKER_02 25:04

That was my first too.

SPEAKER_03 25:06

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 25:07

I was fifteen though, not thirteen. But I don't how did that go?

SPEAKER_03 25:12

Well, it's it's closest to English and then it sort of kept coming into my life. Like I I learnt it all through secondary school. Um when I was fifteen, I had the chance to go spend a month on an exchange in Karlsruhe, Germany. So I spent a month little German town, well medium-sized German town going to the local gymnasium and speaking German with the host family. Right. And then when I got to university, we did Anglo-Saxon, which turned out to have a lot of German resonances. Because that was because before the French came over and like Frenchified the language.

SPEAKER_02 25:50

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Wait, Anglo-Saxon is an actual language. It was old English. Oh, okay. Whoa. Okay, not Beowulf kind of old English. Oh, it is. You learn that?

SPEAKER_03 26:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

Holy cow.

SPEAKER_03 26:05

Like, not learnt it as a language, because it's not a living language. Right, right. But um, they would give us Beowulf and Pearl and kind of all of those texts. And honest, there aren't that many of them left. So I think we looked at them all. Yeah. And we basically translated them into modern English, and that was how we learned them.

SPEAKER_02 26:22

Right.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

Like we didn't have to speak in Anglo-Saxon or anything like that.

SPEAKER_02 26:26

Yeah, yeah, the tr translation method. Yeah. Sure, sure. Wow. Okay. So it was more of a a written exercise in translating. Is that where did you did you get a sense that you liked translating then?

SPEAKER_03 26:37

I I could feel I had a flare for it, but I think I always moved between languages anyway. And I think I'd been hyper aware compared to most Singaporeans. Because my language levels were at different places to most of my peers. So I was always translating a bit in my head, I think.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

Aaron Powell If there were any language in the world you could have learned at 13, what do you think you would have picked instead of German?

SPEAKER_03 27:01

Aaron Powell I don't know if I would have picked Tamil, but I do wish that I had. Malay would also have been useful. I I basically the other two languages of Singapore that I don't speak.

SPEAKER_05 27:12

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 27:13

Because it's quite weird to have four official languages in the country and I only speak two of them. So there's quite a lot of our national literature and just the country at large that I don't have access to.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

Those those historical documents, are they translated into all four of the languages, or are they just available in one?

SPEAKER_03 27:30

Uh well, a lot of things are translated into all four languages. And that there are random things like our national anthem is in Malay. And honestly, a lot of Singaporeans just sing the national anthem every day and don't really know what it means. Sure. There are the army gives commands in Malay. And I guess so everyone who's been through the army knows what right and left in Malay are and what step forward are. Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_02 27:58

Now we keep talking about the four languages. So you said Bahasa Malay was one, Chinese is one. What are the Antemal and English? That's quite a large amount of national languages.

SPEAKER_03 28:11

Yeah. Well, the British brought in people from China and from South India, and that was already an indigenous Malay population. So it's a complete accent of history. Like no one planned this.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

So German, then Old English, and then what what languages after that? As if that's not enough.

SPEAKER_03 28:31

Yeah. Well, I I took a year of Japanese classes at one point, just because like it wasn't even I was just I can't really explain why I decided to learn Japanese. I was playing a Japanese character in a play, and so I thought I will learn a bit of Japanese. Um but then I sort of carried on with it with no clear end point. Like I was just learning a language for its own sake. And then after a year, I kind of moved on. So I still have the basics. But when I'm in Japan, I mostly do that thing of, you know, you read kanji as if it's Chinese and you sort of figure it out.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

Yeah, you can read it but not necessarily say it to someone. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Uh when was that in university after university?

SPEAKER_03 29:13

That was I think it was about 30, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Do we have any more languages?

SPEAKER_03 29:17

I'm st trying to learn Tamil. I started a more serious attempt about five years ago. But it sort of comes and goes depending on how busy I am. So at this point I'm trying to not put myself under too much pressure and just learn a bit whenever I can. Sure, sure, sure. Mostly vocabulary building and just like making sure I don't lose my familiarity with the writing. Because if I can at least read it, and then that's something that I can build.

SPEAKER_02 29:45

Is Tamil written in Sanskrit?

SPEAKER_03 29:48

Or is it it's an alphabet that's a bit like Sanskrit, but it's not Sanskrit.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Okay. So you've got quite a a few different scripts under your belt.

SPEAKER_03 29:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

Whoa. Okay. So for Japanese and for Tamil, did you study in classes or so it sounds like the Japanese was self-study.

SPEAKER_03 30:05

I had a teacher, and I found a teacher on the internet and I went to see her once a week. Um and she got really into it. Like she would make green tea and then we would sit on the side.

SPEAKER_05 30:14

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03 30:15

It was like the whole thing.

SPEAKER_05 30:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:17

With the Tamil, it's really hard to find Tamil teachers. Because I don't live in Singapore, unfortunately, um, where it would be a bit easier. So I found a lady on the internet who taught me on Skype. She's in California, but she wasn't really a teacher. She was just a lady who spoke Tamil. And that was unsatisfactory after a while. Right. Because I would ask, why is the sentence like this? And she couldn't tell me. She'd you know, it just is.

SPEAKER_02 30:41

Right, right, right. I wonder, would you be at all I know it's a a a casual learning, but would you be at all interested in doing like online um like there's things like iTalkie that like hook you up with language teachers online, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_03 30:55

Potentially. I mean, I it was through a system like that that I found the lady in California. Okay. So now I'm a bit wary because clearly if they're just signing up native speakers who are not qualified teachers, then that's not quite worth it. But I I will explore this again. What I did was the last time I was back in Singapore, I got a bunch of primary school text pistols.

SPEAKER_02 31:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:19

So it's is it mostly like exercises and yeah, it's a lot of here is the word for ball, here's a picture of ball drawn line.

SPEAKER_02 31:29

I'm doing that. Oh no, I'm doing more like A, B, C, D instead of a line, but it's the same.

SPEAKER_03 31:34

Oh yeah, a line. Yeah. Fill in the missing letters. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

If you're enjoying this conversation about the Chinese language and would like to participate if you're studying in the Chinese language, or if you come from the Chinese language and have learned other languages, either perspective is greatly actually both perspectives are greatly appreciated on this channel. Let's have a conversation. Let's tape that sucker and let's get it into this podcast. Contact me and let's etch out the details on how to get you and your valuable language learning experience onto this podcast. All of my information is in the show notes. Also all over social media except Facebook. I am Steph Puccio, S-T-E-P-H, F-U-C-C-I-O. That includes Gmail for my email, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. So I look forward to hearing from you. Language learning is vocabulary. Vocabulary, vocabulary, yeah. What is your what is your goal in in Tamil? Is it to be able to speak the language, to read both?

SPEAKER_03 32:39

Both. I I kind of learn in tandem. When I was teaching Chinese, I had students who would say I just want conversational Chinese, and I would be like, no, you are learning the character. Yeah. They've actually done studies that if you write when you learn, it cements it more. So apparently, according to the studies I've seen, if I had learned to write when I was speaking Cantonese, I would have retained it. But because I only ever spoke it, it's gone.

SPEAKER_02 33:14

No, I I I kicked against those studies for a while and then I gave up. Because they're so right. I was using all the the apps for like food I was learning Mandarin initially, all the the Ankies and all the time space repetition things, and it just wasn't working as well. And there were some things I couldn't get in there, or it was taking too long, or I didn't have access to my phone during work, and I really wanted to study then. So I started accidentally using the flashcards that are behind you. And then I realized that it was working better.

unknown 33:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:43

I was like, okay, well, there goes the apps. At least for this part of it. I'm sure there are apps that could work for other things, but there's something in even though I just make it once, it it's like staring at my own. And then eventually sometimes I have to redo them because they look they look like somebody smushed the character. They're so badly written the first time that I have to erase them and go back and try again.

SPEAKER_03 34:05

But just the action of doing it.

SPEAKER_02 34:07

Yeah. And remembering the first time of making certain ones. I know they're not pictograms, but in my brain, they go into little video modes and they jump around on the flashcards to remembering what I thought the first time I saw it sometimes. Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, that brings up a good thing, because some of them do look kind of like what they mean. Do you remember in elementary school as kids, did you guys play with the words at all in that way?

SPEAKER_03 34:34

No, that wasn't a thing. My parents got me a picture book that had some of the pictures that showed how they that they fall over time. But that wasn't something we did at school. It was quite a rote method of learning, which I think is similar to the one that's used here, where you spend hours just tracing the words in the air, chanting the name of each stroke. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:56

I think that's probably better. I I often get caught up in what the the the animations that my brain makes, and like, oh, I need to go on to the next hundred words. Let's keep going. So it's probably better not to do it, but oh, I don't know. It's kind of fun anyway.

