: Engage with media, literature, and communities in both English and your mother tongue(s).
By the time I entered Primary One at the age of six, Singapore’s bilingual policy was already a decade old. The message was clear: English for the world, Mother Tongue for the soul. In theory, it was a beautiful marriage. In practice, inside my seven-year-old skull, it was a civil war.
"It never gets easier. You just get less bad." – Paraphrased from the text.
“We asked our children to carry a heavy load,” the text read. “We asked them to carry the weight of the West on one shoulder and the weight of the East on the other. Many stumbled. Many buckled. But those who walked upright found they could see horizons others could not.”