Reclaiming the Mother Tongue: Cantophone Cultural Flows in Singapore Sinophone Literature

While mother tongues are usually deemed as cohesive forces that connect diasporic communities across national borders, the proclamation of Mandarin as the official language that unifies ethnic Chinese often paralyze rather than contribute to the productive understanding of complex Sinophone identities. In the case of Singapore, the problematic conflation of the Chinese ethnic identity with one’s ability of speaking Mandarin has radically undermined the linguistic diversity and lived histories of the local Sinophone community. This paper focuses on Singapore Sinophone writer Yeng Pway Ngon’s (英培安) The Opera Costume (戲服, 2015), a novel that traces sobering moments in Singapore’s history that changed the country’s socio-linguistic landscape, through the multi-generational experiences of a local Chinese family between the 1930s and 2000s. By examining the novel’s incorporation of the Cantonese language and references to the circulation of Cantonese opera and Hong Kong popular culture in Singapore, this paper argues that Yeng problematizes the status of Mandarin as an institutionalized mother tongue by demonstrating how cultural intimacies forged by linguistic affinities and trans-regional Sinophone cultural flows challenge the state’s exhortation of an imagined Chinese ancestral heritage in China. More broadly, this paper questions: in a country regarded as a “quintessential product of overlapping diasporas”, how does literature engage with the multifaceted histories and tongues of the various communities in Singapore to forge a homogenous national identity?