S03E06 - More Than Words

Transcript

Jay Ooi

Have you ever wanted to learn your mother tongue properly? And not just speaking, but reading and writing too. Stay tuned - there’s a great story coming up in today’s episode. 

Hello and welcome to Shoes Off, stories about Asian Australian culture.

A lot of us who grew up here probably didn’t learn our mother tongue properly, and maybe we regret it as an adult. Well today I’m bringing you the story of one person’s journey of learning Chinese again without being forced to by his parents. Here’s More Than Words by Michael Liang.

Michael Liang

Lee gor meh yi si. What does this mean? This is what I found myself asking my grandparents a lot growing up. They only speak Cantonese, and my cantonese was fairly rudimentary, relegated to things like ‘yes I like this dish’, ‘I did very well in that exam’, ‘thank you, I’m full now’. I often only understand 50% of what my grandparents say, so when they use words I don’t know, I would ask Lee gor meh yi si.

They usually then explain the meaning, but their explanation is then filled with more words I don’t know, so I ask again, gum lee gor me yi si - so what does that mean.

It becomes a rabbit hole of “what does this mean” until either I piece together the puzzle or, more likely, I just give up and smile dumbly.

Things got lost in translation, not just with my grandparents, but with my parents as well. Up until 22 years old, I never learnt to read or write Chinese, so my interactions with my parents were always done in spoken Cantonese or Chinglish, so what often happened was either I couldn’t express myself properly in Cantonese or they couldn’t understand what I was trying to saying in English and the same thing would happen when they were speaking to me.

“So when I was growing up how was our communication?” I asked my mum.

When you were growing up I used Chinese with you because I didn’t want you to forget Chinese. Mostly you would understand what we were saying but sometimes if you didn’t understand you would use English to communicate with us. I would mostly use Chinese to explain to you but if I couldn’t do it I would use English.

Looking back now, my Cantonese is probably one of the reasons why I’m not as close to my grandparents on my dad’s side. I was raised by my mum’s side, so my dad’s side wasn't around as much. I’d see them every now and then, but because of this language barrier, we never really developed the depth of understanding that I otherwise could if I spoke Chinese well. What I knew about their life was pretty much that they were doctors, they moved to Australia for my parents and my grandad didn’t like Xi An.

That’s 22 years of conversation summarised in 3 facts.

This language barrier was a struggle and with me being brought up in a different culture as well; we had lots of weird clashes.

I remember when I was around 17 years old, I was asked by one of my friends, “how I was?” And I was shocked because I had no idea how to answer that - I’d never been asked that by my family before.

Then I realised that’s standard courtesy in the outside world - I remember thinking to myself, ‘Why have my parents never asked me this?’ Did they not care about me? At that point I felt like all they wanted from me was good grades for mianzi to boast to their friends and for me to be a hao shun zai or “good kid” but they didn’t really care about my mental wellbeing.

“Mum, growing up, why did you never ask me about my feelings?”

I did ask you but didn’t you notice? Every time you get off school or come back from anywhere, I would ask you how was your day? How was your sport? How was class? What did you do today? Did the teacher say anything about you? What did you eat for lunch? Did it fill you? What did you eat? How was your studies? These are the types of things I would ask you. 

I don’t know why, but this isn’t the answer I expected from my mum. She thought she was expressing concern for me, but I took that as helicopter parenting and making sure my grades were good.

I just didn't ask you if you were happy or not happy?

“What if I wasn’t happy?”

If you weren’t happy then you would’ve told me why you’re not happy. You would’ve told me I got punished by my teacher, the teacher scolded me, or I had a fight with one of my classmates. Have you fought with your classmates?

“No I haven't.”

I remember there was one time you told me when you were lining up suddenly there was a fight between two other classmates. I wouldn’t have known this if you didn’t tell me right? So this is our type of communication. But I don’t need to ask you how you’re feeling today, so this is how our typical conversations were like.

She’s right. This is a typical conversation. From my mum’s perspective, this was how I would tell her things are bad, but from my perspective, there were so many other things that I wouldn’t and couldn’t talk to her about because it felt like there wasn’t that channel of communication. Like when I was in year 11, there was a 6 month period where I had big philosophical questions that gave me anxiety, but there’s no way I could talk to my mum about this.

So it wasn’t just a language barrier in terms of vocabulary, I think our expectations of how we use language was also very different. 

So growing up, mutual understanding was difficult, and not just with my parents.

This all changed when I moved to China last year. 

When I think about why I moved, the trigger event was really random. I got accepted to this entrepreneurship program in the states and there was a venture capitalist talking who really liked China and talked about China as this amazing place where there’s unmanned supermarkets, mobile payments and all sorts of crazy new age stuff.

I wanted to work in tech and so without really knowing too much past that, I decided that yes I was going to do my 6 months study abroad in China - which ended up turning into a year.

But this move to China was a bit more than just business and career. As cliched as it sounds, a part of me wanted to connect back to my cultural roots, and to hopefully fix up the Chinese that had been holding me back for all my life.

I had done a year of Saturday Chinese school as a kid, and 5 years of Chinese in high school - which on paper is 6 years of language training. But when I landed, I remembered almost none of the characters or sentence structures and could probably only speak at the level of a 4 year old. I was angry at myself for forgetting everything after the exams and wasting so many years of my life on something that turned out to be nothing.

