"Aller Anfang ist schwer." (All beginnings are hard.)
Readers respond to Michelle's essay on language learning, with an aside on divers in Jeju; plus events next Saturday and book club details
Hello dear readers!
We’ve been floored by the flood of messages to Michelle’s essay on language learning. You’ve written in with some profound meditations on love, identity, migration. We’ve collected a series of reader responses for you here.
We’ve been following the news of gun violence in the U.S. and like everyone, we were especially gutted by the story of the orphaned five-year-old who lost his little sister and parents in Allen, Texas. The prevalence of these incidents have left us speechless, although there’s so much more that could and should be said.
Meanwhile, the news occupying the general consciousness in Taiwan has also not been good. Though it certainly doesn’t match the scale and tragedy of mass shootings in America, a series of deaths related to public safety have left many people here outraged and in mourning. This week a migrant worker fell from a construction crane, where he had not been properly belted, and died. The next day a three-year-old child was hit and killed on a crosswalk. A couple days later, a beloved college professor who was a pioneer in Taiwanese indigenous legal theory and a leading human rights activist was killed. She wrote a famous open-letter to Xi Jinping, which we assigned to our students in 2019. She died when part of a crane from a construction-site crashed into the metro train that she was riding. The construction company has been responsible for ten deaths in the past five years. Despite this poor track record, the construction company—the second largest in Taiwan—has still been allowed to operate as normal.
We mourn alongside their loved ones. What angers us is that their deaths were totally preventable. They occurred amidst everyday acts of living in public: walking on a crosswalk, sitting on a metro. One of Taiwan’s great qualities, as a visiting scholar recently told us, is its extensive amounts of public space. Incidents like these tell us that we still have a long way to go in basic areas of ensuring safety within it. We’re going to dive into some of these issues and write about them in the future.
In the meantime, here are some reader responses.
A reader who prefers to remain anonymous wrote:
I have written and deleted this so many times. I’m still not sure how to express my thoughts about your insight that baby P. will soon be teaching you Mandarin. I feel myself thinking “awww” but also feeling tinges of sadness. I’m not sure about what exactly. Maybe the root of it is envy towards both P. and my husband. My husband is also the child of immigrants who speak Chinese, but he and his parents can speak English to each other. I’m in awe of their mature and mutually supportive conversations.
For me, there’s not only the generational and cultural difference between myself and my parents, but also a language gap that I can never bridge with them. Part of me wonders if our relationship would’ve been a lot better if we had been able to communicate better. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference! Even though you’re still learning Chinese, at least you’re learning—and it’s so good that Phoebe will be able to communicate with you.
I love your relationship with Albert’s mom. Like you, I’m also lucky to have a good relationship with my mother-in-law. Honestly, I can talk about more things with her than my mom.
I also wanted to share a funny tidbit. This morning my husband pointed to his notebook and asked if his handwriting looks like a kid’s handwriting; he’s taking Chinese classes. Turns out he had just read your post and it really resonated with him! Thank you for this, too: “If you think too hard about what you might never be able to do, you’ll fall into despair.” I have been in a rut lately and am a bit fretful and this is the reminder I need (please!).
Chitra Aiyar, who returned to law school in her late 40s:
This is exactly what I needed to read at this moment as I am studying for finals in tax law because I had the brilliant idea of going back to law school 20 years—technically, 19—after I graduated! I am so much older than everyone and I don’t understand things. (I was googling what it means to issue a debt instrument and what the hell a security is!) I came into learning about tax with zero background but total confidence/hubris that I am an excellent learner. Except … I apparently am not?!
Starting next Monday, I have four exams and I’m determined to do well. I feel ridiculous and I feel like I’m up against incredible odds. I send you lots of solidarity. This made me feel less alone at this moment, as I’m sitting in the library feeling so overwhelmed and questioning my decision to return to school and doubting my identity as a happy and fast learner.
Nobody here believes I’m 48 and it’s been so nice to be a student with peers. It reminds me how much I love learning, particularly in community, even though sometimes it makes me deeply miserable to not be understanding anything like debt instruments! I have a vague goal of going to work for the IRS and getting people excited about paying taxes because it’s essentially a giant giving circle; we put money in and services come out. There is this concept of fiscal citizenship, which means paying taxes as a civic duty. I feel very committed to it—although I am totally unclear as to who is going to pay me to do that!
