It was the 1980s, and I remember afternoons in Johor Bahru when television was still something you had to wait for. Channels weren’t broadcasting twenty-four hours a day. They started at particular times, sometimes in the morning, sometimes around noon or later. At that age, I couldn’t properly tell the time yet, but I could read numbers and I knew what the clock was supposed to look like. When the short hand pointed towards 3 and the long hand pointed towards 12, I knew it was time to turn on the television.
My mother had this huge Singer colour TV. At least, it seemed huge to me then. We could receive Singapore television from Johor Bahru, and I watched quite a lot of it. If I remember correctly, Channel 5 was mainly the English-language channel while Channel 8 had much more Chinese programming.
I actually learnt a surprising amount from television. I learnt to read partly from watching Sesame Street. But at the same time, without anyone deliberately teaching me, I was also absorbing bits and pieces of Mandarin from Singaporean Chinese dramas.
And apparently national anthems. I learnt to sing Majulah Singapura before I learnt Negaraku. 😂
For anyone unfamiliar with this little Malaysia-Singapore oddity, Majulah Singapura, meaning “Onward Singapore”, is Singapore’s national anthem. Negaraku, meaning “My Country”, is Malaysia’s national anthem. I was Malaysian and living in Johor Bahru, yet somehow I learnt Singapore’s anthem first.
The Singapore television channels would play it when broadcasting began and ended, and after hearing it over and over again, I simply learnt it. I can still sing Majulah Singapura today.
Apparently repetition works. It also worked on my Mandarin.
My first Mandarin words were not 你好
When people start learning Mandarin now, one of the first things they usually learn is:
你好
nǐ hǎo
Hello.
That was definitely not how Mandarin entered my vocabulary. My first Mandarin words were considerably more dramatic.
The Singapore channels showed a lot of Chinese dramas. I remember period dramas, kung fu, people fighting with swords and, naturally, people somehow flying from tree to tree. And because television dramas apparently involved a great deal of kidnapping, fighting and general emotional distress, some of the sounds that stuck in my head were things like:
救命啊！
jiùmìng a!
Help!
放开我！
fàngkāi wǒ!
Let go of me!
And another sound I remembered for years, which I only understood properly much later:
求求你呀！
qiúqiu nǐ ya!
Please! / I’m begging you!
Very practical vocabulary for a small child. 😂
At the time, of course, I didn’t know the characters, the pinyin or even exactly what I was hearing. I just remembered the sounds. Years later, after I began studying Mandarin properly, some of those old fragments suddenly became recognisable.
“Oh. THAT is what they were saying.”
There is something very strange about discovering that words you are supposedly “learning” have actually been sitting somewhere in your memory for decades.
The Samsui Women
One drama that stayed particularly strongly in my memory was Samsui Women — 红头巾, literally “The Red Bandana” (Wikipedia). I remembered it as an incredibly long and rather sad drama.
Looking it up now, I discovered that it was only 24 episodes. Twenty-four! In my childhood memory, these women appeared to spend half their lives on television. 😂
The drama followed Samsui women who came from Sanshui in China to Singapore looking for work, particularly in the construction industry. They became known for their distinctive red headscarves and for the physically demanding work they did during Singapore’s development.
What I remembered, though, was not historical information. I remembered women getting older. I remembered hardship. I remembered that it felt sad.
I remember following some of these women from when they were young until they were much older, and I vaguely remember deaths as well, although after all this time I certainly wouldn’t trust myself to reconstruct the plot episode by episode.
I was fascinated to learn much later that these were stories connected to real women who had helped build Singapore. The production itself apparently tried to speak with actual Samsui women while researching the drama, although many had already moved away from the places where they had once lived and some were reluctant to talk about their past.
None of this was something I understood while watching it. I didn’t need to. I understood enough to know that what was happening mattered.
Perhaps that is another reason Mandarin stayed with me. Long before I understood the language, I had already learnt that emotion could come through it.
Mandarin grew on me before I learnt it
When I look back now, I don’t think there was one moment when I suddenly decided that I liked Mandarin. It grew on me. Or perhaps it grew in me.
First there were sounds coming from a television in Johor Bahru. Then there were strange words I remembered without knowing why. There were Chinese period dramas and kung fu and people flying through trees. There was Samsui Women. There were years in between. And eventually there was me, as an adult, actually sitting down and learning Mandarin.
Maybe that also explains something about the way I learn languages now. I live in Hungary, but I hardly watch Hungarian television. To be completely honest, I don’t even really know how Hungarian television works these days because I simply don’t watch it. Perhaps that partly explains why Hungarian does not seem to sink into my brain as easily.
Mandarin, meanwhile, is everywhere because I keep putting it everywhere. I take Mandarin lessons. I watch Chinese dramas. I watch Chinese videos. I read things in Chinese. I look things up. I listen to people speaking it.
The amount of Mandarin I deliberately consume is sometimes slightly ridiculous. If you looked only at my media habits, you might think I was somewhat delusional and had convinced myself that I lived in China rather than Hungary. 😅
But perhaps I am simply recreating something that happened naturally when I was a child. Back then, Mandarin came through the television whether I understood it or not. Now I am the one turning it on.
And after all these years, my first Mandarin words still weren’t 你好. They were basically:
HELP! LET GO OF ME! I’M BEGGING YOU!
Which, considering the Chinese dramas I grew up watching, feels entirely appropriate.
