My Mother's Tongue

A handful of years ago, I spent a few hours in my basement one summer day when I was bored, rifling through some boxes of old schoolwork. Beneath the layers of dust, I found old projects from grade school and report cards. Being the keener that I was even at such a young age, I had kept report cards from as far back as senior and junior kindergarten. I was interested in what I was learning at the tender age of five and leafed through the sheets, tracking my progress at basics like drawing and counting past 1000 (I distinctly remember always being stuck at 999 - my best friend learned the words "one thousand" far before I did, and I was so jealous of that shiny gold star beside her name on the board). Scanning my teacher's comments, I read something that really, really struck me: "Her English is coming along very well." It took me a moment to absorb the significance of that statement. It hadn't ever, ever occurred to me that there was, in fact, one point in time when I did not know English. Seeing as it is my language of preference now, even over my mother tongue, I had completely forgotten that I was born into a family whose members did not know English and therefore raised me to speak only Cantonese for the first years of my life.

Though, you wouldn't know that now if you met me. Chinese (and its various dialects) is probably one of the most difficult languages to learn since it uses no alphabet and relies simply on the speaker to memorize thousands of characters. Which is probably one of the reasons I dropped out of Chinese school, being the brat that I could be at times. Although my cousins praise me on my level of English and how I have no trace of an accent and speak it with such clarity, I am thoroughly ashamed to say that I cannot read, nor write, Cantonese; I can only speak it, and brokenly so, with bad grammar and an English accent at that. When I speak with my parents on the phone, my roommates can always understand what we're talking about because there's so much English inserted into my Cantonese speech. I confidently check off that my mother tongue is something other than English when I fill out forms, but deep down, I feel like quite the disgrace knowing that I can't even communicate with some of my relatives in a language I was raised with.

Growing up with parents who never really learned English, I was pushed at an early age to get a steady grasp of it. My parents would make me 'practice' by ordering my own meals at McDonald's. I grew up answering the phone when non-family members called, and I read and translated my parents' mail. In fact, I still do things like that for them. And even now, after all these years, it humbles me every single time. Perhaps the huge role that English played in my life so early on led me to be as persnickety as I am when it comes to writing and diction and everything to do with the nuances of the language. I still maintain that English is, out of all the Latin-based languages, the most difficult to learn (and I feel that I can say that having studied French, Latin and Spanish).

Even having studied it in the various contexts of foriegn languages, literature, and sociology, the real significance and importance of language didn't hit me until just about a year and a half ago. My family and I were travelling in Asia and one day, my mother started speaking to a woman in a language I had never heard her speak before. I was completely in awe and expressed this to her as soon as the conversation was done.

"Mummy, what language was that? The one you just used?"
"What? Teocheow?"
"Yeah, I didn't know you spoke that. When did you learn it?"
"Oh your father and I have known it for years. We're not very good at speaking it, but we understand it all when it's spoken. When were in those refugee camps, there were people from all over, speaking all kinds of languages. We had to learn them if we were going to communicate with people. Not only that, when your father and I got married I had to learn his language too so I could understand what his family was saying about me."

My mum and dad know about (rather, at least) six different languages each. Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Teocheow, English, and the dialect that my dad's family speaks from the south of China. And I'd bet anything that they can understand more.

What struck me about that conversation with my mother is that she stressed a need to learn others' languages when she moved from place to place and when her situation and setting changed; and from what I understand, the world that I'm growing up in now, we stress a need for others to learn our language. This bothers me. What annoys me when I travel to non-English countries are the English speaking tourists always complain that there's no English around and that they wish there were other English speakers who they could speak English to, English English English. I get that it's nice to be able to talk to someone in your own language, I do, but for the love of goodness, step out of your self-centred little self and try some cultural sensitivity on for a change - it won't make you look fat, I promise.

When I was in Spain, I met a great number of Europeans and they all knew at least three languages, with most of them knowing four and some, five. In India, there are nearly as many languages as there are states (that's twenty-eight, plus seven territories). People learn them not because it's mandated in the education system, but because they want to, all for the sake of being able to communicate with others when and if they need to. Personally, I think it's a real shame that Canada is officially a bilingual country, but so little of the population actually knows enough French to get by (myself included). When I was in Morocco and Tunisia, I actually had to use my French, something I hadn't done in years and the extent to which it was broken disappointed me immensely and then made me decide to go to Quebec this summer to study it again.

I had to use my Spanish at work a couple of weeks ago. Two refugees from Mexico came in, looking for help on how to find accommodation for the night. They had been in the country for three days and needed a permanent place to sleep and live. One man knew very little English and the other, none at all. I'm not confident in saying that I can even speak Spanish anymore because four months without practice has deteriorated it into nothing but strings of nouns and unconjugated verbs. No one in the office remembered that I had learned it, so I could have easily hid in my little room at the end of the hall, but something in me knew that I couldn't do that. You should have seen their faces, when I said "Good day" to them. It wasn't really surprise, or even happiness. It was relief. I know that face well because I saw it on my parents so often. Whatever it is that I end up doing with the rest of my life, I want to see that face again and again. They came back into the office last week to thank me, but I wasn't in. The thought that they came back at all warms my heart.

