Recalling memories of Ah Mah – in fragments of Teochew

The search for a lost dialect isn’t just about culture and communication, but a reconnection to a beloved grandma.

- Leslie Koh

The writer with his grandmother. He spoke Teochew almost daily for the better part of 40 years, until his grandmother died in 2014.

(LESLIE KOH)

Recently, I tried speaking Teochew to a friend, only to discover that I had to pause and think of the words before opening my mouth. They didn’t arrive naturally, and I had trouble even completing a sentence which, in any case, emerged in a painful stutter.

It was a rude shock, because I had long believed myself to be a fluent speaker of Teochew. Not at the first-language level at which I spoke English, for sure, but enough to hold conversations with my late grandmother that went well beyond “Have you eaten dinner?”. We had regular and prolonged discussions about history, culture and politics, though these were often interrupted by me having to ask her what the right word for, say, democracy, was.

That was important to me, a jiak kangtang (potato-eating in Teochew/Hokkien, meaning Westernised) ethnic Chinese who spoke predominantly in English, was brought up in a Westernised family, and generally struggled with Chinese in school.

It was also my main defence whenever someone accused me of being a “banana” - yellow outside, white inside - with the usual argument, “You are Chinese; why can’t you speak Mandarin?”

To which my reply would always be - “I speak Teochew, which is my true Chinese heritage, not Mandarin - ha!”

Technically, that was only half true, because my father is Hokkien, but I conveniently left that fact out. Besides, culture is tied to the mother tongue, not father tongue. Or, in my case, grandmother tongue.