JH Kim from California writes:
My husband subscribes to your newsletter and we loved your essay about your language learning journey, caring for your mother-in-law and daughter, and finding your place in a world where you’re no longer practicing law. It was so moving and beautiful. Thank you for sharing your story.
My husband's family is from Taiwan. He has also been learning Mandarin with our now-six year old daughter as a way to make sure our Chinese-Korean American kids remain connected to their Asian heritage. We also moved to be closer to his father due to health issues. But we only moved cities in the Bay Area. We’ve talked about what it would be like to move abroad and no longer be able to practice medicine—what we worked so hard to achieve here. We really admire you and your husband’s journey!
Our daughter goes to the same elementary school he attended, so that brings up all sorts of feelings for him, especially when he goes to volunteer and remembers being a student in the same classroom. Our daughter’s Mandarin is progressing; they have been working on it for three years and she’s probably surpassed him now with the help of our nanny who is from Taiwan. Our son who is three has less of an interest; he’s learned about 15 characters and is making slow progress. 😂 I figured Mandarin is much harder than Korean, so I’ve taught our daughter to read Korean in a more laid back way.
I have my own fraught relationship with my parents and culture but I’ve been trying to help my kids connect to their heritage since they will always be perceived as Asian (and somewhat othered) in America, even as third generation Asian Americans. My relationship with my parents is tricky. As they get older, I wish they could be more willing to have a more authentic relationship, but they find it hard to relate to me unless they are micromanaging my life—and that stopped long ago. Hence my fraught relationship with culture. But I grew up spending summers in Korea and have fond memories of my grandparents and relatives. Many of my relatives were divers and I hope to show my kids the haenyeo when we visit Jeju Island. My sister’s grave is also there—she died suddenly while serving with the Peace Corps. My daughter asks about her a lot, so I want to take her to the family burial site.
I admire your closeness and your relationship with your mother-in-law. I think it speaks to both of your magnanimity to one another, and I love that. Navigating in law relationships can be so sticky (I have so many stories). I am glad we can be near my in-laws to help them navigate things. His father recovered from stage 4 lymphoma, but continues to have medical issues; we were just at a doctor's visit today. I’m grateful we can be around, but honestly being a doctor makes us more anxious.
I’m looking forward to visiting Hualien later this summer. My husband has fond memories of volunteering at a Mennonite hospital there during college. He wants to take us all to show us a place that is nostalgic for him.
JH’s mention of haenyeo, a tradition involving mostly women divers, sent us down a rabbithole. It’s been a part of Korean culture for hundreds of years on Jeju Island. Women dive for mollusks, seaweed and other sea life. They dive without breathing equipment, holding breaths for minutes at a time. Here is a short Youtube video of one of the last women divers on Jeju:
We followed up with JH, and she replied:
People who initially migrated to Jeju were exiled from the mainland—mostly scholars who happened to be from an opposing party to the rulers. The men were incompetent at anything besides being scholars, so the women started diving to keep everyone fed and alive. My husband says he would’ve fit right in—he could read books all day, and I would dive. 😂
My grandmother was a diver to support her family. She would dive even when she was pregnant with my uncle. My grandfather traveled to look for work and eventually found a way for the whole family to immigrate to the US. My grandmother’s sister was a diver well into her late 70s. She passed recently of lung cancer.
Valerie, who is from Texas, currently in Taiwan, and soon to begin her own intensive Mandarin classes:
I laughed—Albert's quip over Michelle's quiz. And I cried (at your care and introspection) while reading, and my boyfriend was so confused, haha! Michelle, thank you so much for articulating such tender, vulnerable feelings. It seems like an immense joy to hold and be held by language and loved ones.
Carol 安安, a friend exploring her roots:
What an absolute treat it was to wake up to this today! As is usually the case with your newsletters, I am moved and deeply grateful for your words.
I burst out laughing so many times reading about your Mandarin language learning. I think I felt so many threads of familiarity in the absurdity of some of your interactions—it felt like a comedy set made just for me. My favorite line, "I replied that I was a person, too, but she seemed unconvinced," has so many layers in it, I'll be thinking about it for a while.
Your reflection about buying Charlotte's Web reminded me that a couple months ago I went and bought Reading with Patrick at an Eslite here ... also in Chinese! I had the very similar thought: "Maybe this will incentivize me to read it and learn a bunch of new vocabulary in Mandarin because it's Michelle's book!" I imagine you will not take any offense to it, but I barely finished the first page before feeling completely winded! Let me know if you ever come out with a bopomofo version. It is still on my bookshelf, and I've adopted the much more peaceful version of reading the book for now, which is practicing saying the title to myself when I notice it. One day, I will keep going and finish it.
