Surely, you must be fluent in Mandarin by now?
How I snuck into the inner sanctum of Chinese companies without any formal language training in Mandarin
The dreaded question for anyone who has lived or worked or studied in China is “are you fluent?” Even for friends that studied at IUP, the gold standard program for Chinese language learners, the answer was usually no, I am not fluent. If you haven’t grown up in China and bathed in the culture of the language and its nuances, there are always words, phrases, sayings that will feel foreign. Chinese is not like French or German or Russian. It is not a language that a few months of study is enough to unlock a key to be able to read, speak, and live in it.
One of my best friends studied Chinese and lived in China for twenty years (and even ran a Sichuan restaurant). Some days, his brain would turn to mush. He couldn’t process in Mandarin. Another friend, an incredible polyglot who spends hours a day studying and practicing languages, would define his skills as okay or passable.
For folks like me who haven’t even tried to achieve fluency, my answer is more emphatic. No, I am not fluent. I don’t think I have even tried.
It is not to say that I can’t speak Chinese, live in Chinese, work in Chinese, nor laugh in Chinese. I probably have encountered phrases and characters that others through dedicated study might never have encountered. But fluency is too far of a goal to dream, and it was never the path that I sought to conquer.
A few months back there was a debate among China Watchers about the importance of Chinese language fluency amongst the guild of scholars and analysts. I have never seen myself as a watcher of the same ilk most likely because my Chinese is not the source of years of serious academic training. It is a patchwork of self-study (Zi Xue 自学) and crude heuristics that have allowed me to sit in rooms where we discuss machine learning algorithms or adapting business models from other consumer apps.
I probably have the equivalent of a pottery class education in Chinese, but despite such limitations, I ascended into the inner sanctum of Chinese tech companies as the only foreigner in the room.
How was that even possible? How could someone without advanced training be able to function in those situations? This is a story of failure, shortcuts, embarrassment, and learning. But ultimately, it is a story about how to feel a language as much as you can speak it.
Babel
Learning Chinese wasn’t my first foreign language. If it had been, I probably would have failed even faster. This was the secret ‘sauce’ that made my efforts at learning Chinese a lot more intuitive and easier.
One of the first books that my partner and I read together was Babel No More, Michael Erard’s opus to polyglots and how people come to learn dozens of languages. I am not quite a polyglot, but I was born bilingual and that is a significant advantage in building up the necessary linguistic sensitivity that would make other language acquisition easier.
As a kid in Mexico, I spoke Spanish at home and English at school. When I moved to the US, the situation reversed. As gringofication took hold, Spanish disappeared until it was only the language reserved only for speaking with my dad. Although the benefits of knowing a romance language were still plenty—vocabulary, conjugations, etc.—I risked turning it into a language I knew but couldn’t really use. This was was despite taking Spanish classes in high school and college.
What accelerated my rediscovery of Spanish was when I began to learn my third language, Catalan. I had visited Barcelona a few years earlier and I was embarrassed by how little I had known about linguistic diversity of Spain let alone that of Europe. I thought that studying Catalan would give me a unique appreciation of a culture that I had only experienced from afar.
Studying a language from the ground-up pushes you to think structurally about languages in general: pronunciation, grammar, syntax, vocal register, loan words, and how various languages interconnect with each other. The natural register for Catalan is lower than that of Castilian, sitting more comfortably in the range that I spoke English allowing me to float between the two with greater ease. One of the coolest features of Catalan is the preterite tense, composed of the verb ‘to go’ with the infinitive of the verb you wish to use to describe something that happened in the past. It made the language easy, and I soon began to think and dream in Catalan.
Catalan’s closer relation to French and Italian, especially vocabulary, helped me figure out how to read those languages allowing me to read books and newspapers, something quite useful when traveling abroad or when your school’s library only has the French version of a book.
