Speech presentation in Singaporean English ... - Wiley Online Library

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World Englishes, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 359±372, 1999.

0883±2919

Speech presentation in Singaporean English novels PETER K. W. TAN* ABSTRACT: Speech presentation has attracted much attention by scholars of literary texts, and more recently attention has been focused on academic, political and newspaper texts. Hardly any attention has been focused on the context of the New Englishes. In this paper therefore, I examine speech presentation in Singaporean fiction in English in an attempt to establish if and how the various modes and styles of speech presentation are altered in the context of a new variety of English. These contexts are multi-lingual and multi-cultural; there is also frequently a range of different kinds of Englishes: from creole varieties, through `interlingual' varieties, various non-standard varieties to standard national varieties or even standard international varieties. Creative writers in English need to resolve the tension of how to reflect this context, yet be able to communicate beyond a parochial fashion. I examine three recent novels in English by Singaporean writers, published in the last two years, and examine short extracts in this light. These are Hwee Hwee Tan's Foreign Bodies (1997), Catherine Lim's The Teardrop Story Woman (1998) and Rex Shelley's A River of Roses (1998).

1. INTRODUCTION1

In this article, I would like to examine the way speech is presented in Singaporean novels in English. This is worthy of some attention because existing accounts (see below) do not take into account the special challenges and opportunities posed by a new variety of English (see, e.g., Bailey and GoÈrlach, 1982; and Kachru, 1992). A very influential and widely used framework for analysing speech presentation is Leech and Short's (1981). There, they claim that categories in speech presentation form a `cline', and that there can be considerable range of choices even within each category. The categories can be arranged according to the cline of interference from the narrator in the report, from the most to the least. 1. Narrative report of speech acts (NRSA). Here the narrator (to a greater or lesser extent) summarises what is said and characterises the talk using a speech-act verb. An example would be: He promised to return. (All the hypothetical examples are from Leech and Short, 1981.) 2. Indirect speech (IS), also known as reported speech. This is marked by the lack of inverted commas (quotation marks), the use of the subordinating conjunction that and alteration of deictic words (pronouns, tense, etc.) from proximate to non-proximate. An example would be: He said that he would return there to see her the following day. 3. Free indirect speech (FIS). This is a `sort of halfway house position' (Leech and Short, 1981: 325), where the reporting clause and the subordinating conjunction that are typically omitted and inverted commas not used. The deictic words may or may not be changed. An example would be: He would return there to see her again tomorrow. 4. Direct speech (DS). This claims to be a direct representation (mimesis) of the original (Sternberg, 1982; Rimmon-Kenan, 1983). Reporting clauses are present, and inverted commas used; deictic words are not changed. An example would be: He said, `I'll come back 'ere to see yer again tomorrer.'

* Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, Block AS5, 7 Arts Link, Singapore 117570. E-mail: [email protected] A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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5. Free direct speech (FDS). Here, either or both the reporting clauses or inverted commas are omitted, and the narrator's presence is pushed right to the minimum. An example would be: I'll come back here to see you again tomorrow.

Some minor modifications have been made to the framework in subsequent work. Short (1988) includes the category speech summary when dealing with his British newspaper corpus. This he describes as `a string which reports in an abbreviated form some longer piece of discourse' (p. 74). (This is similar to the category diegetic summary in RimmonKenan (1983: 109).) In another study that uses a larger British corpus (Semino, Short and Culpeper, 1997), the new category narrator's report of voice (NV) is introduced. Here, the reader is only informed that there is verbal activity but is given no further information about the content or the speech act. Semino et al.'s examples include She talked on (from Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point) and We spoke to vice madam Michaela Hamilton . . . (from The News of the World ). Leech and Short claim that the norm of speech representation in fiction is DS (Leech and Short, 1981: 334). This is borne out by Semino et al.'s (1997) corpus. I have isolated only fiction from their corpus, ignored thought presentation, and re-calculated the percentages (Table 1). In both categories, nearly half of the speech presentation took the form of direct speech. Also in both categories, nearly 40 per cent of the speech presentation took the form of free indirect speech (their corpus can be viewed at the Web site: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ computing/users/eiamjw/stop/). What I am interested in is whether these categories are meaningful in discussing the New Literatures. The contexts where the New Englishes (Singaporean English, Indian English, Nigerian English, etc.) are used are linguistically different from those where the Older Englishes (British English, American English, etc.) are used mainly on two counts. First, the contexts are multilingual and multicultural. This means that fiction that is realistically set in these contexts will need to represent speech not only in English, but also in other languages. The writer will need to make decisions as to how to represent non-English speech. Second, a label like `Singaporean English' seems to assume that the variety is homogenous, but in reality there will be internal variation of an extent, if not in kind, different from that found in Older English contexts. There are standard varieties (which might differ from other national standard varieties), co-existing with non-standard and/or colloquial varieties (including creoles), together with what might be termed learner varieties or interlanguages. A possible strategy might be to use a version of speech representation that is more distant (say, IS or FIS) for speech in non-English languages. Table 1. Frequency of speech categories

