Blog | A Language Autobiography (Picking up my First Chinese Novel)
- 6 mins
Very recently, I had picked up my very first Chinese novel, a work called “我不喜歡這世界，我只喜歡你” (translated to mean: “I don’t like this world, I only like you” ), by the author Qiao Yi. The book is an autobiography of sorts, written as many small stories about the everyday life of the author compiled together into a book- the fact that the work is written in Chinese had at first discouraged me, but my friends were able to convince me to start reading. My Chinese has never been at a high enough level for me to be able to read through a dense paragraph without stopping to look a word up at least once or twice. Unlike English, written Chinese is not a phonetic language, and each character needs to be individually identified by memory in order to read written text in the language. This means that though I have good listening and speaking comprehension of the language, my reading and writing abilities lagged a little behind.
I spent the first six years of my life in Taiwan, a country in which the dominant language was Chinese, and had grown up speaking the Mandarin dialect, as most children come to learn their first language. I was first exposed to the English in my kindergarten class, where I learned the bare basics of the language. I could not put the letters from A through to Z into context of anything in my Chinese-speaking life, like I could with skills like running and counting; this “English” was stored in my brain as information that was only ever used in class.
I was culturally uprooted when my family immigrated to Canada, a place where it seemed cold all the time and the people spoke in words that I did not understand. Thinking back, if I were to be put in the same position today, to be suddenly immersed in a completely foreign world, I would feel at least nervous, if not outright terrified. Perhaps due to my childhood naïvety, I only remember the excitement I had felt to try and understand all the new people I met, and I survived in the new environment- in my own way. Through a combination of the random bits of English vocabulary I had learned back in Taiwan and universal methods of communication (hand signals, facial expressions, etc.), the younger me managed to happily attend school and even make friends in spite of the language barrier. Looking back, I had never once questioned my English language ability, even when I could barely get a coherent string of words, let alone a full sentence out. As I spent more and more time in Canada, my English began slowly improving as I inched towards bilingualism.
My parents have always known that it was possible for me to slowly lose my native tongue growing up in a country where the people primarily spoke English. It is not uncommon to see Asian Americans in the area who have long since forgotten their first language. With time, the opportunities for me to speak Mandarin outside of home had indeed dwindled to almost non-existent as I spent more time away from my family. Afraid that the Mandarin-speaking part of my brain would slowly deteriorate to nothing with lack of use, my parents established the rule that Mandarin was the only language that was allowed to be spoken at home, and in another effort to keep me from forgetting the Chinese language, they also enrolled me in a twice-a-week Mandarin school. This provided me with another opportunity to speak my mother tongue on a regular basis. It was at the Mandarin school that I learned the basics of reading and writing Chinese characters, continuing on from what I had learned in Taiwan up until the move to Canada. Though my parents’ efforts did not go to waste, my English was still improving at a much faster rate.
As I neared the end of my elementary years, I discovered the joy of reading when I picked up the first Harry Potter novel on a whim. It was like nothing I had experienced before- to have the level of language ability to be able to smoothly (for the most part) read through text without having to spend the time struggling to remember the meaning of each individual word. Reading English was fun now that I did not have to think so much about the action of reading itself, and this allowed me to be able to actually enjoy a book for the story it conveyed. I began to borrow stacks of children’s novels from the library and devour them one after another every recess, lunch, and in any free time I had after school. Thinking back now, I seemed to have spent an unhealthy amount of time sitting inside with a book… but it was at this period of my life that I began to pick up on new vocabulary and grammar rules at a much faster pace. My love of reading still follows me to the present day, though I don’t spend nearly as much time as I once did with my head buried in a book. (I have a long to-be-read list I only hope to ever reach the end of.)
As of today, my grasp of the English language is much better than that of Chinese, in both spoken and written aspects- a fact still somewhat peculiar to me given the complete reversal of how well my mastery of the two languages compared to each other so many years ago. I ended up loving the Chinese book I picked up, and while it may have taken me a bit longer to read than I would have read an English work, I enjoyed it tremendously. The stories were short and sweet, and this made the book perfect to pick up when I had little bits of time in between classes and during my frequent bus commutes. My avoidance of reading large blocks of Chinese text had always been slightly irrational, but it was having the confidence to begin (and finish) this book that had truly shown me that I really had nothing to be afraid of. I am already looking for my next Chinese novel- it feels as if there is so much literary territory that has now opened up to me, and I can’t wait to explore it!
Until next time,
Amber
Amber Hsu
Senior studying English and Biochemistry at the UW