It all begins with my heritage. I’ve yet to confirm with one of the many DNA tests now flooding the market, but it’s pretty safe to say that I’m ethnically very close to ~50% Chinese / ~50% Irish. Or, as my sister and I dubbed it, 100% Chirish.

You wouldn’t guess it though based on appearance; you also wouldn’t be the first. In the mid 90s at a local grocery store, strangers even made the mistake that my mom was our nanny as she scoured the aisles with two fair-skinned, freckled, brown haired munchkins in tow. Of course, the same person never made the same mistake after she gave them some gentle… words of advice.

Despite never “forcing" the more distinct Chinese culture onto us, in her typical let them learn for themselves way, I remember how she still subtly carried aspects of it seamlessly into our American lives: the world’s best delicacies often on the dinner table (don't take my word, take Momofuku Chef David Chang's on the perfection that is Chinese food), a focus on fiscal responsibility (even if the compound interest on my savings back then can barely afford a coffee today), a deep focus on education, money reliably gifted annually in red envelopes by older relatives, etc.

Truth be told, I was blessed to enjoy my life as a “melting pot” - one with many Chinese flavors added along the way. But if there’s one key ingredient I regretted never being added to the pot, it definitely had to be fluency in Mandarin (i.e., Chinese / the national language of China and Taiwan).

Not being able to speak it never had an impact on me day-to-day, especially given my mom's perfect English. But the same can’t be said for conversations with other relatives like my grandmother, let alone any of my living great grandparents at the time. Maybe some readers can relate - having a relative who smothers your tiny body with hugs but with whom you were never able to break past the surface levels of “I’m good. How are you?”

It's a tough pill to swallow when some of the most meaningful relationships in life never pierce beyond the surface levels of cordiality; while gestures suffice for the basics, they're hardly enough to maintain the flow of family history.

At some point, I had enough of that. Enough of having richer conversations with friends (let alone strangers) than I could have with my own grandmother. Enough of losing history. Enough of not being able to communicate even the simplest of concepts.  

(Of course, ordering off the secret menus in Chinese restaurants would also be a plus)

My family, always supportive of my interests, did their best to foster the language in me at that point:

• We tried speaking it at home. But let’s just say my dad's superpower isn’t learning languages, aside from “I love you”, “thank you, and “it’s time to eat” (this is also why it wasn’t spoken in the household when I was in my most formative days). Compound this with my mom working as a flight attendant, and the constant stimulation necessary to cultivate linguistics just wasn’t there.
• We purchased some materials for me to self-study. But let’s also just say most materials had a big gap between the most basics of fundamentals and the subsequent intermediate levels (to be fair, this is still a problem today in my opinion). This was also before the internet, so there was no Duolingo, no prevalence of entertaining Chinese media now available to consume, no forums for online exchange, and no quick search digital dictionaries.
• We also tried sending me to Sunday school to learn the language. I actually made the most progress here but still stalled in progressing beyond the basics. The infrequency of the lessons led to disconnects on a week to week basis, which unfortunately resulted in significant repetition of the same material every class.

So at 18, after years of hitting the same walls, I was still illiterate. It’d actually be generous to say illiterate though because that implies I could at least speak and understand spoken Mandarin.

I couldn’t. My great-grandparent’s English was basically my level of Mandarin at the time.

At the end of this time in Taiwan, I'm happy to say I came away at least more eloquent than a toddler. It’d be pushing it to go beyond middle school though…but I’ll let you be the judge of that with some artifacts of the time:

ESSAYS

Writings crafted at the time published by ICLP. My formal writings degraded since...but I like to think the improvements in informal texting offset that.

• 看偶像劇對學語言是否有好處 / The Benefits of Watching Drama Series for Language Learners
• ‍人類發展對動物社會階級制度的影響 / Human Development's Effect on Animal Social Structure

‍GRADUATION PRESENTATION‍

I cringe watching this video now and hearing some of the strange habits I had at the time (e.g., exaggerated 4th tones), but celebrating life means reveling in its failures and successes. Plenty of smiles to accompany the grimaces as I rewatch this.

• 那些日子，我們一起學的中文 / Those Days We All Studied Chinese Together

As for the conversations with my grandmother, no doubt there are still rough patches but the dialogues are worlds apart from the one’s in my youth. I even have to feign misinterpreting vocabulary at times, lest she craftily investigate too deeply about relationship statuses and family gossip...

The journey’s still far from over though. In fact, it may never end as a great friend who's shared much of my experience learning Mandarin put it, "the more you know the more you realize you’ll never be native...just too much depth to this damn language.”

...Challenge accepted.

‍