A dust-ridden textbook mocks me beneath my bed every day, every night, never failing to remind me of my own self-reproach. “Integrated Chinese 4th Edition, Volume 1.” Inside, whether it can teach me how to say loser or fool, I wouldn’t know. It’s $68 of language-learning gold, and I’ve never read a single page.
During my first semester of university, I took introductory Chinese to fulfill LSA’s language requirement. Learning Chinese seemed like something I was just supposed to do. My classmates, most of whom were white students interested in Chinese for its business practicality, seemed to think the same. My mom taught me a little bit of the Chinese writing system and pinyin when I was younger, so all of the early lessons were merely review. And yet, I couldn’t shake the crawling fear that I was being judged. What was a Chinese girl doing in first-year Chinese?
I lasted less than a week before dropping the class.
The feeling of “not being Chinese enough” is one familiar to many second-generation immigrants and other individuals that identify with the Chinese-American label, but I’ve always faced a different issue altogether — I’m the wrong type of Chinese. The word “Chinese” as a language has become synonymous with “Mandarin,” or “Standard Chinese,” but in reality, there are over 300 Chinese dialects, many of which are not mutually intelligible.
My family speaks Hoisan-waa, or as Romanized, Taishanese. The language originates from the city of Taishan, Guangdong, home to the village in which my parents spent their childhood catching snakes and skipping stones. It’s a tonal, sing-songy dialect full of southern twang. Rural dialects just happen to be more colorful. More fun, if you will. To my parents, Taishanese was the language of home and family, while Mandarin and Cantonese were the languages of practicality. Then, my parents had to learn English when they moved to the faraway, mystical land of Ohio to start a new life together. English was the language of survival. The other family members we slowly brought over, like my grandparents, never learned English at all, because we could protect each other.
The nature of my upbringing as a Chinese-American, like the true embodiment of the hyphen, is that I learned both languages at once, and rather clumsily. Sometimes, I can’t translate back certain phrases in either direction, and there’s a handful of Taishanese words I’d frequently hear without realizing they were profanities. My parents always like to tell one story in particular, where we all piled into the navy Honda Odyssey on a grocery trip and my grandpa tiraded about some obnoxious person or another. The details have been lost to time, but my parents’ memory of their 3-year-old’s squeaky voice, echoing her grandfather’s curses, is undying. “Kai-ai!” I kept repeating. It made my family erupt in laughter each time, so I only wanted to say the words more. “Asshole, asshole, asshole! Son of a bitch!”
Besides my family, the only other people I’ve met that speak Taishanese are elderly store owners or passing strangers in Chinatowns. Taishanese is similar enough to Cantonese, the second most popular Chinese dialect, that when people ask, I just tell them I speak Cantonese. It saves me the explaining, at least, until I run into an actual Cantonese speaker. Cantonese and Taishanese are about as mutually intelligible as spoken Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. They’re similar enough to catch words or phrases, but distinct enough to leave the other party in a guessing game. Mandarin and Taishanese, on the other hand, are unalike in nearly every syllable and tone.
If I had a dime for every time someone expected me to be fluent in Mandarin, I wouldn’t have quite enough to pay off the debts of “Integrated Chinese 4th Edition, Volume 1,” but I’d get pretty close. So when, instead, a Mandarin speaker from mainland China or an international student asks if I know Chinese, the resulting blunder is always cataclysmic.
你会说中文吗？
“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
Then, they’d stare. I’d blink. I just answered a question I wasn’t supposed to be able to understand. I looked like either a liar or a failure of a Chinese daughter, and it always felt like both were a little bit true. Even among “my people,” an otherness drafts a divide between us.
Taishanese is the language of farmers and fishermen, of families united and the first immigrants who sailed to these alienating lands. It is the language of peeling bean sprouts with grandmother, of checkers with grandfather, of three hopeful sisters and of my parents’ ardent love. It is historic, it is beautiful, and it is dying.
Taishanese has no major presence in music, film, broadcast or other forms of media. To the rest of the world, we don’t exist. And we’re not alone. Even within China, students are actively discouraged from using their native languages in place of standardized Mandarin. Famous linguist Max Weinreich popularized the saying that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” and the death of Chinese dialects, or what I know intimately to be languages, makes this statement all the more relevant in my daily existence. Though my sense of grammar in Taishanese is innate, I have the vocabulary of a 5-year-old. There are no textbooks I can buy, or online classes to take. The more time I spend away from home, the more our language flickers into something strained and foreign. And if the flame goes out, what do I have left?
The University of Michigan offers more Asian languages than I originally thought, from Japanese to Tagalog, Bengali, Urdu and more. However, the description of the Chinese program on the LSA website always struck me the wrong way. The following lines sit at the top of the page: “Chinese is spoken by over 1.2 billion people, making it the most widely spoken language in the world!” and “China plays a major role in world affairs. As China has opened up to the West, there are growing opportunities for employment in all areas. So China is important for your career.”
I caution against relating a language’s intrinsic value to its economic or political importance.
I used to use that same capitalist mindset as an excuse whenever my mom would chide me for only speaking English at home as a child. I’d tell her no one else cares about Taishanese, so it didn’t even matter. I never thought of her, or the rest of my family. I only thought of the belittling laughter of my classmates after my teachers asked me to pronounce my parents’ names, the way the Walmart pharmacist shouted at my grandpa when I couldn’t translate fast enough or the backhanded praise of “You’re so good at English, Sara,” or “I never expected someone like you to be so good at writing, Sara,” which I received endlessly. I was acting out of a desperate need to conform, of the shame and resentment built up from every microaggression against my family’s accented English. I wish I could take it all back. I wonder what the rest of my family thought watching our unbalanced game — my parents would use our native language, and I’d only ever reciprocate in English.
In my youth, my family stood over me like immovable idols, like nothing could scratch the steel sheen of their strength. But as I age, so do they. Silver hairs and sun-touched wrinkles grace the complexions of my loved ones in a way I can no longer avoid. And yet, no matter how many times I’ve ungratefully pushed my culture and my kin away, they’ve always stayed.
We visited my grandmother on my dad’s side after my high school graduation. She had been too sick to attend but wanted to congratulate me all the same. The baby of the family was finally going to college, and I would close the chapter on the first generation of formally educated kids. I still remember one of the last things she said to me. “Wah, hou lek nui! Ngin-ngin hou sek ni, ni ee-tui ma?” Grandma loves you, you know that?
My dad’s mother died of cancer last summer, slowly and painfully. We watched her body wither away over the blooming months, and every insecurity or qualm I had about speaking Taishanese vanished out of necessity. In those moments, nothing was more important than telling my grandma I loved her, in her own language, before she passed.
All of those years I spent rejecting my own culture have planted me in the illusion of impasse; I’ve lost so much of this dying language that it feels impossible to ever return. But it’s not. I will cup the flame with my palms, and shield our fire from any storm until no amount of shame or embarrassment will ever triumph over the necessity to connect. If I let it, I admit defeat to everything and everyone that has ever wanted my family to fail. I still want to learn Mandarin and Cantonese on my own, not because I should, or because not knowing them makes me any less Chinese, but because I like learning languages. In the meantime, I bless my mother’s patience for all of my questions, translation requests and impromptu Taishanese lessons, and if anyone knows someone looking to get their hands on a copy of “Integrated Chinese 4th Edition, Volume 1,” please, I beg you, let me know.
MiC Columnist Sara Wong can be reached at sarawong@umich.edu.