But it also gave me a renewed appreciation of Castilian Spanish,. As I learned phrases and syntax with the rigor required to understand how language worked, I returned to Spanish emboldened. I no longer took for granted my birthright. I wanted to find my own voice in Spanish. I pushed myself linguistically and creatively until I was able to achieve the necessary dexterity to write poetry in Spanish. My Spanish alter ego is more absurdist, satirical, and able to create a voice completely divorced from the seriousness with which I bring to English. I consider some of the best things I have ever written to be my poetry in Spanish.
Today, I would say I am fluent in two languages, but I have varying levels of capacity in most Romance or Germanic languages. I was in Brazil last year for three months and I got to the point where my listening and reading comprehension probably were about 95% and I could speak with the glee of a middle schooler. It was a quick uptick. I can read German if forced, though with a dictionary, and my time in Norway showed I could follow along to a conversation without the need of a translator.
But I had never really flirted with a language outside of the Indo-European tradition, especially one that depended on pictographs and tones.
Taxinese
China was the last place I thought I would ever live or visit, but I met a guy by accident at a pub and all things changed. Our situationship involved me sleeping over at his apartment as an escape from my dorm room and the piles of documents strewn around for my senior thesis. I fall asleep to Rear Window each time, and each time I fell asleep right after the scene where Grace Kelly appears. He was sweet and thoughtful and patient. But I was overworked and not able to really think through what I wanted besides sleep.
When he left to go back to Shanghai for the summer, I realized what an idiot I had been all along. Armed with all the money I had saved I bought a ticket to visit him. We would have our first date over the course of a two-week visit.
China was in the throes of the pre-Olympic building boom, and it attracted a rag-tag bunch of expats that were able to live a life that was unattainable in their home countries. Imagine the vibrancy of New York, the parties of Ibiza, the affordability of anywhere in the Global South, and a general energy of the future. Foreigners traversed the arteries of Shanghai with a limited form of Chinese: Taxinese.
Taxinese is knowing how to say right and left turn, where to go, how to stop. The inherent advantage of Shanghai is the dense street system meant that you could usually state the street crossing of where you wanted to go and any cabbie would know where to go. You could get by for years on mere taxinese.
It was the first version of Chinese that I picked up when I visited that summer and in subsequent years. Our relation ended, but my interest in China remained. Another friend asked me to join him for a company he started and so I moved to China with only a minor familiarity with phrases and no reading comprehension.
Some of the funniest content online for me are videos of Spanish speakers calling into a radio show requesting their favorite English songs but butchering the pronunciation. When we parrot things, we try to make it as intelligible to us as possible, and so we mishear, misspeak, misinterpret.
When I started dating my now partner, he used to tell the cabbie to stop the car with the phrase Tingzhi Jiu Xing 停止就行, stop here is fine. My ears and then mouth would parroted it as Tingzhi de Ting, stop as in stop here. I thought that was what you said, and I would say it all the time.
When I said it one day when we were together, the cabbie knew my meaning but my partner couldn’t stop laughing. What had I done? He told me what I had done, and I became flush red with embarrassment.
But it also taught me about the expat bump—the forgiveness that Chinese people give expats (especially non-East Asian appearing expats) as they mow down the beautiful tonality of their language. If you screw up the word or use something out of context, most folks will figure out what you mean to say in context.. You could get by in a way that we never allow for in the United States.
KTV
About a half a year into my time in China, my company procured a Mandarin tutor to help me improve my language skills. I had a one-on-one session once a week, slowly going through a textbook covering the same content that you would have seen in a middle school. I thought it would take a decade to learn enough at that pace. I thought there might be a better use of our time.
It was then that I came up with a brilliant idea. I would have the teacher teach me to sing Karaoke songs.
One of the hubs of Chinese social life are Karaoke parlors, or KTV (pronounced as English letters). You go with colleagues, you celebrate birthdays, you use it to start your night or to finish it. I had gone to enough Karoake nights to know how it would go. Inevitably, the two sides of the multilingual room would break into foreign or Chinese songs, separating into two groups that almost felt like they didn’t communicate. If I could surprise folks with Chinese songs, maybe it might make these nights more worthwhile.
