Project Baby: 4 months old

Ju is now 68 centimeters and 8.7 kilograms.  It explains the sore arms I got after taking him on a day out at Universal Studios last Saturday. He is indeed at the most adorable stage of babyhood. At 4 months old, he is active, loud and always in a good mood.  He still sleeps through the night and this month's highlight is he can now roll over by himself and believe me, he likes doing it and doing it a lot. 

It's super cute but the only problem is he does it at night too, and sometimes we have to rescue him at 4am in the morning when he gets stuck. He can't roll back yet. His favourite pastime is still looking at his mobiles -- both the manual and battery-automated one.  He is attracted to trees and the television.  He seems to be always smiling or squealing at the top of his voice. His laugh is a rolling cackle which you can get if you tickle him under the arms.

He can grasp things although his fine motor ability is not quite there yet (all his fingers do is to mostly go down his throat). He likes to grab his feet and when he does this with both hands he looks like a big ball of fat rolls, it's hilarious. He can grasp his rattle and likes to bang hard with his fists so we're careful not to let him bang the rattle at his head (which he's done). He can also do a partial sit-up, like a stomache crunch, when he's in his rocker.  His hair is still shedding, but new hair is growing too. His debut haircut was a hit with everyone.  Oh yes, apart from his body mass index, his other big upgrade is his poo.  Everyday he's been doing a poop so big that it gets everywhere, and I mean EVERYwhere. His Pampers medium is not doing the job anymore. Time for a diaper upgrade. I'm thinking Huggies large.

Writing Lesson 1: 吃

How to write  吃 chī (to eat) ?

If you remember the post on what chinese words are composed of, you will recall that 吃 is made up of the radical 口 and 3 other strokes.


Writing is pretty easy as long as you follow the rules, top to bottom, left to right. 吃 is written with 6 strokes.

The following diagram breaks each stroke down to its individual parts.

If you're wondering, each stroke (radical) has a name and when kids learn to write, they are taught the name of the stroke, so that they can "spell" the word. Like this:

口 shù,  héng zé, héng 

丿 piě 

一 héng 

乙 héng zé wān gōu

This is as close as you get to "spelling" a Chinese word!

What is Good?

This is the word for "good" in Chinese:

好

hǎo

It's composed of the radicals  女 (nü  = female) and 子 (zi = son).


So the word for "good" is really made up of two words: female and son.

I looked at the word and it made me wonder what the Chinese thought about gender back in those times. Did they consider it ideal to have daughters as well as sons? The word for "daughter" is written 女儿(nü er).

Or did the ancients think that it was ideal for a woman to bear a son (female + son)?

You would know that preference for sons in Chinese society is endemic and son preference is usually attributed to "Confucian values". But Confucius' ideas predated the Qin dynasty (in 221BC) and I don't believe he wrote anything specific on male gender preference. But of course Confucian texts (the Analects and other conversations) were interpreted by scholars as defending the male as supreme authority within the family.

So why is the Chinese word 好composed of these two other words, and more puzzling, what do they really say about Chinese society back then?

I really don't know, but I'd love to find out.

The Multilingual Experiment: 4-month update

Well, it's been almost 4 months since our not-so-little bundle of joy burst into our lives. Daniel and I have been conscientiously reminding ourselves to use our respective languages with Ju -- he in German and I in Mandarin -- and so far, it's been okay for him and mildly discomforting for me.

I wrote in a previous post that we tend to switch to the default tongue (English) whenever a person who does not speak our language is present. This is still the case although we are doing it less in each other's presence. I might even go so far as to say that Daniel understands a lot more Mandarin now, and vice versa for me after spending the last 3 weeks with his parents. Ju wasn't the only one getting a heavy dose of German exposure! 

Now that Ju is with my mother for 12 hours of the day, his exposure to English has just got a whopping increase since my mother uses English with him. My father uses Mandarin but he's only home after 4pm everyday. Still, they speak Mandarin to each other so Ju could still get some exposure although this would be passive unless someone speaks directly to him in the language.

