Hello,
You know, as I was reading your mail, I was smiling - a large grin. Why? Cos our understanding of the current problems are almost 99.9% - the last 0.1% as a SOP to hedge our stands and "not be too affirmative". To see that you coming from your own experiences have some much similarity to my views show that perhaps with more case studies my understanding of our generation - at least ppl from similar dominantly-Chinese families - is worthy of further pursue, perhaps even becoming "grounded theory", as they call it in social science.
I will reply you one paragraph by one paragraph. See the blue words below.
Cheers,
Bear
hi,i will just like to start by saying that it is definitely an interesting read, but definitely not an easy one. perhaps i have lost connections to the outside world, so pardon me for replying to such an elegantly structured article with simplified sentences in point form. i am sorry but recently i have not been in the best of moods, or the hopeful of a purposeful and just world. perhaps i shall focus more on the content in this mail, not that i have anything against your style of writing..i would not call this feedback, to your writing, but rather i think i just want to put this across as a response.u mentioned we, as chinese, keeps our sense of chinese identity be descent. meaning we are born chinese, and that makes us chinese. i kinda do not agree to that. perhaps i misunderstood you. but i was thinking if put a non chinese in a chinese family before 1 year old to be brought up as a chinese, and if u put a chinese in another non-chinese environment and brought up as some other culture. i am not too sure what will happen. i kinda think that family upbringing is important too in?recognizing who you are. perhaps the language is not as important, but the way you are brought up, the mindset is important.
The point about being Chinese by descent and appearance is a point that has been made by prominent sociologists like John Clammer and Wang Gungwu in the 1980s. To a large extent I still think it very much holds true. In mainland China, to enter the Chinese circle you need to know how to write Chinese, at least - what researchers call "Han culturalism". Even then, be it in China or in overseas societies, "blood" is a very important concept, coupled with paternal lineage. Speaking of just the Chinese alone, in Singapore (and probably most South-east Asian countries), ”blood" forms the baseline of who we are racially and ethnically. Because it comes so naturally, we sometimes don't even question that aspect of our own identity. Now for the cases you mentioned, of course family upbringing is important. But the question boils down to how you see yourself, how others see you, and how society "categorizes" you (more on this later). Put an Indian in a Chinese family in Singapore, he is Chinese in language, habits and thought. Maybe if his father is Chinese they may classify him as Chinese race, but still if he doesn't talk or speaks English, people see him as Indian in our society. It's that simple. It's our epistemological lens of seeing people by their appearance, and then descent.
which brings me to the pitiful point of living in sg. i use to think that the way we grow up, when we are toddlers, looking and making sense of the world, that is when we first start identifying ourselves. the old stuff, the environment we grow up, how i remember my grandma use to wake in the middle of the night to drink milo. but that is the stuff that is wiped out so quickly in sg now. i dont see the things i grow up with, in, around. the ppl move on. the environment change. too fast. if u ask me now what i feel about being a singaporean, i dont know. what that is holding me back to staying here, just the ppl. no much feelings for local culture. no much feelings for local place. it seems to me that it is not about making another place a home, it seems to me the reason why we are still holding on to our lives. recently i have been thinking, look at me.. am i still alive? so what is there worth celebrating about. which is why ppl say to celebrate, exactly as you are living. but in this sense if i am right, we lose our sense of presence, of country, what more a race?
I agree. People do hold us back the most, otherwise I think I would prefer living in HK because it is really more liberal here. But still, after being overseas for so long, I sometimes miss the air in Singapore so much. I miss my neighbourhood, I miss the food market, I don't miss local food, but I miss the plants back home. This issue branches into "national identity", and seriously it isn't that easy to define this aspect because it involves theoretical divisions of ideological, judgmental, emotional aspects etc. For me, the way I have handled it in my essay is to downplay the issue and see it from a perspective of increasing national identity from the first generation to our generation - We may be critical of our own identities, but it does boil down to the fact that you are bothered enough to think about it. If you don't regard yourself Singaporean, you probably wouldn't care less thinking why and what makes you so.
but if i were to look at it as a person, not a singaporean. not a chinese. look at USA. it is like the other country in recent year that is formed from a mix of influx ppl. not totally indians, like India, not totally chinese like China. ?not much like france or britain. its like a mix. mess u can say. still messy now. still incoherent. but they develop their own culture. something the world sees and say, that is just so american. but i see that that helps then to stand out and say they are american. y should we be so concerned we lost out china connections? we itself is too a state and community of producing our own culture? true. we have the benefits of possessing old chinese plus qualities. but we need not stop from finding our own. and not totally worried about losing part of the old ones.?