It was sometime later when reading Erard’s Babel No More that I discovered that tonal languages like Mandarin utilize two completely different areas of the brain simultaneously. One is the language center, where most of our languages sit (though secondary languages are elsewhere). The other is the music center, which fires usually when listening to music. To those of us who are not native speakers, often our music center barely registers unlike native speakers. You just can’t hear the tones the same way. To account for this when I speak, I often need to overpronounce my tones to just make sure I am getting it right, but I often can’t even hear the distinction. To think of tonal languages like music was, rather poignantly, the smartest way to think about Mandarin.
And so week after week I would come in early on Tuesday to learn the lyrics of a song, reading the Romanized pinyin and characters as I aimed to perfect songs like Kexi Bushi Ni 可惜不是你 by Fish Leong, Yinwei Aiqing 因为爱情 by Eason Chan and Wang Fei, and then, what became my signature song, the notoriously difficult Ju Hua Tai 菊花台 by Jay Chou.
Learning the characters was necessary because when at the actual Karaoke parlor, you needed to read the characters to know what to sing. Soon, I was able to formulate a three-part relationship between the sound, the romanization, and the character. More than this, I began to realize that these same characters about love and loss and beaty and softness invariably repeated themselves in the other songs that my friends sang. I was able to read and then sing songs that were popular at the time, like Yoga Lin’s rendition of Ni Shi Wo de Yan 你是我的眼, Khalil Fong’s version of Hong Dou 红豆, and some older songs like Elva Hsiao’s absurd Biao Bai 表白,.
My reading, speaking, and listening all improved, but more than anything I began to enter Chinese popular culture. All Chinese television shows have subtitles, to allow people who can’t follow a particular accent/dialect or to clarify due to the large number of homophones. It made Chinese popular culture accessible. I could follow enough that I finally began to laugh in Chinese.
From Wo Shi Geshou 我是歌手, China’s version of American Idol, to the dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao 非诚勿扰, these popular shows allowed me to join in on weekly watch parties or to talk about who I wanted to win. But the ultimate entrance into Chinese zeitgeist came each year when watching coup de grace was Chun Wan 春晚, the annual CCTV variety program during Chinese New Year’s Eve. To be able to follow this program was to understand how China looked at itself and felt about the world.
My culture first approach could not replace any formal study, but it gave me a good enough background while supercharging my vocabulary. I reckon I wouldn’t be half as good as I am now in Chinese if I hadn’t dedicated most of the early 2010s to Karaoke.
An education through education
I first moved to China to work for an education company. I had been in China for only two weeks when I attended my first 3-hour banquet dinner complete in Chinese. I sat there picking at my food as conversations went on around me. I was interrupted every so often by a colleague asking something and poking me out of my slumber, but then I would be allowed to go back to be lost in my thoughts. I began to try to follow along to the conversations purely as a way to avoid succumbing to utter boredom. I would process the sounds until I noticed words that would always seem to go with each other. I slowly began to figure out the repetition from dinner to dinner, from family to family. And after time, the words begin to accumulate.
My second year in China, I delivered lectures multiple times a month to try to raise the profile of our company. I spoke in English accompanied by a colleague that would translate into Chinese. At the beginning, I could only speak in sequences of 5 seconds to allow for proper translation, but as we both began to know the material so well, I could stretch longer, sometimes adapting my own speech to fit the mood of the crowd. I would hear how the translation shifted, figuring out words and phrases that I might not otherwise have known. I could deduce how a new phrasing would lead to a different translation and then a different crowd reaction. I began to formulate harder associations until I knew exactly how I wanted to present my thoughts not only in English but through my colleague into Chinese.
