Table of Contents
1. The Public: Ranch 99
2. The Private: Bathroom Break
3. The Clash: Opium Arguments
Ranch 99
Step in, there’s that funky old smell that’s a bit like fish but not really. Another step and you see the rickety columns of plastic things, the grotesquely colorful bags of food.
You’re here to get three simple ingredients for a Chinese rice ball dessert that you love to eat but can’t really make. But the shopping cart and its broken fourth wheel suggest you take your sweet time getting what you need. So you meander through the labyrinth of shelves, each aisle bringing you gentle wonder and joy. Rice wine filling small plastic containers, red wrinkled Chinese sausages, Vitasoy in its wide little cartons, taro and matcha flavored things, persimmons galore, those plastic tubs you used to take baths in—it’s all here, and it’s all wonderful. You imagine lying on top of the jackfruits like they’re acupuncture mats, or serenading the wide-eyed fish crowded into tanks. Anything to express the warm feelings welling up in your chest.
Is this what a “motherland” feels like—this fluorescent cavern of a supermarket? It’s Chinese enough to make you nostalgic for another life, with enough English that you function smoothly in this artificially plentiful world. Suddenly the words you learned as a baby let you buy red wine and meat bones, and the waterfalls of English in your mind are dammed by the strange syntax on Sharpie-d signs. You can’t help but laugh out loud in the middle of the snack aisle before continuing on.
(As you stroll, you catch the sounds of Spanish from a cashier or worker. And you understand most of it. It’s familiar too, not in the same way as Chinese, but still reassuring. You’ve heard it enough and you know you exist in its sidelines, a language you’re comfortable to not call your own.)
The best part of all: that resplendent feeling of normalcy. Of shopping, of strolling, of simply existing. Of naturalizing something that’s usually exceptional—or maybe just foreign. You’re honored that the sample lady speaks to you in Mandarin by default; that and her offering of cut-up dumplings mark you as her own. You imagine pointing at the dried squid and duck eggs, saying “Remember these?” to your friends in a way you’ve only ever heard white people say. And you’re at peace with the other people here. You have some strange understanding with the first-generation immigrants speaking rapid-fire Shanghainese and Cantonese, the American Born Chinese kids like you drunk on the remnants of their heritage, even the occasional black or white person who grew up in the area. It’s absolutely absurd that you feel most yourself here, yet it’s quite nice to bask in.
Bathroom Break
On the toilet. Seat’s not cold anymore.
Bored. Look at the shampoo bottle for some lukewarm entertainment.
English at the top. “Apply to wet hair. Lather. Rinse.” Easy-peasy, done reading in a half-second.
Spanish next. “Aplicar al cabello húmedo. Hacer espuma. Enjugar.” Most words make sense. Is this what the sweet sensation of bilingualism feels like?
Then French. “Appliquer sur cheveuz…” Similar to Spanish, except fancy and jumbled and also je no speak le French. Skip.
Is that German? Skip.
Chinese. Unsurprised yet annoyed yet a little proud to find it here. “头发打湿后使用，洗出 泡沫后冲净.” The kindergarten words? Easy. Anything else—what the hell? Five years of Chinese school lead to this one tragedy. Avert eyes from the mocking lines of characters.
Admit defeat. Settle back into toilet seat. Alas, bested by a shampoo bottle...
Opium Arguments
This is what I learned in Chinese school: The First Opium War (1839-1842) was fought between China and Great Britain. The British East India Company had been illegally smuggling opium into China, causing droves of Chinese citizens to become addicted. Some Chinese people, out of desperation, turned to selling family members to fuel their addiction. Chinese officials saw opium’s effects and began destroying British opium supplies, to which Britain responded with military force. But by then, many Chinese men were too weak to fight, and thus the British prevailed.
My mom yells at me in English now.
Or at least, it’s mostly in English. There’s some Chinese here and there, smooth and fast, like bullets sizzling through cold air. “It’s up to you, you can do 你要做的事，但是 don’t expect me to support your tuition!” Wow, she’s so bilingual, my traitorous liberal-arts-educated mind thinks, she’s doing some really stunning intrasentential code-switching right now.
But snarky comments aside, I’m well aware of that searing, needles-in-your-throat feeling: shame. We used to quarantine ourselves against English in this household, so why has it now infiltrated our intimate spaces? I know I’m partly to blame. My grandpa once said, “You’re only fluent in a language if you can argue in it,” and my mom and I both know I can’t argue in Chinese. Thus the subtext of my mom’s argument reads: Not only am I disappointed with you for failing in the Chinese standards of success, but you are incapable of understanding this in Chinese.
Being bilingual for me has never been about coexistence. It’s about dominance and culture clash and succumbing to English—that eager, predatory thing seeping through my family. My mom got hooked on it first. “Do you know what it takes to be bilingual?” She’d ask me. “Every morning at 6 AM I put on headphones and listened to English, 然后我去 dining hall eat breakfast. Then during classes I put them away, and once I was done, 我把 headphones put on again.” Her habits paid off. After 20 years, she had English in the palm of her hand at her prestigious Silicon Valley job. (Of course, English got me more easily. Two hours of Chinese school a week was no match against 8 hours of “English school” a day.)
Twenty years later, English has played a giant trick on us all. It promised us social capital and employment and the American Dream—and it promised, above all, that it was just a language. How much hurt could a language do? But my mom didn’t know that English is also Western ideology incarnate. She may have tried to wean me on Chinese, but eventually English scabbed over the wounds of Chinese words bleeding out of my skin. Now we fight over her Chinese traditions and my Western thoughts, all while being dependent on English to communicate. And even when we do use Chinglish, it is just a bandage: it delays but can’t stop me from losing bits and pieces of myself, my bones remaining but my flesh wasting away.
This argument, for example. I’m sitting on my bed, a small child once more, watching cups and vases tremble from my mom’s words. She’s speaking in mostly English but her argument’s more Chinese than anything. She’s talking about my future her immigration why I’ve failed as her next generation why I need to sacrifice now to reap the rewards later why I need to be practical why there’s not enough resources in the world for everyone why I can’t buy into Pomona because the happiness it sells is for white people why the things I think are important are actually just American—
There’s stones dropping down into my gut now, causing tears to rise up. The cruelest part of this whole argument: no matter what language she uses, I’ll remember this argument—and her—in English anyway.
About the author
Kristine Chang (Pomona '21) is a second-generation Chinese-Taiwanese American from the Bay Area.
Description
I like languages and linguistics, and I especially love seeing how both play into the performance and maintenance of identity. These essays are my attempts to explore my relationship with the languages I speak (English, Mandarin, Spanish) and to especially reflect on my contradictory relationship with Mandarin—how it simultaneously validates and shames my Chinese heritage, how it finds me in my most vulnerable and public spaces, and how it resists yet submits to my inevitable assimilation to Western culture.
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