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…
Read the full article here