miyagi.sg | My Very Own Glob {Curiosa Felicitas}

“Make by Burke“

Our Ang Moh friends find it hard to under­stand us some­times, and it suits us just fine. It suits them fine too. In fact, this sta­tus quo ante bel­lum thingie works well for every­one.
If some­thing stuffs up, the Ang Moh can just say they find it hard to under­stand us, and leave it at that. We stuff some­thing up, we say they don’t under­stand us, and every­one leaves it as is. Get it? No? Me nei­ther. Hard to under­stand lah, we all.

One of our Ang Moh friends recently com­mented that Sin­ga­pore­ans had trou­ble under­stand­ing each other, and it wasn’t just an Ang Moh vs Sin­ga­porean thing. Appar­ently, accord­ing to him, we’re out there mis­un­der­stand­ing and under­min­ing each other because of our lack of a com­mon effec­tive language.

Take for instance the petrol kiosk cashier aun­tie whom I see once every ten days because I can’t afford to buy a hybrid car to save the envi­ron­ment. I’m in a ten-long queue, and she asks every one of the nine cus­tomers in front of me the same ques­tion, and they still all go “har?”

The ques­tion being: “Good evening sir/ma’am, any pumm?”

It throws me off every time, and it still takes me a while to under­stand that she’s ask­ing, “good evening, did you pur­chase any petrol with the rest of your pur­chases, sir/madam, and if so, which pump did you dis­pense the petrol from?”

So, if you were hav­ing a hum­drum day, doing hum­drum things like fill­ing up your petrol tank, and you walked into the kiosk/grocery store, you’d hear the following:

“BING BONG (irri­tat­ing door chime).… good evening sir, any pumm?… har?… orh… pump five…“

Some­times there are variations:

“BING BONG.… good evening sir, any pumm? har? Orh. No pumm. I look­ing for lol­lipop. You got lol­lipop? No. Lol­lipop no have, got Chupa Chup. Har? No lol­lipop? Yah, don’t have.… BING BONG”.

I swear that really happened.

More impor­tantly, add up the col­lec­tive time taken to go “har?”, and you’ve lost valu­able pro­duc­tive hours. And add to that the time taken up by the kiosk cashier aun­tie try­ing to sell you some­thing that’s “on ploe mow shun”:

Petrol Kiosk Aun­tie: Together with pumm?

Me: Yes, together with pumm, and it’s pumm five

PKA: Any Bur­netts for you? On ploe moe shun only twenty five dol­lar after discount?

Me: Any what?

PKA: Bur­netts.

Me: Who are the Burnetts?

PKA: Bur­netts, Burnetts.

Me: Um… Yah, I dunno any Burnetts.

PKA: Bur­netts! The nets make by the Burke!

Me: Make by the Burke?

PKA: Bur­netts you never eat before? Good for the saw troke!

Me: Um, how much is my petrol?

PKA: You should eat the Bur­netts ah, your skin not so good also. Try lah, eat the Burnetts.…

Me: No thank you

PKA: So, only pumm ah?

Me: Yes.

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