My time in education also gave me one other vantage into Chinese, from the students I got to work with. As they spoke to me in English, I could see their minds working in Chinese as they transliterated their thoughts to me in vivo. Probably my favorite example of this is the phrase ‘recently’ or Zui Jin 最近. Chinese syntax usually places the phrase at the beginning of a sentence, but this phrase has two different uses in English. The first would be determinate and positive, as in “I recently went to Mexico,” but it could also refer to things in an indeterminate amount of time and generally negative which we usually translate as lately. “I haven’t been to Mexico lately.” Most Chinese students will use recently in English in both situations.
There are a few dozen of these weird syntax changes that you will discover. As you see and listen to these changes over time, you begin to pick up on these idiosyncrasies, until you find yourself able to understand even students with limited English fluency. You realize that their English was actually a key that then could be used to unlock Chinese behind it.
Immersion
It was not until I moved to Indonesia that I truly began to learn Chinese. I went there to work for vivo, the multibillion-dollar smartphone manufacturer that together with its sister company Oppo are the largest manufacturers of smartphones in the world (bigger than Apple, Samsung, and Huawei). I lived amongst Chinese colleagues in rented dorms near the office, and I was included in Chinese only meetings. I spoke more Chinese in the 9 months I lived in Jakarta than the prior 5 years combined.
If Karaoke taught me how to read characters and engage in pop culture, and my years in education taught me how to develop a strong vocabulary in a single field as well as discover Chinese syntax, my time at vivo and in Chinese companies taught me social and business Chinese.
Social Chinese is the banter of colleagues over lunch or dinner. The conversations would oscillate between mildly inappropriate to extremely formal. I became fascinated at the way people said hello and goodbye to each other with a level of officialdom that felt asynchronous with the daily ritual. In Indonesia, I learned how to joke, tease, and cajole in Chinese, opening myself to a completely different vocabulary but also a very different understanding of Chinese life and people.
When I returned to China and continued working at Chinese firms, I began to find myself pulled deeper and deeper into the life of my colleagues. For the first time, I developed friendships where the only language of communication we had was Chinese.
Business Chinese is littered with English initialisms that demonstrate the long reach of American hegemony. Send me that PPT is easy enough to follow and figure out. It makes the language at once familiar, but this is a false sense of security. The challenge with business Chinese is that so much about what to do, how to do it and when to do it is implied. When a statement is made, you will see the entire swarm of your colleagues go hither and thither and you won’t know why. If you ask them, they won’t really know what to tell you. They just know intuitively what a command means.
I began to unpack more and more of business Chinese after I moved to internet companies with their emphasis on slogans and esoteric concepts. Our task as a business was to Po Quan 破圈, or break out of the circle in order to attack a tangential user group. We cared about Yonghu Xinzhi 用户心智 , or user mindset (deeper than merely their opinion). There was a poetry to these words as they became ways that I thought about resolving user needs.
On the other hand, there was a certain fascination with competition that was at the core of working in these industries. From official HR documents to rallying speeches, I was encouraged not to think about my successes but rather to ask myself if I have developed a Tieshi Xinchang 铁石心肠, a stone heart. My ability to survive challenges and failures depended entirely on my Xue Cao 血槽, the blood reserve like in a video game that would allow me to sustain blows. I would earn this reserve from credits for having done good work for the company, or being particularly capable at surviving harsh times.
I read Yu Hua’s marvelous China in Ten Words about the same time. In the book, which was never published in the main land, the novelist writes about the dialectical nature of the Chinese language, particularly how it could be used and misused based on time and context. Words, he would say, could take on a completely different existence, an almost teleological nature to it. Within the mileu of Chinese tech companies, the particular language that was spoken began to fall deep into my bones. I began to feel a coldness come about when I thought about business decisions I needed to make. I began to eschew almost ascetically from praise, taught to not linger too much on my successes but to be humble and concentrate on my areas for improvement.
The language infected me in a way that only since I have been able to exit this world can I fully appreciate how consuming it was. Some of it was a bit toxic but some of it was liberating. I appreciate that I can now choose more so what parts of myself I wish to bring to my future work.
