By Yong Shu Hoong

As unforgiveable and culturally insensitive as it sounds, I often forget what my mother tongue is.

In Singapore, the lingua franca is English, which serves as the common means of communication among different races here.

In the past, when I was working in a bank, I wrote business reports and prepared presentation slides in English.

Now, I write journalistic articles and poetry in English. In a way, my work depends in no small part on how well I use the language and I strive to excel at it - every word and punctuation mark.

Not many people know that the first thing I had ever published was actually a short story written in Chinese.

It was printed, probably after I had started secondary school, in a small literary magazine quite insipidly named Students' Literature. I was even paid about $20 for it. When I was younger, thanks to my aunts' influence, I was actually more interested in Chinese than English.

School holidays would be spent with them in Chinese bookstores in the Bras Basah area, where I would be browsing through folk tales published in Chinese.

I was a Chinese bookworm then.

My grades also reflected my inclination. For example, I consistently scored A1 for Chinese as a second language in secondary school and junior college, as opposed to B3 for both English language and English literature at O level.

Somewhere down the road, I must have lost touch with the Chinese language.

It was probably during my university days, when Chinese was no longer a compulsory subject and nothing else on the curriculum was taught in the language.

Once I started working, at least in the jobs that I had, knowledge and skill in the Chinese language was never emphasised.

A recent trip to Taiwan, however, rekindled my appreciation for the beauty of the language.

Being in a monolingual environment forced me to get reacquainted with my mother tongue, as Mandarin was all that I spoke for almost a week.

I soon fell in love once again with its musicality and the way the words wrapped around my tongue.

It was a surreal experience because in Singapore, I speak English all the time, with Mandarin, which is often mixed with English, spoken only at hawker centres and food courts, and at home while conversing with parents and relatives.

Fortunately, in Taiwan, I could still get by with my spoken Mandarin, which was sufficiently fluent to fool some into thinking that I was a local living in their midst.

To be honest, I was thankful for having learnt the language as a child.

And it is good to know that language skills, provided you have a good foundation, can come back to you instinctively even after a period of disuse, like the ability to swim or ride a bicycle.

But that is not to say that you do not get rusty.

After returning from Taiwan, I made a vow to keep up and improve on my standard of Chinese.

Viewing centuries' worth of artwork, literary scrolls and artefacts in Taipei's National Palace Museum, I could not help but be amazed by the richness of Chinese history and heritage.

It set me thinking about how it would be a waste if I were to lose track of my own language and culture, especially when foreigners seem more enthusiastic in learning to speak Mandarin and in finding out more about Chinese culture.

I may not switch overnight from rocking out at indie gigs to embracing Peking opera, or from American sitcoms to weepy Taiwanese drama but I will try to add more Chinese books to my reading list and pick up Lianhe Zaobao more often.

Yes, I would certainly try to converse more in Mandarin, not just with taxi drivers and hawkers but also with new immigrants from China or expat friends who need the practice.

In the area of literature, there have been numerous instances of non-Chinese writers culling inspiration from Chinese culture.

For example, American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder has studied Tang dynasty poetry and translated the works of reclusive 8th-century poet Han Shan.

Singapore writers, differing bilingual abilities notwithstanding, would benefit from tapping on their mother tongues - whether Mandarin, Malay or Tamil - to enrich their literary pursuits.

As an aspiring translator of Chinese poems into English, I have begun to discover the fun in discerning the differences between languages.

But knowing a second language also wields practical advantages.

In my journalistic work, a good grasp of Chinese means that I can conduct interviews in the language or have a better insight into Chinese movies that I review.

Still, there are more important considerations than practical ones.

Customers in Chinese bookstores here are declining, with some shops already shutting down.

Creative writing competitions in Chinese, I was told, are now dominated more by recent arrivals from China than home-grown talents.

With many things becoming lost in Singapore's push towards becoming an even more cosmopolitan city, we need to decide for ourselves what we should still cling on to and keep close at heart.

Yong Shu Hoong is a poet, freelance writer and Singapore Literature Prize winner.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.