I was in the lecturer's office enquiring about some Chinese units that I thought of undertaking as electives.
She gave me a passage from the Chinese Advanced 2 (which essentially covers things from lower secondary course material) and told me to read it. That was fine. She then handed me another textbook which was Chinese Specialist 1. I read 10 words and told her I couldn't continue because I couldn't recognise the characters. To put it simply, I'm appalled at my Chinese standards. It's beyond disgusting. You would expect me to come up with something better considering the fact that I came from Nanyang Primary and I speak Mandarin fairly frequently at home. I would expect myself to do better. It's really shameful when I stutter when being asked to read a passage when I bagged a Distinction for Orals both in O and A's.

I don't get it why people would find it embarrassing to tell others you speak Mandarin at home. What's embarrassing is to call yourself a Chinese and yet you can't even string a sentence properly. And honestly, I dont find it funny at all when people purposely add an ang moh twang when ordering food at hawker centres.

When my Dad told me not to be so haughty just because I can speak Chinese better than most of my jia-kantang friends (because Chinese isn't even spoken properly in Singapore and he thinks that my Chinese is horrid) , I didn't understand why. When he told me to sit and watch CCTV and listen to the news on Ch 8 (it's the only program on Ch 8 he doesn't mind me watching because the rest are "trashy"), I didn't understand what the fuss was about.
But now, I do. I finally feel the urgency to buck up my mother tongue. I finally know what my father was trying to tell my sisters and I for the past decade. This isn't entirely about the whole 'China becoming the next super power in the next 10 years or so'. You can call it pride, but I don't like the fact that the ang mohs are sneering at us behind our backs because we can't even speak our own mother tongue properly. And that is exactly what is motivating me to brush up the language.
I might sign up with the Asian Studies department to go on a China Field Study for 2 months.
Am still disgusted with myself. Yuck yuck yuck.

PS: Gracie, you and I will only converse in Mandarin when I get back.