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