You teach your daughter her mother tongue in a way that is entirely hermetic; that is to say, every part of it exists beyond the referent of the linguistic substrate that surrounds it; that is to say, no part of it exists beyond relation to itself; that is to say, all words in the lexicon you've taught her point only to themselves.

It's an intellectual exercise dreamt up by you and your spouse, with no developmental merit. Suffice to say she will survive on the streets of her ancestral city; let her order fishballs from the street hawker unopposed, let her buy bus tickets from the kiosk in the shopping mall. Less easy for her to answer poetic prompts like, "what word in your language doesn't have the same impact when translated into English?" Those skills are not needed in today's knowledge-based economy.

Your child watches television shows where any and all mention of English has been scrubbed out of the set and script through judicious use of AI. Your child listens to radio shows where anecdotes have been lovingly curated from ten thousand traditional skits, the hosts instructed never to use the same one twice. Your child learns jokes from a tattered book of colourful puns and never thinks to question what a feng is, or a nian. These exist in a time of gold-coloured sky. Eventually she learns the business version of it, where they count goods in stones and beads and track profit and expenses with tally marks on palm leaves. You design mock exam papers and eventually groom her for the standardised tests, which she passes with flying colours but in an accent that leaves the examiner for the oral component highly confused. She gets a job in a consultancy in the old country and never once questions why she's so good at it; she never once needs to defend the fact that she's Singaporean.

She comes crying over the phone once, to you and your spouse. She's had a bad day at work. On the screen her face is streaked with tears, she's clearly undergone something traumatic and is trying to describe the particulars in a way that escapes all understanding, she wants to be heard so badly but her words are trapped in the language you've given her. Your spouse and you mime assurances, try reciprocating in emoji. It's to no avail. Her mouth's moving but her connection's bad, her face and hands are frozen into place. This numbness soon comes to overtake you and you are left staring at your dread reflections in the black screens.

In poetry we are each our own daughters, in a way.