I Failed Chinese as a Chinese Person

I never took Chinese in my traditional K-12 education or in college. I took advanced Spanish classes throughout. But I did take Chinese classes the two times a child or teenager never wants to be in school: on Saturdays and during the summer.

It was informally just known as Chinese school among myself and my Chinese friends and peers who would be forced to go to Chinese school. I was one of the worst students. To this day, there’s a part of me that wishes I took it more seriously since I’m fluent in Chinese and can speak and understand it, but my reading and writing may be on a Kindergarten or first-grade level, at best. Chinese is the only language I can communicate with my family in, so, you know, unless I want to be Google Translating everything, I need to know some basics.

I understood why my immigrant Chinese parents wanted me to go to Chinese school. What immigrant Chinese parent wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t want their first-generation child to know their culture and native language? I think a big part of it, however, was that all their friends’ kids were also in Chinese school, and in the Chinese immigrant community, there’s a certain FOMO and “needing to keep up” aspect where you’re always comparing yourself to your friends and needing to one-up them.

It is extremely common for Chinese parents to compare their kids and try to prove whose kids are better accomplished. I hated this growing up and found it particularly unhealthy when parents would compare who scored higher on the SAT or AP tests, but I will say the one time it made me feel good about myself is when my parents would brag to their friends about me as a runner. It was the one thing all the other Chinese kids didn’t do or weren’t nearly as good at. I don’t quite remember what my dad said on one occasion, but it was something along the lines of “you think your kid is special? My son runs a mile in 4 minutes” (my personal record in high school was a 4:36, which I think is slow, but I appreciated the sentiment).

Chinese school, however, was just not it for me. There are a plethora of reasons. I have documented my aversion and mixed and complex relationship with my culture, particularly the image, appearance, and saving face elements of the culture. Other people might like or fetishize my culture from the outside, but I lived it and experienced the conflict and incompatibility of placating Asian cultural values in the West.

I think it would have been fine if I grew up in China, but I felt deeply all the pains of a family trying to control life well into adulthood, a deeply patriarchal family structure in a changing and more equal world, an outdated and complete denial of mental illness at times, and the prioritization of family reputation above everything.

Regardless, another reason I wasn’t good at Chinese school is because I didn’t mesh that much with its pedagogy. In Chinese school, when they’re trying to teach you how to memorize how to write Chinese characters, you have a workbook where you try to drill and write the word 10–20 times. It would be a ton of homework with up to 50–100 characters. There was more homework in Chinese school than there was in actual school, and if I had to prioritize one, why wouldn’t I prioritize the one where I got grades that actually mattered?

I think if the stakes were higher, as in my having Chinese classes in my traditional K-12 education, I would have taken it more seriously. To be honest, I’m the type of person who always needs the stakes to be high and a sense of urgency. It’s a part of my ADHD, so if I was going to get a real D or F on my report card, I would have taken it a lot more seriously. My parents were also too busy to follow up on something they knew didn’t have material implications either.

One thing I did enjoy about Chinese school was seeing my Chinese peers and friends. There really weren’t a lot of other places I went where it was just Chinese people my age, per se, so that was kind of cool. We didn’t bond over the Chinese language as much as we would bond over Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, learning to play the piano, and Jackie Chan movies (occasionally). None of us spoke Chinese to each other. It would have been very awkward and we spoke English because, well, it’s our preferred language.

Now in adulthood, I have mixed feelings about not taking Chinese school seriously. Of course, it would have been very helpful to know the language and be able to read and write, and I could put it on my resume, of course. I could actually be able to read street signs in China and in Chinese areas of New York.

But I was a kid, with very complex feelings about my Chinese identity and just, unfortunately, more immersed in video games than in learning Chinese. A lot of other Chinese kids didn’t take Chinese school seriously. But a lot of kids did, and have those reading, writing, and speaking tools at their disposal.

So I would be remiss to say I’m better off. But it’s never too late to actually learn a language.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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