My parents have also each chuckled at how much my self-taught-at 30-something-years-old characters look like a child's too. The moment I arrived in Taiwan, I felt a need to learn the characters of my favorite food items so I could easily recognize street stalls and menus. I've been practicing less and less as I've felt more comfortable and less of a full-blown imposter living here—interesting how that happens!
On the other hand, my project of learning Taiwanese has felt surprisingly separate from Mandarin. It's a project driven less out of basic survival here in Taiwan and more out of desperation and urgency. Though every interaction I have with a delighted older Taiwanese person when I mutter a basic phrase is heartening for me (boy, do I need that positive feedback to keep practicing!), it's a constant sign of how scarcely the language is used among younger people and how much work it takes to keep a language alive despite, despite, despite. I do have bouts of feverishly buying Taiwanese language textbooks or trying to rope new friends into taking this class with me, but it does sometimes feel lonely and tiring to remind myself this is worthwhile. I've held a couple of casual get-togethers my friend and I cheekily dubbed "TWang Hangs" where I've shared worksheets and books I've squirreled together in hopes of building a (primarily diasporic) community learning Taiwanese. Let me know if either of you would ever want to come join!
I also read the piece you wrote a couple years ago about Michelle's 奶奶 after she passed and am so glad to know more about her story and relationship to her. She sounded like the kind of person who could help you know yourself and see the world more fully because of how deeply she saw her own life. Thank you so much for the gift of her story from each of your perspectives.
Ben, a social scientist from Germany living as an expat in Taiwan, also replied. (Check out his great newsletter!)
I just read your newsletter. Thank you for the openness and vulnerability.
It also resonated a lot. I have started and abandoned learning Mandarin many times. As frustrating it is to not be part of the place I live, it is also painful how hard it is to get there. As there are no relatives or roots connecting me to the language, it is often much easier to just accept that it will stay foreign to me. Still, my job too used to be words, and I miss them a lot!
With that experience, I can only imagine how hard the tension is for you. Your determination is quite inspiring!
Hannah Callaway, author of The House in the Rue Saint-Fiacre: A Social History of Property in Revolutionary Paris (just out!), writes:
Thank you for this reflection on your life, I loved reading it. Your descriptions of learning a language and feeling stupid resonated so strongly with me. I remember watching hearing the two-year-old daughter of a host family I lived with speaking French and thinking, damn, her accent is flawless. I felt like an idiot for speaking less well than her, so I laughed at the story about your law students saying your handwriting looks like a ten-year-olds. It's so true. I remember looking at my enormous Arabic homework sentences next to the teacher's corrections in tiny script and feeling like a child. You're so right about the frustration of having to flatten everything down to simple declaratives, when our self-worth derives from our capacity for nuance. But I also applaud you for doing what you're doing, all of it—the Mandarin, and living in Taiwan, and having to rethink your career at 40. It's definitely self-serving, as I feel like I'm doing something similar. But I do think it's a gift to be able to have "beginner's mind," to steal a phrase from yoga, when, as your textbook so brutally put it, our lives are half over.
There’s something nice about the bluntness you've encountered from people and from your textbook. Having these thoughts articulated gives you the ability to confront them and to take away their power. They're just things that can be said. As many other things that can be said, they don't hold some deeper truth. My mother talks about "de-fanging" ideas in that way—taking the fangs off them—by uttering them.
For both of us, the initial meaning we had given our lives, the identity we had built, stopped existing, and we're faced with this raw task of starting over. But it's such a pure task: making meaning is the core of what it means to be human, and it's so easy to avoid doing it at all, to allow the job one falls into become a career and an identity ready-made.
There’s a parallel version of my life where I didn’t make the turn that is running alongside this version, somewhere, and I keep looking over toward it anxiously. Then I think of the first chapter of my German reading textbook, which was titled “Aller Anfang ist schwer”—“all beginnings are hard.” Leave it to the Germans to boil down complex, fraught existential states into simple peasant wisdom.