SPEAKER_03 35:11

I mean it's fun, but probably not as I think there are certain things that work as mnemonics. I mean, I'll do a thing that won't translate to the podcast. But and when I was teaching, I'd be like, star is big and then Xiao is small. Yay! Big, small, and people remember it like that.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

Yeah, okay. For those of you that watch my YouTube channel, if you go back to the beginning when I did the the thing where I was putting my arms down for a Xiao, okay, that's what he just did. Because I was like, I j I jump up and down and do that just because I was like, it looks because that's because Xiao looks like that. Yeah. And so yeah, that makes complete sense. That's awesome. Plug, plug, plug. And the tones, I imagine if you're growing up with it, the tones don't not an issue at all.

SPEAKER_03 36:01

I was talking to someone the other day and he was like, Your tones are very Cantonese. And I was like, oh, okay, okay. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

Am I understandable? Yes. Okay, let's move on. And it's funny because I hear a lot of the locals here in Shanghai, they'll talk about different dialects and being able to really pick up very quickly where somebody's from.

SPEAKER_05 36:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:22

In Singapore, are there many, many, very many accents, many, many variations of Mandarin?

SPEAKER_03 36:27

No, the accent is pretty standard. Uh the Mandarin is pretty standard. People do speak Hokkien or Cantonese or so forth. Sure, sure, sure. But it's it's a tiny country. Everyone has a similar accent. Where there's a difference, it's more class than regional.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

Ah. And that does that come through with language or just everything else?

SPEAKER_03 36:50

It's part of a package, I think. But like broadly speaking, the more grammatical your English, probably the higher class you are. Um and Chinese to an extent. Like there are certain, I guess, old Chinese families who are like, oh, we speak pure Mandarin. I'm generalizing hugely, but I have met a few people who are like, no, no, we speak Mandarin. But in general, if you speak good English, and generally if you have a high level of educational attainment that correlates strongly with your social class, even though we allegedly live in a meritocracy.

SPEAKER_02 37:26

How would you explain time in Mandarin versus English?

SPEAKER_03 37:32

Um I have various theories about this. I I think we face the other way in Chinese. Because the in Chinese the past is yixien, but it's the opposite to English. We're eatien the past is uh front and the whole the future is back. Yeah. So it's like we're facing the past, which I can see that you can see the past because it actually makes sense. But to the Western mind, it's like no, no, you face the future.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

Right. No, this makes sense. I've heard in Greece also, because I used to do a lot of hand gesture thingies with my students to kind of warm up the classes. And apparently in Greek, and if any of you the listeners speak Greek, please correct me if this is wrong, but they actually point in front of them for past because you can see it, and behind them for the future because you can't see it. You don't know what's coming. So yeah, so linguistically that comes through in Chinese.

SPEAKER_05 38:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:28

My time ability to my ability to produce time in Chinese is is horrible right now. So can you think of exam an example of that in a sentence or something?

SPEAKER_03 38:39

Well, it I think the bigger thing is that time is fluid anyway because of the lack of tenses. And I find this a lot when I'm translating where I'll be translating a paragraph and it's past tense, past, tense, past. And then suddenly I realize that a next sentence has to be present tense, and it's like, oh, we've shifted. But that shift is invisible in the Chinese.

SPEAKER_02 39:01

How do you know it happened then?

SPEAKER_03 39:04

Sometimes because of the sense, sometimes I have to phone the author and go, is she saying that she hated her or that she hates her?

SPEAKER_02 39:14

Oh, it's that ambiguous that you have to handle it.

SPEAKER_03 39:18

I mean, mostly you can figure it out with context.

SPEAKER_02 39:21

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 39:22

But sometimes it's like, are you talking about something that happened before, something that's still true now? And sometimes the writer hasn't decided because they haven't had to make a decision.

SPEAKER_02 39:32

So it's existing in that written form i in an undecided way.

SPEAKER_03 39:38

There are various things that languages make us do. Right. Like So examples that go both ways. An English writer can just write his cousin. And then if I was translating that into Chinese, I would have to phone the English writer and go, cousin on the father's side or mother's side, older or younger, because it's all different words. Right, right. And the English witch writer might not have made that decision. They're like your cousin.

SPEAKER_02 40:04

Very true. It having grown up with English, do you understand the the time importance in in verbs in English? Yeah. So it it's still like a year, year and a half in hurting my head to stare at a sentence and go, okay, I understand everything that's happening in the sentence, but I don't understand the time. And that's just part of the language sometimes.

SPEAKER_03 40:26

Yeah. I mean, there are enough markers like le or you s I think you say the time more often in Chinese to locate yourself. But I don't know. I either you adjust to that context or maybe you get more comfortable with the ambiguity.

SPEAKER_02 40:46

And do you think that linguistic ambiguity is a mirror of the culture that it connected to?

SPEAKER_03 40:56

I don't know. Possibly. I think there are I can't think of a concrete example right now, but certainly in the literature I see it reflected, so it makes sense to assume that that carries into real life as well. Where in English you know, we're always correcting ourselves. Like like you'll say he's a teacher, oh no, he was a teacher. Whereas that would just be an invisible slip in Chinese.

SPEAKER_02 41:22

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 41:25

And then maybe that does contribute to the once a teacher always a teacher. You wouldn't necessarily say he was a former teacher, you'd just say ta shalash. And then if you wanted to make it clear, you might say Tai Chien Silash. But you might not, and then he's just a teacher even if he retired.

SPEAKER_02 41:47

Right, right, right. It's something that just yeah, it's one of the things of being especially a born and raised East Coast American where time is like every minute is important, and making it very clear when everything happens all the time and getting that correctly in in the sentences, that it's a it's something that I'm finding hard to be less strict about. But I yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 42:13

I learned that language in in general is so you can have a sentence without a subject and it's just pure meaning. Whereas English is much more specific.

SPEAKER_02 42:25

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. For Japanese and Tamil, what were the biggest challenges on starting to learn those?

SPEAKER_03 42:35

I honestly I didn't get to a high enough level in either to for the challenges to be anything, but just remembering any of it. And just remembering the writing systems. Like to this day, I do okay with hiragana, but I can't retain katakana because it's less common in the language. And whether I get the meaning of any given kanji is a pretty low probability. Now with Tamil similarly, I remember the more common particles, but the less frequently used ones often slip my mind. And the variations in pronunciation. It's just a very base level. How does this language even work?

SPEAKER_02 43:16

Right.

SPEAKER_03 43:17

Always being tripped up by this or that.

SPEAKER_02 43:19

Right, right, right, right. What language do you think in during the day?

SPEAKER_03 43:24

Mostly English. Um occasionally Chinese if I'm doing something that requires me to work in Chinese. Like if I'm doing a talk in Chinese and I have to write it out, and then I do start to think in Chinese. I've spent longish periods in China and I haven't started thinking or dreaming in Chinese, even though my day-to-day life I guess because my day-to-day life isn't that much in Chinese, as you know, there's still a lot of segregation where you mostly end up hanging out with English speakers.

SPEAKER_02 43:53

How about do uh so are you dreaming in English then?

SPEAKER_03 43:56

Yeah. I think so. I mean, or do Do I not dream in a language and then a remember in English?

SPEAKER_02 44:03

Right. Right. It is I I often think often now. A new thought of mine is uh did you ever see what is it? Oh, it's that movie with John Kruzak, uh something spotless mind, eternal.

SPEAKER_03 44:14

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

SPEAKER_02 44:16

Yeah. I want that for dreams. Not to remove the memories, but for something that can record dreams. Because I often don't remember mine, and then I'll go through a period where I remember it. And there's times when I'll be studying a language, not feel like I'm learning it, but I'll dream in it in a high enough level that I don't even understand what's happening in my dream, which makes no sense to me whatsoever, but it happens. And I would like to record it and then have somebody translate it so I know what I'm dreaming.

SPEAKER_03 44:43

Do you think it's maybe something you heard during the day and you're retained?

SPEAKER_02 44:47

I don't know. I don't think so because I've never gotten to a high enough level to use authentic text. Well, I have not yet gotten to a level where I can use authentic text. So, but these and these feel like conversations between people or even like hear dropping or overhearing a movie or something like that. And so I can't imagine that having been something I heard during the day. It's very weird. But it'd be kind of nice to record our dreams. But then we'd have hours and hours of things to listen to.

SPEAKER_03 45:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

With already too much to do.

SPEAKER_03 45:16

Yeah, I I don't know that I want to get that much into my subconscious.

unknown 45:20

Right.

