Speaking in Tongues

Speaking in Tongues

BY AMY HO

Staff Blogger
Monday, April 22, 2013

Well, this isn’t so bad, I mused as I scrawled characters on the whiteboard. The idea of being a substitute teacher for a beginner Mandarin class had intimidated me at first, but these seven-year-olds were surprisingly easy to handle. Maybe I was wrong to dislike children; maybe not all of them were annoying.

“Teeeeaaaaaacherrrrrrrrr, I have a questionnnnnnnn!!” Or maybe I was wrong about being wrong.

“Jiǎng zhōngwén,” I reminded the little girl. (What was her name again? Lucy? Catherine?) “Ask me again in Chinese.”

Little-girl-whose-name-I-did-not-know ignored my reproach and continued in an obnoxiously nasally voice, “How do you write shétou? Tongue?”

I was teaching the unit on body parts and facial features, and had written the characters for liǎn (face), shǒu (hands), jiǎo (feet), zuǐba (mouth), yǎnjīng (eyes), bízi (nose), and ěrduō (ears) on the board. Shétou, however, was not up there; it hadn’t been on the syllabus that had acted as my lifeline for the first half of the lesson. Chinese had been my first language—I still sounded almost like a native Beijing speaker—and I had spent years’ worth of Saturday afternoons at one Chinese school or another. Unfortunately, without practice, my reading and writing capabilities had faded to the point where I could no longer recall how to write a word as simple as shétou.

Scrambling for time, I set the dry erase marker down, taking an unnecessary amount of time to ensure that it was safely set in a groove, before turning around, crossing my arms over the bottom of my ribs, and leaning back nonchalantly against the whiteboard. And then I pulled a teacher trick: “How do you think you write it?”

The little girl stared at me incredulously. “I don’t know,” she retorted.

Teacher trick number two: “Can anyone show her” (I still couldn’t remember her name) “how to write shétou?”

By this point, I was losing my credibility and my control over the class. “Don’t you know? Aren’t you the teacher?” little Tony heckled.

I desperately tried to imagine how the ancient Chinese would have written the characters. Since all Chinese characters started out as pictograms, such basic ones as the ones for “tongue” must have been simple. Apparently, though, not simple enough for me to remember.

Just as I was about to give up and admit my ignorance to a bunch of seven-year-olds, Sarah’s ears perked up. “It’s recess!” she shouted, scrambling out of her chair and the room before I even registered the faint clanging of the recess bell from the hallway outside. Much more interested in drawing on the board and racing through the halls than in watching their teacher make a fool of herself, the kids barreled past me, cheering. I cheered too, as I rifled through the nearest Chinese dictionary.

I’d always regarded myself as bilingual, maybe even multilingual, if you count four years of French classes. But now, I was quickly coming to the realization that some of my seven-year-old students might know more Chinese than I did. Family friends regularly praise me on my ability to speak like a native—“Barely a hint of an accent!” “Were you raised in China?” “I’m impressed you know how to use those terms correctly!”—but I can’t even read the Chinese translation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and my writing level is on par with that of a Chinese kindergartener, if not lower. At the same time, it’s easier for me to count and do math in Chinese than in English; I know most fruits and vegetables by their Chinese names rather than their English ones; and I often slip into Chinese when I’m trying to describe something unclear.

No, I am not as fluent in Chinese as I am in English, but that doesn’t necessarily disqualify me from being considered bilingual. The nameless seven-year-old girl and I are both native speakers of English and Mandarin. But is she somehow more bilingual than I am if she’s better at Mandarin? We have the Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK) and the Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to rank our fluency in those languages, but outside of establishing an objective standard, these tests may not even mean much. On the HSK, I scored a Level 6, which according to my score report is “the minimum level required by the Ministry of Education for a candidate to enter college or university in China as an undergraduate student in the field of literature, history and traditional Chinese medicine.” But I don’t want to study literature, history or traditional Chinese medicine in China. I just want to be able to communicate with people.

The first time I realized that I couldn’t communicate with everyone was when I was four. I heard my brother and his friend Michael playing outside and decided to join them. However, while I could hear the sounds they were making, I couldn’t figure out what the sounds meant. I didn’t know what English was, so I decided to just copy them. “Goo hah glek bun! Yo nem po bek gloosh?”

“Dude… Is your sister speaking Chinese?” Michael was bemused. “What is she saying?”

After my parents learned about that episode, I was put into English as a Second Language at school. Four years later, my teachers recommended me for a more advanced English class. Although I spoke only Mandarin at home—my parents couldn’t speak English well, and my grandparents couldn’t speak it at all—and went to Chinese school on Saturdays, my Mandarin didn’t improve nearly as quickly as my English did. As a four-year-old just returned from living in China for two years, my proficiency in Mandarin was equal to that of four-year-olds in China. By the time I was ten, however, my understanding of the language was noticeably inferior to that of my Chinese peers. While my English skills advanced rapidly, my Chinese flatlined: I hadn’t forgotten how to speak, read, or write any of the Chinese that I’d learned, but I hadn’t really learned any more, either.

It felt like I was failing my heritage—like I wasn’t “Chinese” enough.

While I was far from the only Chinese American in my community, when pointing me out in a crowd, people still referred to me as “that Chinese girl,” a label that I embraced proudly. I strutted around in my qípáo while handing out “lucky pennies” on Chinese New Year, ate my dumpling lunch with chopsticks, and bragged about taking martial arts classes.

In China, however, my limited Chinese vocabulary set me apart as American: I couldn’t read newspapers, maps, or basic road signs, and I couldn’t understand any of the various dialects spoken in China. When people spoke to me in a Beijing dialect, it felt like I was four again, standing in the street trying to make sense of the strange sounds coming out of my brother’s mouth. Technically, they were speaking in my native tongue, but it wasn’t any tongue I could understand. My knowledge of the Chinese language hadn’t grown with me, and my first-grade level of literacy marked me as an American—an outsider trying to learn an insider’s language.

In America, meanwhile, my rudimentary Chinese convinced the Chinese school board that I should be able to teach basic Mandarin. I was an insider, teaching young outsiders my language. Halfway through the class, however, I was still trying to prove—to the school, to the kids, to myself—that yes, I was “Chinese” enough to teach Mandarin.

The kids straggled back into the classroom once the bell clanged again for the end of recess. Little-girl-whose-name-I-still-didn’t-know raised her hand, mouth already opening to formulate the question. I pointed to the whiteboard. “Class, this is how you write shétou.” As the class obediently copied down the two characters, I gave a sigh of relief. Maybe I wasn’t bilingual enough to pass as a native or survive on my own in China, but maybe I was bilingual enough to teach these kids first grade Mandarin!

“Teaaaaaaacherrrrrrrr, how do you write eyebrow? Méimáo?”

Or maybe not.