Brian Lin, a Taipei transplant:
ICLP1 requires every student to give a short, five minute "final presentation" in front of a crowd of 60. Most students choose fun, lighthearted topics, like coffee or Japanese puns or the great state of Alabama. I chose to subvert expectations, and wrote a speech about my great-grandfather getting screwed by the KMT in the 50s. When I handed in this deeply personal mythos to my teacher, she promptly covered the pages in angry red circles, telling me that I needed to use more fancy sentence patterns, that the tone was too conversational.
Most students also chose to read their lines from printed pages from a podium, Powerpoint slides prompting the way forward. But I insisted on descending deeper into main character syndrome, so I nixed the slides, memorized the speech, and paced the stage with a microphone.
My American classmates seemed to be regaled by my moving tale of love, oppression, family, and the American Dream. My teachers, on the other hand, seemed a bit bemused. One of them was a little critical of how anti-KMT my speech seemed. Another teacher, extra 包子 (steamed stuffed buns) in hand, joked about how it cost 40,000 NTD, referencing 四萬換一元. At the end of the day, a job is a job, and life goes on.
In retrospect, everything about that speech was quintessentially American, including the classic overindulgence on forging a political history and narrative. It's pretty ironic that, in the journey to integrate better into Taiwanese society, I found myself in one of the most Americanized spaces in Taiwan, acting as American as I could be.
I guess my takeaway was that the desire to master Mandarin and learn Taiwanese is intrinsically linked to an American identity and sensibility. English is our way of proclaiming, "I am American and I belong here." English was how we differentiated ourselves from immigrants like our parents, an innate reaction to hearing the term FOB, a lack of self-compassion in search for a feeling of belonging. We take pride in perfect English, in craftsmanship and composition, in oratory, in reading op-eds in The Atlantic and recommending David Foster Wallace to literary minded friends. And now, in Taiwan, we mourn the loss of a pillar of belonging: the loss of language, and mastery of language. And we search and grasp for it again, in the only way we know how.
My counterpoint to your Jeff is my friend Meggie. Although not born in the States, she had invested years integrating into American society, and then more years trying to reintegrate back into Taiwanese society. Thanks to her, I built a repository of slang and cultural know-how: hit up 檳榔 for 結冰水 on summer road trips. 河濱公園 is the cheapest parking in Taipei. Whatever 微妙 is supposed to mean. Oddly enough, it seems like Taiwanese who've tried to integrate into American society know exactly what it is you're trying to learn.
But the vast majority of my local friends tend to be like Albert, genuinely confused about how intensely we want to improve. To them, we're understandable, lovable, and we're emphatically Taiwanese, or American, or somewhere in between (doesn't really matter to them). Why does it matter if some tones are pronounced wrong? It's not like 阿公 knew how to speak Mandarin anyway.
Graham, a writer and teacher in Taipei, also replies. (We’re fans of his delightful monthly newsletter!)
I tried to sign up for group Mandarin classes this semester since I'm only teaching part-time, but unfortunately I teach Monday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, which ruins the schedule for basically every group class. It's probably for the best—I have no desire to try to learn writing. My handwriting is barely legible in English—I have no hope for Mandarin. So now I've added a second one-on-one teacher and it's going okay.
It’s definitely annoying how much praise I get for being able to say anything beyond 謝謝,對不起和你好 (thank you, sorry, hello). The other day I ordered a coffee—焦糖拿鐵加燕麥奶 (caramel latte with oat milk)—and the barista asked me how long I'd lived in Taiwan. 三年半 (three years). Oh, she said, 你的中文很厲害! (Your Mandarin is very good!) I think I replied way too intensely, 不是,學很慢!不好! (No, definitely not! It’s bad!). The low bars to clear as a white man.
For me, it's sarcasm: I am incapable of writing much at all without throwing in some sarcasm or jokes, and these almost always get edited out by both my two teachers. We were doing a lesson recently on 小農 and I wrote something about not knowing if the produce in the street market comes from a more ethical source than the produce in the supermarket—but it made me feel better and that's all that matters. The teacher said, "I don't think this is what you mean" and changed it to something totally different. The same goes for informal phrasing. Things I know I've heard people say—skipping over nouns and abridging phrases—always gets the red ink. I'm never sure if they think I did it by accident or if they just don't think anything less than perfectly correct grammar has a place in language learning. I also don't think they believe me when I tell them I am more interested in being able to chat on social media and in video game voice chat than take a test.
Anyways, solidarity.
