Mother Tongue or Mother’s Tongue?
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with language. While I grew up in the deep south, I was born in Hunan Province, China. I was adopted by a white American family at the age of one and “immigrated” to the United States where I would spend the better part of my life. From the age of one to five I lived in Lancaster, South Carolina where the demographic was mainly black, white, and Amy. At this point I was fluent in the Southern Drawl and if you heard me before you saw me, you’d assume I was just another white kid on the playground. But people did see me, and they saw that I was different from them. One day I came home and asked my mother why no one else looked like me.
When I was in the middle of kindergarten, my family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina–the place where I really grew up. My mom wanted me to be in a more diverse area where I could hopefully encounter more Chinese, or at least Chinese-looking, people. I went to a public elementary school, but when it came time for me to go into middle school, my mom enrolled me in a private TK-12 school called Providence Day. My mother ensured that Providence Day would be good for me because they offered Mandarin. Mandarin? My heart was too broken over leaving all of my friends at public school to care about learning Mandarin. Why would I want to learn a language that no one in my family spoke? It didn’t matter really because when you’re 11 years old you don’t make decisions about your own education–your mother does.
And I am glad that she did. Over the years in school I would always get classmates that would ask me about Chinese or anything related to China because they saw me and assumed I knew. They assumed that I spoke my “mother tongue” at home and they assumed that I used chopsticks and ate Chinese food with a Chinese-American family. I felt obligated to know and ashamed for not knowing. I was starting to see that my mother made the right decision to put me in Chinese class after all.
Actually taking Chinese was a different story. Just like all the other white kids who assumed I was more Chinese than I actually was, my Chinese language teachers would treat me like Chinese students back in China. If you know me at all, you know that I love to talk. Unfortunately, in class I would be speaking too much English and not enough Chinese, and this often got me in trouble. In ninth grade I remember getting two detentions from my Chinese teacher because I talked too much. No other student got detentions, despite the fact that they talked just as much as me.
Nevertheless, I was in the accelerated Chinese track taking classes above my grade level. I also think this had to do with my assumed “Chinese-ness” because I don’t believe I was particularly better at Chinese than anyone else. In fact, a few other white students were in this track with me and it would drive me insane if they got a better grade. This has nothing to do with pleasing a tiger mom but everything to do with the fact that it would make me feel even less Chinese than I already did. I ended up making a huge leap to concur this insecurity and decided to study abroad in Beijing my entire junior year of high school.
I studied with a program called School Year Abroad (SYA), which–surprise–was a year long study abroad program that allowed me to live with a Chinese host family and take courses about Chinese history, literature, and politics. During this year my Chinese level increased exponentially, and I am still very close with my host family. When I was with SYA, a representative from NYU Shanghai came to our school. I remember thinking it was basically what I was already doing but on a larger scale. SYA was an American independent high school program in Beijing and NYU Shanghai was an American university in Shanghai. Same difference to me. I applied and was over the moon when I was accepted to NYU Shanghai’s class of 2020. I should note that I originally wanted to attend Middlebury because of its amazing language program, but when I was rejected I found myself scrambling and ultimately realizing that actually living in China would be the best option for me.
And it was and still is. Through NYU Shanghai I heard about a program called Princeton in Beijing. It’s also called Prison in Beijing because you spend three months over the summer only speaking Mandarin. That summer was probably the most difficult but rewarding experience of my entire life. Now I can’t say I am 100% fluent in Chinese, but I’ve come a long way from the 11 year old me who didn’t understand the value of moving to a different school, let alone another country, to learn a language.
