“She was a big part of my childhood. While returning to mourn for her, I saw her lying in the casket with the little things she had with her all her life. There were the little lyrical booklets of folksongs and vinyl records; some these were brought over (to Malaysia) from China.
I just couldn’t bear the thought of it being buried together with her forever, so I took it out from the casket in the middle of the night.
I realized that these things I’ve kept were all related to “sound” so I started to study more about them.
For example, people use the phrase ‘mother tongue’ and not ‘father tongue’ because biologically the baby’s nerves are always linked to the mother’s tongue in the course of the pregnancy. Every time a mother makes a sound, the baby listens. That’s why, a mother’s sound and her language is the first thing that a new life hears. Every lullaby, nursery rhymes and children’s song in this world came from our mothers. They (mothers) hum to the rhythms of our daily lives, coupled with their own tune to see their child grow up day by day…
Today my work revolves around archiving sounds and stories from the elders that speaks different lineage of Chinese dialects. Some (of the elders) came to Malaysia before the Cultural Revolution in China, so the way they speak, the dialect they inherited is as pure as they were before. However, because they received limited and perhaps no education at all, they could not get by (in life) with modern Mandarin, and slowly they became marginalized because nobody speaks their dialect anymore and nobody could understand them.
Their voices are slowly being forgotten, and their unique identity as well. My dream is to setup a Malaysian “Sound” Museum, where it houses a preservation center for Malaysian Chinese Dialects. I’m also shooting a lot of documentaries of Chinese tradition and culture that are slowly lost in time. This is a way of paying tribute to the first sound that we all hear in each of our lives and the most significant sound of all – the sound of our Mother Tongue.” – Chong Keat Aun
“记得在念大学的时后，收到外婆去世的消息。她是我成长中很重要的一部分。回乡出席丧礼时，看见她躺在棺木里，置放在身边的是陪伴她一生的一些小东西。有一些写着歌词的小册子，还有黑胶唱片，有些甚至是她从中国带过来的。
我不忍心看着这些东西跟着外婆一起永远被埋起来，所以就半夜的时候偷偷的把它们拿了出来，藏起来。我发现那些东西都是跟“声音”有关的，之后我就开始去认识他们，了解它们。
为什么西方人要用”母语“这两个字来形容我们的第一个说的语言，而不选择说“父语”呢？很特别的，打从母亲怀胎开始，小孩的舌头就跟母亲的神经线连接了在一起。母亲发出的每一个声音，孩子都在听。就因为如此，母亲发出的声音和她用的语言，是每一个生命第一个听到的声音。这世上所有的摇篮曲和童谣也是从母亲口中来的。她们用她们自己生活的旋律，还有自己的音调陪伴孩子一天一天长大。
如今，我的工作是在采集老人家用方言来述说的声音和故事。他们有的是在中国文化大革命之前就南来来到我们这里，所以他们用的方言还是很标准正宗的。然而，因为受的华文教育不多，他们无法在生活当中与现代的人沟通，同时也没有人能够明白他们，所以慢慢的，他们被边缘化了。
老人家的声音就这样慢慢的被遗忘，同时消失的是他们每一个独特的身份。我想设立一个“声音馆”，是一个马来西亚华人方言文化保存的一个地方。我也在拍摄一些逐渐被时间吞没的华人传统和文化的一些纪录片。这一切都是献给我们生命中最重要最美丽的声音 –母亲的声音。” – 张吉安
The above interview was conducted in Mandarin.
Photo, story and translation by Tan Dao Hong.
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(This post was first published on March 1st 2018)
