[ soundbite ; mayday - shi guang ji ]

ohmygawd, i seriously think that singaporean chinese who pretend that they dont know a word of chinese and put on that pretentious caucasian-accented english should just go bang their heads into the wall and take a knife to stab themselves. (of course i dont blame those who grew up in western countries and have acquired such a speech since young.)

come on, you have black hair (well some have natural brown hair), black eyes (some have dark brown though) and yellow skin. you are a chinese. stop pretending you're not. in fact, you should be proud of that. im not gonna preach like some CME teacher here but no matter how hard you try to westernise yourself, your speech or your dressing, you remain a chinese. in the caucasians' eyes, they assume you dont know a single word of english and they stare at you when they hear you speaking understandable english (yes i've the experience before).
digression a bit - im not saying i speak fluent english but just that most singaporeans indeed can speak fluent english wad.

okay, back to the people who put on pretentious accents. well, so what if you can speak perfect english? who are you trying to impress? the whites? because they wont think of you as one of them although you speak oh-so-american/british-accented english. you remain a chinese and should embrace that. though in singapore, the caucasians are used to hearing us, singaporeans who can speak english well, but once you travel overseas, they won't know where you're from and will constantly try to make sure you understand what they're saying (which is very irritating).
digression a bit - but of course there're several exceptions like some friendly and funny new zealanders i met in new zealand, but i'll talk about that next time.

i've had such an experience in australia before, when i was alone in the hotel room. it was day before we were gonna check out and this hotel porter came knocking on the door and asked if i had any luggage to hand to him. it was rather late in the night and i had just woken up, feeling groggy i shook my head as i had to wait for my dad and mom to return before sorting it out. but he thought i didn't understand him, so he asked "you know luggages? any BIG ones?"

i shook my head again, wanting to close the door. but he continued, "you know BIG?" and he gestured with his hands to show what BIG is like.
i was nodding my head by now, thinking in my head "yeah i jolly-well know what the hell big means and yes, my luggage is big but i don't need you to carry it down now because i've to wait for my parents to get back you nincompoop."

but, those words didn't get out of my mouth, i just muttered a word of "no." and closed the door to get back to sleep.

the next morning, that porter arrived at the door to collect the luggages. we were setting off to the restaurant for our breakfast and i was playing with my sister, teasing and racing each other down the corridor (yes, i was rather childish XP), okay and the porter, heard us speaking and looked weirdly at me.
he must have been thinking "oh so she knows english,",
though i hope he was thinking "oh my goodness she can actually speak english?! im shocked, bewildered and impressed. a chinese girl speaking english at such a young age! im such an idiot, using ridiculously large hand gestures last night."

but nah, he was probably just thinking, "oh, so this chinese girl can speak english. how surprising, sheesh."

yeah so there you go. anyway, it's common to hear my friends proclaiming that their "chinese sucks", i know how hard it is for some of my friends to learn chinese and score good grades in school. but there was once i heard my malay friend saying "i hate malay! malay sucks.", i was thinking, "erm, aren't you hating yourself? oh, so malays dont like learning malay as well ah. but i thought it was their mother tongue so they should know it pretty well." then i reflected upon us the chinese, how other people would feel when they hear us proclaiming that we hate our mother tongue. they would look at us with a different opinion, they would be thinking "oh my, she doesn't even know chinese when she's a chinese? eew."

stupid people who put on fake-accented english when ordering food from the canteen stalls.
(-_-!)