Mother Tongue

Before I came over to New York, a professor advised us exchange students that we would have to modify the way we spoke so that we could be understood easily.

So I brushed up on my English by watching Youtube tutorials on American (for practical reasons), Irish (to dazzle and charm) and er other-ethnic-group accents (so that I could tell whether the guy chasing me in a back alley wants my wallet or wants my body... not that it would change how fast I would be running).

4 Youtube tutorials and 80 House / Heroes / SATC episodes later, I was pretty confident that my faux American accent was polished enough. This was a good thing, for upon coming here I blended in pretty quickly, and never really felt left out.

That is, I blended in well with the English-speaking world. Not, it seems, with the Mandarin-speaking world here. I mean, seriously, who goes to the US for exchange and expects the cohort to be made up of 35% Mainland Chinese?

The beginning was the worst. Most of the Chinese students came up to me speaking in heavily-accented Mandarin, and were rightly stunned when they discovered my Mandarin was halting. "Your English is better than your Mandarin?" they would say. In Mandarin. I could hear my ancestors writhing in their graves in shame.

Yes, the shame! I knew how my friends must have perceived me - I must have looked like a Japanese who hasn't heard of Origami, or a Brazilian who never watched football, or a RI boy who didn't know how to charm the socks off girls. It struck me then how language is such a distinguishing hallmark of heritage.

Yet one learns fastest when one is thrown into the deep end. My conversations were like this last August:

朋友：喂， 你选了哪些科目？选到你想要的吗？
Me: 我... er... 很幸运， 学校给了我... ok look this is more painful for me than for you. I got Securities and Patents, which is probably 安全科目 and 不可以偷用我的东西科目. Just kill me.

For a while I continued speaking English with them, but things got to a head in one of my study groups. There were 2 other Taiwanese, and whenever the debate got too heated the 2 of them would switch to Mandarin, and then revert to English so I wouldn't feel left out. It occurred to me then that I had to cut the excuses and just practice my friggin mother tongue.

I figured that since there's about 0.8 seconds of lag time required for translation of my very English thoughts, I would take the initiative of greeting my friends in Mandarin. Then, in the time that they opened the conversation proper, I would have time to prepare my thoughts. This strategy, however, saw mixed results:

Me: 你们好！哇， 今天风和日丽，乌云满天！好久没见， 光阴似箭！
朋友：... 你是不是生病了？

Obviously they weren't buying it. After perusing a few self-help books on making friends, I figured that I needed to bring up a common topic, something which would clearly show that I was one of them:

Me: 同志们！毛主席万岁！台湾抢回来了吗？
ex-朋友：...　我们是来自台湾的。

There's a happy ending to all this, despite what my Chinese teachers fervently believe. Just last week, I bumped into a Chinese friend, and it was only after we parted ways did I realize that our entire conversation was in Mandarin. Apparently, my past few months of practice have done me some good.

Of course, my journey is hardly over. I've got years of practice and immersion ahead of me before I will fully appreciate my Chinese heritage / identity, but hey, 千里迢迢的路是一只脚开始的.