Inkblots and thrushes and cat pix, oh my!
Readers weigh in on learning heritage languages, the elusive Pollock–Taiwanese modernist art connection, and a Chinese writer who hates parrots.
Dear readers,
It’s been heartening to receive so many warm responses to Catherine’s guest essay about learning Mandarin and Taiwanese. Among the many wonderful outcomes is that we’ve realized how many people are also embarking on their own language-learning journey. We’ve collected a batch of responses to her piece here, along with some older replies to our posts about marriage, Taiwanese modernist art, moving “back” to Asia, and more.
For those who are new to this list, welcome! We send out posts in English on Sundays and in Mandarin on Thursdays. You can unsubscribe to either version by going to the My Account tab on Substack. All our essays have been free so far.
Other updates: This past Thursday, we published responses from jazz musicians and educators in Mandarin. Many thanks to Peter Lin, Hsinwei Chiang, and Jeff Chang for reflecting on their art.
And also, Happy Lunar New Year! Hope everybody has a wonderful Year of the Tiger. 祝大家虎虎生風，虎年行大運！
Readers respond to heritage languages, trailing spouses, modernist art, moving to Asia, and more
Jessica Chen, a heritage Cantonese speaker, on her own “obsessive” attempts to learn Cantonese and Mandarin:
Wow: reading Catherine’s essay gave me a spark of recognition. For the past six months, I’ve been fixated on learning Chinese in a way that seems obsessive. I thought I was the only one. I’m a heritage Cantonese speaker and studied Mandarin in college, but have been negligent in maintaining language skills since. The sudden urge to reclaim these languages came out of nowhere–“consumed by an unlooked-for desire” is a good way of putting it. If not for the pandemic, I think I would have found my way to China or Hong Kong or Taiwan, taking courses and eating noodles on the street.
I tried online courses but they felt stilted. Instead, I put together a slapdash “syllabus” of old TVB Cantonese dramas, Mandarin variety shows, C-pop lyrics, flashcards, a fourth-grade version of 紅樓夢, podcasts, workbooks, classical poems, newspapers, etc. This kind of untethered learning makes it difficult to gauge progress, but it gives me a sense of connection and joy that seems out of proportion for something as pedestrian as language learning. I can’t explain it but I’ve found that there are parts of myself that I cannot reach except through Chinese. It feels like rediscovering a different lens with which to see the world. My parents are bemused by my sudden adeptness in talking back to them in Cantonese.
Many thanks to Catherine for a lovely essay. I admire the boldness and commitment to following one’s instincts. I relate to the frustration of trying to get a grasp on both Mandarin and a related, less standardized language. The ending quote made me tear up.
And many thanks to you two for sharing your transnational journey. I’ve immensely enjoyed following along and enjoy the thoughtful and interesting pieces each week. Incredible work!
Zito Madu, a writer and longtime reader, on struggling with questions that don’t always have answers:
I love this essay. Learning to read/speak another language is such a vulnerable experience, because it does make you feel like a child who has to grasp the world and its meanings all over again. Which is hard but I think it’s also enlightening. There’s so many rules to languages that people who are fluent don’t think about, and there’s sometimes no real reason for certain structures in languages, which makes me laugh. I’ve been learning French in the most casual manner for a few years now (up to eighth-grade level) and so much time in the lessons with my friend/teacher is spent with me asking why something has to happen one way, and after she thinks about it, she usually answers, “That’s just how it is, I guess?” And then we move on to me struggling with colors and numbers again. I wrote about the experience last year.
We can’t resist quoting a part of Zito’s essay, where he describes how the city of Marseille inspired him to learn French:
I also went to those places that I was told not to go. It wasn’t so much an act of rebellion or thrill-seeking—Marseille is a city of immigrants, proudly so, and I figured that the people in those shunned places were probably people like me, only separated by luck and the cruelty of Western borders. It felt incorrect to think of a city as beautiful without seeing the people who make it possible, those who are often hidden away from the bubble of tourism.
I was right. Walking through those narrow streets in my black tracksuit, I fit the image of many of the people there. The problem was that I couldn’t speak to anyone. So I declared that I would learn French, because I wanted to live there, and I wanted to be with those people, to talk to, learn from, help, and suffer with them.
Language study, he writes, offers a “chance of becoming something new.”
Gina Hausknecht, a literature professor who guided our book club through Paradise Lost this summer, wrote:
Catherine Chou's piece half-broke my brain: I'm overwhelmed by the complexity of the interlocking language systems she describes, and the learning process. I thought about it again last night as we watched Drive My Car. (I'd love to hear the Broad & Ample Road authors and/or community on this movie!)
Wenpei Lin, a translator who lives in Taiwan, on her “irrevocable” sadness at her poor fluency in Taiwanese, one of her parents’ mother tongues:
I speak Mandarin, English, Japanese, and Taiwanese, the fluency of each indicated in a descending order.
Every time I think of this hierarchy of language ability, I feel an irrevocable sense of sadness and loss that my Taiwanese is so poor.
My relative mastery of those four languages reflects the global hegemony of languages. I learned English because, of course, it is “the” international language. I learned Japanese because, in addition to being required for study of modern Taiwanese history, it is a “useful” language worth investing time in. As for Taiwanese, it is supposed to be one of my mother tongues (the other one being Mandarin). Growing up, I heard my parents and grandparents speak Taiwanese. Yet my own Taiwanese is worse than my English and not even as good as my Japanese. I also have almost no literacy in the language.
