Preview: Chinese Lessons
I meet with Alicia, my study partner, every Sunday on Zoom. She’s from Kansas and talks with a slight Midwestern drawl, but her speech sharpens when we practice Chinese. She lived in China and Taiwan. She drills me, the way her teachers in China drilled her, mercilessly, until I get it right.
“Zhe ge needs to flow like molasses,” she reminds me, the syllables lolling together.
“Shi!” she commands the sharp staccato of the fourth tone.
Every so often, she interrupts our exercises to exclaim, “I’m so mad at your dad! How come he didn’t teach you as a kid?”
“We could have avoided all of this if you just taught me as a kid.”
I adjust the phone against my shoulder, careful to keep the cord from moving the Mandarin worksheets spread across my desk. These conversations to check my homework with my dad are part of my routines—like visiting the farmer’s market in Amherst Center on weekend mornings, or listening to Selected Shorts after my writing workshops on Tuesday night—as well as the regular reminder that, if only he had spoken to me in Chinese as a baby, I wouldn’t need to invest these valuable college hours in studying Chinese.
“我 知道,” my dad says. “I know.”
I learn how to write about cultural identity. How stories shape us; how the layout of words on a page can create an experience for a reader. I learn the simple grammar patterns and sophisticated characters in Mandarin. I learn to question the checklist—what does ‘real’ mean when it comes to your heritage, and who sets the rules?
When I write a play with other half-Asian kids about being half-Asian, we notice that those of us who have Chinese mothers are bilingual, those of us with Chinese fathers are not. I hadn’t considered until then that maybe there were reasons why my dad didn’t speak to me in Chinese. Maybe he had to prioritize English, keep it in the front of his mind, while he ran his business. Maybe he felt pressured to keep up with his native English-speaking peers. Maybe it was one of the demands of raising a family in a country you were not born in. Maybe it wasn’t helpful or kind of me to constantly remind him of what he should have done different, as though he didn’t try.
On Sunday mornings during elementary school, after we cleared the dishes from breakfast, my dad set up the kitchen table for Chinese lessons for me and Andy. He had a calligraphy set with bamboo brushes and a tablet of ink we had to mix with water in a slate well. He taught us how to listen, speak, read, and write the radicals, the ancient building blocks of Chinese arranged in metaphors for modern meaning.
We barely finished preparing the ink before we were crying and fighting. Every week, I issued the same frustrated plea—“Just send us to Chinese school. That’s what the other [i.e. real] Chinese kids do.”
It’s too much to explain to Alicia, especially in the middle of our practice session. I tell her what my dad told me, “I know.”
To read the full version of “Chinese Lessons’” and access my library of short stories, craft notes, and e-books, join my story subscription program.