i was so freaking annoyed that i wrote a letter to the straits times abt it before...here we go:
I can attest that Mr. Peter Donkin’s observations of young Singaporeans are
true. I have many negative opinions of young Singaporeans too, despite being
a youth myself.
My observations of inconsiderate behaviour amongst young Singaporeans almost
always involve a common group of people – the mandarin speakers. While not
implying that all mandarin speaking youths are rotten (neither are all
English speaking youth angels), an overwhelmingly large group of offenders
are observed to be from that group. This seems to stem from the Chinese
school of thought which advocates “If I don’t take, I lose out” and “If
others can do it, so can I, otherwise I lose out”, among other factors.
Before anyone takes offence at my discrimination of language cliques, go out
and experience a MRT ride across the island first, and my theory will come
to life. On a train ride from Jurong East to City Hall last month, I
experienced 3 independent groups of Mandarin speaking youth huddled round
their handphones playing Chinese songs at full blast, all 3 groups were
there at the same time, and all of them were in the same train car! It was
terrible, and one couple even left the car for another because they couldn’t
take it. On the other hand, while many people were glaring at those youths,
a girl from one of the groups declared in a mix of Mandarin and English “Wa,
wo men hen attract attention leh!”, which translates to “Wow, we are
attracting lots of attention!”. Was she thinking that people saw her group
as “cool” just because her handphone played mp3s and they were the latest
Mandopop hits? Obviously, I was most outraged at this particular
inconsiderate group.
The Mandarin speaking Singaporean youths also seem to be attuned to ignoring
rules and regulations that make the world a better place. For example, they
will ignore repeated reminders to keep to the left on escalators, they also
ignore the markings on the ground that serve to allow passengers on trains
to alight first. A Malaysian classmate who recently visited Thailand spoke
of how gracious the people there were, and their almost perfect train
etiquette, that sure sounds desirable to me. Step into a shop, and you will
notice that they are the ones who use a rude tone when speaking to service
staff, and never use phrases like “please” or “thank you”. Based on
interaction with my peers, they are the ones who take offence most easily,
yet have no qualms about being sarcastic (sometimes outright rude) to
foreign teachers. Many young litterbugs also seem to be Mandarin speaking
youths. When I visited Melbourne some months back, I was greatly impressed
at their perfectly clean streets. I saw everyone there putting their litter
into bins, there were no Cleaners around at all!
While many of the Mandarin oriented youths are nice people on a personal
level, their mentality can manifest the antisocial behaviour that I
mentioned earlier. My friends and I belong to the minority English speaking
group and we are ashamed to use any mandarin in public (no we are not
elites, just normal teenagers). Unless this association of bad behaviour
amongst youth with mandarin can be negated, Hua Yu Cool isn’t going to work
on any of us anytime soon.
