Angmo said, "Can you speak Chinese?"

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Temperature: 11 c

Being a Malaysian Chinese, I always curious about how it will be like for others (who are not native speaker of my language) to speak my language when communicating with me.

In Malaysia, I did not have the opportunity to find out. No one who is NOT a native Chinese speaker will speak Chinese to me. When talking to a Malay, we used Malay; when talking to a Indian, we used English or Malay.

In UK, I also did not have the opportunity to find out. When talking to a Angmo, needless to say, we used English.

Today, I was tasked to perform a due diligence (DD) on a company (target). Wow! It was a new adventure for me. I was never a corporate lawyer. I know little (close to nothing) about joint venture, private equity, foreign direct investment, venture capital etc. But now, things changed: I am a “corporate lawyer” in the middle kingdom. Big thing!

For the benefit of the readers who do not know what DD is, let me put it simple: when someone wants to invest in a company, he wants to know whether this company is doing ok, whether this company owes people money, if yes, how much etc. How will he find out? He hires people like me to go into this company, open its cupboards, dig out every file and study them “diligently”. We will check whether this company pays its rentals, whether it pays its employees, whether it has skeletons hidden somewhere in the closets. Once we have finished digging out the shits of this company, we will gather all the information we have found, analyze them and prepare a DD report. In this report, we will tell, in our opinion, whether this company is healthy or in the border of committing suicide. Then, it will be up to the investor to make the commercial decision.

How good it will be if we can perform a DD on a lady before we marry her. We can get a professional like me to go into the bedroom of this lady, to check out what perfume she uses (or whether she uses perfume), what time she wakes up in the morning, how well she cooks (or whether she cooks at all), whether she swears in the house, whether she flushes after using the toilet, whether she abuses little animals, whether she is a hardcore fan of Gucci, LV, Dior etc. Then this professional will prepare a written report for us to consider whether to commit for a life time. If this is done, I can guarantee the divorce rate will drop dramatically, BUT at the same time, marriage rate will also drop drastically. Ok, maybe I have digressed too far. This happens when you have an amateur “corporate lawyer” talking about corporate stuffs; we always find it funny and tend to joke about it.

This evening our team of 4 lawyers (including me) went to the office of the target to have a discussion (facts finding mission). The auditors were there too. In the big spacious conference room, there were 8 local Chinese, 1 Malaysian Chinese and 2 Angmos (English). When the meeting began, these local Chinese, with varying degree of English knowledge, spoke in English. But, the Angmo said, “你可以说中文。” Wow! I could see the reliefs in the faces of the Chinese parties. And this 2 Angmos from UK not only can they speak basic Chinese; their pronunciation was close to perfect. They speak like a Beijinger! How long have they been in China? I had the opportunity to ask them after the meeting, they have been here for more than 3 years.

Now, the situation has really changed. I remember when I was in High School, I attended a talk by Dr John Naisbitt (the author of Megatrend). He predicted that in the foreseeable future, the Westerners will have Chinese name for reasons of doing business with the Chinese. The Asians having English name will be something of the past.

Now I am seeing his prediction becomes reality. This Angmo’s name card shows his name as “Ken Wilson” and his Chinese name is “韦志浩”. The other one is “Brian Suntherland” and his Chinese name is “孙杰龙”.

I was feeling unreal after listening to these Angmos speaking Chinese in the meeting.It was like Alice in the Wonderland where rabbit can talk. In a “normal” situation, we see Chinese speaking English (regardless of how poor his English is) in a meeting with Angmos. Now, it is exactly the other way round.

I think this is an inevitable trend and it will become more obvious in the next few years as more Angmos graduated from the Chinese schools.

So, my piece of advice to the parents (especially the Chinese) who send their children to national primary schools (as opposed to Chinese schools) thinking that it is ok to neglect the Chinese as long as the BM and English are good, you are dead wrong. I have said this before and I will say it here again: once you leave the soil of Malaysia, nobody really cares how good your BM is. You can blow trumpet telling everyone you are tri-lingual, but the reality is: BM doesn’t count. So you are left with English and Chinese. If you neglect Chinese, you lose the advantage of being bi-lingual. Do the math before deciding the fate of your children.