FDS (free direct speech) DS (direct speech) FIS (free indirect speech) IS (indirect speech) NRSA (narrative report of speech acts) NV (narrator's report of voice) A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

`High' literature

Popular fiction

199 246 12 8 23 16

171 206 4 9 29 15

(39.48%) (48.81%) (2.38%) (1.59%) (4.56%) (3.17%)

(39.40%) (47.47%) (0.92%) (2.07%) (6.68%) (3.46%)

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2. SINGAPOREAN ENGLISH

There are already many accounts of Singaporean English (SE), and my analysis will not diverge from the account in Gupta (1998), who takes a diglossic view of English in Singapore.2 Among competent users of English, the High variety Standard Singaporean English (SSE) will be used in more formal or written contexts, or when talking to nonSingaporeans. In more informal contexts, and especially to friends, the Low variety, the non-standard Colloquial Singaporean English (CSE) is more likely to be used. CSE is frequently referred to as Singlish by the Singaporean public. Whilst I use the label `Singaporean English', I am also aware that SE shares many features with Malaysian English (ME) because until relatively recently, Singapore and Malaysia shared a common history under British rule and for a number of years after independence when Singapore was part of Malaysia. The ethnic composition of the speakers in Singapore and the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia also show many similarities. Many accounts therefore consider SE and ME together (for example, Tongue, 1979, and more recently, the second edition of the Times-Chambers Essential English Dictionary, 1997). I have therefore found it not inappropriate to use some examples of ME in my discussion below. I also therefore do not consider it problematic that in two of the novels discussed below (The Teardrop Story Woman and A River of Roses), some of the setting is in present-day Malaysia.

3. SINGAPOREAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

For an introduction to Singaporean writing in English, readers are directed to Talib (1998a, 1998b). In general, the novel form has been slow to take off, partly because of the demands made for sustained writing. Early writing in English in Singapore has mainly been in the form of poetry and short stories. The problems and tensions inherent in writing in English in Singapore are not different from that of other post-colonial nations (Miller, 1996). Despite the official English-knowing bilingual policy in Singapore, most are more comfortable or more dominant in one of the languages that they have in their repertoire. The question of writing in English as opposed to other languages is therefore not one that arises in the case of most individual writers: they are almost always comfortable writing in one language. Having achieved some sort of `critical mass' that can be seen as performing the function of some kind of model, Singaporean novels in English are beginning to appear regularly. Part of the problem for many is the difficulty of coming up with an `authentic' English voice (Su, 1998). The norm for the narrator has been, and continues to be, SSE or some kind of International Standard English. The consensus seems to be to reject largescale manipulation of the narrator's language of the kind found in, say, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993: 1): The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis dringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.

The norm for the speech of characters is, however, less clear cut. It is this that I would like to explore by examining passages from three recently published novels. Despite my earlier use of statistics from the Semino et al. (1997) study, I will not take a quantitative approach. A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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The statistics from their study, however, present a useful backdrop to the passages that I will examine. 4. SPEECH PRESENTATION IN NON-FICTIONAL TEXTS

Obviously, speech presentation is not something that only occupies the minds of writers of fiction. Other genres that require some form of speech presentation include newspapers (Semino et al., 1997; Waugh, 1995; Short, 1988), political discourse (Slembrouck, 1992; McKenzie, 1987), broadcast news (Roeh and Nir, 1990) and academic discourse (Preston, 1985). What is of interest to me is that whilst in all genres direct speech is an important form of speech representation, there is a range of ways of dealing with the issues of `referentiality, truth, reliability and accountability' (Waugh, 1995: 129). In fiction, it is assumed that not only the speech act and propositional content are faithfully conveyed in DS and FDS, but also the words and structures. Optionally, manner of speech and accent (cf. the extract from Trainspotting above) may also be conveyed. However, in the tabloid press, journalists might sometimes disregard the actual words and structures in what appears to be DS: PREMIER Margaret Thatcher took one look at her new portrait and said: `Get rid of that squint!' (The Sun, 21 June 1984, quoted in Short, 1988)

