This essay is part of Transpacific Literary Project’s monthly column, with art by Juyon Lee.

I was wary, and weary, when my American colleague asked me what my first language was. I have dreaded the question ever since I moved to Berlin.

I tried to weasel out of answering, and debated furiously with myself whether I should just say “Chinese,” since he had already asked if I was Chinese when he saw I was a lover of rice and a user of chopsticks. I am unabashedly that, except that I wanted so much to explain nuances. When he continued indulging his curiosity as to why I was teaching writing in English (and not, well, my first language—he hemmed and hawed to ask what that first language could be), I said, “Oh, I taught writing in English back in Singapore.” Singapore is a city-state also known as the “garden city,” its pride and joy being the Gardens by the Bay, an immaculate greenhouse-like garden where foreign plants travel from afar to settle and grow in regulated temperatures.

“English is our first language, officially,” I told him, but that did not perfectly dispel his doubts.

“No, I mean, first language. Mother tongue,” he said.

In the end, I told the colleague that Chinese is my mother tongue, also officially. “It’s an educational policy thing,” I happily elaborated. 

He looked at me, raised his brow, and told me with teacherly authority: “Then your first language is Chinese, not English. English is your first foreign language.”

As a Singaporean of Chinese ethnicity, I had never thought of English as my foreign language, nor had I thought of it as my mother tongue. I didn’t realize they were mutually exclusive. However, my colleague’s confident declaration did jolt me into pondering: What exactly is a mother tongue? Is it that one tongue that we inherit from our mother? Or, as the Cambridge dictionary says, “the first language that you learn when you are a baby, rather than a language learned at school or as an adult”? Or is it, like in the Singaporean context, the official language assigned to an ethnic group?

By the above three rather different definitions, I could answer my colleague in three different ways: that my mother tongue is Indonesian (by the first definition—because my mother is Chinese Indonesian); or a mix of Teochew, Hokkien, and Mandarin (by the second definition—since a mother tongue is born out of the family), which I hereby coin as “chew-kien-darin” as that’s how my parents speak to each other; or Mandarin Chinese (by the third definition). 

This turns me into a hybrid of multiple tongues, much like Vanda Miss Joaquim, Singapore’s national flower, which is a hybrid that doesn’t fit neatly into any orchid categories, unlike her “purebred” orchid ancestors do. In fact, there was once much debate over its origins—whether it was a natural hybrid or one created by gardeners. It has since been established that Agnes Joachim, who was part of the diasporic Armenian community that settled in Singapore in the 1800s, bred the flower in 1893. 

In my ten-plus years living in Berlin, many different people repeated the well-intentioned correction or misplaced curiosity from my American colleague. It stung at first because as someone working in English, I needed to prove a lot more about my level of competency when it came to securing a job teaching English. Most, but not all, schools expect that a writing teacher should be teaching in their native language. Ditto for translators. We are expected to translate into our one native language, because how could anyone translate into native language(s), when “mother tongue” has always been singular? 

Through a period of confusion, anger, and acceptance, I finally decided that my former colleague (and quite a few others) was not absolutely wrong, but also not absolutely right in their correction of what my first language should be. It hurts because I did spend a long time “perfecting” two languages declared to be very important back where I come from, and they are both called first languages in the context of my hometown. Although I’ve become gradually unsure if languages, first language or not, can be perfected.

Truth is, it wasn’t always easy for me to learn English in Singapore, growing up in a Chinese-educated family. Nor was it plain sailing learning Mandarin just because I tick all the right boxes ethnically.

My family actually speaks a messy tangle of “unofficial languages,” like Chinese dialects and a smattering of Indonesian. Despite that immersion, my competency in these unofficial languages wasn’t magically perfect just because I was born into them. Instead, growing up in the eighties, I fared better in the state languages, which makes sense considering the effort the country poured into making sure of that. 

When the People’s Action Party, the dominant political party represented in today’s Singapore Parliament, was elected to power in 1959, it introduced a bilingual educational policy. Under this policy, which is still in place, students have to study the English language—assigned to be their first language—and their respective mother tongues such as Malay, Mandarin Chinese, or Tamil—designated as their second language—according to the ethnic groups they belong to. Languages are assigned to citizens based on what is practical for the state in order to operate smoothly, like a perfect, well-oiled machine.

Singapore gained independence from the British in 1963 and became an independent state in 1965 after breaking off from the Malay Federation. In the many decades following the bilingual educational policy’s implementation, the Singaporean government has tried to ensure that its citizens have a perfect grasp of English and their mother tongue. In 1999, a Speak Good English Movement by then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong was introduced through which citizens were encouraged to speak grammatically correct or “good English.” According to the government, mastery of standard English is imperative for Singapore’s progress as it secures its place in the international arena. I believe, and still do to a certain extent, that the bilingual educational policy did serve the newly independent country well. It was supposed to connect us—with the world outside and with our world inside—except that a potpourri of other languages also flourished together with the state languages organically, like wildflowers bursting into color. 

The advocacy for bilingualism in two official languages meant that these wildflowers would have to be trimmed and pruned. The ideal was a manicured garden of languages and, in the case of English, it had to be the perfectly intonated and grammatically correct Queen’s English—English spoken with the accent associated with the British royal family and aristocracy. For those whose designated mother tongue is Mandarin Chinese, there were Speak Mandarin government campaigns to ensure that your Mandarin didn’t suddenly wither and die a tragic death as the Queen’s English bloomed. 

