Ceritalah | Don’t be fooled by Netflix: there’s more to the Chinese diaspora than Mandarin
- New series ‘The Ghost Bride’ airbrushes the wonderful hybridity that characterised colonial Malacca, a melting pot of cultures, faiths and languages
- Chinese may be tempted to embrace Mandarin but this runs the risk of erasing the rich diversity of Chinese civilisation
Netflix is celebrating Lunar New Year 2020 by releasing an original series, The Ghost Bride, set in 1890s Malacca, Malaysia’s historic entrepôt. It’s basically a schlocky ghost story: a young woman is invited to marry into a wealthy family to help her debt-ridden father. Here’s the catch: the groom is deceased, and his ghost enlists her to avenge his death.
“Most of the Babas are now English speaking,” Khoo Joo Ee wrote in her 1996 study “The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History”.
“Those of earlier generations were fluent in Malay, and although it may seem very strange now, in the last century few of the Babas spoke either Cantonese or Mandarin. However, during the era of re-Sinisation, around the time of the 1911 revolution in China, many Baba families learned Mandarin.”
The series is based on a novel by Yangsze Choo, who wrote in English. In her notes, she stated Chinese immigrants mostly spoke dialects such as Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese. One of the characters speaks three dialects and Malay. Choo resisted using the pinyin Mandarin Romanisation system for their names. Yet the show is almost entirely in Mandarin, even though a more authentic depiction would have had them speak in one of the Chinese dialects or even English.