However, it is highly unlikely that Mrs Thatcher would have used the words quoted above. Further down in the report, the readers are told that she pointed out the problem `diplomatically'. Even in the `quality' press, It is well known that interviewees often expect reporters to clean up their utterances and indeed may claim bias on the part of the reporter who renders in the written text the hesitations, dysfluencies, markers of dialect or spoken language, or various discourse markers of the spoken language. (Waugh, 1995: 168±9)

This expectation for the language to be tidied up is also seen in the so-called verbatim transcripts of parliamentary debates in the Hansard (Slembrouck, 1992). The language in the Hansard may be expected to have been edited for writtenness; to under-represent interpersonal meanings and over-represent ideational meanings; to tidy up turn-taking procedures and to have been edited so that the address terms conform to parliamentary requirements. This means that journalists, editors and other writers have a wider range of choice of representation of speech than is commonly supposed. What this implies is that fiction writers need to make decisions relating to not only the mode of speech presentation, but also the style and/or variety of language used. In Singaporean news-reporting, we can see this too. Here are some excerpts from the Singaporean Straits Times and Sunday Times. He [Mahathir] added that `there will be some problems that will keep on bothering us, but that is not sufficient for us to have any confrontation'. Relations with Singapore were also `not quite as close as before'. The Straits of Tebrau `is still separating us ± still the same width', he quipped. (The Straits Times, 16 November 1998)

Mahathir's speech does not seem to have been edited in the way mentioned by Waugh (1995) above. The inelegance of `that is not sufficient' has not been edited to `not a A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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sufficient reason'. The increased use of the progressive aspect is a feature of informal Singaporean and Malaysian English. The editor has also decided not to modify `is still separating us' to `still separates us'. The final sentence fragment (`still the same width') is also not filled out. We see the same tendency in the following report on Mahathir again. In an interview broadcast on TV3 on Friday night, Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad shrugged off the idea that the move was too sudden. `When they [Singapore] take action, they never give us time also ± same lah,' he said. `It is not difficult: just fly somewhere else . . . Or is it that the plane cannot turn? I think they can,' he added. `I have flown planes before, you know. It can turn very sharply ± like that only,' he said, motioning with his hand. (Sunday Times (Singapore), 20 September 1998)

Colloquial Singaporean/Malaysian English has not been translated into Standard (Singaporean/Malaysian) English. Colloquial English in Mahathir's speech can be seen in: 1. the use of never to mean the negative (`they don't give us time'); 2. the non-standard use of adverbs (also rather than too; only rather than just); 3. the use of the pragmatic particle lah.

I am not suggesting that the editor of the Straits Times and Sunday Times deliberately portrayed Mahathir negatively or that the newspapers instigated a subtle hate campaign against him. On the contrary, the Straits Times and Sunday Times studiously, as a matter of policy, avoid `opinion' in news stories. The reader is therefore left to draw his or her own conclusions about Mahathir: is he inept because he does not adopt the appropriate High variety, or is he in touch with the people by using the language of the person in the street? Waugh also claims that `what is quintessentially journalistic is the absence of free indirect style of the Flaubert sort' (1995: 154). Her corpus was from French newspapers. The restriction does not seem to apply to the Singaporean press in English. Here are some examples of FIS (italicised) in the Straits Times. For the most part of the cross-examination, the witness was combative. She became upset when the defence took her down the love trail. Was it true that she had confessed to many people that she was madly in love with Anwar? No, she replied. Did she tell her brother Azmin that she was crazy about Anwar? `That is not true. I told him that I admired Anwar as a leader before I found out who he really was,' she said, keeping her eyes fixed on the defence lawyer all the time. (The Straits Times, 23 December 1998)

I have deliberately given examples from Singapore newspapers to press home the point that there is a range of choices available based on the mode of presentation (e.g. direct speech) and on the variety of English used (e.g. the non-standard v. the standard). The reporter of a news story and the narrator of a novel both share the want or the need to present their characters partly through the language that they use. As reporter or narrator, the characters' language is necessarily mediated, and therefore the perspective of the reporter or narrator refracts to a greater or lesser extent the characters' language. Speech representation in the press therefore shares much in common with speech representation in fiction. There is also, of course, a key difference, as mentioned earlier. Speech in news reports is based on antecedent speech that has independent existence apart from the report; speech in fiction has no prior existence. It therefore make sense to discuss the relatively more A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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straightforward process of speech reporting in the press before moving on to the relatively more complex process of speech reporting in fiction. 5. THE CHOICES AVAILABLE TO A SINGAPOREAN NOVELIST

