Singapore Settee

Neglect of elderly - Singapore government partly to be blamed

While many people are travelling during the Chinese New Year, it must not be forgotten that each year, Singapore welcomes more than 10,000 new citizens. Many of these new citizens take the opportunity to visit their parents and other family members - not only during Chinese New Year but also during the Ramaddan month, during Deepavali andon other holidays.

Some travel with the entire family so it allows them to bond together as a family. Hence, the issue of neglect of the elderly in Singapore is not necessary due to a loss of our cultural norms. However, structural changes in society has made bonding more difficult. And I believe the government has made this task a bit more difficult to surmount.

In earlier days, it is common to have three generations of the same family staying together in a large house. The effort to provide housing to all within the land caused the ever rising HDB flats. These are now getting smaller in size while the names has not change. A five-room flat built in the 80's are certainly bigger than one built in the 90's. How do you get more people into one small unit.

Furthermore, the concept was that you get married and you get a flat. That caused an entire generation (and it is still the same today) to grow up learning that when you marry, you must move out to your own flat. Anything else means you are either a loser or you are a miser. How can anyone stand up to such a test.

Lately, the issue is to get the elderly employed. I wonder how many of us are ready to supervise the elderly and the outcome of it. A few years from now,we will probably not be surprised to hear a younger person telling off an elderly as it will be a common notion. After all, we would have hear plenty of such comments at our workplace. As more elderly continue working later into their years, more of them would be subjected to performance measurements, work appraisals, and would fail to measure up like any one of us. Respect of the elderly would be totally lost.

Yes, the elderly needs to continue to work to be able to ensure their financial stability but at what price? I foresee the demise of the Parent's Maintenance Billbecause someone is bound to argue that the parent should continue working so as to be less dependant upon the younger generation. After all, the Singaporegovernment is telling everyone to do so.

Unfortunately, it will not be neglect but a total lost of respect for the elderly. You will probably agree with your colleague that "that old so-and-so is useless", "that old so-and-so is really a dinosaur and does not accept your views", etc. When this is said all over Singapore, then we are is a situation where it is unique. What happens when you hear the same being said of your still working father.

posted by JHG J Chang @ 9:19 am 0 comments

Dialects - BRING IT BACK

WE should bring back Chinese dialects before it is totally forgotten.

My children were born and attended schools in Singapore. Both were bilingual (I use English with them and my wife use Mandarin with them). Unfortunately, that was the extent of their linguistic capability.

It was not until I had the opportunity to return to Malaysia for a considerable time that I had the change to consider how the children could actually benefited from learning more languages. In the time my family was in Malaysia, the children picked up Cantonese from their grandparents and Fujian from their schoolmates. On top of that, they were able to learn and use Malay in schools.

I had also intended to get the children to begin using Hakka (their mother's mother tongue). Both were able to understand basic greetings and some common Hakka words after they were taught. But we had to return to Singapore and we lost the chance for them to pick up the Hakka dialect effectively.

Now that we are back in Singapore, there has been many instances where they were able to hold conversations with various people including some tourists. They can understand their Malay schoolmates and they have more Malay friends because they can communicate easily with them.

These are some of the benefits of encouraging the young to speak more than English and understand rudimentary Mandarin - what has been going on in Singapore for the past many years. Unfortunately, it may already be too late to bring back dialects as even the older folks had learnt Mandarin to communicate with their grandchildren.

But we can get the Chinese clan groups to begin dialect classes to ensure that these tongues are not lost forever in Singapore. The clans themselves are facing numerous problems trying to recruit members in order to keep themselves alive. Perhaps, the dialect classes can be one way to bring back some life into them.

But there can also be disbenefits. The recent issues concerning the newcomers from India shows some issues must be thought through as well. Many may not realize that India has many dialects - probably more than the Chinese -and many of the language scripts are also different. Tamils are but from one province in India. Punjabbi are another. So is Malayalam. And they do not share the same written script.

Luckily all Chinese shares the same written script (let us not debate on the traditional or simplified scripts). And from the same script, we can speak in dialects. Is this not wonderful? It is time to bring back our dialects. LETS DO IT.

posted by JHG J Chang @ 4:42 pm 0 comments