"Is your son from International School?" the workers at the dispensary in ChungHwa asked with their eyes wide opened.
"No lah!" I replied with a big laugh. "Maybe I took a wrong angmoh baby home," I added jokingly. I mean, how many kids here call their mother "MUM"? I definitely did not teach him to call me that way, but since he could talk , he insisted calling me that, and a lot of people think it is 'cute' and 'funny'. Some of his friends even copied him by calling their mothers 'mum'!
Frankly speaking ,I don't know how he got his american slang . TV programs from cartoon network, internet, educational cd-roms or is it because of the speech therapy he received? Due to his delayed speech, we are already very relief that he could now converse in English. We do not want to presssurise and confuse him further with Mandarin. But of course , we do try to introduce mother tongue to him whenever we can. So his abilty to understand and speak Mandarin is minimal and very angmoh style.
I can still remember that when he was younger he used to say that he was English. It took him quite some time to accept the fact that he is a Chinese who is able to speak English.
My girl who is a typical Singlish speaker is the result of exposing her to English and Mandarin at the same time. What more she is one who is really not very good in languages. Until now, at the age of fourteen, my god, i still don't understand what she is trying to say, sometimes! Ha.. she even tried teaching her brother to add lahs and lehs in his speech, but our dear angmoh kia simply cannot say it in the correct way!!
To the adults, they may seem to be amazed and envious that Son could speech such wonderful English with American Slang. But what about his peers? Will he be the odd one out? Will they ridicule him and think him as weird and quirky? I do have friends with asd kids having the same problem that they have been treated as "aliens" in the school and thus being bullied.
That is one of my worries when he goes to primary school.
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