In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

451 Curious Connections: TalkingCock.com and PM Goh YEN YEN JOYCELN WOO AND COLIN YONG PING GOH In some ways, satirical website TalkingCock.com’s awkward existence in Singapore’s notoriously controlled culture presents a funhouse mirror image of Singapore’s former prime minister and now Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong. This essay ponders the seeming inconsistencies between Goh’s public image and certain policies under his administration, specifically those pertaining to language. What emerges is a puzzling narrative of someone whom most people seemed to like, but who seemed compelled to disown the very qualities that made him likeable. In examining the conjoined story of Goh and TalkingCock.com, it becomes clear that the issue is not about whether Singapore has or is capable of having a cultural identity, as has been debated vociferously in the media,1 but rather,what happens if our authentic selves do not comport with the image the country is trying to project, and what our response to that says about us. We speculate on how Goh might contribute to Singapore’s evolving culture, and perhaps remedy some of the excesses committed under his administration. A Preliminary Note on M&Ms In this essay, Goh will be referred to, where appropriate, as“PM Goh” in instances when he served as prime minister, and “SM Goh” when he stepped down to act as Senior Minister. The post of Senior Minister is a semi-retirement Cabinet post first held by former Deputy Prime Minister S. Rajaratnam. Among Singaporeans, however, it is most closely associated with the country’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who assumed the title when he handed the premiership to Goh in 1990, and occupied it till 2004, when Goh himself became Senior Minister while Lee became the Minister Mentor (MM). Cross-Hatching PM Goh might not have given birth to satirical website TalkingCock.com, which the authors founded in August 2000, but he could be described, not unfairly, as its midwife. This was because TalkingCock.com was created partly in response to the government’s 39 452 YEN YEN JOYCELN WOO AND COLIN YONG PING GOH anti-Singlish policy, which attained its exegesis in PM Goh’s 1999 National Day Rally Speech, wherein he claimed that the use of Singlish would adversely affect the nation’s global competitiveness and ability to“be a first-world economy or go global”.2 Singlish is, of course, the popular term for Singapore’s vernacular English, a polyglot of English, Malay, Tamil and various Chinese dialects characterised by humorous wordplay that cuts across multiple languages. An example of someone complaining to another colleague in the workplace in Singlish might be:“How come you always arrow other people to do your work? Some more, I always kena! Pattern tzuay kuay badminton!” To “arrow” someone means to delegate a task to someone else.“Kena” is a Malay term that means,“to get”; while “pattern tzuay kuay badminton” combines English and Hokkien to describe someone as having more moves than the game of badminton, meaning that person is wily and devious.3 The paragraph might be translated into standard English as: “Why are you always pushing your work to others? Worse, I’m always the one who winds up doing it! You’re a really devious person!” Singlish was also,by design,the cornerstone of TalkingCock.com,whose name is derived from a Singlish term meaning to talk nonsense or engage in idle banter. The Goh administration’s attempt to eradicate Singlish even extended to influencing the scripts of Phua Chua Kang, a popular sitcom on national television about a housing contractor. Goh suggested in his 1999 National Day Rally speech that the titular lead character—whose colourful Singlish utterances were a prominent part of his character and, some say, his appeal—should attend English classes and repent his Singlish transgressions. While it might seem strange that linguistic regulation should extend to fictional characters, this was not surprising given the success of Singapore’s interventionist language policies through educational institutions and the media since the late 1970s. These policies were aimed at eradicating the use of Chinese dialects such as Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka and Cantonese, and promoting the use of Mandarin and English. According to Census data in 1980, 59.5 per cent of Singaporeans spoke one or more of the Chinese dialects in their homes predominantly, but according to the 2000 census data, only 4.3 per cent of Chinese children between the ages of 5 and...

Share