But I learned an important truth from these years. Business Chinese is not so much a language but a lifestyle, one that was unvoiced as much as it was ever said out loud.
Trust
I arrived at Kuaishou in November of 2020 as the first foreign hire for their new internationalization push. I was quite lost at the beginning. New company, new jargon, new ways of doing things. With all the conversations conducted in Chinese and with 10 months spent abroad in the US during Covid, I felt like I was thrown in the middle of the ocean and I didn’t know which way to swim to find safety.
I leaned heavily on Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map to better understand how my own behavior might be interpreted by my Chinese peers but also as a way to think through what was it that they might be doing. Meyer emphasizes Chinese high-context culture as something that allows communication between Chinese to be more efficient and sometimes implied in a way that my American sensibility could not decipher.
I decided to look for tea leaves as much as possible. I wanted to figure out precisely how were decisions being made, who was making these decisions, and therefore who should I try to get to know better during the next few weeks. I tried my best to get into the office first each morning, spending each day to write down who arrived at what hour, who met with the boss, how did the boss appear after each encounter, who was the last to leave, who got compliments for work, who seemed to annoy the boss. I began to formulate a comprehensive understanding of the office dynamics, which bonds were tightest and which repelled.
Above all, I came to learn about ‘the room.’ It was a physical space, but it might as well have been mythological. It reflected the inner sanctum, those most trusted. You would see folks disappear into that room for hours, staying late into the night to discuss or gossip or whatever I might imagine would go on there. I watched the room with the curiosity of an ethnographer. The decisions were not being made in the meeting rooms or any other space. They must emanate from there.
Throughout all my interactions in China from working with high powered parents to the down to earth managers at vivo to the engineers and geeks of Kuaishou, the common theme was always that of trust.
My boss at the time used to say that Chinese people are so wary of new people that they start you off with negative trust when they first meet you.
It is often why the earliest encounters with someone in Chinese can often feel stuffy, cold, formal. The outer most layer of any relationship would often feel political and porcelain. You feel as if anything you say wrong will lead for the relationship to crack. It is often why we discuss of the importance of these very surface relationships as being about giving face, Gei Mianzi 给面子.
It was the second week that one of the fellow leaders, a Chinese guy who had worked in the US for some time, took me out to lunch at a local Beijing-style hot pot restaurant. Food is the central organizing concept in Chinese life. People can spend an entire morning just talking about what they will eat for lunch. Inviting someone else to lunch thus has a critical quality of being more than being merely polite, it is about sharing one of the most important experiences of the day.
We talked around things, never quite landing on anything specific. We meandered through his life and career, which he winked as he mentioned he couldn’t talk about his last employer. I shared my own experiences and thoughts. It was pleasant but not Earth shattering, but I soon learned it was enough.
A week later, I met with the big boss who said on the recommendation of this other guy that I should take on more leadership. Imagine the surprise or confusion I had that our pleasant chat had brought about such a unique experience. The big boss then took me out to lunch, chomping on food from his native province. We rode bicycles in the cold winter air as it was easier to get back this way from the restaurant and to allow our bellies to digest. He mentioned the idea of Hua Bing 画饼 , or painted pancake, regaling me with its origin and meaning, and then asking me if I wanted to take a stab at explaining at a theoretical level what we needed to do overseas.
The next week, I probably spent close to thirty hours in front of a blank piece of paper trying to reduce all the complexity of my thoughts into something that could fit on a single piece of paper
I sent it to him, and I was quickly corrected. Not this, like this. Not that, like that. I assumed that I had failed the exercise, but instead I was asked later that night to come to ‘the room.’ I was there alongside another colleague who spent a lot of time in the room. He asked both of us to work to expand the document for a presentation that our team would have to prepare for strategy session. I had made it into the room.
