Language/Generations

I was at Weiwuying, the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan this past December. I had been invited to attend a conference on arts participation and lead a workshop on festival curation. I’d been to Kaohsiung many times to visit family, but it was my first time there in a professional capacity. Everything was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time: I recognized the humidity, the smells, the tempo of this southern port city, but I was still a stranger. 

In between conference sessions, I arranged to see a matinee. As my liaison handed me a ticket, she warned me that I likely would not understand it because it was in Taiwanese Hokkien, not Mandarin. The piece was inspired by the history and site of Weiwuying, built on former army barracks. It featured a genial narrator, a popular aging folk singer, Chinese opera, jokes about a local chain-store, beautifully shot city vignettes. It was a love letter to the city. I understood half of the language and references, but recognized the humor and the people. I felt strangely, and wonderfully, at home. I realized I’ve only experienced Hokkien around a dining table, not as live performance. It was a performative language full of inside jokes, loan words, specific rhythms — a linguistic dance I was more aware of perhaps because of my distance from it. For the first time in years I wished I hadn’t lost the language. 

I wondered, how would this show do in festivals? How to translate it, would it translate? And I caught myself. The piece was made to resist being read easily by an outsider, and I had reflexively tried to package it for international consumption. Artists don’t necessarily make their work to tour; they tour if the economics of the making necessitate it. Not every piece is for a touring circuit, asshole.

My parents immigrated from Taiwan to Singapore a few years before I was born, in the 1970s.  Growing up, there were different languages spoken at home: a mix of English and Mandarin with my sisters, Mandarin with my parents, and halting Taiwanese Hokkien with my relatives and grandparents. Japanese was also in my home — the remnant of the colonization of Formosa, but also from my parents’ genuine connection with the culture. 

In homes and public spaces, Singaporeans speak Malay, Tamil, Mandarin (and the dialects Teochew, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc.), Peranakan Malay, Hindi, Singlish, and more. English is the (dominant) working language of the state. Malay is the indigenous, official language of the country. Children are educated in English and take lessons in their “Mother Tongue” (Malay, Tamil, Mandarin) as a Second Language. In the race from “third world to first,” the government (like others) pressed on with regulation and standardization, privileging certain languages over others in the name of progress: English instead of  “Mother Tongue,” Mandarin instead of the dialects, and so on. 

Language can be lost in one generation — I worry about that every day with my young daughter speaking Mandarin. What, then, to make of the dialects that are spoken less with each successive generation, the very dialects that have drowned out indigenous voices? The globalization/colonization of cities presses languages out of cultures and out of the land. The globalization of culture presses art/works into particular aesthetics and a linguistic framework that is legible and translatable. If I had to imagine a theatre, it would be a theatre that resists with all its might being easily read, that flourishes in moments that are impossible to translate.