I have always been interested in comparing North America's development path with our nation's own development, esp in this day and age when immigration begins to affect us drastically. I have yet to do so, but from the professor teaching this module - an amazing guy who's American with Italian blood, came over to HK in his late 20s and been here for over 30 yrs, and is an expert on minorities in mainland China specializing in Tibet and Mongolia, I do see many similarities. But for our nation to develop something like theirs is going to be difficult, not least because of the historical road we have taken - or at least what the PAP has wanted us to take. I wouldn't be too sure to say that we have produced our own culture, this point is controversial among researchers. I do agree, however, that we need to find our own - which includes losing old stuff, acquiring new elements, and balancing the two. That has been taken into account in my paper, by the inclusion of "basic Chinese cultural norms" and "modern cultural norms" in the cultural identity, and if you see my suggestions towards the end of the paper, this point about storming, norming and forming our own unique identity as "Singaporean Chinese", if this term isn't too offensive, is what I advocate in our education, and also what "bicultural elites" take the initiative to do. (End of this month or early next month, I am preparing to write an article for my column on Zaobao Sunday, called 《人文性的“双文化”》, which will focus on this issue.
just a random quote i saw today, "I can?foresee?a country without wars. no one is fighting. no one is hungry. everyone works and is well fed. everyone is happy and content. and i can foresee us attacking that country, coz they are least expecting it." it is sometimes not enough for ourself to be happy and built a sustainable country coz we will be attacked. but can we built one that is peaceful and fully capable of defending ourself? can a trained but inexperienced soldier ever fight a war?
Pray, no wars. *Fingers crossed* Amitabha, Amen, Allah...
sometimes i also think that religion may play a small or larger role. look at the older folks, their religion, their beliefs. and look at the newer generation. sometimes u cannot blame a shift in belief. if the belief shifts, it may have an impact on the culture, the festives, the purpose. like tomb sweeping. like mid autumn. like cny. many of these we are no longer feeling for it. many of these, sadly, is more for a moral celebration than a physical one. like cny. we are not farmers. we do not feel the happiness in the spring. we are not a large country. we do not understnad the gathering of a large family to celebrate. so what then do we celebrate? if there ever is a need to celebrate.
I agree with your views on religion, because of my own personal experience. When ppl ask me about my religion nowadays, I say I am Taoist by birth but Buddhist by belief. Now why keep the Taoist part if I no longer believe in it? Cos I seriously think there's a big part in me that is shaped since young by this part of myself, and even till today I think the calming effect acquired from Taoism still works better than yoga for me. I have stopped short of mentioning it in my paper because it will be too much of an assertion that I won't be able to find much substantiation. But still I believe personally religion contributes a lot to who we are as Chinese. And festivals, you're right. Less "feel" than before. But still it's not going to die out, and even if it's just going to be ritual, I think it helps in sustaining an ethnic group identity.
if we look at a couple of centuries ago, we ask ourself what is a race? why are there races? why are the indians and the chinese not a race? why are the malays and indians not a race? why are the hokkiens and teochews not a race? there seems to be a max limit of the size of a race, the physical distance before they are no longer part of the race. so why is it that now, as we migrate, we bring our old race along. old race? new race? recently i was thinking about the reasons why humans need to live and organise. to create power. to create leaders. to create gangs. to create so many systems and structures.?
