Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 29 June 2008:

Much ado about how much
by Colin Goh

We Singaporeans like to say that we greet each other with “Have you eaten?”, whether in Malay, Mandarin or Chinese dialects. It tells others what kind of people we are, namely, food lovers.

But I have to say that in my personal experience, “have you eaten?” was a greeting my parents only exchanged with their peers or elders, and never with me. (Maybe it’s because I was a “fatty bom bom”, so people felt that the answer to that question was rather obvious.)

Meanwhile, my generation must have appeared to outsiders like stereotyped Red Indians (i.e. “native Americans”) in an old-fashioned Western film, because we would always greet each other with a brusque “How?”

The typical reply to that question, however, was unmistakably Singaporean: “Lai dat, lor.”

I used to chalk this existentialist response up to mere humility – that we Singaporeans somehow felt it impolite to suggest that we might be happier than others in our company.

So when I first moved to New York, I adapted my reply. When people would ask, “How’re you?”, I would answer “Surviving”, or at most, “Okay.” If people asked, “How’s it going?”, I’d say, “It’s going.” (To be honest, to this day, I have no idea what “it” is, and where “it” is supposed to be going.)

After a while, it occurred to me that the impression I was giving people wasn’t one of modesty, but of grumpiness or depression. Because the New Yorkers I met would always reply, “Good!” or “Fine!” whenever you asked how they were, even if they were in the midst of wading through six feet of sewage. I guess both the Singaporean and American responses could be characterised as insincerity, but I was beginning to prefer the one that radiated positivity over the one which suggested I needed Prozac.

Then a few months ago, I encountered a greeting that was extremely sincere, but not necessarily polite. I might have mentioned this in a column last year, when I wrote about moving to the town of Flushing in the borough of Queens, which is home to New York’s largest Chinese community. When the Wife and I first met our next door neighbour, a fellow from mainland China, his greeting wasn’t “How are you?” or even “Hello” or “Nihao”. Instead, his first words to us, said while jerking his chin in the direction of our house, were: “Duo shao qian (How much money)?”

We were to encounter “duo shao qian” as a common salutation over and over again in the ensuing months. It was said in lieu of “good morning” by the cab driver who’d arrived at our place to drive us to the airport. It was the second question put to the Wife by her foot reflexologist, immediately after “where do you live?”

Meanwhile, a Singaporean friend who also lives in Flushing reported how he was flying his model airplane in the park, when he was suddenly aware that a mainland Chinese gentleman was standing right next to him. The gent’s first words? You guessed it. “Duo shao qian?”

“It’s crazy,” said our friend. “Just the other day, I saw a guy walking his dog, when a Chinese woman stopped him, pointed to the dog and asked, “duo shao qian?”, because she wanted to buy a similar breed for her kid.”

No less than the New York Times corroborated our experiences, in an article last week about the city’s growing number of mainland Chinese tourists. According to Jane Soong, a guide who leads tours of Manhattan in Mandarin, Chinese tourists are often curious about the values of the real estate they see. Said Ms Soong, “They’ll ask, ‘How much would that building cost?’ And when I give them an estimate, sometimes they say, ‘That’s not so expensive.’ ”

Some of our American friends think this inquisitiveness about monetary value is intrusive and gauche, but I’m more ambivalent. To me, it’s less offensive than those Singaporeans we occasionally meet at gatherings in New York, who invariably ask, “So back home, what district you live in?” or “what secondary school you went to?” Because when the Chinese ask “duo shao qian?”, it’s just gathering information to help them make a financial decision, and not to assess where you are in the social hierarchy.

How we greet people can say a lot about who we are, but then, so can how we choose to interpret it. Being asked ‘how much’ all the time seems a bit too much, but when you think about it, it’s much ado about nothing.

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