Giving Voice to a Museum Objectl

I gave voice to animate a piece of paper, a relic from the Second World, at the National Museum of Singapore two weeks ago. It is part of their "Facetime with History" event, where visitors can get a feel of history by chatting with the exhibits. 

The owner of the piece of paper had used it to take notes during the mandatory Japanese language classes during the Japanese Occupation (from the years 1942 to 1945). The owner, likely a Hokkien speaker, had used Hokkien to phonetise Japanese words, which ironically are themselves Kanji, and therefore are borrowed Chinese characters.

This is the gallery where the piece of paper is exhibited. "Syonan", meaning "Light in the South" was the name of Singapore during the Japanese occupation.

These are some of the exhibits. 

This is the said piece of paper, the one on the bottom left.

This is it.

This is a game to illustrate how Hokkien words were used to phonetise Japanese words, by ethnic Chinese in Singapore at that time.

For example, Ashita is phonetised approximately as "Ah Si Ta" in Hokkien.

The visitors on Friday were more earnest learners, mostly young adults. When it came to Saturday and Sunday, the visitors were mostly young families, whom many of the adults were happy to let their children play the above game to their hearts content - transforming it virtually into a playground.

I had some problems keeping to character as Peng (the paper), with these kids messing around. "Peng" stands for "Peng An", which means Peace in Hokkien, I must have repeated that a hundred times. LOL.

Here are the other voice actors. They acted as a writing desk, a rocking horse and National Stadium seats.

In the end, it was quite a blast. We did our part to entertain our visitors with our improvised voice acting.

For more about Voice Acting ,click here.

For other articles about Hokkien, click here.