SPEAKER_02 45:22

Or even get a summary of it at the end of the night. Here's what you dreamed about. Why are you so worried? So other than Tamil, are there any other languages like in the distant, distant future, that you'd like to delve into at all?

SPEAKER_03 45:36

Oh, I mean all of them. You know, I I've been through various places. I've stopped now because it's a clearly a terrible habit. But when I lived in the UK and there were these charity shops, there were always these language tapes that people had abandoned, right? And they were like a pound.

SPEAKER_05 45:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:52

And so you'd be like, oh, it's a pound. Maybe this time I will learn Portuguese. And of course you never learn Portuguese. Right. But that sits on your shell for a couple of years and you think you might, and then you give it back to the charity shop and someone else can have it. But I would definitely like to get my Tamil like to any kind of level. I would like to get my German up to fluent and then Malay, probably. And then I could just sit here and list every language in the world actually. Because there's so many that are fascinating that that's one reason or another why I want to get into them. Like I would like to learn Cambodian or Vietnamese because for a while I was editing a magazine, a magazine of Asian literature, and I could not find translators from those languages, or they were very rare. They were like a couple.

SPEAKER_05 46:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 46:43

So that felt like a lack. The cultures I'm fascinated by that I would like to get to know better. There's just a lot out there that's incomprehensible. Yeah. But realistically, there was a New Yorker article recently about polyglots. And it's pretty clear from reading the article that I'm not one of them. So I've got a find- Really? Well, not in the set they were not polyglots, hyperglot. Hyper polyglots.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

Oh, was it the Babel No More book that they were reviewing or anything?

SPEAKER_03 47:12

I can't remember. I think they were they were following an actual guy around who had that ability. They followed one of these people to Malta and just works watched him learn Maltese and saw how long that took. So the way they absorb languages is clearly out of this world, whereas I absorb languages like a normal person, i.e., I probably have finite capacity. So German, Japanese, and Tamil, and maybe Malay is probably like the amount I could absorb in my life, and that's already quite optimistic.

SPEAKER_02 47:47

That's but that's a very substantial amount of languages to have. A lot of people help one. Oh, not a lot. Sorry, where I'm from, a lot of people have one. In the world, multilingualism is more the norm. Sure. Um than in the US. But yeah, I was reading this book, Babel No More. He was following around, well, historically and in person, uh, hyperpolyglots. And it's the first time I ever heard that word, as if being bilingual or multilingual isn't difficult enough. Now there's this exaggerated high bar of mul of hyper polyglots, and different people were defining it differently. Some people said it was over seven languages, some people said it was over 15. Right. And I'm just sitting there listening, going, what? And to a very, very high level of fluency and functionality. Ha. But anyway, so have you ever been to this site, omniglot?

SPEAKER_01 48:37

I have not.

SPEAKER_02 48:39

Part of being a stubborn monolingual that can't get a second language is that I've learned a lot about languages without learning them. And so it's actually really, really cool. Listeners, I'll put it in the show notes. It's really, really cool. You can go into any language and it will tell you, it will show you examples of the written form. I think it has audio samples now of the sounds of it, of course, are let's go to Tamil.

SPEAKER_05 49:01

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 49:04

Tammy. Do they not have it? It's a T-A-M-A-M.

SPEAKER_03 49:10

Yes. Is that a misspelling? Oh no, there it is.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

Oh, okay. It's just not.

unknown 49:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 49:16

So they'll have like descriptions, some historical stuff, and they'll just have like Huh. Really kind of fun. And there's oh wow. Yeah, there's the script right there.

SPEAKER_03 49:26

Yeah. You see the difference just not forgetting that is an accomplishment. Seriously, it almost looks like Thai in a way, but not as well apparently what I read was that um it was originally written on palm leaves, and the reason it's all curves is that angle to cut then.

SPEAKER_02 49:47

Right, right, right. And you couldn't pick up your pen probably because if you've had to accept feedback. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, that is quite a looking. Anyway, so it's it can yeah, there's a Huh. I have no idea. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:11

But it does this for so many different languages. So when I was teaching in a multilingual classroom, I would go in here and kind of get a sense of what my student came from and do that kind of thing. It's really, really cool. I'll send this to you. Two. Thank you. Do you later. But I love learning about languages. I'm just not uh terribly good at learning. Um, so we haven't talked about your writing or translating very much yet. So or even your you've you've written plays as well, right? Yes. Plays and fiction.

SPEAKER_03 50:41

Plays and fiction, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:43

Wow. Which one did you write first?

SPEAKER_03 50:45

Well, I guess very initially when I was at school, I wrote short stories. They weren't any good at all. Uh then I trained as an actor and I became an actor for a bit. And then I started writing plays, which is quite a natural progression, right? Lots of actors end up writing plays.

SPEAKER_01 51:00

Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 51:00

Like Shakespeare. And only I stuck with it. Um and it became apparent at a certain point that I was better at writing than at acting. So I did that. And then I had written fiction before, so I sort of transitioned back into that. And then started spending more time doing that, partly because fiction you can just do, whereas plays are much more collaborative. Um so I've written I find I do much better writing plays when I'm working with actors in a director and we're building something together.

SPEAKER_02 51:34

So plays aren't written first and then I mean that happens a lot. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:39

It's just I've had better results when I start with a script and then bring it into the room and then the actors and the director get to work. I was like, well, that's how it should go.

SPEAKER_01 51:47

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 51:48

And then I sort of write new bits on the spot.

SPEAKER_01 51:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:51

So that's that's kind of become the way I write plays. I say that I haven't done it that much. I've had two productions so far. But it's quite an elaborate way to go about it because you have to get everyone in a room and they've got you've either got to find money to pay them or they've got to be willing to do it, which you can't ask them to do too often.

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 52:12

Whereas fiction, you just lock yourself in a room and you do it.

SPEAKER_02 52:16

Mad respect for that. I was reading an article on you today where you were talking about how you were very good at organizing your time. Like you did a block of translating, then a block of writing, and a block of exercise, and you just you had to separate the writing and the translating from each other and and and be very organized and methodical like that. How did you come to that organization? And do you still do that?

SPEAKER_03 52:40

I do. I mean, it doesn't always stick, but I always plan my day and then try to because I almost always have a number of things happening at the same time, I need to make sure that they're all progressing a little bit. Yes.

unknown 52:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 52:56

Yeah. Um whereas I I do have phases where I get completely stuck into say a translation and then doing that for 10 hours a day. But A, that is kind of unhealthy. Yeah. And the work suffers because your brain doesn't have time to take a break. Whereas switching to a different thing is a sort of brain. And also when I then go back to my other thing, it's like, oh, it's been two weeks and I've lost the thread.

SPEAKER_05 53:19

Right.

SPEAKER_03 53:19

So I use the Pomodoro method, which is where you do things in 25 minute segments.

SPEAKER_02 53:25

The pom how do you spell that?

SPEAKER_03 53:26

Pomodoro, like Italian for tomato. M-O-T-M-R-O. Yeah. You can do that with the kitchen timer or that's a Pomodoro website where you set it up and it just does. So it's 25 minutes of work and then five minutes of break, and you do a unit of four, so that's two hours. And it's very manageable because if something seems daunting, you can still do it for 25 minutes. And that's quite a nice structure for me to break up my days. So I use that as a building block, and then I decide which Pomodoros I'm going to devote to which projects.

SPEAKER_02 54:04

I have this theory that I think is pretty wrong. That if one were fluent in multiple languages, that when you switch languages, you can kind you can keep doing something and it's not taxing. For example, if you exhaust yourself while you're reading in Chinese and then you switch to English, you'd have a fresh mind immediately because you'd be going kind of to a different place in your mind.

SPEAKER_03 54:26

Aaron Ross Powell That happens with me, but I think purely because I find English immediately a relief because I'm more comfortable with it.

SPEAKER_02 54:34

Ah. So if you went in the other direction, it wouldn't have that effect.

SPEAKER_03 54:37

Aaron Ross Powell Actually no. It it would it would still the change would still be refreshing. So there would be an element of that.

SPEAKER_02 54:44

So once I got bilingual, I could work twice as much.

SPEAKER_03 54:48

Theoretically. No, but what I do find is that um when I switch between translation and writing, or even between translating two things that are very different, I do get a little burst of energy. Yeah. It's like, oh okay.

SPEAKER_02 55:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking within the same Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking task-wise, I completely I think so too. Unless you're so far gone after ten hours of doing the same thing. Then it's too nothing can help other than sleep. But yeah, just language wise, if they're I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 55:22

I think you probably do use different parts of your brain. I I don't know. It this completely placebo effect, but if it works Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 55:36

Bad, bad, bad. Media. What do you do you consume most stuff in English or does it do you have do like reading stuff, listening to stuff, podcasts videos, movies?

