When I was thirteen, by accident I heard a pleasant voice of a woman talking in a non-Chinese tongue. It was on the brick-sized transistor short wave radio, a rare gift for my brother and me from our father. Wow, such a foreign tongue existed?! I was shocked beyond belief. It ignited my insatiable curiosity and lit up my spirit. What kind of language was that? Who spoke it? Where were these people living on earth? I couldn’t stop wondering but had to keep it to myself because I knew no one in my blue-collar dirt yard could answer my questions.
At age fourteen, when I was finally allowed to start my middle school after the Cultural Revolution shut down schools, burned books, beat teachers and principals and murdered many, I learned my first English sentence: Long Live Chairman Mao!
The English sentences in my textbook were the usual violent Communist political jargon, translated and taught to me by my native Chinese teachers. But I fell in love with the language itself all the same. By simply manipulating my tongue in different ways, I could speak a foreign language! It was so refreshing. A brand-new world opened up for me and granted me a magical new identity.
At home, my parents were convinced that my middle younger brother was the brightest, and, of course, my youngest brother was just as bright, they said. But my parents never mentioned me, despite my all-time highest grades. Whenever I made a mistake doing my chores cooking or cleaning, my father would yell that I was dumb like an elm tree stump, and useless like the air valve on the bicycle tires — air in and air out, that was all I was good for.
The English language came to my young darkened life like a ray of bright shining light. Thanks to my photographic memory and parrot-like imitating ability, I could memorize everything my teacher taught in class, even the long English song, The Internationale, translated by China’s dearest Communist Big Brother, the Soviet Union.
But neither my native Chinese language nor the English words in political jargon taught me how to express my thoughts, love, or feelings. Individual thoughts, wants or needs were forbidden in my growing up years. Every child was taught in kindergarten to sing our undying loyalty to Chairman Mao, the rising sun of the East. Love was a dirty word for the masses. It was reserved only for Mao, the savior of the Chinese people.
At age seventeen, after American President Nixon’s visit to China and thawing the Sino-U.S. cold war, I wandered into the very first foreign language bookstore in downtown Taiyuan city, and discovered a finest book, English 900.
The wonderful book was a McMillan print and imported from outside China. I had never seen such a beautiful book! The cover was the prettiest shining blue color, its pages delicate pure snow white. I couldn’t put the book down. Without hesitation, I paid 3.50 Chinese dollars yuan ($0.50 USD), my allowance of three and a half months.
I had to hide my treasured book, English 900,under my pillow, my only private space in the two bare-walled rooms with no running water for my family of five. One day I forgot to tuck it away. My father saw it on my bed. He exploded, yelling at me for being stupid wasting such huge amount of money on a “useless” book. At the risk of being beaten, I boldly, for the first time, lied to him that I’d borrowed it from my classmate in school.
How I loved the content of English 900. Not a single one of the 900 English sentences were screaming political slogans. Instead, they sounded so human. It was all about friendly greetings, politely asking each other’s names, their families, friends and the weather. It made my heart feel warm and comforted.
At age eighteen, I clutched my precious English 900to my chest sitting on a stack of bricks in the dirt yard and mourning my dead future. No high school graduate was allowed to go on to college. Everyone was to be sent down hundreds of miles away to become a peasant and toil in the cornfields for at least three years.
At age twenty-seven, I was granted a once-in-a-lifetime chance by the government to compete and earn my B.A. degree in Beijing, China. That was when I heard for the first time how American English was spoken by my American professors.
It was my English skills that lifted me out of the misery of totalitarian China.
For decades to come, I never stopped striving to improve my English skills, as a high school teacher and now a writer, the same way I keep improving my cooking skills. These two skills make me feel useful in life.
Listening, speaking, reading and writing English, it is a lifelong learning process. There’s always something new for me to discover and learn.
Over the years, I’ve conquered the written language more than I can say about my spoken English.
For writing is more forgiving. It allows me unlimited opportunity to practice at my own pace, reading other people’s writing as good writing models, and putting into practice what I’ve studied thoroughly and memorized by heart: the grammatical rules of the sentences structure, the sixteen verb tenses along with a long list of irregular verbs (go, went, gone), and the irregular plural forms for the nouns (bookshelf, bookshelves), etc. As long as I’m willing to work hard, I can keep refining my writing to make my words shine on paper, touch hearts, bring smiles, and attract the eyeballs of publishers.
My endeavor to conquer spoken English, however, is still an uphill battle. I rest in disappointment that I would never be able to speak English flawlessly like a native speaker who was born into the language. It’s impossible because I started learning English older and did not have the environment to hear how the words were pronounced but memorize the spellings and meanings.
Conversing in English with the locals demands spontaneity. No time to hesitate or think. It’s hit or miss. No “grace periods” to practice beforehand as I do in writing. Whatever words tumble out of my mouth become final, like the arrow flying off the bow. You can’t take them back, even when I instantly realized I must’ve just offended someone by clumsily and hastily grabbing a pair of wrong words out of my not-so-plush English word bag! Ai ya ya …
Chinese and English languages are not even distant relatives. Each looks and sounds drastically different from the other. Instead of being composed of alphabetical letters, Chinese words were square characters made up of variously shaped tiny lines and sticks. And they were evolved from ancient pictures all the way back to the caveman age.
For examples, a person or people: “人”,the symbol of two legs walking; female: “女”，the symbol of two legs crossed; and, country: “ 國”,the symbol of borders with Great Walls as the frame with people, soldiers and weapons living inside.
While there’s just one written form of Chinese, there are hundreds of dialects in spoken Chinese. And they all sound throaty andchoppy, like corn kernels popping, compared to the soft, wavy sing-song tone in American English, like the lulling ocean waves gently and leisurely crashing onshore. Massive numbers of single English words are multi-syllabled, whileeach Chinese word is single-syllabled. For one example, the three-syllabled single English word “education” is two separate individual words combined in Chinese: 教育.And each Chinese word is always pronounced equally in length and emphasis, like solders marching to the rhythm of drumbeats.
And we all know how the English sentence: I haven’t seen you for a long timewas “chopped” into the comically entertaining “Chinglish”: Long Time No See!
It’s universal that some things from your native language just won’t go away but stick around for life just to mess with your second language, no matter how hard you try to adapt and assimilate yourself into the new language and culture. All because you started learning your second language after passing the prime age of a young child. I still tend to forget to drag out the “L” sound in the middle of a word, as in water vs. Walter!
And the pronunciation of my own name, Jing, got me every time. The way I say it always causes confusion to a pair of American ears, because the Shanxi dialect I was born into has no difference in the ending sounds of “-in” and “-ing.”
This happens all the time even after living in America the past thirty-one years:
“What did you say your name is, Jean?”
And, worse, when my sense of inadequacy makes me feel uneasy or nervous, my choppy Chinese will creep up to shorten the sing song wavy English vowels when I try to tell people my full name, Jing Li:
“Is it Jeanie?”
Ugh!
So, to cope, I’ve since created a context when introducing my name to people:
“Jing, as in ‘Jingle Bells!’
Then I witness the enlightened smiling face.
It’s been a fun ice breaker!
Leave a Reply