Singapore often prides itself on its multilingualism, yet the majority of its younger generation has strayed from speaking their native tongue following decades of linguistic repression.

The movement responsible for this, the Speak Mandarin Campaign, has been around since 1979. It’s used to urge the younger generations to use Mandarin, a rarely spoken Chinese language back then, instead of their true native tongues: Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and more.

22-year-old Sherryl Sng remembers much time spent with her grandmother being enveloped in unfortunate silence due to the language barrier.

“I would just sit in her room and help massage her legs in silence, while watching television,” she recounts.

Sherryl often blames herself for not putting in more effort to learn her native tongue, Hokkien. But growing up, she simply didn’t see the importance in learning it, particularly because of the pressure to speak better English and Mandarin.

“No one else uses it,” she says, “Especially when I didn’t have my grandparents around, I was only surrounded by English and a little bit of [Mandarin] Chinese.”

As part of the movement, a ban was placed on non-Mandarin Chinese languages in the media, effectively eradicating them from TV shows and radio programs.

But because the campaign has been active for several decades, many never realised how prevalent it was—it’d simply turned into a norm.

“I didn’t even know they banned the non-Mandarin Chinese languages in the media,” Sherryl says, “I have never been good at Mandarin and I didn’t know there were different types of Chinese languages.”

For Nikki Fang, a 23-year-old copywriter, the biggest regret was not being able to hold a proper conversation with her late grandfather.

“He’d speak in Hakka and all I knew was ‘Have you eaten?’ and ‘I came here from church’,” she says.

But the issue with the Speak Mandarin Campaign wasn’t the fact that the state promoted the use of Mandarin. 

In fact, National University of Singapore linguistics lecturer Dr Jock Wong believes it was useful in standardising the language of the Chinese population.

“I think it made sense to encourage Chinese people to speak Mandarin as the common language among Chinese people,” Dr Wong says, “Because after all, it was and still is the official language in China.”

“The problem was encouraging Mandarin at the expense of the other Chinese languages.”

Wine subscription service A Glass Of received negative attention among social media users for its single-serve wine pouches last month.

The company encouraged customers to recycle their 200ml foil wine pouches, but most critics questioned if the product was necessary when they could easily store leftover wine in the fridge.

As winter arrives, heavy shower visits become more frequent and mushrooms emerge from the warm, still earth. Recent years have seen an increase in mushroom picking hobbyists: it’s fun, fresh, and if you spot edible mushrooms, you score a free dinner.

But the biggest misconception amongst novice mushroom foragers is that it’s easy. Here are some unspoken rules you should know before commencing your first shroom hunt.

With the push for racial equality bustling now more than ever, also comes a bevy of threats to the cause—and tokenism is just one of them.  

What is tokenism?

Merriam-Webster defines it as “the policy or practice of making only a symbolic effort (as to desegregate)”. In other words, acts of tokenism are performative, perhaps to jump on a trend or avoid criticism.

Some obvious examples include influencers posting empty black squares on Instagram without so much as a caption or meaningful discussion; TV shows inserting minority characters into the mix only to define them by their skin colour; political parties putting forward POC candidates in races where they have little to no chance of winning.