However, that halo of dual-language perfection did not quite put me in good stead when I went outside of Singapore to Berlin, all starry-eyed, wanting to teach my state language or painstakingly “perfected” first language. So many doors were banged shut on my face because my English is not native to the UK or the US.

I was rejected by a school because my English had an accent. The woman who interviewed me couldn’t place it but said, “There’s a hint of an accent, alright.” I told her I am from Singapore, and I could hear her voice beam over the phone. “That’s it. That’s the accent. You speak English really well, but I’m so sorry. We are actually looking for native speakers.” 

To work as an English teacher, my “can’t be placed” accent needed a lot of repeated explanation. Writing and translating work into English, however, did slowly come when some clients decided I could actually translate into English at a high standard even though I didn’t fit the general idea of what someone who translates into English looks like.

Tragically, the same thing happened with my assigned mother tongue. Even though my skin color is right, my ethnicity is right, I still do not fit into the traditional native Chinese speaker category when I work with Chinese speakers from homogeneously Mandarin-speaking countries like China and Taiwan. I started to wonder if I would ever be the perfect blend of East and West, like my country had attempted to instill in me since young. Would I ever be perfect in “bridging” two different worlds effectively with one perfect English and one perfect Chinese?

It took me a long time to address that white elephant in the room—that the “perfect” English is American or British English. Preferably, the Queen’s English.

And who exactly is this “Queen of English” that presides over the language that is now spoken by around 1.5 billion people in the world? (This figure is from information published in 2023 by Statista, a German online platform that specializes in data gathering and visualization.) Do they all speak this English that might not even be the late Queen’s native tongue?

Sources indicate that the United States has the most total English speakers in the world, with 306 million. India has the second-most, with at least 129 million, followed by Pakistan (104 million), the United Kingdom (68 million), and Nigeria (60 million). As of 2022, about 400 million people were native speakers of English. 

Yet, these native speakers do not include people from India or Nigeria, who might have also grown up speaking English in their home countries. For those living in the many places that were former British colonies, including Singapore, their English does not hold the same status as the Queen’s English on the global platform—it is a subvariety that must aspire to be a major variety when it is spoken beyond the shores of those countries. 

Yet, the many Englishes spoken in the world today are fun, quirky, varieties that cling to the body and emotions. They are haphazard Englishes born out of a desire to connect with your neighbor, to bond with your friend. They are varieties of English exchanged and communicated between people who, incidentally, also speak other languages on top of English. But they can’t be natives. Because, if you trace the language’s origins to the very beginnings of time, multilingual and multicultural countries like Singapore are not considered authentic Anglophone countries. The climate is wrong. The skin color is wrong. There are too many languages swirling around, unplanned and random, tainting the one-and-only original.

Jhumpa Lahiri, a British American author born in London to immigrants from West Bengal and who grew up in the United States, opined in her book Translating Myself and Others (2022), on the question of authenticity. “Who is original, who belongs authentically to a place? Who does not? Why are those who are not original to a place—migrants who did not ‘get there first’—treated as they are?”

It is hard to say who got to Singapore first. Orang Laut (Malay for “sea people”) are indigenous to Singapore and are believed to be its first inhabitants.

Then the British came and established the island as their trading colony in 1819. Most of the city’s population growth until World War II was due to immigration. Singapore drew in large numbers of laborers from China, India, and the Malay Archipelago, which slowly formed the core of Singapore’s population today. Various languages like Kristang; Chinese dialects including Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese; and Indian languages like Bengali and Hindi, came with the people, who scattered an assortment of language seeds that sprouted and bloomed on the Singapore soil. From the outset, Singapore has always been the quintessential multilingual and multicultural society. The one “authentic” face of a certain era or a group of people has evolved into multiple ones through colonialism and the fervent common migrant hope to survive and thrive.

British English, the colonial language that inscribes a Eurocentric consciousness but that is also the neutral language supposed to connect the diverse migrant communities in Singapore, gradually evolved into Singlish—the wildflower that continues to thrive up to this day. Yet, in the wider global community, it is preferably kept under wraps, like the black sheep of the family. The world has a standard, keeping Singlish firmly in its place. 

As long as the world insists that English is measured against one common standard so as to “separate the wheat from the chaff,” hierarchies will exist among English speakers. In the Singaporean family, it’s a language of struggle. In Singaporean society, it’s a language of aspiration. In the world, it’s a language of domination.

American British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie once said, in an essay on Indian writers in England, that the use of English indicates a critical consciousness because “we find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies.” Earlier he writes, “We can’t simply use the language in the way the British did: it needs remaking for our own purposes.” 

Literature and language reflect the reality of a place, or reimagine how and what a place could be. The “one size fits all” approach might have worked for monolingual countries in the past, but not in this day and age where people move and travel on routes that branch off into many different directions: they uproot, change routes, sink roots, create routes. These routes intertwine with languages discovered, adored, learnt, assimilated, invented along the way to make us who we are and the stories we tell. 

Personally, I think I belong everywhere and nowhere. This belonging follows the routes I have taken in life which, most of the time, are meandering and never, ever direct.

I’d like to think that’s how it is with languages. The languages we speak always move, adapt, evolve into the environments they find themselves in. They form imperfectly perfect gardens bursting into life on soils old and new; they are wildflowers that adapt and bloom in places once unknown to them, determined to dazzle in their newfound homes, a chaotic and beautiful riot of colors.