Ah ha! Good question. I mentioned this in my paper that we in Singapore have a CIMO (Chinese, Indian, Malay, Others) policy that I found out was staunchly put in place when we were in primary school. This has been critiqued since the 1980s till today. For the Chinese we don't feel it so much esp after we lose our dialects, but for the Indians it's still very much an identity issue because the languages they speak are different and that is linked to their or their forefathers' of origin. In due time we will need to reconsider this because the "others" population will begin to increase tremendously. The thing is, race is very much a colonial idea to segregate ppl so they don't create trouble, and has been thrown out by many countries after WWII. Only Singapore is still using it very much alive as a political form of segregation. It boils down to how we have been managing our racial diversity issue all these yrs. Like you pointed out in the later part of your letter, we speak English but we don't understand one another. Because all along we have been taught to be "harmonious" - which, the way I see it, it's just "tolerance", albeit without much offence. We never truly integrated as a people. That also in turn affects our national identity, and how our national education has been shaped to become so superficial. That's also why until today we are having IRCC - Inter-racial confidence circles. See, it's just "confidence", still no integration.
many of the stuff i understand today of chinese culture are told by my parents. grandparents. the younger seems to not talk too ?much to their older folks. somethign of the chinese and only seen in chinese. we do very little documentation. very few instruction manual. we pass a lot of skills, informations through words of mouth. through lifestyle. through living together. but sometimes i think, disagreeing with what u said, we are still unable to learn language as only a tool. u learn maths. u use maths. do u feel very mathematical? no. maths is a tool. no culture associated. anyone who is discussing about maths do not feel so far off from each other. u learn english. u learn english literature. can we understand literature without underatanding their culture, background, society? i think not. but we need to do exams. we study history, of singapore, of west. of china? not till recent years. y? like i said. i am an engineer. you learn maths as a tool. you cannot learn english as a tool. cannot? you can actually. but we are not. we are learning so much of english, or any language, that it is no longer just a tool.?
This is one point that you definitely have mis-read me. If I mentioned anything like "language as a tool", I must be raising it so I can shoot it down. This is an excerpt from my blog post today:
我们中文教育一向的逻辑是：流着华人的血脉—必须学华语—
It is precisely because 身教 no longer works that education has to take on a greater cultural responsibility, and the nation needs a better cultural policy. That's why in my paper I suggested adding "literacy" to the ethnic-language-culture equation of logic. But as you see, we never still quite have a good Chinese term to translate "literacy". That's why it doesn't figure in the minds of Chinese educator. Without suitable vocabulary there is no concept.
something i feel recently, a lot of kids do not understand the point of education while they are in the system. a lot of us still do not understand education. i still dont. i dont think i ever will. sometimes, i dont want to. the more u understand, the more u look back at what we are doing and ask what the hell are we still doing something like that? but we are sometimes reistant to the solution. we may see it. but we may not always do it. singapore does not allow someone who is 30 or older to go back to formal education. not like europe. y? because of that, we are only given one chance. those who screw it up halfway gives up and walk to the end. those that does not, runs all the way to the end. completes the race. and stand there at the end point. coz we dont know what we have done. we dont know what next to do. sometimes i feel that language is an application tool too, like maths. we teach language, using that, we communicate. and through communicating, we teach common sense. we teach right and wrong. we teach thinking skills. and we use language. but currently i like to think that we teach language by teaching language. literature kind of language.?
Ok, this point strays from the discussion. Still, it's very important because it's a bigger question - in fact an international one facing all developed countries shrouded by the globalization discourse. Basic state education is a very difficult issue to deal with, in fact more troublesome than tertiary education because the implications are far-reaching. I attended a lecture by a World Bank official some weeks back, and one point he mentioned was precisely the inclusion of continuing education for adults in tertiary institutions. In due time I believe this point will come through, depending on market conditions. As for the point about not daring to think, well at least for me it's a responsibility. It's ultimately what taxpayers paid my school fees for isn't it - to improve the education system? I do wonder sometimes how far I can "fight" state decisions and power, but at times if need be, I think I will still "speak Truth to the state" in my personal capacity. At least the current Director-General of Education is very receptive to new ideas, very humanist as well, so I see hope.
like u said, a lot of our education is actually economically driven. we started off as a fishing village. we move off, as a trading village. we end of as a traders village. if u think about it, most of our economy is still business based. we are only starting to do services, which is still a kind of business. we do not have much native technology. we do not have much native skills. switzerland ppl makes good watches. germans make good cars. what we do best? trading. traders learn what they need to make the money. we teach chinese for china, english for US and the world. sometimes i really wonder how sustainable is this? last sat's straits time. the best paying job is still econs in nus and smu. ntu is bio engineering. it says, i am not quoting, that if u can, the best choice now is still to go to business. econs. but y is the current ecomonic situation like that? but i suppose the money will still stay in that sector for a while more. perhaps a long while. if education is economically driven, then y are we thinking so hard about it? if we do not understand the fundamental of having education, how can we make a good system?
