Why Don’t You Speak Your Mother Tongue
There is an old saying in China “Lao Xiang Jian Lao Xiang, Liang Yan Lei Wang Wang,” which means how pleasant it is to meet countrymen in a foreign country. As an international student, after coming to US, I live in an environment that most people around me are speaking English or Spanish. To communicate with others, I have to speak English all the time although it is my second language. However, whenever I am hanging with my Chinese friends, I definitely speak Chinese with them, and I will do so when I find somebody who I just meet is also a Chinese speaker because this will make me feel simple and easy.
One day, when I was taking an Uber in Santa Barbara, a strange thing happend when I was trying to chat with the Uber driver. After reserving an Uber, I checked the profile of my Uber driver through the App, and I found that this driver has an Asian face and also Chinese name. I reasonably think he is a Chinese, so I used my mother language for greeting after getting into the car. However, the driver greet back to me in English in stead of using Chinese. At the beginning, I considered him as an American Born Chinese who is not able to speak my mother language or not good at it, so I started chatting with him in English.
Nevertheless, during our conversation, he told me that he was in China for twenty years before he came to America. I suddenly grew curiosity on why he didn’t speak his mother tongue with me when we both are Chinese speakers. Finally, I asked him this question curiously, and I used English to do so in order to show my respect to him. He told me that he knew I am a international student when he saw me at the first time, but he didn’t want to speak our mother language with me because he knew Chinese is my comfortable zone, and many international students from China like to stay in that comfortable zone where all the fellows speak a language which they are familiar with, and they can’t speak English fluently after four years in college. He also told me that he spoke English with his friends too when he firstly came to this country in order to practice his English, which made his language skill progress rapidly, and I should also step out of my comfortable zone to improve my English and get into the local environment as much as possible.
