My first encounter with this "Daffodil Syndrome" was in Catherine Lim's book Romancing the Language: A Writer's Lasting Love Affair with English. It put into words what confusion I've been feeling about the slightly jarring juxtaposition of living in Singapore as an avid English reader/writer, with Mandarin as my "mother tongue".
I distinctly remember feeling confused as I looked at the exam paper with the printed words "Mother Tongue: Mandarin". I couldn't understand, if it was Mandarin, why my family would instead converse primarily in English (siblings) and American Sign Language (my parents are deaf) growing up, with the exception of my grandparents whom I saw once or twice a month when they were still living.
Many of us Singaporeans, whether reader, writer, or not, must have felt at one point or perhaps at many, this similiar strange sensation of an identity crisis towards the languages we've been exposed to.
Will the Real Language Please Stand Up?
Lee Kuan Yew had always emphasised the importance of the English Language to get ahead and prosper not just in our careers and country, but out there in the world. This is an extract from Lee Kuan Yew's speech on adopting English (Accessed from The Straits Times):
"Therefore, we decided that, however unpleasant, however contrary to the concept of a homogeneous society, each racial group would learn his mother tongue as a second language."
Communicating in eloquent English is key for economy and trade, but the late Lee Kuan Yew had acknowledged that it would come with a cost - the possible dilution of cultural identity attached to the mother tongues. With this new policy of 'speaking English first' set in place in 1965, Singapore started to re-focus heavily on English. Chinese-speaking families and Tamil-speaking families possibly had the hardest times with the mammoth adjustment, but Malay-speaking families continued speaking Malay, whether at home or outside.
For the past fifty years, Singaporeans have been struggling with an Outer Circle English issue - we have inherited a colonial language from the British, and with language comes culture and tradition. Being exposed to both English and Mother tongue ideology at the same time can be at best quite confusing, and at worst, inspire rebellion and recusancy.
For Catherine Lim, it was confusing - at first. In her book, she writes honestly about this experience, having witnessed first-hand this insurgence of the English language into a country not-quite prepared for it.
Growing up, she had heard interesting stories about her Chinese-speaking neighbours, but instead of writing about gossipy "Ah Guek Soh", Catherine would write about "Mrs Chester Brown who lived in a cottage in the woods that were always full of buttercups in spring" (32). Did she see these buttercups, woods, and experienced spring when she wrote that? No, she had not.
Over the years, she would pick English over her mother tongue, Hokkien-Mandarin, time and again. The stories in English literature inspired an imaginative utopia, ideas, and a whimiscality that Singapore in its rougher beginnings could not offer - of "castles, and elves and princesses with long golden tresses and princes who came riding on white horses" (33).
"It would be years before I was cured of the Daffodil Syndrome," she writes. But what exactly is the daffodil syndrome?
The Daffodil Syndrome
It all started with William Wordsworth's poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1802).
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
This little-known, pretty word compacts quite a heavy punch of not-so-pretty meaning.
For Catherine, she grew up loving this Wordsworth poem that has become the emblem for the jarring post-colonialism situation whereby non-English folk romanticise elements in the colonial language, and regard it as part of their worldview. Most of the time, their reality isn't congruent with the romanticised version of things.
Author Jamaica Kincaid also writes about this daffodil syndrome in her book Lucy (1990). In the story, Lucy says, "The reason I do not like daffodils is not at all aesthetic but much more serious than that: having been forced to memorise a poem about daffodils, when none were to be found in the place I grew up.”
The daffodil syndrome is when the colonial language and its culture has seeped in and become a part of your worldview, even though you haven't really seen or experienced it.
It is said that if Wordsworth had visited the tropics, he would have "his religious convictions rudely disturbed" (Huxley 113), because the beautiful rural places of England influenced his own relationship with God greatly. But this is too harsh a comment for poor Wordsworth because we may never really know, either!
Do We Have Daffodil Syndrome?
Daffodils are native to Southern Europe and Africa.
Does Singapore have daffodils? Maybe, though having them in Gardens by the Bay doesn't count!
But we have noticeably more mosquitoes, humid weather, mangroves, and hot days. The daffodil syndrome woos you with a "sort of desire for a perfect place, a perfect situation" (Smith 1).
It isn't just the daffodils. There's the milky way, large fields of sunflowers, babbling brooks - the endless prettiness of the English world painted and embedded into the learners of the language.
While we can appreciate the beauties of a world beyond our little sunshine city, maybe we need to also embrace and root ourselves in the reality of our imperfect sunny country and learn to see it for what it is - the Singlish, the humid weather, the paiseh culture, the HDBs, the lack of vast hills of flowers, the high cost of living, the hawker centres, the garang gunis, the long kiasu queues, the tissue choping - and appreciate it as part of who we are as Singaporeans.
Some of us, including myself, may unconsciously still have this daffodil syndrome (it can be notoriously hard to weed out), but perhaps now with the internationalisation of English, a greater body of Singaporean Literature work being published year after year (#BuySingLit!!!!), and the creation of a stronger Singaporean identity fuelled by a more liberal mindset of Singlish in these recent times, it would no longer be that much of a syndrome very soon! Steady lah!
Let me know your thoughts if you have any!
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