I think about refugees a lot when I travel. Especially when it's to a place that is drastically different from home. I think about how I don't know the country very well, the culture, the customs, the language, the food, and I'm reminded of how my parents must have felt for the first few years that they lived in Canada, feeling the exact same things, every day, not knowing when it would end. One night in Egypt, we went to a restaurant where no one spoke English and had the hardest time trying to order food - it must have taken us at least a half hour to communicate what we wanted. I ended up getting quite choked up about it later on, not because it was difficult or frustrating, but because it showed me exactly how hard it was for my parents to simply live when they arrived in Canada. Despite the fact that I had no idea what was in the soup or what it was on my plate, I ate it all that night, grateful for getting something to eat, grateful for the experience, grateful for the reminder, grateful for being humbled down to the very soles of my feet, to the ends of my toes, to the very end of my soul. I've always craved culture shock when I travel - going to countries that share a similar culture to the one I live in doesn't interest me - and sometimes I wonder if I do this to be 'closer' to my parents, to experience and feel something that they dealt with for so long.

Both my mum and dad work in the manufacturing industry, automotive, to be specific. When they came to Canada, they had little knowledge of the language and no sellable skills except their own hard labour. They did a few years of odds and ends jobs and then settled down in factories. So when my father got a letter a few weeks ago telling him that he had been temporarily laid off, I had trouble keeping myself together because I knew how hard it would be for him, and my mum, to find him new work. I spoke with her on the phone a few days afterwards and she was right on the ball, saying that they were going to go to Manpower to see what they could find there. She was being extra careful with groceries too, waiting for the sales. She tells me stories of how little they once had, how everything fit into nine grocery bags that they slept beside on the floor. She reminds me of how poor they were, how sad it was, and how hard it sometimes still is.

I know, mummy, I know.

But she's resilient. And my dad is too. I've heard all sorts of stories that tell me they've gone through enough that they can deal with this now, and hope and know that things will be just fine.

That one sentence, Her English is coming along very well, brought a whole history through my head that afternoon. It reminded me that my mother tongue is indeed Cantonese and I need to get it back, that my first frame of reference came from being raised with refugee parents, that the stories that come from my Mother's tongue hold innumerable languages and invaluable lessons. That, despite being so different, not being able to speak Cantonese well, and not resembling my family in my actions and speech, I still am her daughter. That there was one point in time when we both did not know English, and everything was just fine.
3:24 pm

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Road Triiip To Mont Royal

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I went through my what-could-have-been-excruciating three hour accounting exam last night fairly breezily. I only stumbled on a few of the multiple choice questions and only had trouble with one of the long answer questions. I'm hoping I can get out of the class with an A-. Recognizing completely that an A- is a fabulous grade, I know that I really could have achieved a solid A if only I had focussed a little more and studied harder. However, what gave me reason to slack off during my nine-hour study/cram session was that I found out I got an A+ in my marketing class, which pulls my GPA up and gave me more slacking room when it came to my grade for accounting. Plus, I was in a computer lab for nine hours straight without any social interaction at all, and having only gotten up three times to go pee (that's an average of once every three hours!) I felt a little justified in taking that four hour break to read through almost the entire GMail chat conversation history I have with my ex-boyfriend. I have to say, when we weren't arguing or in pissy moods, we were pretty darn cute.

Speaking of my ex-boyfriend, he was pretty much jammed in my head all weekend because Oh, that's the suburb where he lives, and Oh, we went to the Biodome together, and Oh, we went shopping there, and Oh, that's where he took me to have nice crepes, and Oh, the last two times I've been here I was with him. Explanation...: I'm back at work today after four days off - two of them spent in Montreal and two of them spent in libraries and labs on campus. Not surprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed the former location far more, despite the nostalgic reminiscing. I took off on Friday night in the backseat of a two-door hatchback wrapped in a fleecey blanket, with a plethora of snackies at my feet and yelled "ROAAAD TRIIIIIP!!" much to the annoyance of my fellow car-mates about four times before we even got to the highway. It was a fun six hours (at least for me).

We didn't do much other than spend a lot of time in each other's company. When I think about it, we probably spent as much time in the car as we did in the hotel and outdoors in the actual city. The only typical touristy things we did were drive down to the Old Port and have a nice lunch in a cute little stone restaurant, and go to the Biodome where we saw the orange tamarinds, the colourful macaws, and the penguins (who put on quite the show, what with their super fast swimming and shooting penguin poop everywhere). We went shopping, had food, hung out at the hotel, watched French TV, and bounced around on the beds.

Our group was split perfectly into two mini-groups: girls and boys. So while the boys were outside having a smoke or going out to get more fast food, us girls had grand ol' quality girl time. For instance, we rolled up our shirts and compared our tummy flub (Clare can hide a pair of eyeglasses in hers!), checked out how stretchy our boobs were, and shared favourite positions (of the sexual kind). Yes, this is what girls talk about when boys aren't around. And then we flopped around on the bed. I am decidedly the least bouncy out of the three of us.

