“Excuse me, can I trouble you to ask how much you charge for tailoring a pair of pants?”
This was me asking a tailor in Chinatown about his rates. Sounds normal right? Didn’t seem too exaggerated or try hard to impress? Right, but I asked him in Chinese,
“Bu hao yi si, ma fan ni yi xia, qing wen zuo yi jian ku zi ni zhe me xuan?”
To my bewilderment, the tailor’s response was, ” Wah
Are you local?” (Wa
Ni shi ben di ren ma?). So how crude must I sound for him to think otherwise? “Uncle, tailor pants how much?” or “One pants how much?”
Isn’t it ridiculous how he no longer associate proper structured questions (or manners for that matter) with “locals” anymore? Or is it that when we converse in Chinese, people tend to sound drastically unrefined? I don’t wish for it to be true but chances are, if I said what I said in the English format, no one would bat an eyelid.
My friend who was around shared my sentiments: it’s apparent to most people that Chinese is the “second language” yet ironically our “mother tongue”, thus resulting in the general public happily conversing with it in their daily lives but don’t bother exploring the technicalities and beauty of the words… Strangely, some of these people actually out-and-out admit, “My chinese no good la”. If that being the case, may I ask what the fuck are you good at? Cannot speak Ang-Mo well, cannot Jiang Hua Yu properly, why don’t you just be friends with the fly hovering above you, you useless piece of shit.
Ehem
sorry, I lost my kewl. This is not the first time some stranger has pointed out that I don’t sound local and probably won’t be the last. It is really getting on my nerves especially when I’m the one making the effort to be polite and accurate in my speech and all that they could muster up to tell me is that I’m not as authentic a Singaporean as they are
Gan Ni Na
How’s dat for a start? Na Bei
I know it ain’t no biggie, it just bothered me enough to blog it down.