SPEAKER_03 55:49

I think English I go through phases because I tend to get obsessed with things. Like for a while it was Ode to Joy, the terrible Chinese. Have you seen this?

SPEAKER_04 55:58

No.

SPEAKER_03 55:58

It's a TV series set in Shanghai called Ode to Joy. It's about five women who live on the same floor in a condominium called Ode to Joy.

SPEAKER_01 56:07

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 56:09

And two of them are rich and own their apartments, and the other three are regular working people and they share the third apartment on that floor. So it without being too direct about it, it does look at the class difference between these five women and their different ex how Shanghai is a very different city for them.

SPEAKER_02 56:28

Yes. Are are most of them not from Shanghai?

SPEAKER_03 56:32

Yeah. The rich one of the rich ones is from Shanghai. The other rich one has this ludicrous backstory where she was an orphan and grew up with escapes.

SPEAKER_02 56:41

Of course.

SPEAKER_03 56:44

And the three poor ones came from small towns and like are really struggling and that have to send money home to their parents.

SPEAKER_02 56:51

That's really cool. When do what's is this on now?

SPEAKER_03 56:55

I think the second season has just finished. I just watch it on Yuku where everything's up forever. I think if you go onto YouTube, there are even some subtitled episodes.

SPEAKER_02 57:06

Oh, danger. No. I'm trying by the time I take my HSK3 test on December, I need to I need to force myself to listen to real language, even if I don't understand it yet. And I I'm always looking for something.

SPEAKER_03 57:22

Well, I reckon that's it then, because a lot of it is just day-to-day life and they're just living their lives, and it's just like them in the office having an argument.

SPEAKER_02 57:29

That's really cool. That's really cool. It needs to uh yeah, the language needs to be humanized. Right now I'm doing a lot of like two or four line conversations between voices, not people. And so it's it's very odd. And they go to the they're in the grocery store, something happens, and then we're at the office and something happens. And then we're at the bus stop and something happens, and it's not a a collective story. Do they slip into Shangha'is or is it mostly in Pudonghwa?

SPEAKER_03 57:54

It's Pudong Kwa. Yeah. There's there's one character. One of them has a tricky relationship with her boyfriend's mother. And the boyfriend's mother uses a lot, not a lot, but some Shanghainese. Like she uses these, especially when she's trying to be coercive. And it's quite interesting the way that character uses Shanghainese. But mostly no, I guess because they want it to air across China.

SPEAKER_02 58:16

Sure, sure, sure. Very cool, very cool. Okay, so you go through phases where you're watching stuff like that, but in general?

SPEAKER_03 58:22

Mostly English, I have to say. But I think that's partly because I live in the States and the things that people are talking about that I have to watch this are in English. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 58:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 58:32

I mean, occasionally when it's something in German particularly, like for a while everyone was saying, Oh, you have to watch Babylon Berlin, it uh some Amazon Prime show. Oh, okay, gotcha. I watched it with German subtitles. Nice. Which is a kind of middle ground. I think if I just turned off the subtitles, I probably wouldn't understand a lot of it. But with German subtitles I can actually follow it, and then that became a way of keeping up my German. One thing we haven't said is about language acquisition and my language ability in Chinese has improved dramatically since I started translating. Like I was fluent before, just through having grown up with it. Right. But I don't think I really had a working ability with the language. Like I probably couldn't have written a short story in Chinese, whereas now it would still be awkward and difficult, but I feel like I am more equipped to do it. So translating in itself is a great way to really get into the nooks and crannies of a language, of pick up things that you wouldn't just by learning it.

SPEAKER_02 59:46

I studied second language acquisition for my master's degree. I thought I was signing up for like a teacher training kind of two-year master's degree. I'd already taught English overseas for a decade, wanted to go back and get qualification to get better jobs overseas, yada, yada, yada. It turned out to be a very theoretical second language acquisition uh course. It was only two years. The teaching part of it was very interesting, so I stuck with it and got my master's. But I got to learn the trends in second language acquisition and how they bled over into education and how languages were taught, at least in the the English language world of whoever published in English in the in academia, which is a smaller and smaller world. It was every qualifier I put on that. And there was for a very long time the the translation method. And then it went out of uh went out of whatever the phrase I'm trying to think of is, and another one came in, and another one came in, and there's all these different methods that people use, and they use one method at a time. Do you find that there's one thing that works for most people, or do you think it's a variety of methods that help people learn languages?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:55

Aaron Ross Powell I mean the one thing that definitely works is immersion, but that's not always practical. I think all I can safely say really is that translation worked for me. And that's my mind, which is quite analytical and quite detail-oriented. But someone else might find it more useful to just do practice or to um I don't know, do flashcards.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:24

Right, right, right. I don't know. Part of me wants the language classroom to have different tracks and to have like a few days of each and then people get to pick which they won't necessarily probably the ideal one is that they do different things at different times. And that would work. But how do you organize that with a group?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:44

I mean that there are definitely different types of learners, right? And I'm pretty sure that I'm a kinesthetic learner. I learn by doing.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:52

Um, and translation is just doing. Like you're moving between languages and you're physically typing it. And something about that makes things stick more than just reading or just hearing.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:04

Yeah, yeah. Now you translate from Chinese to English. Do you also translate from English to Chinese?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:09

Very occasionally. I am less fluid in my use of Chinese, so it wouldn't really make sense. Like that's literally a billion people who could do it better than me. People don't always understand the difference, and then I have to explain it. And I've started getting to know English to Chinese translators, so I can refer those clients. I do it sometimes to challenge myself, and sometimes I have to. Like I have to translate a publisher's email to the writer I'm working with, because I'm the only bilingual person in the whole thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:41

Right, right, right, right. Oh boy. Any situations you can share about doing that? Anything that comes up that I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:53

I mean it comes up situations. Pretty much all the time because very few of the Chinese writers I've worked with speak English to a level where they could have an email exchange.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:03

Sure, sure, sure. Have there been any misunderstandings in the translating back and forth that were comical after they were not?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:13

I don't know about comical. I mean, there have definitely been misunderstandings over things because the concepts are different. Like who owns the copyright?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:23

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:25

And it it's it's hard to get across that that's a legalistic concept of who physically signed a contract that says I own the copyright. Right, right. Because they tend to go, oh no, it's mine, of course it's my assignment. No, what does your contract say? So there's a lot of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:40

Yeah, somebody's writing those contracts in multiple languages. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:46

And then, you know, the English publisher, the Chinese publisher have their own legal teams, but they're working with different law systems.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:53

So That must be a nightmare. Not just between those two, but between any uh languages slash cultures that have to navigate the legalities of Hong Kong.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:06

Yeah, and and you usually agree at the start that this contract will be governed by American law or or Hong Kong law or whatever, then you negotiate over that.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:15

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:16

But that doesn't cover every contingency. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:18

No. And then you've got in enforcement. If you're saying it's going to follow the American laws, how do you enforce that elsewhere?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:25

Aaron Ross Powell Well, fortunately that's never come up. I dread the day.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:31

At a certain point, if that did because I'm definitely not a legal translator, I wouldn't translate even a contract. Like right, that has to be someone who knows the legal terminology.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:41

Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:42

But just the emails about the contract are already a headache.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:46

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I I worked for a lawyer in my early 20s, putting myself through school and i in English, in my first and only language at that point. And even just switching over into the the legal English was just like, why are people writing like this this paragraph is taking me forever to read or whatever? It's just it was such an impenetrable language at first. And I'm like, but this is English. No, this is legal English. Like it's such a difference just in that and having that in two languages. I'm glad that somebody else's. So on this podcast, I do have people who were both learning Mandarin Chinese, and then I have some locals who, um, well, not just locals, but people who grew up with the language, such as yourself. Although you are my first person who grew up bilingually with Mandarin and English. What kind of questions do you think I should or would be interesting to ask future interviewees?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:44

I guess I'm always very interested in the idea of ownership of language. So along with language ability, I think it's interesting to talk to people about how much they feel the language belongs to them. And I think there's all kinds of ramifications, like someone who grew up primarily speaking Shanghainese or Cantonese, how much is Mandarin imposed on them versus something that's actually theirs? And an increasing number of people are voluntarily switching to English, right? Like still a tiny minority. But I'm definitely meeting more and more people who have chosen to make English their main language. Yeah. Haven't grown out of Chinese. And what's that like?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:32

What is that like? Yeah. So what is it asking like what languages they feel are theirs and which other ones are kind of like ornamental later on?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:43

Or I guess what degree of ownership do you feel over each of your languages? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:50

Would be how I'd phrase it Is that teasing in identity? Is that tapping into identity?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:56

Hmm. Um I I mean, you know, I think different people respond differently. For some it might not be a question at all. Yeah. For others, the mastery I have over the English language versus the weird post-colonial hangover that I feel about that being the case is something that I'm still grappling with.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:19

Can you dive into that some more?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:20

Well, I think a lot of this is that Singapore imposes a lot of uh guilt on its people for not speaking their mother tongues well enough. So you have the situation where we have first the British government and then our own government imposing certain linguistic policies that enshrine English as the dominant language. And then you get from our Chinese teachers, but also from government campaigns. Your Chinese should be better. You know, you're shaming your ancestors. How can you speak the white man's language better than your own? And well, that is the environment I grew up in. Right. So it's very conflicting to write in English in a way that it's not for an Asian American, because that's a clear identity, right? You grew up in America, English is your language, of course it is. But I grew up in Asia. Right. So how to negotiate that is something that I'm still working on. I don't think that's an answer. I think maybe India is getting to a place where they have their answers, and there is a form of Indian English that they very much own, which I don't think we quite have in Singapore. Like we have singlish, but that isn't It's not different enough. More that it's more a spoken language. There isn't that much written Singaporean literature. What that is feels contrived when I look at it.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:50

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:51

Because it's not really designed to be a written language. So how do we work with that?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:55

Right, right, right. Do you feel that pressure and that guilt when you're outside of Singapore as well as when you're there?