I spent the next few weeks trying to figure out exactly how that had happened. What did I say? What did I do? It felt rapid and almost undeserved. Was it because I was a foreigner and the only real foreigner in the office at that? Was this another variation of the expat bump? It didn’t feel that way. Was it prospective? A way to invest in me and therefore to bring me into the fold.
I asked my boss one time what it all meant, and he was always tight lipped. “You’re doing a good job,” was all he said. Praise was never overly warm or effusive, but it was enough to energize me for the following months and to lead me to achieve things that I couldn’t have imagined. Was it because I was in the room? Or was I in the room because I could achieve those things? It was a tautology.
Then, I just let it be true. So long as I was there, I felt an obligation to contribute. My voice began to emerge from the shadows, and I began to be unafraid of changing the opinions of my peers. In Chinese, I can be more incisive, cutting into the issues with a precision that my long-windedness in English failed to achieve. It was both a reflection of my own limited vocabulary but also the personality that I formulated within it.
I learned how to maneuver in the language in a way that made me feel at home. I was tough. I was focused. I was as much of a wolf as any of the others. The folks in the room no longer felt I was a foreigner. No, I was one of them. I was like a brother.
The limits of comprehension
I left the protective bubble of a big tech company and went out with colleagues to start a new venture. It was not the first time that I had done a startup, but the world of China of 2022 was quite different than that of 2019. An emphasis on profitability and free cash flow meant that I no longer needed to master Chinese operational concepts, but I now had to learn accounting in Chinese. I barely understood the ideas in English.
The luminescence of my rise over the years began to flicker as I sat in the room confused and bewildered. I had no idea what we were talking about.
At the time, I would say that if I knew the material ahead of time (read a document or receive a briefing), I could follow 95% of the conversation and I could contribute effectively. If I knew the topic or it was a regular meeting, I could follow about 70% of what was going on. This is the bare minimum I felt to passively consume a conversation. I didn’t feel capable to speak up in these situations, often I would need to confirm my understanding with others and then pass notes on what I might want to say so my opinions could be expressed.
If I didn’t know the topic at all or it was more like a free discussion, my comprehension depleted to less than 30%. I could still pick out some words in the conversation that I understood, anchoring myself to them with the hope that I might discover where the conversation might go. But sometimes a word or a phrase was hard to decipher. By the time I figured it out, the conversation had moved on and I was left behind. I couldn’t contribute in these situations, but I found it valuable to figure out the dynamics of who seemed to be more invested or who seemed not to care.
30% comprehension descends quickly over the course of a conversation. By the second hour of a marathon meeting (those strategy sessions that run for 3, 4, maybe 6 hours), my brain would stop listening, treating the sounds of my peers as exegetical music. I would then fall away into my own world, thinking about when would be the next time I would visit my family or when I should go to the gym.
It was then that I most felt like I was a fraud. I might laugh when others laughed. I might grunt when others grunted. But this was all to overshadow how lost I was in the conversation. Even though I probably spent as much time listening to accounting terms in Chinese as any other concept in the last decade, the words are lost to me, they formed no association and were never encoded.
They were experiences whose existence has been extinguished.
It's easier if we just use Chinese
When I took my sabbatical from my startup this year, one of my motivations (as much as the personal, the geopolitical and all others you have read me suggest on here) was the fundamental question about my ability to contribute to an organization where comprehension of concepts would shift so quickly that I couldn’t follow. I had finally met my match.
The company was at a stage where the leadership team needed to be unified in its understanding of the problem and thus aligned in what to do. Language was limiting. I felt, and still feel, my departure gave the team the necessary cohesion to meet the moment. It was what we all needed.
I spent most of this year disengaging from Chinese. I allowed this part of my brain to lay fallow for a time. I went to Brazil and Greece, Norway and Wales. Each new country began to irrigate my interest in languages as I began to dissect each, find joy in learning new words, and take pride in how each language made it easier to learn the next. Language learning is cumulative.
