Chua was born in China in 1931 and migrated to Singapore in 1937, growing up along the banks of the Singapore River. He might have arrived in time to watch the lavish celebrations of the coronation of King George VI in May, where all the ethnic communities of Singapore held parades and other festivities to show their loyalty to the Empire, a nascent exercise of Frankensteinian multiracialism (based on notion of distinct separate parts joined into one) in service of a communal spectacle. Interestingly, National Language Class, the play, was staged since our National Day.

But 1937 was also the year that organized anti-colonial political action against the British began. In late 1937, in two separate incidents, 10,000 Chinese rubber and coal workers went on a communist-organized strike and 13,000 Indian municipal and construction workers went on a nationalist-inspired strike. The strikes, which would be followed in later years by more industrial action, made mockery of King George's loyal multiracialism, exposing the spatial-ethnic fixing of colonial exploitation and heralding the anti-colonial movements that would span rural and urban Malaya and Malayans of all racial hues.

It is in this context that we should place Chua's painting. There is some confusion over which year it was painted, 1950 or 1959. A number of websites, one by university students citing Kwok Kian Chow's Channels and Confluences: A History of Singapore Art and another by an artist, put the date down as 1950. Ong dated it as 1959, thus giving the work the interpretation of 'a patriotic post-colonial assertion of national identity'. The exact date is not as important as the implications of the decade signified by 1950-59, from the height of the Emergency sparked by the communist revolt in the peninsula after the failure of the Malayan Union proposal to grant equal recognition to all races, to the year of Singapore's attainment of self-governing autonomy, through the turbulent years of anti-colonial action organized by socialists in Singapore.

After the failure of the communist revolt, the socialists outside the ambit of the Malayan Communist Party in Malaysia and Singapore sought to form loose alliances. This was a multiracial compact, involving leaders like Said Zahari, MK Rajakumar and Lim Chin Siong (one of the founders of the People's Action Party who was later detained without trial by the government of the Party he helped found), to reassert the Malayan Union multiracialism, the 'Malaysian Malaysia' cry later championed by Lee Kuan Yew's PAP (let us not forget that the party once called itself democratic socialist). Lim was influential in advocating for Malay to be adopted as the national language and learnt by everyone wishing to call him/herself Malaysian.

Chua's artistic style has been called Social Realism, a school of art responding to the industrial revolution and urbanization, focusing specifically on (working) class realities rather than the colored idealisms of Impressionism. Many social realist artists around the world were socialists but not necessarily communists. If we look closer at the picture, the trace of Lim Chin Siong's socialist advocation of Malaysian multiracialism through linguistic adoption is evident. Pasar Melayu (market Malay), after all, was already well used by the common people. Malay would not only bring together all the races but was also the language of the working classes, the socialist common denominator of class equality.

Significantly, Chua's painting shows young women and men, future of the nation, of different linguistic habits and different classes learning Malay from the cikgu: the bespectacled middle-class man of pressed pants and shoes, the working-class man in white cotton shirt tucked out of khaki slacks in loafers, the woman in Chinese school uniform-like white dress, and so on. Notice that they sit around a round table, a symbol of equality, which also signifies a plebian/proletarian public sphere, being reminiscent of the kopitiam tables one find in the coffeeshops of old. As they sat facing each other, they are called to consider the deceivingly simple questions: Siapa nama kamu? Di-mana awak tinggal?

Here is where I locate my critique of Ong's review, for the dimension of class is missing in her attempt to draw out the race-language-nation nexus. Race-class-language lies at the heart of today's divide in globalizing Singapore: pre- and post-65ers, heartlanders and cosmopolitans. The physical and social mobility of the educated elites is being matched by the physical and social stasis of increasing number of citizens of the middle and working classes. The influx of lighter-skinned foreign talent to be considered as our immigrant brethren is being matched by the flux of darker-skinned foreign laborers whose desire to be citizens are irrelevant just as our forefathers' desire once were under British rule. The significance of National Language Class is not linguistic, not the psychological dissonance we get when we sing the National Anthem in Malay just before reciting the pledge in English. The significance is in the issues of race and class, inflected through language, tearing at our official multiracial identity in the age of globalization. We are in dire need of a multiculturalism that is bottom-up democratic, that instead of happily glossing over the old-new inequalities would push them to the forefront of public consideration. Who are you? Where are you?