SPEAKER_03 1:09:02

Well, I've kind of got to the point of being like, you know what, this isn't my fault. It's not. But many, many Chinese Singaporeans, I can't speak for the Malay or Indian populations as much, but um, many, many Chinese Singaporeans express shame when they tell me that their Chinese isn't that good.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:24

And you know, I I often have to tell people that I acquired a lot of my Chinese in my twenties. They're like, oh, as as if it's something like, oh no, I should have worked harder at school, I should have listened to my parents. That's this whole bundle of feelings wrapped up in it, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:41

I to a small level, I know.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:43

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:45

I uh grew up with Italian parents who spoke Italian, but want because of the hazing they had uh when they came to the US, they were the other of the moment when they both went to the US at different times. They didn't want any of us to grow up with Italian. So I have the lovely double guilt of not having a second language and having people think, okay, there's something wrong with you because your parents are other, you must be other. So treated very weirdly in a suburban environment in Pennsylvania where I was the other, but I didn't have the advantage of having the other culture.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:20

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:21

So it's this weird empty space of I'm supposed to be this exotic person from somewhere else, but I grew up here.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:28

I've heard something like that from transracial adoptee.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:33

Yeah. Yeah. So for trans transracial adoptees in Singapore or in New York?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:38

Uh actually I had a c conversation with someone in Pennsylvania. Yeah. I was in Philadelphia, and I was talking to um a director who is ethnically uh Korean but was adopted by white Jewish parents. Right. Um, and she said something that really struck me that she was in her twenties before she thought of herself as Asian. Like she would see things that were Asian American and be like, oh, that's nothing to do with me. And then it took her a while to realize that actually she was part of that culture, even though she'd been raised in a different one.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:10

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:11

Just by virtue of, I guess, the way she looked and her heritage.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:16

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:17

Well, i or is it even your heritage if you weren't raised in it?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:20

It's still genetic. Well, yeah, exactly. But it's tricky when it's visually apparent, right? Because then you hear about there was a while where a lot of people were adopting girls, baby girls from China and bringing them to the US. And they were try like some people were trying to come to China often to kind of have the child exposed to the culture to some extent. But then they grow up in the US very, very much so detached a lot of times because they weren't living in places where there was a Chinese population.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:51

But do we always need to have our genetic history be our cultural history?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:58

I mean, when I was in the UK, I did a couple of workshops at a summer camp that was for Chinese adoptees. And for many of them, they were the only Chinese child in their village or in town because not even their own family looked like them. And that they would come to this camp and be with people who looked like them for the first time in their lives. And that really did feel like, okay, this does mean something.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:22

Yeah. Yeah. See, and that almost made me cry. So I must believe that it does mean something too, because I just, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:29

No, I I think there is something powerful about genetics and that sense of belonging. Like we are kind of heartwired to respond to that in some way.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:39

Yeah, yeah. I this is really going off on a tangent, but some of the most peaceful places I know, safety-wise and whatnot, are very comparatively homogenous. More the more diverse places, especially when you have a distinct, a few distinct groups together, are sometimes often not sure the word I want right there, uh more dangerous because of the conflicts and trying to agree on things. And I'm I've I would never say this in my 20-year-old self, but years and years and years and years later, I'm like, huh. I wonder if we're supposed to be in a diverse culture. I wonder if we're not supposed to kind of separate and I mean the thing is we are.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:25

I know I I think people have always wanted to move around and will always move around. So there's no way to ensure that kind of um purity anyway. Exactly. But also I I really do think that diversity is strengthening because you have these different influences. Like the reason I am a translator is I believe that the English-speaking world would just wither and die if it only read itself. Like a tiny percentage of books are translated. And I promote this all I can because we need to bring in other voices, because you need to hear what's happening elsewhere in the world, you need to hear how other people think. And I think diversity is just another axis of that. It's just bringing people together and saying we do things differently, we think differently, we see the world differently. And then if we can get past the conflicts, and there will be some conflicts. We reach a point where we are stronger, we understand each other better. There's ultimately we all live on the same planet. Right. So even uh in relatively homogenous places, you can't pretend that the rest of the world isn't there. You have to engage at some level. And if you have people right next door to you who are from those cultures, then it becomes so much easier. I think it's just something that needs to happen. What you were saying earlier about Americans not being interested in learning Chinese. Well, maybe they should have more Chinese neighbors and maybe they should see that it's not this weird, frightening thing at this, you know, forbidding looking language, but actually it's just something that people use to communicate.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:09

Just another language, yeah. And it's just another culture. It's just another, it's just people. Because at the end, it totally against what I said a couple of minutes ago. I still, in my core, my first city was New York City. My first experience was around people from many, many different cultures. And I thought that was the global norm because I was a child. And then we moved to a very suburban place where it wasn't, and people didn't seem to be happy. And so I associate homogeny with unhappiness. And then I moved to places that were homogenous that weren't like that. So I just I've had all these experiences. Where the heck did my brain go?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:46

Well, also I'm mixed race, so I I'm kind of there is nowhere that would be homogenous to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:54

Right. And a lot of people are, but they don't even know it.

unknown 1:15:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:57

Like my my mother's side's from Albania, which isn't that far from Italy. It's right over the water, but it there it is. My grandfather, I didn't only learn a few years ago, was left on a doorstep. So he maybe isn't even Italian. So there's all this stuff within our genetic history that we don't necessarily know, and we'll be like, I'm straight this, I'm straight German, I'm pure uh English, I'm whatever. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:20

I think a lot of that is cultural and I guess appearance. But yeah, one of my grandmothers was left at an orphanage. So we we assume she was Chinese, but like, who knows?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:29

Oh, here's where I was going. Because the different places I've been to lived or traveled, mostly lived, the things that people value seem to be almost the same. Like the top three things that people value, even five probably, are the same. People appreciate their and love their families. Uh being physically healthy, having uh, you know, safe food and water and medical care stuff and education and uh these things, these things are important almost everywhere. Yeah. And how can that not define us?

SPEAKER_03 1:17:04

They manifest differently, right? Like in Chinese culture, you live with your parents until you get married and move out. And that's how you show family loyalty. Whereas in America, you show family loyalty by getting out when you're 18 and letting your parents live their lives.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:24

We used to. It's changing, as you I'm sure you know. Yeah, but not not by choice, by economics. Yeah. Although I haven't been there for a lot of that shift. You've probably seen more of it than I have at this point. How long have you been in New York? Five years. Five years, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:38

So And I mean, yeah, all my friends are freelancers working in the arts. You can imagine.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:44

Yep. They might be in a basement somewhere or well, basement in New York City. Well, they're a basement apartment. Never mind.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:51

I mean, no, uh I a number of my friends have moved out and found cheaper cities to live in. Sure. And that's totally a thing that's happening. New York's definitely becoming less affordable. One of the reasons I live in Sunset Park, apart from wanting to be in a Chinese neighborhood, is that it's cheaper. It's an immigrant neighborhood, it's more affordable.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:15

Is Chinatown Chinatown in Brooklyn? There's a Chinatown in Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:20

There is there's one in Queens, one in Brooklyn, and one in Manhattan.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:23

That's funny. I don't know why I didn't know that. Because I know there was an Italian is there still an Italian part in Brooklyn?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:30

Uh there is Carol Gardens is the Italian neighborhood, I think. There there is oh and I'm very bad at this. I think because as a because of the way Brooklyn is wired, you tend to get to know your neighborhood. Sure. Because the subway system assumes you don't want to travel to different parts of Brooklyn that you only want to go into.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:49

Right, of course. That's ironic. What the heck? Why? Really?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:56

I mean, but to get to certain parts of Brooklyn, it's actually faster to go into Manhattan and come out again.

unknown 1:19:03

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:05

New York. Yeah. That's the that's the beauty of being a late adapter, is by the time I've even noticed this in the US with highway signs. When you're on the East Coast, like in New York and in Boston and stuff, and you're driving do you drive a lot in the US?