The aim-of-education debate needs to be sparked off again, but I think researchers and philosophers are trying to find a way how. Cos the moment you do this, you not only have to counter state power, you have to deal with the whole globalization discourse and it's just going to be either non-effective or you come up with a theory that ultimately becomes an ivory tower. As of now, I think at the tertiary level we can borrow some ideas from other universities how to be less market-driven in our "products" - read, graduates, but still the proportion is gg to be controlled by the State. No choice, we need money before talking abt anything else. But from primary to pre-tertiary, I am determined to prevent any over-inflitration of money talk seeping in too early. In recent months some friends have asked me what I think of including "financial management" as secondary modules, and I replied perhaps JC or poly. I really don't wish to see kids becoming corrupt in the mind when they're too young to even differentiate right from wrong - or maybe left? I see it in some Band 3 schools in HK. Kids talk of jobs jobs jobs at 13 yrs old, 'cos that's what their parents teach them at home knowing they won't make it to university. The way I see it, basic education has a "shield" to maintain. If there is indeed a logic as study hard --> score good grades --> get good degree --> find good job, I don't wish for students to jump from one end to the other straightaway when they shld be exploring a lot even in their teenagehood. At times you do question why learn all the "wrong" stuff that's over-simplified, and I think once you had the answer by saying that it's because by having the basic stuff that's incomplete, we learn to unlearn and relearn, so we learn better than if we had nothing. I think that's going to be eternal. It's just a process of knowledge growth. It's just like the religion we mentioned earlier too: when young you learn rules without questioning, or getting answers like "you'll know when you grow up" if you did question. When you grow older, you will seek your own answers - but only if you remembered you had a question. So the aim of basic education should not be to provide answers. Rather it should be to learn some facts, then do 2 things: 1) stimulate questions that need not be answered right away; 2) helping students maintain the curiosity to find out the answer(s) as they grow older. At least, that will be my philosophy of teaching.
you also mentioned using language, like english, that is common to bridge distances between different communities. but sometiems i think it is not useful. u can make then talk, but that does not mean they understand one another. that does not mean they dont fight. i rather think that the policy they are using is not allowing u to talk about it. abstinence. like sex and aids. dont touch it. u dont get it. the virus, and the sex. oh ya. and the communities arguing. cant we use religion, the chinese harmony values and morals to promote peace? cant we identify with the fact that we are stuck here on this island and we need to stick together? i dont see too much use to a common language honestly. it is a tool. but it does not solve the problem on its own. sometimes i feel like our society is binded together by post it notes. it holds together. but it also peels away without any stain. we cannot change a society ?overnight. so education is like the only bet. but we dont see the real aims of education, other than ecomonically.
I wouldn't agree with the point that society cannot change overnight. It can, and that's why we are all so concerned. I think one key question that has popped up and stayed there in my mind these days is: how is society possible? Some ppl like Margaret Thatcher may say there are only individuals and families, no society, and relegate society as a construct that is in the mind. Still, for various reasons humans have bonded in groups and a society. Try reading Rousseau‘s "On the origin of inequality". It's got some nice theories though probably not sufficient to answer this anthropological question.