This post is about how we've done so far with exposing our baby to TWO* minority languages with little feedback. By this I mean that conversation is still very much a one-way street, with no way for Ju to respond except in baby-talk. In fact, the daily reality in our house resembles a scene from the psychotic ward in a mental institution:

Me: Hello Bao Bao! (Bao Bao = Baby in Mandarin)
Ju: (Ignores me)
Me: How's my little Bao Bao? Ni hao ma?
Ju: (Ignores me)
Me: Mama xiang nian ni oh, Bao Bao xiang nian Mama ma? (Mummy missed you, did Baby miss Mummy?)
Ju: (sighs and smiles)

After a few minutes of the same stuff....
Me: Bao Bao jin tian guai bu guai? (Was Baby good today?)
Ju: (smiles) he...he...
Me: Shi mah? (Really?)
Ju: Eeeeh.....eeyaaaah!
Me: Zhen de ah! (Oh really!) Hai you ne? (And what else?)
Ju: Eeeeeei.....eeeyaaaooooaaaah!
Me: Wow! Tai hao le (Wonderful)!

You get my drift. The same is repeated in German when it's Daniel's turn.

You can find a useful list of tips and how-to's here if you're trying to get your kid to speak a minority language. However it's more age-appropriate for toddlers and older kids. Little babies who are just starting to baby-talk with the ahh-goos and ba-bas require a little more creativity. After all research has shown that babies absorb a startling amount of varied tones and sounds in the months leading up to the 7th month, and a baby's ability to differentiate between various languages decreases dramatically after that. This means if you want to lay a good foundation for a multilingual kid, you start the minute he's born, or in-utero depending on your fetal ideology.

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So how have we done so far with Ju? Using the list that I linked to above, here's what we've done and the things that can be added for infants and children under 1 year:

BE INTENTIONAL
1) We talk about everything as much as possible in his daily routines, during bath time, in the car and changing his diaper in addition to playtime. Ju responds most of the time, and he would start his own soliloquy if he's in the mood.

2) We read to him in all 3 languages. We have books in German, English and Chinese and the ones that are lyrical (Chinese rhymes or repetitive sounds like "Guah Guah" or "Moo Moo") or rhythmic (rhymes like Dr Seuss' Cat In The Hat) work best. He gets excited when you get excited, and it's not so much the story that he likes but the sound of your voice and the tone you use.

3) He loves it when we sing to him. Again, we can't tell if he is absorbing the phonetics but the musical tones appeal to him immediately and he rewards us with gurgles and smiles.

4) Even if he's using baby talk, we respond to him in the language. We do the same even if he isn't saying anything. It's a stretch sometimes to have a one-way conversation but we keep it up for as long as we can just so Ju gets the exposure to the sounds.

BE CONSISTENT
As I've already commented, it's difficult to be consistent in only one language all the time. We have had to be flexible because of the situation but by and large, we make the effort to speak the minority language most of the time with Ju. It's not important to be 100% all the time, but it's important that Ju learns to associate that language with each of us. I admit I have switched to English when it was impossible for me to express something in Mandarin. I don't think it will be much harm and to improve this, I've started to read one Chinese article a day to brush up my Chinese -- painful but worth it for Bao Bao!

BE PERSISTENT
We're always reminding and harangueing each other to "speak in Mandarin!" or "Deutsche please!" so that we don't forget and slip into easy mode -- English, since that's our mode of communication. We're also on the lookout for other Deutsche- and Mandarin-speaking babies so Ju could have potential playdates when he's older.

So whatever you do, don't give up on getting that minority language into your baby and it's never too early to start. It is possible, however, to be too late!

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*You could count Chinese as a minority language even though the population is 75% ethnic Chinese and there is quite a widespread use of it. The simple reason is because in Ju's world at least, he is only exposed to one other Mandarin-speaker besides myself -- his grandpa. The complicated reason, I will devote a separate scathing post to at some later time.

Right and Wrong

Dear Kid

How am I supposed to teach you what's right and what's wrong when everywhere I look, I see people doing wrong, getting it wrong and plain being wrong and getting away with it?

It depresses me when I read about all the systemic failures that our government is partly responsible for (I don't know why I read this stuff every day, it's like cocaine, they should really ban critical analyses online by private citizens like they did for the Straits Times so that people like your dear old Mum here won't get all angsty and indignant every morning).