SPEAKER_03 1:19:18

I actually can't drive.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:19

Very smart, man. Don't do it. It's awful. Um but when you're on the highways and stuff, the signs are really unclear. And when you have to turn off at your exit, you find out a second before. So if you don't know it's coming, you're like, ah, getting across four lanes kind of thing. By the time you get to the West Coast, you've got like a five mile, it's in miles, a five-mile warning, a two-mile warning, a one-mile warning, hey, it's coming up warning. And then you you have tons of time to get over to that side to get off, and it's generally not this tiny little exit. And so that just the the progression of the signs as you go from east to west, because they started on the summit.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:54

Well, I mean, looking at the Shanghai subway, I was like, oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:57

Oh my God. I wish we could put this in every US city.

unknown 1:20:01

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:02

It's beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:03

Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:04

It's so they're up to 17 lines already. Or is it 18 now?

SPEAKER_03 1:20:08

I a lot. I lose track. And I was here like not that many years ago, and there were far fewer lines.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:14

Yeah. I was here eight years ago, and I don't remember being impressed by the number. So it must have been significantly less.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:20

Aaron Ross Powell So just the extent to which New York doesn't really have a functional public transport network. It's just and it somehow isn't able to get one.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:29

And that's scary to me because that is one of the cities that has one of the better public transportation systems in the US. So if it's not good, then yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:38

Well I mean there are many places where we just couldn't le live because I can't drive.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:43

And there's no other way to get around.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:44

Well, I hate I intentionally live in cities that do have it because I can drive, but I hate doing it. And I think it's incredibly wasteful to do it. So I intentionally live in places that have systems like this. And it just it floors me how limiting that is in the US.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:02

Yeah, no, it's too big. It's it's too big of a country, which to bring us back to this, I wonder if that's why there's less linguistic diversity. Because it feels like you need to bring the country together somehow. Um and I mean there is this totemic thing amongst the far right wingers usually that you should speak English here in America. You have to speak English.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:30

Which isn't even an official language. Yeah. Oh. Right? No. We don't have unless it's changed and I haven't heard about it, but we don't actually have an official language. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:42

Right. But then it's become this weird thing of I guess finding things that bind the country together. Yeah. And how do you do that in a country that vast with which unlike China doesn't really have a homogenous culture? Well, I mean now that actually strike that from the sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:00

I know. I know.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:02

Well, no, I I don't want to say that because China doesn't have a homogenous culture, right? But the Han culture is relatively.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:08

It's a large percentage of the population. Yes. Depending on how people define Han. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:15

I know. I we're getting to my view of the people. We are.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:19

Reportedly, what, 70 or 80% of the population claims they are Han?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:23

So I don't know where I was going with this. But I guess English is some kind of artificial binding agent, maybe. I don't know. When I was growing up in Singapore, there are definitely people who spoke English as an article of pride, but there would be people who would take it as something to be proud of that their Chinese wasn't good. Because English was the language of the elite, it was the language of power. Often it went along with Christianity. Sure. So upper middle class people tend to be English-speaking Christians in Singapore.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:00

That still hurts my head a little bit. But I have a damaged history with Christianity in the US. That's that there. It has nothing to do with Singapore.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:08

Oh, we're just American-style megachurches.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:12

Mega churches.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:13

Yes, the megachurches have made it to Singapore. Oh my gosh. And a lot of that, I'm sure, is because of the language. Like it's easy for them to expand in Singapore. They have expanded into Taiwan and I believe Korea as well. So it's clearly not just language. Sure. But the fact that you could just broadcast an American sermon in Singapore makes it that much easier.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:34

So they're not even live sermons, they're telecasted.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:40

But a a lot of it is is on YouTube. And like they link in people.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:54

I don't even I don't even know what to say then. Because it's funny, because you were I you were talking about language and ownership, and I don't I have when I first started teaching English abroad, there's a lot of cultural baggage. They expect you to be the ambassador of your culture. And I was like, what like I there's huge chunks of American culture I don't know because my parents didn't know. So we uh they either created stuff or we just didn't do certain things. And so when people were like, teach them about Thanksgiving, teach them about Christmas, I was like, We had pasta. We didn't have cranberry sauce and and turkey. We sometimes had turkey, but it but the seafood salad and the pasta were much bigger creatures than the turkey and cranberry. We never even had cranberry sauce. Like there's lots of those things that I'm like, I had to go learn it to teach them what an American did on these holidays. And I'm like, I'm really uncomfortable with this.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:50

Oh. Well, I can actually relate to that because as a translator, and I think probably because of my ethnicity and background, I'm sometimes expected to be a bit of a native informant as well. Where, you know, as you like explain the background of this and yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:09

And so I realized as I was getting uncomfortable with this, I was like, look, the language is is easy. I've been a word person despite the bilingual thing being the challenge. I've been engrossed in words and uh awed with words and been playing with it my whole life. So that part was easy. Getting people excited about getting to X, Y, and Z in language, that part's easy. Having me be the cultural representative was really uncomfortable. And it was but it was so interconnected in a lot of places I worked with.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:36

And I had to get to the point where I was actually teaching writing, not teaching conversation, for that to finally move away from so I could focus on the words and not the cultural aspect of it. Because I don't, I don't feel like English is mine. No, I don't have a language that's mine. Yeah. So it's it's funny when you said that, I was like, what's my language?

SPEAKER_03 1:25:59

Right. Yeah. And I think that's something that would be straightforward for some people and not for others. And that would be interesting to explore why. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm I am fascinated by this idea that English somehow belongs to America, that you can't learn English without also learning about Thanksgiving.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:18

Well, it depended on who the teacher was. If they're for the for the more progressive schools, it depended. If the teacher was from England, then they would have them teach about British culture through right? Exactly. But part of my point, once I understood why it was uncomfortable for me and I realized how many varieties of English there were, not even the two dichotomy that schools try to grapple with. And like there's many, like so many varieties. I was like, look, why don't we introduce them to how many varieties there are in the world, not just in the, you know, these few countries. There is Singaporean English and Malaysian English and and Japanese English and all of the best phrases I heard when I was in Japan teaching was paper driver. It not in Japanese, in English, my students like told me that this phrase exists in Japanese. They don't use the Japanese phrase, they use paper driver for somebody who got their driver's license but doesn't want to drive.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:13

Oh, that's such a good phrase.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:15

Exactly. And there's stuff like that in most languages there or most places where English isn't the first language, but there's varieties. Like, so why don't we teach that global varieties culture instead of it's being an American, it's being a British person, it's coming from Australia.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:30

Exactly. Well, yes, it's very more I mean, often Australia doesn't even get a look in, frankly. Um That's very true. And maybe why not Australia or New Zealand or South Africa? Although, yes, definitely Singapore and India. Where there's this whole other way that English is used.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:47

So it's it's this thing about English being so widespread, but then who gets to claim ownership over it? And in many schools people still want a particular thing, right? When I was teaching English in the UK, I heard a couple of complaints to the head teacher about my accent. Now my accent is fairly standard British, right? So they were clearly just going off my appearance and like just couldn't hear it. So they just assumed. And I've definitely heard, I don't know if that's still the case, but 10, 20 years ago, it was hard to get an English teaching job in China if you weren't white.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:27

Oh, I don't think it's still the case anymore.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:30

But this is a whole package, isn't it? That you're you're not just teaching Englishness, you're teaching Westernness.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:39

Yeah. It in 2003, and this is so slippery. In 2003 in Taiwan, it was impossible.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:45

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:46

I had to either online or offline, I had to sit with a number of folks who were thinking of or came and then were struck with the realization they packed up all their bags for no reason. Uh people of varying shades of non-white.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:03

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:03

Who just couldn't find work. And to the point where we actually had to have giant, like A4 size pictures of uh the US, the the white English teachers, right outside the school. So when the parents drove by on their scooters, they could see, oh, they've got those English teachers. Cool, I'll send my kid there. And our seats were by the window. Like this was my first job, so I didn't know what I was getting into. And all of these things were, I was like, what is happening right now? Literally, parents would like stop outside the window, look at our pictures, look over at us working, like prep preparing and stuff, and be like, oh, that must be a good school because they have white teachers. And I'm like, what? Yeah. In China now, that in mainland China right now, that is very, very different. I come across people, I don't teach anymore, but I come across people from varying backgrounds and varying skin colors and varying accents. Um and so I don't know if it's because there's so much need that they had to forego that, or they're just more open-minded than years and years and years ago. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:08

