One of the things I’ve been doing in the time before I start my Masters’ in September is taking a language class. We’re going to Japan for a walking holiday in less than a month, and we have time on our hands that we didn’t have when working. So each week we head over to the Community Centre. There are five of us in the class: the two of us, two Canadian men with Japanese partners, who are trying to learn at least some of the language, and a Mexican Canadian woman who intends to go to Japan for a pilgrimage several months. Each week we wait outside the classroom, perching on tiny children’s chairs outside the adjacent kindergarten door.  Sensei always appears exactly on time, opens the door, and we arrange ourselves in a row behind two plastic folding desks, facing the whiteboard. Our teacher has a method. We first chant out all the sounds in Japanese, following either the hiragana or the katagana syllabary. Then we work our way through material covered in the previous weeks, repeating after him. Greetings. Introductions. Numbers. Telling the time. Asking questions. What is this? What is that? Whose pen is this? We repeat, and at times we role play. Sensei will start at the beginning of the row, and we will each reply, filling in the blanks with our own words. 

I don’t have a gift for languages: what progress I have made in Mandarin in particular has been a struggle that will continue to the end of my life.  I’m often very engaged by the language, as I am with Japanese, but I suffer from two problems: a shyness that means I am reluctant to practice, and an increasingly poor memory. But I’m always fascinated by situations of language learning, whether voluntary or coerced. Japanese has two entry points for me: the katakana often spell out an English word you can guess through pronunciation. Kanji are decoded through a completely different process: Chinese characters that usually, although sometimes obliquely, give meaning but not pronunciation. And I’m curious about fiction that deals not with the fluency of translation, but problems of incomprehension and misunderstanding, when people don’t speak languages well, but still use them effectively — in David Scott’s terms the techne of the language class but the métis of actual linguistic practice — how those at the margins of society are also often very fluent in disavowed languages, and engage in complex interlinguistic practices. 

In our Japanese class, however, something else very interesting happens. We introduce ourselves.  

We are given a formula to follow. 

初めまして。マイけミラーです。アメリカから来ました。IMC の社員です。どうぞよろしくお願いします。 

Shorn of the elaborately polite greetings, this translates as: 

Nice to meet you. I’m Mike Miller. I’m from America. I’m an employee of IMC. My pleasure. 

We have, in conversation, to replace Mr Miller’s details with our own. I learn what “literature teacher” is — ぶんがくしゃ aka 文学者. But that doesn’t fit my life any more. I’m pleased with myself when I come up with something more situational — にほんごのガクセイor, with kanji, 日本語の学生 — a student of Japanese. This is what I am at the moment. But the nationality bit is more tricky. If I’m told, following my passport, I’m an イギリス人, an English person. Japanese, like Chinese, doesn’t really distinguish between English and British. And of course I don’t feel British or English, and yet, even outside the classroom, I’m often perceived as this. If find Canadians are more sensitive to the nuances of accent than many Americans: they can readily detect Australian accents, for instance. But much else – Indian English, for instance – is often heard as “British.” When I was younger, my accent changed quite quickly: after two years in the US I spoke with something half way to an American accent. Here at times I try –I roll those “r”s as consciously as I can – but my accent’s still recognisably foreign. It changes when I talk to others, without my being aware of it. When my sister visited, I became more British. And when I get talking to an Indonesian woman at the coffee bar in UBC, I start moving into something closer to Singlish.  In some ways it’s the opposite of in Singapore. There I’m recognisably foreign, and only more local if I open my mouth. Here, I’ve now morphed into an older white man with a grey beard, the kind of guy who appears in craft beer advertisements. I wear gortex, polartec fleece, and cycling tights in Canadian and American brands. I’m unobtrusive until I speak. And on my visits to Britain before my father’s death, I was also misrecognized. Perhaps I was from Eastern Europe, seemingly fluent, but with some distorted vowels? Or from South Africa? 

This misrecognition isn’t much of a burden, most of the time. It doesn’t, for the most part, result in discrimination, or an inability to speak, as misrecognition of others in Canada often does. But it is disconcerting, partly because, unlike with my reply about being a student of Japanese, I am no longer sure what the correct answer should be. Where am I from? I still have a burgundy-coloured EU passport, but when I renew it, after a Brexit that now seems almost inevitable, it will be blue, like those stiff British passports of a childhood I’ve long left behind. For most of my life in Singapore I thought of myself as a citizen in waiting, delaying applying because of my concern for my parents and my need to take care of them. But that door now seems closed. In a year and a half, I could become Canadian. And yet I want to cling onto some aspect of Singapore, some acknowledgment of how central Singapore has been to my life. The difficulty is the longer you stay here, the more you put down roots. You want to stay unmarked by this place at some level, to seal yourself off. And yet there’s the slow seepage of everyday life. You become comfortable here. You begin to forget. You’d like to float, not really worry, but there are always those questions from others, who want to place you, catch you up in a web of language: 

どちら から です か 

Where are you from?