I always struggle when I think about what my native language is.
If you met me, you would think I was born, bred, and raised in the United States, which is 99% true. I am a native English speaker. English is my best language.
I was born in America. I teach English, in America, and have passed all my licensing exams for teaching English. I write articles in English.
You get the point. Even though I have a Chinese surname, English is very much my first language, and I consider it my native language. My Chinese has a horrible American, New York accent. I can’t really read and write in Chinese well. When I communicate with Chinese members of my family, I need to use the pronunciation keyboard, which is a sign of lower proficiency in the language than an average speaker.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a “native speaker” as “a person who learned to speak the language of the place where he or she was born as a child.” For me, that means I’m a native English speaker.
However, English was not my first language. My parents spoke Chinese at home, and my first word was “mom” in Chinese.
When I was two to four years old, I moved to China to live with my grandparents. My parents could not afford to take care of me as a poor immigrant family n the United States.
Thus, I learned Chinese. I didn’t know any English. I interacted with my cousins, uncles, aunts, and more. Chinese was my native language at the time, until one day.
All I remember from being four years old was being on a plane and suddenly being in a house in New York. I remember not recognizing my parents, thinking they were strangers, and telling them I wanted to go home, back to my grandparents in China.
Little did I know, this new country, America, would be my home the rest of my life.
. . .
I recently listened to a podcast about Luis Grijalva, an elite runner in the U.S. who is a Guatemalan citizen. Grijalva is a DACA recipient, and he moved to the United States when he was one year old. He learned Spanish first and did not know any English.
Then, all of a sudden, his language strengths reversed. He learned English during pre-K, after being exposed to peers who also spoke English. Now, he also has an American accent while speaking Spanish, and needs to think carefully before he gives interviews in Spanish.
I resonate with Grijalva’s experience. I don’t remember an exact moment where my English speaking skills grew stronger than my Chinese speaking skills. I just remember being around a lot of people who only spoke English, and not having any idea what they were saying.
All of a sudden, I learned English. I will attribute much of my progress to pre-K. Exposure to peers who only spoke English was key — not even being given the option to speak Chinese to communicate was also key.
One time, when I was six years old, I distinctly remember lagging behind in Chinese. I all of a sudden didn’t understand what a family friend was saying when they visited, and I started speaking by default in English instead of Chinese to everyone besides my parents.
By eight, I was much stronger in English than Chinese. I couldn’t even read and write in Chinese. While I was much stronger in reading and writing in English, I still lagged behind my peers because of my slow start. Some school employees considered putting me in an English as a Second Language program, but fortunately, I caught up to be average at English.
In the meantime, my parents wanted me to go to Chinese school. It’s hard to describe what Chinese school is to someone who didn’t go to one, but it was Saturday school to hone Chinese skills. For ABCs (American-born Chinese people), it was a means of staying in touch with our culture and language.
It was incredibly tedious learning basic skills. There was a ton of homework where we had to read Chinese stories and write Chinese characters in books at least 10 times.
I absolutely hated it. I wanted more time with my American peers, not all these Chinese people. First of all, I thought everyone was a nerd. Everyone seemed to be a prodigy at the piano, which I had no interest in. They all also seemed to excel at school.
I wanted to be a very different kind of Chinese, so I brought my Game Boy to Chinese school. I played games in Chinese school classes and generally played around too much with my friends.
Above all, I didn’t enjoy the fact that I was forced to be there by my parents. I would have rather done anything else with that time.
Needless to say, with that mindset, I didn’t make much progress with my Chinese literacy. With my Chinese friends, we almost never spoke Chinese except when we wanted to gossip about someone right in front of them. Otherwise, we very intentionally only spoke English with each other.
We wanted to assimilate, to fit in more as Americans, not stand out as “others.”
. . .
Now, I regret not progressing further in Chinese school. I regret not becoming a better reader and writer in Chinese. I regret my desire to fit in with my American peers and my reluctance to speak Chinese hurt my ability to be literate in the language.
An education is still an education, and I wish I was more receptive to what my teachers were trying to do. At times, I was openly disrespectful. I never disrespected a teacher in my primary school, but I once cussed out a Chinese school teacher, which I now strongly regret. I was getting a free bilingual education, and I wasted it.
I struggle with whether I can really say I’m “bilingual” now. I can speak two languages. I’m fluent in English and Chinese. However, I’m not literate in English in Chinese. I write much better in Spanish than Chinese, which may have been an intentional choice on my part, but also a subconscious rejection of my native heritage during a time I was trying to find my identity among my American, English-speaking peers.
I don’t necessarily hate all elements of my Chinese culture and tradition, but I am working on taking away the positive elements while working on discarding the toxic ones. No, I won’t force my child to get straight A’s or become a doctor. I think I can do away with that part of my culture, but I do want them to at least be exposed a little bit to Chinese, to see if they have interest in learning it.
I want my fiancee and my family to visit China. But I regret to say I would need a guide or a family member to help us get around. I regret that I would have no idea how to read street signs or know how to get around.
I essentially forgot my first language. Yeah, I can still speak it, but it’s a very elementary level of speaking. According to Sophie Hardach at BBC, forgetting your first language is common, especially because two systems compete with each other once you learn another language. Linguist Monika Schmid researches language attrition, which is the loss of a native language.
Younger speakers are particularly vulnerable. Before the age of 12, brains are flexible, and language skills are very vulnerable to change. Some internationally adopted nine-year-olds have completely forgotten their native language if they’re removed from their country of origin.
But few people completely forget their first language. Bilingual speakers often operate in a state of “linguistic hybrid,” which is a constant switch between two languages. It is a back and forth that makes it “harder for your brain to stay on a single linguistic track when required,” and this makes mastery of a first language hard, especially if around other native speakers who understand both languages.
This hybrid state was exemplified in my household. While I defaulted to Chinese to speak to my parents, I could always substitute an English word if I didn’t know it in Chinese. As an example, if I wanted to say “I need my jacket” in Chinese but didn’t know how to say jacket, I could say “我要我的 jacket.”
I know this as broken English. But having this option of default weakened my Chinese. While I couldn’t substitute in a Chinese word when I didn’t know how to say something in English, having that substitution option in Chinese gave me an English crutch since everyone I spoke Chinese to knew English anyway.
Regardless, I don’t really have any incentive to improve my Chinese. It’s not like I’m going to live in China at any point in my life, and I can get by conversationally. The lesson is humans adapt and adapt quickly. If I had to move to China, I would learn street signs relatively quickly, and my Chinese would improve.
But because of the unique situations of many first-generation children of immigrants, we are stuck in this state of linguistic hybrid. Now, in hindsight, I very much respect my friends who have become literate in Chinese and are as skilled in Chinese as they are in English.
It’s hard to be bilingual when the dominant language doesn’t require the use of your first language.
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This post was previously published on Ryan Fan’s blog.
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