For most of the year, my go to playlist was Brazilian hits with the likes of Luisa Sonza, Anitta and Pedro Sampaio. The infectious beats carried me on runs from Ibirapuera to Prospect Park. But it was around August that I happened upon a Chinese song that was popular on Douyin two years back. Soon, Apple Music began to populate my library with Chinese pop and R&B songs until I had built up my own playlist of music. My runs were no longer to the ass-shaking frenetic pounding of Ludmilla but the soft soul of Ice Paper. I came back home to Chinese.
Toward the end of the summer, I was approached by Chinese companies to consider roles working in overseas outposts. I felt uneasy about it. I had become so politically tied to the necessity of leaving China that this somehow felt like I was allowing myself to be pulled back to something that was antithetical to what I wanted. But as my conversations with US firms stalled with summer vacation, I took the chats.
The roles were advertised as not requiring Chinese language ability, which felt good because months of being outside of China I felt quite rusty. But after I entered the first chat with someone based in Europe, I realized that Chinese was a more efficient way to communicate. My Chinese was stronger than his English.
Subsequent interviews included an hour call with someone that earned an MBA at a top tier American university, but for sake of his own comfort, we spoke mostly in Chinese to make sure that ideas were discussed best. I also had an all-day session with one company where I spent 7-hours discussing everything from my experiences to my management philosophy in Chinese, sprinkling English phrases to fill in words that I had forgotten.
None of the opportunities quite fell into place. The trust that I had developed at other companies was not transferable. Every new organization wants you to prove yourself to them specifically, even if you have done it many times across many organizations. Perhaps I am naïve, perhaps I am tired, perhaps I am overconfident. I didn’t want to go back in time again, but I understood their perspective.
I don’t regret having had the chance to learn about these companies, their new ‘hopes’ for going abroad. I also was able to update my comprehension about how Chinese companies of different stripes have adapted to new markets (learnings that have helped me in writing). And, quite frankly, these conversations allowed me to know that I can still operate in Chinese at a high level, so long as it is not asking me to describe complex accounting principles.
I think the lesson to be learned for China Watchers is how important it is for Chinese companies to have foreigners that can speak viable Chinese. The quality of the conversations are significantly different when speaking in English or Chinese. The concepts, ideas, debates are richer in their native language, and so I reckon it will create a lot of long term issues for Chinese companies in the United States without some kind of bridge people.
One last act
My last act in Chinese will come when my kids are born. My partner and I have decided we want Chinese to be the primary language in our house. We see it as the hardest language to learn and thus the one that requires the most amount of seeding during their early lives. With the benefit of his parents, immersion programs, and my partner’s educational instincts, we hope that they become fully functional in Chinese throughout their young lives. Though I hope to supplement this with Spanish through speaking and reading to them in this language, we will aim for most of our family conversations to primarily be in Chinese. (We know that they will decipher English in the future with ease.)
After I moved to the US as a kid, my dad went to TOEFL classes every day, dropping me off at school on the way. He needed to pass the test so he could eventually take his US medical licensing examination to be able to get back to being a doctor that he was before we immigrated.
I oscillated between moments of embarrassment and pride. My dad’s thick accent would make it nearly impossible for him to be understood, leading my sister’s and I to serve as his translator. It forced me to grow up faster than other kids in our town as sometimes it felt like you were the adult. But I think about how courageous he was to leave everything in his life behind—his job, his family, his language— to move to the United States as he approached his 50th birthday.
I wonder what embarrassment my kids will feel as I butcher my way through our family chats or their annoyance as I ask them to help me get around when we visit China. But I hope to continue to learn the language both for them but also from them. I look forward to their innocence in correcting my tones or telling me that people don’t use that word anymore.
I look forward to discovering a new relationship with the language—one built on love and family and life. I will be bad at it, but I will develop incredible joy from the simplest of all pleasures: the belief that you have learned something deeply human and personal, a kind of knowledge that the conveniences of AI can never recreate.