I think it's probably also that so many Chinese people study abroad now. There's tens of thousands every year in the States alone that they might have a more sophisticated understanding of what English is and that you cannot be white and still speak English as a native.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:26

I would hope so. Although having said all of that, the visa restrictions just changed a lot last year. And they've upped the qualifications for all education uh visas. They've upped, I'm not teaching, but I'm in an educational-ish area. I'm in language testing. Right. And they've upped uh the qualifications and the passport, home passport for all uh everything in education. And so a lot of English teachers from non-what are they called? Inner g I forget the really horrible word, for like those four or five countries that where people think native English comes from, they've they've kicked out a lot of people from those countries, even though they might be qualified.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:10

I'm really fascinated by this whole I wonder if Singapore's one of those countries it's not, is it?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:16

I don't know. I don't know because I'm not teaching anymore and I I don't want to go back to it. I didn't look in a lot of that, and I'm already hired in my job, so I'm okay staying with Wea.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:30

This comes up in a different way with Singaporeans who are applying to go to university in the States or in the UK, and then they are made to take an English test.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:39

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:40

Which is like But also Canadians don't have to. And I've definitely met people from Quebec who don't have fluent English.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:50

Right. Well, South Africa, uh Afrikaans is a uh first language for a lot of folks there, not English. So I met a lot of English teachers in uh Taiwan all those years ago who got into teaching there because they were one, white and two, they the the officials didn't know that that Afrikaans was their first and most fluent language. And but they were struggling with explaining things and dealing with the language, because it was like an academic language that they barely used before they got the job. So there's all kinds of New Zealand actually does it right. For all of their work and school visas, everybody has to take a language test, regardless of where they're from.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:32

Well, that's that is some sort of solution. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:36

Well, that's better. Yeah, if you're going to do it at all.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:38

You yeah, need to go by more than just yeah. It's so complicated. Well, it is.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:45

Um, and I think people don't realize how complicated it is. There's this assumption that, oh, language is language, you speak the language of your country. I'd like, well, no, there's all these other areas, right? There's all these in-between things. And that for me is where it gets really interesting. I'm very fascinated by people who are in between or people who overlap or who belong to more than one community.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:11

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because I think those people that straddle different parts of this linguistically or culturally have a bigger pi are kind of forced to have a bigger picture view of all of it. And so I think they kind of compare and start to look for other ones. And I think it's more a more curious existence than if you don't realize there's other stuff out there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:33

Yeah, I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:35

I think if you've never been out of your comfort zone, then it's very easy to be like, oh, all Americans should speak English or whatever. But if you've experienced how difficult it is to move outside your linguistic zone of what you're used to, or to try to grapple with a different language, that you realize just what a big step that is in actually how communication I don't know, is is complex. Yeah. And we need to have a more nuanced understanding of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:08

Yeah. Oh, let's spread out the monolingual guilt though. You lived in the UK. I've heard, I've only been there very short periods of time, but I've heard from a lot of the British people that I work with and talk to that they're almost as bad as being very monolingual as Americans are.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:24

Well, I lived in London, so I think that's a different experience. Okay. And again, it's class inflected, right? I mean, look, there's various levels of it. But there are many British people who pride themselves on speaking French particularly. Right. But then that's a class marker, right? That's something you do if you're posh. If you go to the right sorts of schools, they teach you French or Spanish or God help us Latin. Um and then that becomes this whole different thing of, well, I don't want to look down on people for not speaking that because their schools didn't offer it.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:56

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:57

And again, I think there is this imposition of guilt. And sure, some of it is lack of curiosity about the world and just people not seeking out opportunities. But there's also what are the schools doing. Right. If it was compulsory for everyone to have a second language, then Britain wouldn't be as monolingual as it is.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:19

Although it is compulsory in the at least it was in the US when I was in high school, which is a long ass time ago now. And very few of us ended up fluent out of that experience.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:30

I think high school's too late.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:32

Yeah, I agree.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:34

And it really needs to be elementary school as early as possible. Yeah. But also it's how it's taught. Yeah. If it's constantly presented as this optional add-on extra, then people are gonna do it and discard it at the first opportunity.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:46

Yeah. And if it's taught as a subject, which is the vast majority of how mine was in in primary and secondary school, as a subject, then it's kind of something you do on paper and then you that's it, it's gone. It's not something that connects people, it's not something that can lead to like cultural understanding or anything like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:02

Yeah, and I think it did make a big difference in my secondary school that our art and music classes were taught in Chinese.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:09

Right. Because then it's not just learning the language, it's there's something in the language.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:15

Doing something with it.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:16

Yeah. Oh, that's such a good idea. I want to go back to my elementary school.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:23

Although they didn't, yeah, they still wouldn't have it today, but so much of um Western education needs to be redesigned away from the primacy of the Western of English and all of that. And it's unfortunate that Singapore inherited a colonial British-centered education system. I think Hong Kong moved away from the s, but Singapore kept this.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:48

Yeah, yeah. So is for primary and secondary school now, is it mostly in English?

SPEAKER_03 1:36:53

Yes. The my secondary school was very unusual in Singapore. There's only a small number. And I don't think it's that healthy because it also meant the school was racially segregated. If people could choose their second language in Singapore rather than having it imposed by ethnicity, that would be a different story again.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:13

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:13

Um, but yeah, if anything, English has become more dominant in Singapore, which I guess in a multi-ethnic society, it's one way of bringing people together, but there is also a lot of loss there.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:28

Yeah, especially when that's yeah. Ay, ay, aye. What would be a better solution?

SPEAKER_03 1:37:41

If Chinese and the other languages were taught in a way, not just taught, but were present in our society in a way that made them engaging. And if they mixed more. We have very linguistically pure TV channels, so that's the English station, the Chinese station, and Malay station, and the China station. Um but you don't really hear people using the same mixture of languages that they do in daily life in Singapore.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:12

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:13

So that would help. More, I guess, culture that wasn't as segregated.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:21

But it's hard because it's not a simple fix. I can't really say, oh, do this and this, and then that would be easy. It's more go back and change the last few decades of our education system and the way that language and class and privilege and various things have become entwined in Singapore in a way that's not that helpful, I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:42

Right. Which is really hard to do once it's in place.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:44

Well, exactly. It's just going to replicate itself. English is going to continue being the language of the elite. I don't see that changing. So then you have a disincentive to learn anything else. Yeah. It's not everyone's mind is set up to be bilingual.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:03

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:04

And if you don't have a good education system to embed that early, then that's hard. I guess though actually, despite what I said about a lot of Singaporeans feeling shame about if a lot Chinese Singaporeans feel shame about their Mandarin being not good enough, they speak Mandarin to a reasonable level. Like they can have at least a simple conversation in Mandarin. Right. Which, like, because we're indoctrinated with the oh no, I'm Chinese, I've shaved my ancestors, I'm terrible. Actually, it's like a reasonable level. Right. Right. And we don't see that. We're like, you know what? We're pretty bilingual. That's great. But like that's not how we've been taught to see our language ability. Right. Taught that anything short of full bilingualism is a failing.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:50

That is very present in American culture as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:54

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:54

Yeah. For people don't it's funny, because I ask people how many languages they know, and there's always qualifiers.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:00

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:00

They're always like, well, I know a little bit of this. And they'll they'll I'll like hear them having full-on conversations back and forth for like half an hour. They'll be like, I know a little bit. I'm like, no, that's not a little bit. That was a lot of interaction going on. And so people really, really dampen, like if they're not able to give like a presentation for an hour in a in a really intense subject, then they're like, oh, I'm just not very fluent.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:23

Yeah. And I think we need to maybe be more forgiving of ourselves. Yeah. But we tend to remember the things that went wrong at the time I said the wrong word in that conversation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:32

Yeah. And then there's books about hyperpony polyglots who just are so out of reach for the vast majority of people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:41

And also I guess we know what fluency fuels like, right? We know what native fluency feels like in English. And then we're like, oh, if I could have that in all my languages.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:50

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:50

That's like, no, come on, just being able to function is good.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:54

Exactly. Yeah. I look forward to it someday. If, because technology is always changing and growing and enriching and torturing us. So if they did come up with a chip to put it just put into your brain or somewhere else that would give you fluency in any language or all languages, would you want it?

