Chinese

The share price of Shanghai Fukong Interactive Entertainment Co. Ltd. can only go up from here, right? It's so far in the doldrums now.

Don't take my word for it. I've only just ventured into looking superficially at stock charts, and have no idea what I'm talking about. So to keep things simple, when I see a line that goes almost straight down, I judge that that particular stock will probably increase in price again soon, i.e., rebound. Because that's the circle of life. Regression to the mean is a real thing, even in trading.

A couple of things happened recently that made me interested in Chinese stuff. First, I won the China Daily Prize for being a top performer in my university course. Hot on the heels of that came the MTX controversy surrounding the game I play, which many players blamed on the corporate greed of the holding company... Shanghai Fukong Interactive Entertainment Co. Ltd., which the RuneScape community refers to as "Chinese overlords".

Cue a series of comments, mainly on Reddit, sarcastically written in Chinese. Or rather, written by Westerners in English, then badly translated by Google into Chinese characters which were then pasted onto the comment threads. For example, here's one from u/ChineseOverlord, a satirical account, responding to a satirical suggestion that the company should lock all accounts and charge players a fee to be able to log into the game again. Yes, RuneScape players are sarcastic that way.

谢谢你的想法！

P. S请用中文发布您的投诉，以便霸王更容易理解。

Being a helpful person, and not wanting anyone to miss out on the joke, I manually translated the comment back into English using my considerable command of my mother tongue.

Thanks for your idea! Please use Chinese to give your suggestions so that it's easier for the overlords to understand.

- translated by human being who knows Chinese

I received 14 upvotes and 1 Reddit Silver for my troubles. A subsequent translation of another comment bagged me another 4 upvotes. These are nothing more than virtual currency for bragging rights but it was fun nonetheless!

The thing is, if not for the China Daily Prize, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the translations. I struggled with Chinese throughout my 10 years of compulsory education. The only subject I ever failed an exam in was Chinese in Primary 4, and I had tuition for no other subject except Chinese from upper primary all the way through to the O Levels.

It's safe to say I hated that language with a passion.

But that's not to say I'm completely inept at it. I can hold a normal conversation with another Singaporean using it, and my recognition of the characters is adequate for carrying out chats online in it. Sure, I stammer a lot because sometimes I don't know the words for certain things, and my pronunciation sounds like an American learning Chinese for the first time, but the problem was mainly psychological. Because I was forced to suffer through 10 years of Chinese hell, I didn't want anything to do with the language if I had a choice.

So I turned my back on it. For almost four years I took great pride in my inability to speak Chinese, and never used it unless someone used it on me first, and even then I would use it begrudgingly and purposely dumb down my standards.

At times I did feel slightly guilty. What kind of Chinese person can't speak Chinese? And was I hurting myself, given the growing influence of China on the world stage?

I never did anything about these misgivings though.

Winning the China Daily Prize changed that.

I can't really explain why. Maybe it's the feel-good factor. Suddenly the concept of "China" is associated with the positive feelings stirred up by my award, displacing the negative ones from my school days. In fact on the night I opened the letter announcing my win, I voluntarily spoke Chinese for the next hour, because I felt I ought to do so in honour of China Daily.

And the opportunity to practice my Chinese by helping those Westerners understand the sardonic comments reinforced the joy of using the language. Positive Reddit karma is always nice too.

I can't say for sure how long this rekindled interest in the Chinese language will last, but hey, a little bit is still better than nothing at all.

Now perhaps I should go read some investment analysis reports about Shanghai Fukong Interactive Entertainment Co. Ltd. that are published in Chinese...