The lunch crowd at Amoy Street Food Centre was at its peak—a humid symphony of clacking chopsticks, the rhythmic tok-tok of fishball noodle sellers, and the frantic hunt for a “choped” table.
Wei Lun and Haziq sat at a corner table, their plastic trays squeezed together. Wei Lun was picking at his minced meat noodles, while Haziq unrolled a packet of nasi lemak.
“I tried to get my boy to order his own drink yesterday,” Wei Lun said, shaking his head. “Just a simple teh peng. He stood there looking at the uncle like he was speaking Klingon. In the end, he just said, ‘I want iced milk tea, please.'”
Haziq laughed, but it was a dry, tired sound. “At least he tried. My son? If I don’t speak to him in English, he thinks I’m scolding him. Last week, my mother came over and asked him in Malay if he had eaten. He just stared at her and then asked me, ‘Papa, what is Nenek saying?'”
“It’s the same lah,” Wei Lun sighed. “My parents try to speak Mandarin to him, and he replies in full sentences of English. He understands maybe fifty percent, but the tongue just cannot move. He sounds like a tourist in his own house.”
“That’s the thing, right?” Haziq tore a piece of ikan bilis. “We spent so much time making sure they are ‘globalized’ and ‘competitive’ that we forgot to give them the basics of who they are. Now, if I want to have a heart-to-heart with my own blood, I have to do it in the language of the British.”
“It’s more than the language,” Wei Lun added, gesturing with his chopsticks. “The nuances are gone. The idioms, the jokes that only make sense in your Mother Tongue—they’re all lost in translation. Even the way we eat. My son wants pasta or burgers. He thinks hawker food is ‘too oily’ or ‘too hot.’ I tell him, ‘Boy, this is where your grandfather started!'”
“Exactly,” Haziq nodded. “My daughter thinks traditional weddings are just ‘too much work.’ She wants a ‘minimalist’ hotel thing. No kompang, no tradition. I feel like we are becoming a nation of people who look like us, but think like everyone else.”
They sat in silence for a moment, the roar of the food centre washing over them.
“You think it’s too late?” Wei Lun asked.
Haziq shrugged, folding his empty nasi lemak paper into a neat square. “Maybe not too late, but it’s an uphill climb. I started a rule: No English on Sundays. Only Malay at the dinner table.”
“And? How’s it going?”
Haziq grinned. “We’ve had a lot of very quiet dinners.”
Wei Lun chuckled and stood up to clear his tray. “Maybe I’ll try that. Though I think my son will just go hungry.”