Kelany, who is from the Dominican Republic and the United States, is currently studying Mandarin this year in Taiwan:
My first reaction when I read Michelle’s article was: “Yes, finally someone gets me! I’m not the only one who feels stupid in the classroom.” Today was a particularly hard day. After taking my Chinese test I was reminded once again of everything I am lacking. Usually, when I feel that way, I laugh it off, mainly because of my trust in God. I am often able to let go, trusting that God knows of my small wins. But today it was challenging to keep a sunny mindset. With only one week left in Taiwan I feel that I have not learned enough.
I was ten when I first moved to the U.S. I often felt annoyed that I could not understand what the teachers were saying. I had to constantly ask my classmates who spoke Spanish to translate for me. At the time, I didn’t want to be in New York anyways, let alone learn English. I wanted to be back home in the Dominican Republic. Mandarin was different: I chose to learn it. But I still can’t grasp it.
The idea of language as a form of domination also resonated with me. When I was in high school, I almost failed my literary analysis final essay, which was mandatory for graduation. I blamed it on English because it was my second language. In college, one of my first classes was “Essay and Revision.” I became a literature major and found pride in my ability to read and analyze novels. (Still, my little brother still corrects my English pronunciation sometimes!) But learning Chinese feels different. I’m desperate to speak it. I want to be friends with it and I want to know it. The thought of giving up scares me, so for now I’ll continue struggling rather than abandon it.
Albert’s cousin Jay Tzeng in Taitung works with kids with reading and writing difficulties. He’s a renowned professor in the Department of Special Education. He works with students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and who have Chinese dyslexia:
I have had a lot of fun reading your articles about your experiences in Taiwan. And today I learned that you are taking intensive Chinese lessons.
In 2020, I published a comic-style Chinese teaching material for young children who are just beginning to learn Chinese reading and writing, and older children who have dyslexia. I can't remember if I ever gave you a set. I'd be more than happy to send you a set if you can use it.
Because the children I work with have difficulty reading and writing, maybe the design in the textbook will also help your learning. Also, for older children who have reading difficulties, they hate to read "childish story books" because of the feeling of humiliation when reading them. Most of the stories in my textbooks are true stories that you (and your daughter) may be interested in. In addition, Chinese characters are indeed difficult to memorize and learn. Let me tell you a little trick: don't just copy the target Chinese character. You must force yourself to create something out of nothing, and recall the writing method of the target character when there is no character to refer to. This method of learning is called forced recall, and it works better than pure copying.
We received these wonderful books in the mail and plan to order more through this website.
Thank you to all the readers who replied on the comments thread and shared their own stories of language learning. If you enjoyed reading reader responses, here’s the full archive
If you enjoy responses from readers, check out the full archive:
On ghost stories, the Immigrant Multiverse, old school Hong Kong pop (including responses to guest essay by Nina Rastogi)
On reverse migration, accents, parrots, nativity scenes, and informers in Albania
On the misery of waiting in public spaces & Chen Shui-bian’s election and downfall (including responses to guest essays by Zito Madu and Nick Haggerty)
On leading and trailing spouses, loser status and native status, and moving “back” and moving forward
On adoption and heritage, moving abroad, and trailing and leading spouses
On "decider" guilt, atomic bombs, restorative approaches to intimate partner violence, and more
On heritage languages, moving to Asia, and modernist art in Taiwan (including responses to Catherine Chou’s essay on learning Mandarin and Taiwanese)
The best thing about writing this newsletter is hearing from you! You can write to us by replying in the comments section, writing to broadandampleroad@gmail.com, or responding to this email.
Upcoming Events: Cissy Yu plays next Saturday night, plus Ukrainian / Tatar Resistance at National Human Rights Museum
Next Saturday, May 20th at 3 P.M. there’s a bilingual speaker event featuring voices of Ukrainian and Tatar resistance at 國家人權博物館 National Human Rights Museum. That same evening, one of our favorite musicians, Cissy Yu, plays at Clash New Taipei a 8:30 P.M. We’re hoping to make both events.
Book Club for June and July: Joann Tompkins & Alexander Chee
Thanks for the moving conversation about Francisco Goldman’s Monkey Boy, which has left us thinking about the origins of violence and places we go to heal. There will be no book club in May.
In June we’ll read Joanne Tompkins’s What Comes After on Friday June 30th, time TBA. In July we shall read Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh.
ICLP is a notoriously difficult intensive language program in Mandarin.
Love the responses. I'm especially fascinated by haenyeo also! I've never heard the term before. I just found one children's book on the topic at the library, but would love for the commenter or someone else to write more!