There therefore appears to be a wide range of choices available to a writer of fiction wanting to represent Singaporean speech in English. This is summarised in Table 2. This suggests that there is much more choice available to a Singaporean writer. Many of the tendencies mentioned by Waugh (1995) and Slembrouck (1992) will also be applicable to fiction, so that there might be a general modification in the direction of a written `international' standard English. The various renderings listed at the bottom right-hand part of Table 2 have been arranged according to their proximity to this written `international' standard English. For example, ` ``You are all impolite children . . . .'' scolded Second Grandmother' (The Teardrop Story Woman, p. 6 ± original in formal standard English in DS) could well have been rendered as . `You all no manners one . . . ' scolded Second Grandmother (SCE: copula deletion, distinctive use of one (see Alsagoff and Ho, 1998). . `You people no manner one . . . ' scolded Second Grandmother (speech in interlanguage, ungrammatical as SCE). . `Li nang bo le mau e . . . ' scolded Second Grandmother (speech in Hokkien Chinese).

All of these, or some combinations of these, are possible versions of DS. And there will be the equivalent choices and combinations in FIS and FDS as well. Table 2. Modes and styles/varieties available to a Singaporean novelist Mode

Style and/or variety

NV (narrative report of voice) SS (speech summary) NRSA (narrative report of speech act) IS (indirect speech)

SSE or standard `international' English

FIS (free indirect speech) DS (direct speech) FDS (free direct speech)

choice of rendering fnon-English language, interlanguage, CSE, SSE, standard `international' Englishg in its own form or further down in the list, with or without graphological manipulation.

6. THE THREE SINGAPOREAN NOVELS EXAMINED

One of the implications of writing in English is that the writer will be communicating, potentially, with a larger body of readers. It is therefore significant therefore that two of the novels chosen were published initially in London. Hwee Hwee Tan's Foreign Bodies (FB) is a first novel, and although her reasons for publishing in London are apparently to do with UK publishers being more professional and ambitious than Singaporean ones (personal communication), we cannot discount her wish to communicate to a larger body of readers. Catherine Lim has previously published her works in Singapore, and moving A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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her publication base to London is a new venture. I have selected her 1998 novel, The Teardrop Story Woman (TSW ). Rex Shelley has consistently published with Times, although interestingly, the publisher has styled itself as `Times Books International', so that there is a clear eye towards an international readership. I have selected his 1998 novel A River of Roses (RR). All three novels are mainly set in Malaysia/Malaya3 (TSW, RR) or Singapore (FB, RR); most of the main characters are Malaysian/Malayan or Singaporean. The setting and national identity are central to the novels: this is almost self-evident as they are mentioned in the blurb on the back cover or on the dust jacket. I would therefore imagine that being able to portray this setting convincingly with acceptable verisimilitude would be a measure of the success of these novels. Furthermore, Catherine Lim confirms the importance of keeping her `local flavour' in an interview (quoted in Yi-En Lim, 1999: 57). It remains to be seen if the novelists make use of the linguistic resources at hand by establishing a Singaporean (Malaysian) voice to achieve this `local flavour' or whether the pull of the international standard English counteracts this impulse. In each of the novels, I select one representative passage from each novel for examination. The exception is RR, where I have selected two passages for the reasons stated below. 7. ANALYSIS

Foreign Bodies The story is told from the perspective of the three main characters of the novel: Mei, a Chinese Singaporean lawyer in her early 20s; Andy, her English `boyfriend' who works as a teacher in Singapore and is arrested for masterminding a football (soccer) gambling syndicate; and Eugene, Mei's friend from childhood. The action takes place mainly in present-day Singapore, although there are significant flashback episodes or analepses. (Like Rimmon-Kenan, I will use Genette's terms analepsis and prolepsis (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983: 46).) Most of the dialogue can be assumed to take place in English. The following is an analeptic passage when Mei was 18 and had just got her A level (i.e. matriculation exam) results. When I was eighteen, I got those good results. I got straight As, fulfilling the entry requirements to read law at University College, London. We went to Ah Kow's coffee shop to celebrate. We sat down on the wobbly stools at our usual table. Even though Ah Kow was filthy rich ± he had a Rolex and a Mercedes ± he still wore his cockroach-bitten singlet . . . . (1) `What you want?' Ah Kow said. (2) `Shark's fin shoup. Sweet and sour pork. Fried noodles. Braised beef in claypot ± no chilli. Five bowls of rice. Almond jelly dessert,' my mother said. `My daughter got four As today.' (3) `You going to study what?' Ah Kow said. (4) `Law.' (5) `Go NUS, is it?' I shook my head and (6) told him that I wasn't going to the National University of Singapore. (7) `I'm going to London.' After I said that, my parents remained quiet for quite a while. (8) I chatted on, (9) talked about going to Harrods, and (10) told them to make a list of things they wanted me to buy for them in England. (11) Then my father said, `You're not going to London. You're going to NUS.' A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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(12) `Why? But you promised.' (13) `I say it's okay for you to go, but (13a) your mother say cannot. (13b) She bu she de.' So that was the line. Bu she de ± my mother wasn't willing to pay the cost. I should have seen it coming all along. My mother bu she de a lot of things. It was difficult to get her to spend large amounts of money on anything ± like when we tried to get her to buy a microwave, (14) she just said, `Wah, so expensive, I buy, make my heart painful, I bu she de.' (15) `But you always told me that it wasn't too expensive,' I said. `You always told me that you could afford to send me abroad. You always said that as long as I got good results, you would send me to any university I wanted. Why do you think I studied so hard?' (16) `It's not the money,' my father said. `We're afraid that if you go abroad, you'll never come back.' (FB, pp. 137±9)