It angers me whenever I am having my meal at the hawker center to see elderly, semi-elderly and some able-bodied folk going from table to table hawking a handful of tissue paper for $1. I am instantly guilt-stricken for wondering (for a split second) if I should "buy", because I am subjecting the poor chap to a moral judgement of his deservedness (you will understand when you're older that he is not really a simple purveyor of disposable wipes) and then after I decline politely but firmly, I find myself glaring pensively at his back, berating the State and its stingy anti-welfarism for allowing this sort of daily assault on my conscience.

[Note: your Pa and I have had a discussion before you were born about our position on mobile-tissue-vendors, as we didn't want to send you mixed signals about charity. We reached a consensus that we would "buy" if the purveyor looked like he/she was really in need and not if he/she looked "healthy and capable of working for a living". I have since decided to revise this position because let's face it, means-testing beggars according to how decrepit looking they are is really the epitome of hypocrisy and conceit. You either give to everyone or you don't give at all. I must admit my moral conscience hasn't been quite persuaded by this logic cos I ignored one yesterday, telling myself "I had already bought one handful yesterday!" Obviously I am more screwed up than previously thought and I have to go back to the drawing board on this one.]

It also pisses me off when I'm driving at over 60kmh and I have to do some major braking when a stray pedestrian jaywalks -- no, when he sashays -- across my path with impunity. First, this causes me to swear and when you, kiddo, are in the back, it's one less "fuck" you should be hearing. Second, along with all other types of traffic misdemeanours your Mummy encounters daily, the perpetrator gets away with it. Third, I am reminded of all the times your Pa and I have done it ourselves and I have another dilemma about teaching you what NOT to do.

Should I apply a continuum of rightness and wrongness to your lessons? E.g. "jaywalking is okay as long as you don't do it like a imbecile asking to be run down"; or "we should be kind to this one poor old folk, but we shouldn't be giving money to all the poor old folk cos then they will all stop going out to hawker centers to sell tissue packets or pick up cardboard boxes and just stay home and wait for the handouts".

You see kid, it's not so easy to tell you what's right, because sometimes it isn't and then some people will disagree that it's right and then I'd look like a right fool telling you that. I don't think I could be completely sure about what's wrong either, because there are some people who do a lot of wrong and they get off scot-free while other people get in a lot of trouble. Then there are things that FEEL really wrong, but because the powerful people tell you it's right, you kinda wind up confused. Like how people need to be paid millions of dollars for being a politician so that they would want to be a politician even though there are other people willing to do this job for a lot less except they don't know the right people.

So there you go. Your first lesson on right and wrong. If you're a lot more confused than when we began, tell me about it, cos Mummy here has no clue either.

Chinese Lesson 2: What's In A Word

When Ju was born we gave him a Chinese name. Daniel asked me to teach him how to write it and I tried to. Of course the exercise was a disaster, he never mastered the "correct" way of writing the strokes (left to right, top to bottom!) and his characters came out looking like squiggles made by a 5 year old.

Chinese isn't easy, I admit, and it took me the requisite 12 years of formal education plus 3 in kindergarten to learn how to read, write and converse at a level where I can claim some proficiency in the language. The difference between Chinese and languages like English and German that use the roman letters is we have to memorise every character and there must be thousands. In Singapore, the system aims to get a child to memorise 2000 words by the time they finish high school, which is a total of 10 years! That would get you to a minimum level of proficiency but the journey is painful, as anybody who has had to learn it this slow, hard way would tell you.

So I've given it some thought, how I am going to teach Ju my language, when it's so memory-intensive and requires a total immersion in character-recognition and not only conversation. If you go right down to the basics, there IS a schematic to Chinese. I'm not qualified to teach it or give a history of our pictograms, but I will just give a very simple introduction to the written form.

 Chinese is quite lyrical, with 4 tones to each word (or character) and a neutral for a few. Each character consists of radicals (like words consist of letters). Radicals consist of strokes, starting from the most basic single stroke (see above, 1) to the most complicated 17 strokes which is in itself a character.

