i was trying to locate some friends from the past via
facebook. i found most, if not all of the
chinese now use names like david, sebastian, nancy
etc.
as far as i can remember none of my classmates had such
names. i know them as tan ah seng, ho yew fai, ting kok kwang
etc.
call yourself tan ah seng if you are tan ah seng. not
gordan tan. who the **** knows gordan tan is
actually the tan ah seng 20-30 yrs ago?
btw, i dont see malays calling herself nancy fatimah bte
faisal. why do chinese have to follow anything and
everything, angmoh?
To answer your question, we must touch on a bit of history of
Singapore.
THE BABAS OF SINGAPORE
What
makes Singapore different? The majority of Singapore's population
is ethnically Chinese, but Singapore is largely free of corruption,
has sound institutions and the rule of law dominates. It's nothing
like China. The
answer lies in a historical division in Singapore's Chinese
community between the babas and the sinkeh. The
sinkeh, comprising the majority of the city-state's population,
were the recent immigrants from China, or whose parents were born
in China. They spoke Chinese, lived like Chinese and considered
themselves overseas Chinese. In Indonesia, such Chinese were called
the totok.
The
babas, on the other hand, also known as Straits Chinese, were
Chinese more in name than practice. They were the descendants of
the very early Chinese immigrants (Hokkiens from the Fujian
province) to the straits settlements of Malaya (Penang, Singapore
and Malacca). They assimilated with both the local Malays and the
colonising British, whom they especially admired. The babas
developed their own culture, cuisine and language - Malay liberally
sprinkled with Hokkien.
The sinkeh were
the traders, the coolies and the shophouse owners. The babas became
the lawyers, the civil servants and the politicians; they attended
the local English-language schools run in the tradition of the UK's
public schools, and Oxford and Cambridge. If the
sinkeh received an overseas education at all, it was in Nanking or
another university in China. Although the sinkeh dominated
Singapore's population, it was
the babas who dominated public decision-making. In effect, a baba
minority captured sinkeh Singapore, and that minority's attitudes
were more those of Victorian England than
China.
It was
the babas who were the framers of Singapore's rules and
institutions. Many of Singapore's most prominent Chinese have had
baba backgrounds. Lee
Kuan Yew, who became prime minister of Singapore aged just 35, is
the most obvious example. He claims a Hakka heritage, although his
upbringing was that of a baba: at home, he spoke English with his
parents and baba Malay to his grandparents. "Mandarin was totally
alien to me and unconnected with my life," Lee said of his
childhood.
For
Lee, Chineseness was an acquired skill and later a political
necessity. He was not brought up as a Chinese with a focus on
China, but as a baba who looked to England. He followed the
conventional career path of a baba and went to London to study law.
And so Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore became Harry Lee of Fitzwilliam
College, Cambridge. His father had given him and two of his
brothers English, as well as Chinese, names. Did Lee run Singapore
as a piece of Asia mired in Chinese ways? No. He ran it in a manner
to which a British colonial administrator would have aspired.
That
other great framer of Singapore's institutions,
Goh Keng Swee, who rose to become finance
minister and deputy prime minister, is the epitome of the baba
elite. Goh was born in 1918 in Malacca, the epicentre of baba
culture, into a baba family. His parents were English-oriented
Chinese Methodists.
The baba influence is now more subtle, but still
there. Singapore's current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong has the
strongest baba pedigree of any of the country's
leaders.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/