The interaction takes place in a coffee shop, not an up-market establishment, and this is confirmed by the description of the furniture and Ah Kow's attire. In Singapore, an interaction between a Chinese customer and a Chinese coffee-shop owner is almost invariably in a Chinese language (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, etc.). In the interaction between Ah Kow, Mei's mother and Mei (1±7) we are given no indication of the language of the interaction. Speech presentation is mainly DS and FDS, with the exception of (6) which is in IS. The use of IS here is clearly to do with the fact that the acronym NUS would never have been expanded in a dialogue between Singaporeans. IS is therefore employed as a less obvious way of explaining NUS to non-Singaporean readers. What is interesting also is that the DS and FDS renderings of Ah Kow are clearly in the non-standard CSE (evidenced in the lack of inversion in the questions, the lack of preposition in `Go NUS', the invariant tag is it ?). Mei's speech (`I'm going to London') is significantly in SSE (evidenced in the use of the auxiliary verb and preposition), rather than echoing Ah Kow's style (`I go London'). In the middle section (8±10) the narrator renders Mei's speech as NV, SS and IS. These seem to be distancing devices, signalling that the speech is not important to the overall thrust of the passage. The final section (11±16) consists of an altercation between father and daughter, with internal representations of the mother's speeches in the father's speech (13) and in the daughter's thoughts (14). The speech presentation has moved back to the norm of DS and FDS. This section is marked by the use of SSE (evidenced in the presence of inflexional markings and auxiliary verbs) with the exception of the internal representations of Mei's mother's speeches. (13a) and (13b) are unclear to me as to the category of representation, the former being a marginal IS rendering and the latter a FIS rendering (because of the third-person pronoun use and the quotation of her Mandarin Chinese phrase). The speech presentation in this passage seems to conform to the British norms (as seen in Table 1), and therefore presumably international norms for English-language writing: DS and FDS dominate. The parts that do not are therefore marked: the middle section is presented in a more `distant' mode because it is just idle chatter. The other occasion where this occurs (6) is occasioned by the need to explain a Singaporeanism. The Singaporean flavour seems to be conveyed not through challenging the established modes of presentation. Instead, Tan relies a lot on the contrast between CSE and SSE for the effects in the passage. What is interesting is that because the narrative is told from Mei's perspective, the reader is much more likely to be sympathetic to Mei than to the other characters. Ah Koh does not understand what is going on, and Mei's mother has reneged on her promise, and A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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these characters' speeches are rendered in CSE. Ironically therefore, the colloquial variety has a distancing (rather than solidarity) effect. The Teardrop Story Woman The novel is centred around Mei Kwei, the daughter of first-generation immigrants from China to the then Malaya. The tale is woven around Mei Kwei's relationship with her family, Old Yoong (an old man who wants a young wife to rejuvenate him), Austin Tong (whom she marries) and Father FrancËois Martin (a French Catholic missionary-priest). Most of the action takes place in the 1950s. Lim does not tell her readers what language(s) her characters speak, except on a few occasions when this is signalled implicitly as in the passage below. This, presumably, is therefore not an important aspect of establishing the `local flavour' of the novel. Apart from Martin, almost all the characters are ethnic Chinese. We might therefore expect that a lot of the speech is in Hokkien Chinese. Austin Tong, however, attended an English school and interacts with the British, whereas Mei Kwei is largely unschooled. We do not know whether Martin takes the church services in a Chinese language, or in English. When Martin writes to his sister, it should presumably be in French, but we do not get any indication of this. Lim seems to prefer to gloss over the linguistic complexities in Malaya, presumably to propel the story-line forward more efficiently. In view of the linguistic ambiguities mentioned above, I have chosen to focus on a passage which deals with a conversation between the young Mei Kwei and her grandmother, which must almost certainly have taken place in Hokkien Chinese, and, interestingly, Lim has provided some indication of this in the way the speech is represented. My granddaughter is the most beautiful baby girl, she thought, and I will make sure that she wears appropriate celebration clothes when she is taken out to be shown to the neighbours. The swaddling clothes from the torn-up old sarongs should never be seen again. So she came home the next afternoon, hot afternoon, hot and panting, her black umbrella of little use against the scorching heat, her little feet bravely holding up from the arduous trip, only partly by trishaw, to the pawn-shop. (1) `Here,' she said, taking out of her blouse pocket a pair of jade ear-studs given her by a relative in the ancestral country, many years ago. For the first time in her life, her ear-lobes were without ornament, but now she had money to buy good red cloth, a child's silver anklet and the celebratory eggs. In later years, when her mind wandered over past events and (2) she spoke incessantly, (3) she would scold her beautiful, strong-willed granddaughter into sheepish submission by reminding her of the enormous debts due for the dung-ruined silken shoes and for her precious ear-studs. (4) `I didn't ask you to do it, Second Grandmother,' the little girl would say petulantly. (5) `Ingratitude! Ingratitude!' the other would mutter, but still the old woman and young girl would come together in a natural gravitation of the lost and rejected. (6) `Smelly cunt,' said Second Grandmother, echoing the father who had spat out, not merely said, the words. (7) `I want to show everyone you are no smelly cunt but the beautiful granddaughter of Lee Gek Neo!' For she herself had possessed that rare rich beauty that ought to be perpetuated in daughters and granddaughters. She had wept bitterly to see her firstborn, Ah Oon Soh, sallow and ugly, except for the abundant lustrous hair. Fortunately, the beauty had not disappeared down the line but merely skipped a generation, reappearing in a new flowering in the granddaughter. (TSW, pp. 11±12)

