When I spoke it, people frowned and asked why my Mandarin was so bad. When she spoke Mandarin, people smiled and gave her free stuff-food, trinkets, even clothes. When I traveled to China with a white friend, the same was true. It’s like: Oh, wow, this white person can speak our language! What an honor! In fact, when he speaks Indonesian, no matter how awful he sounds, he’s always greeted with delight. The thing I’ve noticed, though, is that while my family and I are often made fun of for our funny accents outside of Indonesia, my husband, who is English (the country, not the language), has never been made fun of for mangling Indonesian. People assume that because you speak broken English, you are less intelligent, less worthy of respect. I still cringe remembering the reactions of shock, giggles, and wide-eyed disdain.

It’s glorious! But when I've spoken Singlish outside of Asia…oh my gosh. When you run out of words in English, you just pluck one out of any of the aforementioned languages and keep plowing ahead. In Singapore, we speak Singlish-English that’s heavily mixed with Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Malay, and Tamil-and it’s the language I’m most comfortable speaking.

But this conflicted relationship is something I’m sure many people from immigrant families can relate to. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with languages, which is ironic because I’m a writer. So I find myself always speaking in present tense, which gets a bit confusing…and embarrassing. Plus, the other two languages that I speak (very badly, I might add), Indonesian and Mandarin, don’t have tenses. I did learn English when I moved to Singapore at the age of 7, but since I moved back to Indonesia seven years ago, I feel my grasp of the language slipping. I have a confession to make: I prefer writing in present tense because I don’t really know my tenses.

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto