ITASA

Learning to Speak Again

Foreward: Growing up in a bilingual household is not uncommon for Taiwanese Americans. Although the mastery of more than one language is a gift indeed, the path to being bilingual is often challenging indeed. Assistant Public Relations Director Diane Tsai tells her own story. Check it out!

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For many Taiwanese-American families, the language most often used around the home can be described as Chinglish. With my family, there used to be no such thing: simply Chinese, and English… and perhaps a bit of Taiwanese, if one was feeling particularly daring.

That’s because my parents have spoken to me in Chinese for my entire life. They rarely use English with me, and the few times they do, I will most likely feel irritated that they are 1) under the impression that I wouldn’t understand what they’re saying otherwise, or 2) not using the language most convenient for them and straining themselves to express their ideas in their second language.

I recently realized that my parents have never expressed even a hint of the same type of irritation when I’m struggling to voice certain thoughts in Chinese (which, sadly, happens more often than I’d like to admit - the struggling part, I mean).

And maybe this is why: ever since I turned six, I’ve refused to speak Chinese. (That is, up until a few years ago.) Though I was born on the east coast, my family moved back to Taiwan pretty soon after, and I spent the first few years of my life speaking and hearing nothing but Chinese and Taiwanese. When we returned to the States, I was enrolled in kindergarten and couldn’t speak a word of English. Neither could my sister. The first thing I asked my mom was how to say “Can I play with you?” so that I could have friends on the playground, and my sister had a traumatic experience when she thought she forgot her lunch money at school and couldn’t explain to anyone what happened, resulting in a devastating amount of tears.

From that point on, speaking English was highly encouraged.

I’ve often looked back on this moment, wondering how my parents could’ve been so stupid to let me completely stop speaking Chinese. Today, I understand that there are various reasons why things happened they way they did.

As immigrants, my parents have experienced the tediousness of memorizing English vocabulary night after night, and cruel reality of workplaces in which speaking English with an accent is ridiculed. They didn’t want my sister and I to be overlooked for opportunities simply because we weren’t eloquent enough in English. They also did really try their best to get us to speak Chinese, but we always stubbornly found ways not to.

Thus, we always had bilingual conversations. My parents spoke strictly in Chinese, and we in English. It always seemed natural for us to speak using the language that each of us knew best. It didn’t occur to me until I returned from my first quarter in college how strange it was: in every single conversation, I expected my Taiwanese, middle-aged parents to fully understand my every word, even though I was babbling away in my Southern-Californian teenage slang!

Today, when speaking with my parents, I want to use the language that will help us to communicate the best. Sometimes that’s English, but because of my cultural background, words and phrases in Chinese are often much more significant and meaningful. My Chinese is nowhere near as good as it used to be (I desperately miss being perfectly bilingual), but because I consciously want to practice and improve, I wouldn’t say it’s bad.

Thus, as of now, my conversations with my parents involve a lot of Chinese, with a few English words thrown in. Chinglish, you might call it.

And hopefully, those English words will soon become unnecessary.

Written by Diane Tsai - Assistant Public Relations Director (Northwestern University)