That night, we went to a club downtown called La Boom. Lemme tell you, it was a whole different kind of experience that I don't want again, ever. Truthfully, I haven't had my ass grabbed in a really long time, and while I liked it when it was done by someone I liked, I can't say that it's something that I miss, especially when done by a complete stranger in a setting like a crowded dance floor in a dimly lit club. So, I have to say that when it happened that night, I literally jumped and yelped and basically looked like an idiot because I was so frazzled at what actually just happened. The freaky thing was that it didn't just happen once, it happened about seventeen times that night. This is not to say that I have a nice ass - this is simply to say that the guys in that place were disgusting. It's not even like they made an effort to seek a nice ass out and chose me out of everyone there because they probably had been grabbing girls all night long and were going to continue to do so. In the most non-bragging way possible, I say honestly that we were swarmed by guys in there. At one point, when Tanya left to go to the washroom and Clare and I were left on the dance floor, a group of guys formed a circle around us and, well, ...I won't go into details, but let's just say that while neither her nor I were hurt, it was not a situation I'd ever want to be in again. I can't say the same for the other girls in there, but some of them definitely seemed to either like it, or expect it. I did neither.

My favourite part of our little jaunt out of province was this (and this probably says a lot more about me than I care to admit):
We were driving along the highway en route to home and Michael asked Tanya if she had ever done that thing where you yank your arm up and down at a truck driver to get them to honk their horn. She hadn't, not even as a child. Appalled, Michael noticed four big-rig trucks in the lane next to us and said that she had to try it, just once. With me for moral support in the backseat, we pulled up to the first truck and Tanya and I moved our arms up and down in the window, laughing, hoping that he'd honk. He took a look at us, and then continued looking straight ahead. Aww, boo, I thought. But then! He raised his hand, pushed a button twice and Honk Honked for us! We were elated and laughed and clapped with joy. Of course, there being four trucks in a row, I said that we had to see if we could get all four of them to honk for us. So we sped up, and up, and up, and caught every driver's eye with our enthusiasm and they all Honk Honked for us, all four in a row! Of course, by the time we got to the third one, he was probably expecting us, or else was wondering why the hell his fellow truck driving buddies were honking behind him. So that's that, my favourite part of the trip, giggling with utter girlish glee at the fact that we got four trucks on the highway to Honk Honk for us.

I left the trip with a thought from Tanya ringing pleasantly in my head: "If we were to all travel together, I (Tanya) would bring the candy, Clare would bring the granola, and you (Me) would bring the band-aids and the maps."

9:40 pm

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Can't Talk

Studying.

9:33 am

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

All Papers And No Food Makes Me Bitchy

I've been sitting in front of this computer for seven hours now and I can feel my spine starting to compress. I'm tired and hungry, no doubt, and incredibly frustrated that the paper I've been working on for the last two days still isn't finished. I'm soooo close. It's been an unfortunate afternoon - my concentration leaked out of my head a few hours ago and the lab has been busy and loud, filled with really, really annoying people.

Take, for instance, the super spastastic girl who sat beside me for the most of the day. Not only is she the loudest typer to ever exist on this planet (rather, the loudest keyboard masher on this planet), so also spread her stuff all over the place, and then proceeded to ruin my concentration every half-second with her unbelievably loud keyboard mashing. When she finally finished her paper, she asked for my student card because she had no idea where hers went and she needed to print the paper to hand in. In another building, across campus. It didn't occur to me until after she left with it that I probably should not have handed my ID with $100 on it over to some stranger who I didn't really like to go trotting off to do whatever they wished with it. I tell myself though, that if I were ever caught in that bind, that I would also really like some stranger to hand over their card too. Plus, she's paying me back, so it's no big deal. She eventually returns with it and proceeds to lie about how much money she used to print her paper (I checked my account online) and then tells me that she doesn't have her wallet either. I'm too irritated to even say anything, so I just tell her that it's fine, secretly waiting for her to offer me a cookie, or something. Nothing. She even packs up and leaves without saying bye. Excuse me, did I, or did I not just save your annoying, bony ass by letting you use my student card to print your term paper?

I'm going to go and get my own goddamn cookie, THANKS.

---
Update: 20 minutes later

You know that in addition to me, irony can be a bitch too, right?

The girl just walked into the lab and handed me a five dollar bill.

Mm, my foot sure does taste good.

5:09 pm

Saturday, December 01, 2007

You Know What

I love? Giving tours.

I'm really looking forward to? The rest of my life.

? My lips are dry and chapped from the winds and my skin feels like rice paper.

I'm doing tonight? Going clubbing in Toronto (finally)!

I'm doing right now? Working on a marketing plan for plastic claw covers for pets that scratch.

? I know what http stands for. I have no idea where I learned it.

? It's a beautiful day and I can't wait to head home, have a warm meal, and celebrate the 1st of December with my roomies and crappy advent calendar chocolate!

2:46 pm