If you look at the radical, yi (meaning "one"), it looks like a little line. You write it in one stroke, from left to right, and that's pretty much why it's a 1-stoke radical.  Look at the radical, er (meaning "two) and voila, it's two lines, hence a 2-stroke radical. You think: no-brainer, this is easy!  Except it gets more complicated.

Each radical, be it a simple 3-stroke one or a mother of a 15 stroke word, pairs with other radicals to form the Chinese characters. This means radicals can be characters by themselves too. Look at the above diagram, you will see the 3-stroke radical kou, also the word for "mouth". Well, kou makes tons of other words (see below). The list is not exhaustive, I am only showing you kou paired with words with 2 and 3 other strokes:

I don't recognise all the words, as a few are rarely used in daily life. Most are commonly seen words, like 吃 (chi, meaning to eat) and 吓 (xia, meaning to frighten or scare). 

But you get the picture. Incidentally, it's no coincidence that 吃 and 吓 involve the mouth (eat and frighten) in some way, and therein lies the logic of the radical 口 kou. This is also how you can recall how to write characters in Chinese.

In closing, hanyu pinyin is the system of romanising the Chinese characters. For example, xia tells you exactly how to pronounce 吓 (I'll deal with pinyin in another post). The accent on the "a" tells you which tone to use, in this case, the 4th. There is also a system to where you put the various accents, of course, and they are always on a vowel if you look at the first and second tables.

It is also when you know how to break down a character into its component radicals that you wouls be able to use a Chinese dictionary.

Chinese Lesson 1: Know The Bloody Difference

In keeping with my multilingual experiment to raise Ju trilingual, I have decided to do a series on learning Chinese. This first post is something of a prologue of sorts, just to set things straight. In my research on multilingualism, I've chanced across a few personal blogs by Westerners (mostly American) who have either (1) studied the language and/or (2) married a Chinese person and are bringing up their baby in Mandarin as well as English or (3) adopted a Chinese baby and are bringing up their baby in Mandarin as well as English.

They are not all that bad, and some are in actually entertaining and quite insightful.  However, some of them have made the following mistake that I deem it worthwhile to devote my first post on Chinese language to this irritating error: they do not know the difference between MANDARIN (Pu Tong Hua) and CANTONESE (one of the many dialects of Southern China).

This is the Chinese character, "learn", pronounced "xue" in pinyin.  "Xue" is what we call MANDARIN or Pu Tong Hua. Some Westerners call it "Mandarin Chinese" but even if you say "I speak Chinese", most Mandarin speakers understand that you speak Mandarin.   Mandarin is the official spoken language of China and Taiwan. 

Now, Westerners who have learned to speak CANTONESE, which is a dialect of Chinese, would pronounce the word as "hock".  They are not speaking Chinese. Cantonese is th de facto tongue of Hong Kongers and spoken in the province of Guangdong (previously known as "Canton", therein the origin of the name).  In Mandarin, the Cantonese dialect is known as "Guangdong hua" or "the language of Guangdong.

So today's very basic yet important lesson is to know the bloody difference between Mandarin Chinese -- Pu Tong Hua -- and Cantonese. Of course if you want to nitpick, you could say every dialect including Pu Tong Hua counts as "Chinese". I would disagree as a native Chinese speaker*.  That's because Mandarin is the unifying language of China, created  its written script was first standardised by China's First Emperor of Qin (aka Qin Shi Huang) to unify the vast lands hitherto known as Zhong Guo (the Middle Kingdom, aka China). Cantonese, on the other hand, is only spoken by a small percentage of the 1 billion inhabitants of China. They of course include the large population of overseas Chinese migrants which would explain why Americans and Canadians think they are speaking "Chinese" when they are really speaking a popular southern dialect.

Hence, from here on, I will use "Mandarin" to refer to the spoken language Pu Tong Hua; "Chinese" to refer to the entire language system which includes verbal Mandarin and the written Chinese characters. With this,I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I think I will in bringing up my baby trilingually.

*I consider a native Chinese speaker as a person whose heritage and lineage derives from China and who has learnt Chinese at a level that it constitutes a central part of his/her identity and perspective in addition to proficiency in the language. I have studied and spoken Chinese since birth, simultaneously with English and Cantonese. My mother's parents hailed from Guangdong province and they spoke only Cantonese to me when they were alive. To this day, even though my proficiency in Cantonese is below-average, I maintain a vocabulary and fluency that gets me by pretty decently on the streets of Hong Kong.