The main action (1, 6, 7) takes place in the `present', during the first-month celebration of Mei Kwei. There is a proleptic (`anticipation' or `foreshadowing') section in the middle A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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(3±5). The speeches in the `present' are in DS (1 and 6) or FDS (7). (6) is interesting in that Second Grandmother quotes Mei Kwei's father (Ah Oon Koh), so it is FDS within DS. The proleptic section however begins with NV (2), moving on to NRSA (3) and finally to DS (4 and 5). The motivation for this seems to be to move the speech in the proleptic section gradually closer for the reader to experience. Of particular interest however to me is the way in which the `original' Hokkien Chinese speech is represented. Here (and elsewhere), the choice has been for International Standard English ± but with a few exceptions. The most notable is the phrase `smelly cunt'. This does not represent SSE or even CSE in that this English phrase would never be used. The phrase is a literal translation of a fixed phrase in Hokkien Chinese (chhau chi bai ). The terms of address, used not only by characters but also the narrator, are likewise literal translations or transliterations. Second Grandmother is a literal translation. Ah Oon Soh is a transliteration. (Ah is a prefix for names, and soh literally means elder sister, but is here used as an honorific. Her husband is Ah Oon Koh, where koh literally means elder brother. Very loosely, Ah Oon Soh could be translated as `Mrs Oon' and Ah Oon Koh as `Mr Oon'.) Second grandmother's name Lee Gek Neo is a transliteration, with the normal Chinese order of names preserved. Compare this with Hwee Hwee Tan's name, where the surname is put an the end as in Western custom, as opposed to Tan Hwee Hwee as she would be known in Singapore.) In passages like this therefore, Lim is able to signal the language being used, in spite of her representing the speech largely in International Standard English. Readers who know Hokkien (or other Chinese languages with a similar phrase, like Cantonese) would immediately realise what we have is a literal translation from Hokkien. Readers who do not would be reminded that, by virtue of the unidiomatic nature of the phrase `smelly cunt' in English, what is in print is a translation from another language. Therefore, although Lim often glosses over linguistic complexities, she is still able to provide the `local flavour' linguistically in a subtle fashion. A River of Roses Rex Shelley's novels focus on the Eurasian4 community in Singapore and Malaya/ Malaysia. He uses the term `Eurasian' to refer specifically to the group of PortugueseMalay descent. The narrative RR spans between the end of the nineteenth century and the present, though not in a linear fashion. The wide time span also means that differing linguistic dynamics have to be manoeuvred. In much of the temporally earlier narrative, the characters would not have been speaking English ± it could be Portuguese, Malay, Tamil or a mixture ± whereas in the narrative set in the present and near present, the characters speak English. Because of this, we will examine two excerpts from RR. The first takes place in the early 1900s, the second in the 1960s. Vellupillai stared at Rama and saw that he had been scrubbed and his hair was plastered down with coconut oil. Vellupillai was sure it was coconut oil. (1) `What's all this in aid of ?' he asked Rama in Tamil. The urchin put his nose in the air and did not reply. He put his black hand on Mr Rosario's large tanned hand, shocking Vellupillai with his blatant intimacy. (2) `Good morning, Mr Rosario,' Vellupillai wished Fonso. Fonso grinned widely and (3) returned the salutation with a little bow but said nothing more. Vellupillai could see that he was nervous. Then he realised Mr Rosario too looked remarkably A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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clean. Some attempt had been made to comb his mass of blond hair. Probably his wife made him do it. (4) `I have to see the kerani besar about these papers for Padre Rocha. I'll go first, Mr Rosario,' Vellupillai said, excusing himself. He scurried to the general office like a frightened cat. (5) `Hoi, Salleh, what's that lout of a fisherman doing with the Tamil urchin?' he asked the clerk in Malay. (6) `That's Muthu's son, you know.' (7) `Yah, yah. I know. But what's he doing here?' (8) `Ha! I'll tell you. It surprised me.' Salleh grinned and let Vellupillai wait a few seconds. (9) `That geragok fisherman, that shrimp fisherman wants to adopt the brat.' (10) `WHAT?' (11) `Yah. True.' (12) `Goodness me!' (13) `Don't ask me why. He can hardly feed his own family. How many has he got now? Eight? Ten?' (14) `Seven already.' Vellupillai made it his business to keep tabs on all the Padre's flock. He took it as part of his heavy responsibilities. (15) `Aiyah ! These people,' Salleh sighed to imply their stupidity. It was the same kind of sigh his wife Minah used on him after her `Aiyah ! You!' every time he came home with a new songkok or a new sarong for himself. (16) `That fellow, stupid lah. The cunning little worm must have come to him crying with his hard luck story and the . . . ' (17) `Eh! That boy's your people, you know,' Salleh stopped him. (RR, pp. 42±3)

