By Stephanie Yap

WHEN I went to replace my lost identity card recently, the officer at the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority took the chance to update my particulars in the Government's database.

Besides asking me for the usual biodata, such as my marital status and education level, she also asked me to verify that my dialect group is Hokkien.

Though I admire the rich diversity of dialects in the Chinese language, I find this categorisation quite meaningless in my situation. After all, only one of my parents has ancestors from Fujian province and I don't speak Hokkien anyway.

At any rate, when I collected my new IC, I found that my dialect group did not appear on the card. What is listed however is my race: Chinese.

I am not against racial categorisation per se. If I were to commit a crime and go on the run, it would help the authorities somewhat if they knew which race I belong to.

However, this incident did start me wondering about such ethnic categorisation and how little it says about an individual's self-identity. For example, I am officially classified as Chinese and thus Mandarin is considered my 'mother tongue', even though my ethnically Chinese mother speaks English and Hainanese and not Mandarin.

I picked up Mandarin only in primary school. And since scraping through my Chinese exams, I have had limited contact with the language, as I don't read Chinese newspapers, listen to Chinese music or speak to my family and friends in Mandarin.

Although I am proud of my Chinese heritage and consider it an important part of my identity, I feel that simply describing myself as 'Chinese' or even 'Chinese Singaporean' is insufficient when it comes to capturing my outlook and attitudes.

As an 'ang moh pai' (Hokkien for Caucasian faction) Singaporean, I have more in common culturally with my Westernised friends of any race than I do with a fellow Chinese Singaporean who speaks Mandarin as a first language, enjoys Mandopop or worships at a Chinese temple.

Some will dismiss me as a - to use a distinctly Singaporean and Malaysian English term - 'half-past-six' Chinese.

In my defence, there is difficulty in defining what is truly culturally Chinese, especially given the fact that the country with the largest population of Chinese people - China itself - has done much to eradicate its own traditions and culture.

This fact is something Chinese author Ma Jian addresses in his recent novel, Beijing Coma (2008).

In this passage, he writes about the difference between Chinese mainlanders and Hong Kongers when he talks about a Hong Kong girlfriend: 'In the past, I'd imagined Hong Kong as a debauched and corrupt city of capitalists and prostitutes, but after I met A-Mei, I realised that it upheld many traditional Chinese values that we in the mainland had lost. A-Mei was very close to her family, whereas I didn't know the dates of my parents' birthdays, or even my grandfathers' first names.'

That said, it is still easy to identify a larger culture shared by countries with a majority ethnic Chinese population, including Singapore. Beyond the traditions and rituals imported here by our Chinese forefathers, the community here continues to be linked to those elsewhere through an active engagement in contemporary Chinese arts and pop culture.

Take the excitement over Chinese movie epics such as Red Cliff or the sold-out stadium concerts of Mandopop stars such as Jay Chou, complete with extensive coverage in English-language papers such as this one. Their appeal transcends regional differences such as dialect: Hong Kong films and music are wildly popular here even though most Singaporeans do not speak Cantonese.

And we Singaporeans do our part in contributing to this shared culture - see the overseas success of home-grown stars Tanya Chua, Stefanie Sun and JJ Lin.

Also, despite the fact that English is the lingua franca of this country, I find myself using quite a bit of Mandarin in my daily life simply because many Singaporeans use it as their primary language of communication.

This extends even beyond the more obvious settings such as in taxis or hawker centres. For example, I go to a day spa in the heart of Raffles Place for facials. Despite the fact that its location means that it catches the international or English-speaking crowd, everyone at the spa speaks Mandarin and only limited English.

Once, however, I absent-mindedly asked my facialist a question in English rather than Mandarin. Without missing a beat, she responded in Mandarin. She obviously understood what I said in English, yet she preferred, or was more comfortable, responding in Mandarin.

Like characters in Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar Wai's 2046, we each spoke our own language, yet understood each other perfectly.

Perhaps by virtue of Singapore's youth and small size, Singaporeans will, to an extent, tend to try to define themselves in the context of larger, more established cultures.

Yet, instead of pigeonholing ourselves, we should celebrate the fact that Singapore is a place where many cultures mingle and co-exist - even within an individual.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on July 17, 2008.