I'm currently working in an art gallery as an odd job worker. Sounds odd? Yeah it is. It's a really odd job. Ok I think the temperature just dropped.
The last few days, my job has involved translation between chinese, bangladeshi, and filipino workers. Here's where being bilingual comes in. Although you're not really good at either language, at least you're able to speak a bit of both so that people who totally don't get each other can pretend they do. But I had no idea how bad my chinese was till I found this job.
Try translating the difference between duct tape, cable tape, scotchstape, double-sided tape and masking tape. I had no idea what the chinese guy was asking for till I realised anything ending with "胶" basically meant he wanted tape of some kind. It's even better when you try explaning which kind of tape to the filipino store guy with an attitude problem who only knows the word "tape".
"Erm the small one. Thin? Don't know what's thin? Sticky. Hmm all tapes are sticky. Um red colour". The guy looks at me like he wants to kill me. He always looks like that so I never know if he really wants to or not. It doesn't help that he's looking down from a metal platform 3 metres up in the air so I can wither under his intense glare.
It got even weirder when the guy from China tried to strike up conversation. He asked us about how strict Singapore's laws were. Then he proceeded to ask which offences warranted just caning. I think I mentioned murder and drug trafficking in there somewhere. That might be true, but certainly not in Singapore!
It wasn't much better when he tried talking about education. I wanted to say we get generous government subsidies, then I realised I didn't know the chinese word for "subsidies". I tried to cheena-fy the word, like they do with english names in chinese. He gave me a weird look.
After that I talked with a bangla about how cheap things were back in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, shirts sell for 70 cents and jeans for 3 dollars. And in the past, 50 singapore dollars could feed one bangla person back home for a month. Now it's a hundred. I don't know whether to be happy or sad because the value of human life in Bangladesh just doubled.
The bangla then got a little too friendly and wanted to exchange handphone numbers. I was like thinking "No like what the hell am I going to do with your number. And I don't want to know why you want mine." So I had to cook up some lame excuse to reject him like "Oh I'm using a prepaid card." Yah right.
So much has happened in two days. And I haven't even got down into the nitty gritty of working yet.