the way we go on so about it, you can be sure there isn't a deader horse in the universe, but whenever i am home i feel terrible that i can't speak any dialects. whether it's because when home we're around old people a lot: cindy's grandmother is here, and i've been seeing mine alot - she's been in and out the doctors' rather often of late - resulting in a desperation to communicate with them, which is to say after standing around so often in a posture of helpful helplessness a guilt-spurred desperation arises from knowing that they are at the perilous age where your inarticulacy today may wail of potential regret tomorrow - or because we are once again immersed in singapore's multilingual scene that being able to speak only english and mandarin seems so pitifully inept, or that the languages you do know - latin and greek, and spanish and japanese - are so irrelevant here it might as well have been that we never studied them. just yesterday morning i heard my mother speaking cantonese to a parent downstairs, the melodious words floating up clearly to my room, and i thought dialects are so much more familiar and qin qie. and then when i came down later she was talking over the fence to the neighbour who's teochew, and then a few hours later, on the phone in hokkien to my aunt who called, and then later on in the evening, in cantonese again to my grandmother. we might have studied lots of languages at school but our parents are the true speakers of many tongues. they didn't need to go to 101 spanish 5 mornings a week for systematic instruction in grammar. they just absorbed lots and lots of it by living in singapore. and i can do that too, at least, when i understand teochew i can do it without translating it into chinese, and no one ever taught me teochew, but i know i'm only getting 70% of it. how can i have learnt it perfectly? i didn't have grandparents living at home, and my parents spoke it to each other but not to me. and then i didn't want to learn. i thought teochew was inferior, low-class, that no educated person would speak it. the government certainly didn't want us to speak it. and now i regret it so much, and it isn't as if i could sit down with a textbook and learn it all again. and this must happen the world over - i have taiwanese friends at school who can only speak mandarin and not taiwanese (hokkien) and they tell me how their parents laugh at them when they try, although they can understand taiwanese. cindy says her big concern now is how she is losing all her languages. her japanese is good now, after spending the semester in tokyo, but without constant practice it is only a matter of time that it will slip from her again; hakka and teochew she is finding difficult to speak anymore. i think that's the problem for all of us. salvage our dialects? or consider them dead and work on our newly acquired languages - those that we can at least cajole to live with grammar books and prospects of travel. but it all seems too late. it isn't even having a ridiculous accent (when i speak teochew von laughs at me) or not knowing the words - it's that you think your dialects should be closer to you than italian or latin or german, but you find yourself equally unadept at them. for a long and awful time i thought this only happened to me, but cindy confided that when she tries to speak to her grandmother now, in a dubious mixture of hakka and teochew, more often than not japanese words come to mind instead. in the early days of learning french, when i was very awkwardly speaking teochew, sometimes the words that come out are french - a sure sign that teochew, cantonese and french are merely indiscriminately swirling together inside some compartment of the brain labelled "foreign languages". that teochew should be in there with french hurts.

and yet and yet, it is precisely because you didn't learn it out of books, from teachers, without rules except those you knew without knowing you knew - that in your greatest agitation - at least, in my agitation and despair and urgency i could still force the dormant words from the deep recesses of my mind, memories of sounds that i could never remember in tranquillity - to speak whatever dialect in broken fashion - that you are so unwilling to let them go - saying to yourself yes i can of course i can regain my estranged tongues the foundations are there hidden in the crevices of your brain and you can speak the old languages again - and refusing to concede that they are lost.