Perhaps sometimes we are overstating the economic issue sometimes. At least, in basic education I do see that at times we do try to do more than just the economic - though that is the ultimate goal. That said, my take is that our form of "political correctness" in education is becoming overboard in light of changing limits in thought. I mentioned this in my paper as well.
its not very coherent this email. but i try to put it some post it notes at the end. hopefully it holds. chinese identity. pardon me for asking y we need it? pardon me for asking how u define it. to me i grow up like that. handed down mouth to ?mouth, hands to hands. i did not learn it in school, during my time, school promoted speaking english. speak english at home. honestly. so i never really appreciate the purpose of education. because of that, i dont see a link education and chinese identity. the language can help, by teaching the language, u teach the chinese moral, history, way of life. the westerners spent a lot of their history invading, colonising. we spent a great deal, after qin emperor, thinking. philosphers. medicine. certain science. like chiinese medicine, we learn from pratical, trial an error. observations. in many ways we are different from the west. and we are not necessarily worse off. if u look at leading science, medicine approach, it is actually quite close to the chinese. but we dont teach that in school anymore. the chinese righteousness. the morals and values. the contradiction. we can find all sorts of contradiction in chinese teachings, and we can see a convergence in all that. i dont yet. some ppl do. but we dont teach these anymore. we stick to passages, we stick to learning more words. there was an argurment put forward in book outliers, asians are always better in maths. y? maybe its the language. we only have one syllable for each number. one to ten. seven. that is long. we go shi san. two syllable. two number. thirteen. that is odd. and twenty three does not follow the thirteen system. twenty onwards follow a different naming system than from eleven to nineteen. compare one, eleven, twenty one, thirty one. eleven is odd. different system. look at yi. shi yi. er shi yi. san shi yi. that is coherent system. so it facilitates us counting in the mind. its more efficient. coherent. more fun, easier, we do better in maths. but its his book, his theory. he is an ang moh. look at abacus. nothing close to its efficiency, non-eletronic, in the western side. but we dont tthink like that anymore. we do zen meditation yoga. but chinese has its form of meditation too.
I think this is one point I am more bothered with than most ppl because of my own experiences in China. Makes me wonder sometimes if I am more West than East. Here, a few paragraphs from my blog post today:
1) 在我们的语文课程内，特别是中学课程，
而当下，政府似乎在将所有人拉向语言的学习，把文化留给精英们（
2) 之前不断被“权利”与“义务”、“付出”与“获得”
而到了今天，我们却把这些背景全抛开，一想到“义务”就与“
而当下，中国逐渐出现 的矛盾之一，便是在“权利”与“义务”这个点上。被压抑的要“
its sometimes the things we teach that makes us identify ourself. its the things we understand that we call our own. as child psychologist believe, children need to identify themself. so they mimick their adults. the first thigns they see. their parents. so its from there on that they learn. and it always continues learning. but we live in the new age, the age that asks y. how efficient. y a chinese identity? what can it do for me? other than riding the china wave. y education.? y i am borned a chinese makes me a chinese? i see that we now think of ourselves as stuck nowhere. not fully chinese, not western. and under siege of a hell lot of immigrants with more culture to mix in. sometimes we dont identify ourself with the new chinese immigrants. they call themselves chinese. i am supposed to do the same. but i dont identify, but definitely they are chinese. so probably im not. what i think? we need to create a singapore chinese, not too unlike the chinese chinese. but somethign distinct we still call our own. wats wrong with a different type of chinese? american english, british english, australian english, y cant we have a singapore version of chinese, or singlish?
On the point about Singapore Chinese, another blog quote:
就像英语在新加坡有能”登雅堂”的正规英语和“窜民间”
Stuck between East and West - that is the fundamental question in my mind as I ponder on Chinese education in Singapore, and on a greater scale, the whole society's development. China is facing the same problem, but they are burdened with a LARGE historical baggage. So I think for Singaporeans, we can lead the Eastern world by becoming the ones to be "bi-cultural" (ok I hate this word but it's probably apt for now). We need to move from the way we have amessed East-West culture into our political system, to focusing on each individual's own world. If you ask me, that is the way education has to go, and is one of the main aims of education. Because, simply put, without this, most ppl will be lured by Western ideals in no time because it has a Satan-ian appeal like the snake to Eve: "bite the apple bite the apple!!" While for those of us who still have a staunch affliation for Chinese habits and culture, and who don't see everything as "outdated", we need to find that middle ground that is not too English, not too China-Chinese. If you ask me, that has to involve all disciplines of the humanities. On my part, I am trying in the arena of arts, thought and education. But whether there can be success, I don't know. I'm not too worried, since after all society evolves as a whole. I just wish we have more "thought leaders" in Singapore, and hopefully a few make it into Cabinet.