Project Baby Week 15: Part Time Mummy

I planned to return to work after my 16 weeks of maternity leave were up. For reasons related to my mother's schedule (she is the designated babysitter when I go back), I returned after 14 weeks and plan to take the remainder at the end of the month.  My first week back at work filled me with mixed feelings.

I suppose thousands have written about how leaving their baby to return to work completely messed with their maternal instincts, leaving them feeling guilty and stressed, being torn between twin and clashing obligations. I totally get that. After all, women have only 24 hours to their day to use, just like men do. It's not like we can go to amazon and order an upgrade on our productivity capacity, although I can think of quite a few men (and even women with no children) who could use this.

So here I am, back at the grind, missing my kid, trying not to feel lousy that my boobs have all but shut down milk production and returned their original size (much to my delight since now I don't have to buy new bras plus I'm sure Daniel means it when he says he doesn't mind). I haven't had much trouble keeping to the original work schedule I'd kept before going on leave, i.e. I don't arrive at work any later than before and neither do I leave any earlier.  I'm lucky that I do not have to compromise on my own productivity or committment to my work, simply because I trust the person bringing up my child while I work.

Now I must say I enjoy my work a lot more than I can say for other people, and for now at least, I'm not one of those mothers who think of nothing else but going home to be with their babies.  Of course I was peeved I didn't get to see the first time Ju started grabbing his toes or that whenever he sees me at the end of the work day, the object of his interest is his mobile more than his mother.

 I guess it's just something I have to get used to, Ju is going to see me for, what, a total of 2 hours each day (his bed time is 9pm) plus the half an hour in the morning if I am lucky (he sleeps till 6.30am on average but we have to drop him off at his grandma's before 7.30 to go to work).  It all sounds like a raw deal for me, and I would agree. Daniel hates it even more. But what can we do? We're a society with ridiculous working hours because the establishment invests more in a cheap workforce than a productive one.

When it comes to helping its female workforce have more babies, it applies logic that appeals more to chimpanzees than human beings who want and need to work and yet want and need to be mothers with some modicum of nurturing. And nurturing requires TIME, something that women -- no matter how much the men wish it -- do not have any more than men do.

            What does a country like Sweden or Finland have that we do not? Let's see now, they have universal healthcare and affordable, high quality childcare that is available to all women in addition to the right to take over a year of maternity (and paternity leave from that entitlement) leave without fear of retrenchment. Would all that translate directly to more children in Singapore, I hear you scoffing.

What that translates directly to, I would go so far to humbly state, is a widespread societal acceptance, no, I would say EXPECTANCY that all women, regardless of ethnicity, class or age, would be given quality support in the care of their children if they wished to return to work. It means that as long as the woman deems it appropriate to be a full-time mother, the state and her employer supports her choice and retains her position in the company (within limits of course).  It means that a woman from a middle-class background is given the same access to quality care and flexible work-options as the woman from an upper-class background. This results in an even "working field", if you will, in the Scandinavian workplace.  No one is disadvantaged by the lack or inability to pay for the help and support required to allow them to return to work.

This means that a Scandinavian mother cannot possibly complain about unsupportive parents, inlaws or husbands or the State even, hampering them from being 100% committed to their work. The State has provided for the most important factor, I believe, which can contribute to a woman continuing to be productive in the marketplace as well as in the family: equality amongst females.

Yes, that's right. It isn't even about gender inequality anymore. In Singapore, men are pulling their weight in the household and they WANT to, and the government isn't even interested in letting them do it, by ":recommending" a paltry 3 days of paternity leave.  The real injustice is that the women without family support do not trust the quality of childcare available, and well they shouldn't. There is very little of it that is affordable. This creates a schism between those with more resources and those who don't. In addition, the women who refuse to compromise on their children's health and intellectual/emotional development would rather sacrifice their jobs than subcontract such important work to sub-par professionals. And the worst news of all: everyone else who knows this and can't (or won't) become economically poorer for the sake of their children would rather not have any at all.