Forrest Gump vs. Pygmalion

Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be—a case of bald social climbing—but at the time I genuinely thought this was the voice of lettered people, and that if I didn’t have the voice of lettered people I would never truly be lettered. A braver person, perhaps, would have stood firm, teaching her peers a useful lesson by example: not all lettered people need be of the same class, nor speak identically. I went the other way. Partly out of cowardice and a constitutional eagerness to please, but also because I didn’t quite see it as a straight swap, of this voice for that.

My own childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of disparate things. It never occurred to me that I was leaving the London district of Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.

- Zadie Smith, Speaking In Tongues

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I have no common sense. I have only uncommon sense. I believe in everyone. I believe everything is possible.

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Sometimes people ask me: "where's your accent from?"

The truth is, I don't have a good answer. I want to say, 'a little bit of everywhere.' (Nowhere) I want to say, it's a remix of a mash up of a portmanteau language. But then I have to explain.

In primary/elementary school we utilised a crude yet expedient pidgin consisting of fragments of English, Mandarin and Malay which then morphed into a more systematised monstrosity at a privately funded secondary school, where English predominated as the medium of instruction, and where I discovered that it is customary (sometimes even necessary) in most other countries to speak only one language at a time. Shortly after this, I moved to an International School where a cornucopia of foreign dialects and inflections clashed and assimilated and intermingled with each other on a daily basis - and I decided nobody would notice if I started speaking differently here, since nobody talked like each other to begin with. And so I began the process of co-opting my already confused and unruly pronunciation into something vaguely American - something that approximated the way people spoke on TV, because by then I understood that to be on TV was to be universally validated. To be on TV meant that you had somehow earned the tacit approval of the vast anonymous majority, and those who appeared on TV must therefore be paragons of populist appeal, an elect distillation of all that was humanly excellent and beautiful, unblemished specimens whose overwhelming pan-attractiveness clearly trumped us too-generic, too-eccentric, barbaric, imperfect, untelevisable folk. I believed that if I learned to speak the way TV people spoke, everyone would love to hear me speak. I shed my old ways of speaking like a woman attempting to lose weight to fit into a very tight dress, and for pretty much the same reasons. I settled into this new way of speaking with very little difficulty.

Four years later I moved to Nottingham to study medicine and my faux american accent began to take on shades of East Midlands intonations. And now that I live in Preston I'm starting to sound like a proper northern lad. But I exaggerate. Truthfully, these latter two transformations have only been minor adjustments. Tweaking the way I say, 'alright', 'go on', and a handful of other phrases. My speaking voice is essentially the same as the one I had developed in college. The only time I notice it drastically altered is when I speak to other Malaysians. Especially those from Penang or Johor, or anywhere other than from KL. It occurs near enough unconsciously now. I flatten vowels, drop consonants like it's nobody's business. 'yes ah?' 'ya, liddat lor.' I marvel at how good it feels to speak badly. To be a different me for a while.

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The thing about my native accent that I'm apprehensive about is that when you say big words with a KL / Malaysian accent you sound cognitively impaired. Painfully foreign. Vulgar. Backwards. Unsophisticated, if you want to be generous. When I say 'big words' I don't mean complex, nuanced constructions like conglomeration or disestablishmentarianism. I just mean words with three or more syllables. Words like Photography. International. Anatomy. Anaesthetist. Government. In local parlance, using the phonetic say-as-you-see-it pronounciation of Malay, everyone said 'foe-tow-graph-ee' instead of 'photog-graphy', and so on with 'in-te-nash-she-nal', 'anna-tommy', 'anna-stet-teis'. Thankfully someone decided that 'go-vern-meun' just sounded silly and we all opted for 'gahhmen' instead. (Sometimes, 'blaardy gahhmen') We know how it sounds to you non-Malaysians. We are aware none of you talk like this. So we translate. We speak 'Ang-Moh'. We're careful to give more emphasis to 'tog' instead of apportioning it equally to 'pho-', 'gra-' and 'fee-'. We make sure to include the 'R' in 'international' but somehow can't help phrasing 'in/ter' as staccatos, as if trying to isolate it will help us really nail that crucial second syllable. But then we're stuck, because we can't adopt these new voices wholesale. We can't overwrite our cadences and rhythms altogether. There's something grating about hearing a Malaysian say 'fuh-toh-gryph-i' instead of 'foe-toe-gra-fee'. It just stops the conversation dead in its tracks. You want to say, 'ooooh look at you, Mr. Fuh-toh-gryphi - you stahdee overseas is it? Action lah.' It reeks of trying to be something you're not. It's not Malaysian to speak Ang-Moh unless you have to.

My grandmother studied abroad in a British boarding school and used to teach etiquette at a country club to nouveau-riche families who wanted to appear a certain way. Around the house, she would correct me if I said 'tree' when I should have said 'three', 'rubbish bin' when I meant 'wastepaper basket' and 'hAah??' instead of 'pardon me'. It's probably thanks to her that I grew up with two voices, two registers in my head, and an understanding that there's nearly always more than one way to say what you mean. That there are many names to refer to the same thing and some are simply more accurate or appropriate than others. (My paternal grandmother couldn't speak a word of English and spent her afternoons lounging around in floral patterned tai-tai pajamas, watching cantonese soap operas reclining against the differently-floral-patterned sofa cushions.)

But with opportunity comes cost, and the cost of choice is consequence. I'm particularly cautious around 'photography', because it comes up the most when talking to people. When I'm talking and it dawns on me that I'm going to have to say the word at some point, I have to quickly decide - how do I want to say it? And why? And is it not too late still to try and cobble together an elaborate circumlocution to get me out of this? Neither option is 100% authentic, and neither is 100% phony. You see, the more you acclimatize to 'fuhtog-graphy', the less 'fo-to-gra-fee' sounds plausible. Maybe there's an easy solution to all of this. Maybe I should throw caution to the wind, rip off the straitjacket of conformity and just say 'Foe- tuhgrafé' from now on, and hope they understand. Throw in a little pantomime, maybe. Malaysian sign language. They'll know what I mean.