With the application form before me, it was a tough ping-pong game going between the choices of being a Collections Intern or an Outreach Intern at the NUS Baba House. Maybe it was my own intimate contact with the Peranakan Chinese culture in Singapore through my godmother and my own Penang heritage that eventually influenced my decision to choose the position over at the Baba House. Initially, I was wondering how I was going to do an internship if the house was closed to visitors for a month due to renovation works. What awaited me was undoubtedly something more than I had bargained. When my supervisor warned me that the learning curve was going to be steep, she certainly was not kidding.
Throughout my five weeks, I wore many hats as an intern at the Baba House; be it as a vendor catalogue, artefact handler and even Japanese translator! While the first two weeks were relatively less active compared to the last leg of the internship, sourcing for vendors exposed me to Singapore’s rather overlooked calligraphy scene as I scrambled to search for calligraphy masters for the Saturday Explore programmes. It also proved to be incredibly fun and daunting when I was asked to search for Baba Malay speakers who were fluent enough to give a storytelling performance. It became a test of how well I could utilise my existing contacts in Singapore’s heritage languages scene and create new ones, mostly through reading dissertations and thesis papers centred around Baba Malay. Whilst all the contacts that I had led me back to the same few sources, it was still an interesting challenge nonetheless.
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