TODAY: It ain't easy being foreign

An article from TODAY, by Phin Wong.

I HAD an Australian teacher in secondary school. Her name was Mrs Rose Harland. Gosh did everyone hate her.

She had arrived, fresh off the Boeing, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to teach the students of Ghim Moh Secondary School the glorious wonder that is the English language. Or at least the difference between "their" and "they're".

But these were kids who constructed sentences around colourful Hokkien phrases involving someone's mother. These were kids who said things like "I call my brother, then you know" - and had absolutely no intention of introducing you to an actual sibling over tea and scones. These were kids who got frisked.

In fact, I'm not even sure they were kids - some of them were there before I got in and were still there after I had graduated. Ever met a Sec 2 student with stubble? It looked like a father of two was sitting in to brush up on his algebra.

Mrs Harland didn't have a chance in hell.

It wasn't that she was a bad teacher. In fact, compared with our last English teacher - who corrected the only other English-speaking student's commendable use of the word "strumpet" to "crumpet", thereby changing his tale of a scorned harlot into a composition about tasty baked goods - Mrs Harland was pretty awesome.

It's just that she was so ... foreign.

For a start, she had never been to our little island, so she had no idea what to expect. The first time she walked into a funeral wake, she thought it was so lovely of her neighbours to have decorated the void deck of her HDB flat with pretty flowers. It didn't take long for her to realise it wasn't a garden party. The corpse was a dead giveaway.

It's hard to fit in when you don't look like everyone else. And Mrs Harland didn't fit - literally. At over six-feet-tall, she towered over just about everything except the Tembusu tree behind the canteen. And she was blonde. You could spot her from just about anywhere in the school, looming in the distance like a magnificent skyscraper, providing shade from the afternoon sun for flocks of migrating ah lians on their way to home economics class.

Then there was the accent. It's hard to teach effectively when your students don't understand a thing you're saying. Her audience was used to hearing Miss La La speak, and now they had Dame Edna telling them it's I before E except after C.

I didn't have a problem understanding her though. I'd already watched A Cry In The Dark three times by then. Such a great film.

Mrs Harland's biggest predicament with being a new transplant to Singapore, however, was her inability to grasp a foreign language. Which was exactly what our names were to her.

Xiao Ching? Shao Xiang? Jie Wen? Forget about it. She'd read your name right off the register and you wouldn't recognise it. "Oh, I'm sorry, were you talking to me? I thought you were having a seizure."

Because it took too much time to address a student by saying, "You, there - third Asian girl from the left, next to the 30-year-old kid with stubble", Mrs Harland took to calling us by our student numbers. It's hard to like someone who refers to you as 36.

It also made our English lessons sound like mathematical problem sums. If 12, 22 and 8 ganged up on 13 because 5 told 22 that 13 stole 10 bucks from 22, how many sweets would Jane have sold by Thursday?

We hated her for reducing us to anonymous digits. Years later, as a Singaporean transplant lost in translation in Melbourne, I understood a little better how difficult it can be for an out-of-towner and forgave Mrs Harland just a little.

My first week in school, an Aussie classmate asked warmly if I'd ever had "an Aussie barbie". I replied that I never even owned Malibu Barbie even though her beach house looked fabulous. I never got that invite for steaks.

When someone asked how my "arvo" was, I replied that it was a little sore from assembling all that Ikea furniture myself. (Someone explain how "arvo" could possibly be short for "afternoon"?)

Then there was the harrowing 30 seconds in a cab where the driver didn't understand my repeated instructions to make a U-turn. "Go back!" I sputtered, mere millimetres from the turning. "Turn right here - here - and go back the other way! U-turn! U-turn!!!"

"Oh, chuck a U-ey?" replied the cabbie. "Why didn't you say so?"

You may have heard they speak English in Australia. You would have heard wrong.

Just as I was convinced that any communication I'd have in Australia would be between me and the dust bunnies reproducing under my futon, a student stopped me on campus to ask if I had the time.

"Three-thirty," I mumbled.

"Wow, you speak really good English!" he said, surprised at this Asian kid's vast vocabulary of two words.

Yeah, I know my numbers really well. And it's all thanks to Mrs Harland.