Rachel Heng
The Great Reclamation
Riverhead Books: 2023
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When I was five or six, my grandma asked me to teach her to read English. It was a strange thing to ask of a child. I remember handing her a lined exercise book and writing the first letters of the alphabet for her to copy. I don’t think we made it past ‘e’ before she gave up.

Years later, I asked her why she had made this request. She, who moved effortlessly from speaking Cantonese to Hokkien to Teochew, who could scrape by in Malay, Mandarin and Hakka, but who barely spoke a word of English, who could only read and write the three Chinese characters that made up her name. She felt lost in the neighbourhood we had just moved to, she replied. All the road signs were in English, so she thought that learning the alphabet would spare her the embarrassment of asking passers-by where her own home was. Having grown up in 1990s Singapore, well after written English had attained dominance in public space, I found it hard to understand the depth of her alienation. Yet, far from feeling resentful, she often expressed gratitude for Singapore’s radical transformation. After all, it allowed a garment sweatshop worker like her to have an English speaker for a grandson.

• Tags: Darren Wan, Issue 33, Rachel Heng, Singapore