Before I got into a taxi from the airport, I remember I had to scrawl down my dorm address in the worst characters you’ve ever seen because I knew I would have no hope of communicating to the taxi driver if I didn’t write it all down whilst I still had wifi.

And so I begun learning Chinese. First with scribbling down the characters of that note, then with a broken conversation with that same taxi driver, and then at restaurants, street signs, with private teachers and anyone who could speak Chinese.

I formally studied Chinese close to 6 hours a week for that year. And every time I didn’t know something I would return to the same phrase I had asked all my life.

The Mandarin version of lee gor meh yisi - Zhe ge shi shenme yisi - “what does this mean” but this time, what changed was, I tried hard to understand what came back.

When people ask me why I tried so hard, I’m a little bit conflicted. Part of it was because I wanted to be able to order drinks without looking like an idiot and another part was realising the extent of my lack of knowledge about my Chinese culture that I wanted to fill as many of those gaps as possible.

There’s an idea in psychology called the Dunning Kruger effect where people upon knowing a little bit about something think they know a lot about it because they don’t know what they don’t know, so when your knowledge is rather low, you’re overconfident. 

That’s where I was prior to coming to China. I thought I knew all about my culture and language but when I learnt more about it I started to know what I didn’t know, and with that, my confidence and sense of identity plummeted.

“With regards to China as a country and Chinese as a language, how did my perspective change before and after going to China?”

Your change was rather big. So before you went to shanghai, before you learnt Chinese, you pretty much didn’t like China. And from a young age even though we travelled there a couple of times, you still didn’t like China. You didn’t like the food there, you weren’t present, so after you were around 10 years old we never took you back to China. But this time when you went to Shanghai by yourself, you saw China’s lifestyle convenience and strength as a country. Then you slowly began to like China, so your innate motivation to learn Chinese became a lot higher. In the past, no matter how hard I pulled you, I couldn’t get you to learn it. Now you will learn of your own desire. This is the difference. So now you rather like China because you were living there for a year. 

“Do you think this change is weird?”

Of course not. China is not a bad place. Dad and I were born there ourselves. It’s not a bad place… Lots of people when they go to China and live there for a little while, they will also like China. It’s just that on the outside, when you haven’t had any personal experience with China, you really don’t understand what it’s like. You’ll hear lots of people on the outside talking about what it’s like, but when you experience it for yourself, it’s not like what other people say it is. Everything is okay there.

And she’s right, I really do like China, and I became business fluent in Chinese within the year and started a business called Culturestride to help Asian Westerners like me learn Chinese and pursue opportunities in Asia.

Coming back home now, my improved Chinese definitely has helped with communicating with my family and there are significantly less situations where I’m lost for words.

Don’t know the word in canto? No problem, switch to Mando.

One of the coolest things is that I’m finally about to take a seat at the table of my family wechat group. My one has 11 members in it, including my immediate family, grandparents on both sides, uncles and aunties and their respective families.

That used to be the only reason I had WeChat installed and I used to put that thing on mute because it was in Chinese and I didn’t understand anything in there.

But now? I can finally figure out what they’re talking about and add to the conversation - which honestly feels amazing.

I’m also able to text my grandparents now, and my popo and gonggong - grandparents on my mum’s side - were also first to hear about my new girlfriend who I met in Shanghai. We have an ongoing conversation where my grandma will send me articles and check up on me in the low touch way that your friends would do to you.

It feels incredible to deepen that relationship and share dreams, thoughts and perspectives with the people that raised me - which is worth all the effort spent learning the language in itself.

And another benefit of spending time in China? I also feel like I see my parents’ and grandparents’ worldview a little better now.

Previously I would give my parents a bit of a hard time about some of the things they do in public, specifically one that I get irritated at is how they treat waiters in restaurants. I used to always feel the way they speak to waiters was very dismissive and a little bit rude, but when I was living in China, I suddenly realised that everyone does the same thing here.

It’s standard practice just like asking “how are you?” is in Western culture. My parents’ behaviours and expectations are just brought over from that society in the same way that I am doing that to them with mine.

So my thinking, subject to more information, is that we’re all really just products of our environment - and I should probably cut my parents a little of slack.

Watching my parents and grandparents do the same things like talk to waiters now sometimes still creates the same emotional response but, now, the outputted action is less vindictive and hopefully more accepting.

I think most of us are burnt in highschool, university or Chinese school with traditional methods of teaching Chinese that makes everyone feel like they’re not a languages person. But I have a hunch now that everyone can do it, it’s just a function of how and why you’re learning that makes you either love or hate it.

For context, I hated and bottomed my high school Chinese class, but here I am, now business fluent, so I believe this can be done by anyone.

Throughout this journey of relearning my language, I’ve learnt that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge until we appreciate the limitations of our own perspective and the stories that we believe are undeniably true. Language and culture are self perpetuating frameworks of thought that by no fault of the person themselves (ie my parents and myself) have been absorbed in. But for me the opportunity to step outside of my own born-context has been an amazing journey that’s brought me closer to my family, identity and created belonging where there was none before.

Jay Ooi

This episode of Shoes Off was written by Michael Liang, and was edited, produced and mixed by me, Jay Ooi.

Special thanks to Michael Liang for all the hard work in putting this story together.

In the show notes for this episode at shoesoff.net you can find his business Culturestride so you can pick up Chinese just like he did.

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Thanks, and catch you next episode.

Guests

Michael Liang from Culturestride - learn Mandarin and Cantonese from native speakers