In the excerpt, Vellupillai talks to Rama (a young Tamil boy to be adopted by Fonso), Fonso (Alfonso Rosario, a Eurasian fisherman), and Salleh (a Malay clerk). We are told explicitly that Vellupillai talked in Tamil to Rama, and Malay to Salleh. It seems highly likely that he used Malay to Fonso as well. The excerpt starts off mostly in DS, with the exception of (3) in NRSA, presumably for stylistic variation, before moving into mainly FDS. What is especially interesting is the way in which the DS and FDS bits are represented in English. In almost all of it, Shelley litters the dialogue with what appears to be codeswitching into Malay, although some of it can be seen as CSE as well. This is done with the supposedly Malay dialogue, but interestingly, no attempt has been made to capture the flavour of the Tamil dialogue. Indeed, (1) uses an idiomatically English sentence (`What's all this in aid of ?'). Generally, Malay words used in the dialogue have been italicised, but this is not used consistently. Thus, we find kerani besar (`head clerk'), geragok (`shrimp, small prawn' ± repeated in English for the benefit of the reader) and aiyah (exclamation of exasperation). However, we also find the use of the pragmatic particle lah, not italicised, associated with CSE and also Malay. We also find the use of yah, again not italicised, which today represents `yes' in CSE. By and large therefore, the dialogue is given a Malay flavour by introducing some representative Malay lexis and some other items associated also with CSE. The second extract is set in the 1960s, and pupils in UP junior college are holding a discussion. (The typical ages of junior college pupils are 17±19, although Toni, as a more A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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mature Malaysian pupil is a little older.) The conversation this time is undoubtedly in English. When they came to select the committee member responsible for organising the food, Andrew pointed with his whole arm raised above the table to Cheng Ho. (1) `You know all about this. You should do the food.' There was a challenge in his tone. Everyone was silent. Toni looked at their faces, but they avoided her eyes. Cheng had clenched his fists and was hanging his head. As she looked at him, he raised his head and (2) said to Toni, `You probably don't know, Toni, that my father runs a cooked food stall at Toa Payoh Central Hawkers' Centre. I work there most nights.' Toni moved at once. (3) `Do you cook too?' (4) `Yes sometimes.' (5) `Hey!' she shouted out loud with her hand extended to him. `Shake. I was a cook for more than three years in a dirty little restaurant in Ipoh! And if I may say so, a damn good cook.' Cheng grinned and took her hand. (6) `Whoa,' the lanky guy from Anderson said. `We have two experienced cooks in UP.' (7) `Hey. We must have a competition one day to see who's the better cook.' (8) A chorus of voices agreed. (9) Then Ignatius said, `Why don't we do it at the dance? We could play it up. Battle of the kwalis.' (10) `The woks.' (11) `Male versus female,' Lettie said. (12) `Singapore versus Malaysia.' Toni looked at Cheng with a twinkle in her eye. (13) `Man, you got no chance! Cantonese food will beat Hokkien any day.' (RR, p. 351)

