4 Tips To Teach Your Baby Cantonese (When You’re Not Fluent Yourself)

I want to preserve the language for my kids.

Photo by Minnie Zhou on Unsplash

I’m a Chinese-Canadian mom (you can read more about my journey of accepting my culture here).

As much as I’ve been open to learning and adopting the Chinese way of doing things, it’s been hard balancing what I think is important to preserve in my family versus “I’ll just do it the Canadian way.”

There are some Chinese practices that I just don’t embrace.

For instance, my daughter should not wear white, blue, or black hair accessories because of a Chinese superstition that it’s associated with bad luck/death.

Okay, those clips/hair ties go missing all the time so I get them in bulk and there are a bunch of blue, black, and white ones. I’m not going to waste half the package because of a silly belief.

But mainly I believe bad luck is a necessary component of life; it makes me adapt, becoming more resilient with whatever life throws at me.

I can’t control these things and it’s better that I accept that I can’t control them because then when shitty things happen, I don’t live in regret, thinking I could have somehow prevented it from happening (you know, like by more wearing red).