Language Loss and Found (Kind Of)
As a child, I despised going to Chinese school. The short drive from home to Gunn High School (which I would find depressive in its own right come ninth grade) was no stranger to my morose gazes out the window and melodramatic sighs peppered between grumbles to my dad. I never really understood the point of the single-character flashcards I was forced to shuttle around for a semester, the booklets my parents needed to sign off on each week, and those absolutely inane basketball and train word games I had to play. I staunchly believed I had much better things to do with my copious amounts of free time than the assigned work—like lying about my age on Wizard101 or knocking off yet another Warriors book from the list—as I just could not understand how acquiring Chinese as a second language was useful enough to justify the hours spent suffering.
Even when I grew older and became comparably more aware of the truth to my parents’ once-platitudinous assurances that I would thank them one day, I didn’t come close to realizing just how right they were. Consequently, the effort I put into learning and maintaining the four lingual pillars of Mandarin waned slowly but surely up until I took the AP Chinese test in sophomore year of high school, after which it dropped precipitously into virtual nonexistence. I couldn’t tell you what sort of untenable, near-delusional conviction I harbored that made me believe I didn’t need to work to keep what I’d cultivated over the course of 11 or so years, but I firmly held on to it. I was almost certain that having my parents speak to me in their native tongue and replying in a hodgepodge of Chinglish would be all I needed—which was, in retrospect, quite bold for someone who could hardly hold her own in China while at the height of her Mandarin ability.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, going about language retention in this way did not work anywhere near as well as I’d presumed. I was slow to notice the atrophy at first, and I lived in blissful ignorance as my grasp on my second language silently loosened. However, once I began catching the harsh American accent that would break through every so often (and eventually far too often), as well as the frequency with which I had to ask my mom to give me a live reading of the articles she sent over WeChat, I couldn’t deny my regression even if I tried. While younger me hardly would have cared, the realization that I’d lost so much of my ability to speak, read, and write Chinese was an upsetting one. It came with genuine fear of drifting away from my culture, a heaping, bitter dose of chagrin for allowing myself to be so neglectful, and anxiety regarding just how much higher the barrier between my grandparents and me stood. Even while my day-to-day life generally didn’t require much Chinese aptitude, my lack of ability threatened to make this an immutable reality, and that in and of itself was an alarming prospect.
As much as I moaned and groaned about being bad at Chinese whenever it was germane to conversation, I hardly ever attempted to do anything about it; call it laziness, call it a lack of commitment, call it what you want—I just didn’t try, and it showed. After years of idleness, however, I was finally shocked into action after one fateful night last semester: some of my housemates and I were discussing how few of us remembered much of anything when it came to writing Chinese (“It’s only because we use pinyin [spelling characters out phonetically] all the time!”), and it was right then and there I discovered that I’d even forgotten the order of the strokes needed to construct my Chinese name. The fact I no longer possessed the muscle memory to recreate three characters I’d scribbled down so many times in my life was really the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, leading to a watershed-type moment wherein I silently vowed to genuinely attempt a change.
Unfortunately, it turned out that given my woefully packed schedule and indecision about where to start, said change was constrained to watching China’s version of “The Voice” with my housemates and my parents during the school year and the summer, respectively. Would I say that this is the apex of linguistic training? Not in the slightest! Quite frankly, the thought of one of her students turning to such measures would probably make Ma Liping recoil in thinly-veiled disgust, but she doesn’t have to know. Despite how underwhelming this might seem, I can say for certain that the simple act of exposing myself to more Chinese and pestering my friend Eric—whose humbleness fails to mask his fluency—and my parents to translate phrases actually helps me improve. I look at it as a small step in the right direction: I’m not pursuing anything close to mastery at this point in time, and my main goal is to keep my capabilities from decaying to figurative dust.
With all of that, though, it would be disingenuous of me to omit how I still do shirk the goals I’ve set and to pretend that I’ve found myself on a solid path toward fixing my problems. Even though watching an episode a week of a TV show designed to be entertaining should be easy, in the face of competing responsibilities and wants, it’s often easier to reshuffle my priorities and forget how deeply I desire to improve my Chinese. I’ve learned so many times over that commitment is hard when the learning curve is steep and the only person you have to answer to is yourself, and I’ve been shouldering the weight of my disappointment all semester because of it. However, while I could look at my behavioral patterns, shake my head, and come to the conclusion that I’m a complete lost cause when it comes to chasing down my second language, I would rather do something else: using this article to keep me accountable, I promise on this public forum that I will put more heart and persistence into this goal, because it’s clearly worth the effort.
And you all can hold me to it.