Again, the speech representation conforms to Semino et al.'s (1997) norms of DS and FDS, with only one instance of NRSA (8). The DS and FDS are almost always in SSE, and as the discussion is semi-formal, this is perhaps not surprising. In (2), Cheng Ho refers to the more `correct' cooked food stall rather than the usual hawker stall; she also uses the hyper-correct Hawkers' Centre instead of the usual Hawker Centre (I label this hypercorrection because inflexions are optional in CSE). In (9), Ignatius uses an item from Singaporean English at that time, kwali, a loanword from Malay. This is being superseded by wok, a loanword from Cantonese, in International Standard English. The use of wok is a little before its time in Singapore. The only evidence of CSE is from Toni. This can be seen firstly in the particular ellipsis in (5): Shake, for Let's shake on that in International Standard English, although in this case they want to shake hands not because they have reached an agreement, but because they are in the same league in having cooked for customers. The real equivalent in International Standard English might be more like `Join the club!' Secondly, in (13), Toni uses got in place of have or have got, as is typical in CSE. 8. CONCLUSION

My initial question was whether the special context of the New Englishes would cause writers to re-assess the way speech is represented in novels in English. There are multiple varieties, and multiple languages. Clearly, the tradition of presenting speech mainly in DS or FDS has been very robust in that the Singaporean novels examined did not move away from this norm. There doesn't seem to be a stronger likelihood for speeches in non-English languages to be presented in a less proximate mode (for example FIS or IS). The fact that a A Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

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non-English language is used can still, however, be signalled through the use of judicious code-mixing (as in the first passage of RR) or literal translation (as in the passage in TSW ). No great surprises here, as this has been used by many writers before the trio we examined. It does seem to be the case, however, that the author needs to be familiar with the language in order to do this effectively. Shelley was probably not conversant with Tamil, and so this could not be signalled in the Tamil speech in the first passage of RR. Also interesting is the pull of the standardising English norm, which might sometimes work against an author's search for a Singaporean voice, a `local flavour'. I have already noted that non-English speech is unlikely to be represented fully in the original language. It might, however, be represented in a non-standard English variety like CSE, and I suggested that parts of the passage from FB and the second passage from RR could be read this way. In most other cases Standard English seems to be the preferred norm. In fact, the CSE in FB seems to establish distance, rather than solidarity. I also noted an instance of hyper-correction in RR. Clearly then, the pull of the standardising English norm is fairly strong perhaps in conformity to the norm in English fiction and perhaps to garner a larger international audience by not alienating them with an unfamiliar variety of English. However, it is also very clear to me that the authors examined have resisted going totally Standard English in representing speech, and perhaps this is indicative of how there is a development towards the establishment of different norms for the representing of speech in English in Singaporean fiction. NOTES 1. I am grateful for the comments made by the anonymous reviewer and have taken note of most of them. 2. There is also another view of Singaporean English based on the three lects (acrolect, mesolect and basilect), seen in, for example, Platt and Weber (1980). Talib (1998c) advocates this view for the analysis of the language of speech in Singapore fiction. As the choice of either the diglossic or lectal-level view does not substantially affect the argument in this paper, I will not dwell on this distinction. 3. `Malaya' is the pre-1966 term for what is now known as Peninsular Malaysia or West Malaysia. 4. The term `Eurasian' is used in a more restrictive fashion in Singapore and Malaysia. Gupta explains it this way: ` ``Eurasians'' . . . are more likely to be the descendants of distant racial mixing. In many cases the mixing had taken place in some other Asian country' (Gupta, 1994: 37). It is this group of `Eurasians' that come to mind in Singapore when there is a mention of the `Eurasian community'. Shelley confines his concerns to a sub-group within this community: the group where the `European' element is Portuguese and the `Asian' element Malay. This restrictive use can be compared to the restrictive use of the the item `Asian' in the US and the UK: the label `Asian' in the US usually means `East Asian' (Chinese, Japanese or Korean), whereas in the UK it usually means `South Asian' (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan).

TEXTS Lim, Catherine, The Teardrop Story Woman. London: Orion, 1998. (American edition published in New York by Overlook Press, 1998.) Shelley, Rex, A River of Roses. Singapore: Times Books International, 1998. Tan, Hwee Hwee, Foreign Bodies. London: Michael Joseph, 1997. (American edition published in New York by Perseus Books, 1998.)

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