SPEAKER_03 1:41:15

Uh it would depend on how I experienced it, I guess. Like if it was a Google translate in my head where I could think in English and then it did that, and then the words come up differently, then I would not want that. Okay. Because I feel like that kind of translation is going to lose nuance and I don't trust whatever this chip is to get it right. Gotcha. Okay. I think that'd be a slip. But also it would feel false in some way. But if it somehow enhanced my brain to the extent that I could actually grasp these languages in their entirety and actually have them in my head, then yes, absolutely. So a chip that allowed me to know these languages. Yes. A chip that was just doing some kind of sophisticated Google Translate. No.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:59

That was almost exactly my answer. Somebody asked this on social media a few weeks ago, and I was like, what's a really good question? And I'm like, I don't I do want more languages, but I don't want it without the nuance and the the ability to select the words. Word selection and word play is really important to me, and I don't want that to go away. I appreciate that we can Google translate. I use that a lot. And I I've heard I've seen the apps where you can just have someone speak in and it comes out, and or you can do it and it comes out at a different voice, and that's fine for what it is, but I don't want that in my in my head.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:32

No. I mean and as a translator, I don't have I don't think machines will ever get to the point that they can do what the human brain does.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:42

Yeah. I agree.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:45

I think not in our lifetime sense. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:50

Oh no, no, no. Yeah, we're good with that.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:52

Yeah, yeah. Like if it happens 500 years or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:54

Yeah. But not not right now. Not right now. Okay, final question. So you're in China for um a month now. And a month and a few months from now. Linguistically, is there anything that surprises you about how Mandarin is used as you're maneuvering around China slash Shanghai slash wherever you go?

SPEAKER_03 1:43:17

Huh, that's interesting. I mean, I'm noticing small differences in the types of Chinese that are used, um, and that's always interesting. I'm hearing more standard Mandarin than I expected. Like I'm not really hearing much Shanghainese around me. People seem to speak very standard Mandarin. Um and maybe that's just the spaces I'm in. But so far, no, I think because um Shanghai is so well represented in literature that between the Shanghainese novels I've been reading and Oh to Joy, I've a pretty good handle on how Chinese is used here. And so I've just been like, oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:56

This is a sound blessing. Have you been to China many times before this time?

SPEAKER_03 1:44:00

Uh yes, but mostly to Beijing, because that's where a lot of the writers live, and a lot of the writers that I was working with live in Beijing. It's kind of like well, I do love China and just love being here, being immersed in it. A lot of my travel here has been work-related in the sense of I need to retain familiarity with what's happening in China, which includes meeting the writers, going to bookshops and like scooping up loads of things to take home and read. Sure. And a lot of that is Beijing-centric, like publishing everywhere, right? You pick a city and like everything happens there. I would like to go to more cities. I've only been to, besides Beijing, uh Shanghai and Chengdu.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:42

Oh wow. Where would you want to go?

SPEAKER_03 1:44:45

Uh well, I'd love to see Nansing and really just do a lot of traveling to small towns and like see the vast different landscapes of China. Because everything I've done has been very coastal. Right. Um and very big cities in China are not homogenous, but there definitely are similarities.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:12

Oh, absolutely. And although and the f especially the first tier cities are pretty polished in parts.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:17

Right, yeah. So I feel like I'm only getting to see that side of China.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:21

Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:22

Um I'm definitely interested in seeing what else the country, because there's there's so much of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:27

It's so big.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:28

It's just so big. It's some and uh I do I've seen some because I traveled a lot for work last year, but I've I haven't been very far west. And I really want to go to the Xinjiang region.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:40

Yeah. Yes, I mean that, Tibet, yeah. Um but just how the landscape changes. Yeah. And you know, I mean, we said first-tier cities in China are how margin is, but actually first-tier cities in the world kind of converge, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:57

That's so true. And uh having said that, but they're not because there's uh so much of people from other provinces coming into Shanghai too.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:06

Especially this week, yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:08

Yes. But just in general for work. There's a lot of people that go from the countryside into first-tier cities for work. They're not necessarily in the areas that we might go in on a daily basis, but then again, most of my taxi drivers are not from Shanghai.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:23

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:23

Yeah. So but what I mean. Oh, that sounds so posh. Most of my taxi drivers Oh, geez, Louise. Disclaimer, sorry, disclaimer. Uh my language level is so poor that I've got like three phrases I can ask someone, and it's usually service people because then the conversation's over and it's not awkward. Anyway, sorry.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:41

Oh, that makes sense. But I mean, I was in a supermarket the other day thinking actually this could be a supermarket. Like the variety of produce and packaging so it's a bit different, but I could be anywhere. True. That's what I mean by navigating a city in China. It's like it's not that hard. That's the language. I've got the language, but even if I did it, it wouldn't be that hard. Yeah. Whereas if I got to a town, I'd probably experience a bit more difference and maybe a bit more of the ways in which China is China and not anywhere else. Like certain things that this would only happen in China.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:20

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:23

As a traveler, yes. As a living in Shanghai, even with my language handicapped, there's still things that are distinctly Shanghai.

unknown 1:47:34

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:38

Even 13 floors up, or even in um going to the French concession way too freaking often. Um there are things that that that come through. But you have to be here a while for that to to bleed into your daily life. But yeah, if you went out to smaller cities or to the countryside, you would get that immediately. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:00

Yes. Which, like, I guess was the impulse between behind the whole um cultural revolution going down to the villages thing, right? Disclaimer, the cultural revolution was not good. The impulse was, I think, one that's still present today, an acknowledgement that China is really divided.

SPEAKER_05 1:48:19

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:20

And the on my last visit to Shanghai, um, I think it was four or five years ago, I was at a dinner party, and there were, you know, some Singaporeans and some Chinese people, and one of the Chinese people said to me, and I'll never forget this, he was like I mean, sure, and we were in a skyscrip pointed at Shanghai. Yes, yes, I can see why you think we should have democracy, but there are 700 million people in the countryside who can't read or write. Do you want to give them the vote? And I was like, Yes, yes, I do. And he was just like to him, that's like, no, no, it's much better this way.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:02

That's a hard pill to swap. What do you say? What did you say? What do you say to that?

SPEAKER_03 1:49:06

I mean I couldn't say very much, right? Because I'm not going to tell a person from China how to run his country.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:15

Of course, of course. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:16

So I was like, okay, well, I I still think democracy would be good and every sort of thing. It was a dinner party, right? So the conversation is wafted on in a very polite way.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:25

See, and it's like with comments like that, I I keep coming back to the US and China being so similar to each other.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:32

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:33

We have so many laws that prevent people from voting that are ridiculous.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:40

And and we are quote unquote democracy. And um sorry, not to bring it back to the US, but yeah, no, you know, we just watched Crazy Rich Asians last week. Have you seen this movie?

SPEAKER_03 1:49:51

No, I haven't. I will at some point, but I have complicated feelings about it being set in Singapore and I I'm sure you do, and I I don't know how

SPEAKER_02 1:50:00

I I have no Asian roots at all and I don't even know how to feel about it. I I think it's a fun story, and I think the actors that were in it are they they had a wonderful cast of actors and I think they did a really good job at having a romantic comedy that was heart-tuggy and all kinds of like a good story. But there were cultural moments that I was like, huh. I wish I had some folks around me that I could like pause and go, what do you think of that?

SPEAKER_03 1:50:25

I mean, there are definitely Singaporeans going, why the hell aren't they making dumb things? No. Because it's not a Singaporean thing, right? It's a northern Chinese thing. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:34

Well, it's funny, early in the movie, they they made it a point to describe how how Chinese, these this the main Singaporean, the the stubborn mother that didn't want to accept the woman, how mainland Chinese they were. And so they broke out, like one of the characters broke out this luggage that had a map of the world. And I was like, who is that who are they taught who are they educating right now? But she literally brought it out and was like, look, they came from here down to here and they did this and now they own all of this. And it was yeah, it was really interesting. And I'm like, okay, clearly that's for the Westerners that geographically don't know where Singapore and China are, but they really meanly made this distinction that they're they're rich Chinese that came into Singapore, these characters in this in the story, and did this, this, and this, and this.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:20

That's very ahistorical.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:22

Really?

SPEAKER_03 1:51:23

Well, the older, the richer, older families in Singapore tended to have been then much longer and intermarried and so on. And the more recent immigrants came from the south of China as laborers.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:36

Yeah, so I wonder, yeah. Oh, maybe you should watch it.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:40

I'll watch it eventually. I just wanted to be able to say I haven't seen it yet for the first few months so that I didn't have to give an opinion.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:49

Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. It was it was it was interesting. Like I said, the story was good, the actors were good, but there's some cultural things that I was like, I'm so glad that this isn't my battle, because this seems weird.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:02

Well, they've green lit the second movie, and the second book was set in China, so let's see how that plays out.