My loss of Taiwanese reflects the diminishing presence of the language in Taiwan. It went from a full-fledged language at a time when Mandarin served as the lingua franca and people spoke their own “dialects” to a language mainly spoken in the household when a National Language (Japanese) appeared for the first time. It was further reduced to a language of limited use even in the household as another National Language (Mandarin) rose to supremacy violently. At that time, even the use of Taiwanese in household interaction was discouraged, probably out of self-censorship.
Now the people (and the government) in Taiwan are striving for the revival of Taiwanese, but the issue is complicated and often divisive. The effort for revival is often accused of Hokkien Chauvinism (福佬沙文主義). I don’t think this is fair, as Mandarin is still often referred to as the National Language while the status of Taiwanese is just less jeopardized than other native languages (Hakka, Indigenous languages, etc.).
The argument is also embodied in the fight over its name: some say that it should not be called Taiwanese (台語 Tâi-gí), for the name suggests that it is “the” language of Taiwan, “the” language that represents Taiwan, while there are in fact many languages spoken on these islands, including Mandarin, Hakka, Indigenous languages, Vietnamese, etc. I prefer to call the language Taiwanese, but I can accept Southern Min (閩南) or other names, if these names make everyone on the islands happier.
Loss due to historical contingencies can be made up with personal agency. I am trying to make up for my Taiwanese illiteracy, which could be frustrating at times since I myself question whether it is “useless” and “not worthy of my time,” echoing the mood of the wider society. But I will keep working on it. And I hope one day I will be able to write as eloquently as I do in Mandarin and English, as a less pragmatic yet meaningful response to my national identity.
(Wenpei translated our piece on informers to the KMT in Taiwan to Chinese; here it is.)
Catherine’s piece made the rounds on Twitter, with many wonderful responses. It’s hard to list them all, but here are a couple:
Joshua Yang writes:
Catie Lilly @catielila
As a 1st-gen American I hadn't believed I could be literate in my heritage languages, until 1 day I did. For A Broad & Ample Road, I explore what literacy means & how learning Han characters via Mandarin gave me access to worlds of Taiwanese-language text. https://t.co/iVp0EECXigAnd this from Marissa Cummings:
Catie Lilly @catielila
As a 1st-gen American I hadn't believed I could be literate in my heritage languages, until 1 day I did. For A Broad & Ample Road, I explore what literacy means & how learning Han characters via Mandarin gave me access to worlds of Taiwanese-language text. https://t.co/iVp0EECXigHere’s a reply to Albert’s post about a Taiwanese modernist art exhibit. Albert had been convinced that Jackson Pollock was inspired by inkblots of Asian calligraphy, but couldn’t prove it. Writer and art critic Aaron Peck provides a missing puzzle piece:
I wanted to reach out because I was particularly interested in the description of the exhibition of Taiwanese postwar modernism in your most recent post. It is fascinating. For reasons far too complicated to get into here, I am a low-key specialist of the American abstract painter Mark Tobey, who you might be familiar with. Along with some other modernist painters in the mid-century Pacific Northwest, Tobey looked to the classical Chinese and Japanese painterly traditions, particularly through studying with a Shanghainese painter named Teng Baiye who had lived briefly in Seattle during the late 1920s. After further study in both China and Japan throughout the 1930s, Tobey developed a style of abstraction that, by the early 1940s, he called “white writing.” (Here is an example of one of his paintings in the MoMA collection.)
All of this to say: it struck me that Albert’s description began with a Jackson Pollock painting, because, although Pollock never cited Mark Tobey as an influence, there is proof that Pollock saw an exhibition of Tobey’s in New York at the Willard Gallery in 1944 before Pollock had his own breakthrough for the drip paintings. Though different in scale, at times the stylistic similarities are remarkable. In light of the exhibition that you described in that post, detailing a form of Taiwanese modernism that attempted to bridge Asian and European aesthetic traditions, I loved the further irony that there is more than a remote chance that Pollock’s style was biting the work of another modern American painter who was, in turn, emulating calligraphic forms learned in Asia.
And Kathy Cheng, a writer and consultant who created Tricky Taipei, sends along a marvelous piece of artwork by Liu Kai (劉開), who designed posters for Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-hsien and won the 1995 architectural design competition.
Kile, a scholar of Chinese literature, commiserates with Michelle’s attempt to adjust to a new life in Taiwan (read the Mandarin version here), noting that Li Yu (李漁), a seventeenth-century Chinese playwright and novelist, thought parrots were highly overrated birds:
I was sorry to hear about your experience with the parrot. I translated some of Li Yu's thoughts on parrots in my dissertation, and I've pasted that translation below. He has more positive things to say at other points on the possibilities, but here he is just reveling in the fact that parrots are quite so bad at talking. So, from Li Yu: "Don't listen to that bird-brained loser!"
More than any other bird, the thrush and the parrot delight people with their voices. Yet the parrot’s voice is valued above the thrush’s, and many people are taken with it because it can perform human speech. I am greatly opposed to that reasoning. I think the best thing about a parrot is its plumage. There is nothing about its voice to recommend it. The reason a bird’s voice it worth listening to at all is because of its difference from the human voice. I want to listen to a bird’s voice that is different from a human voice because what comes from people is the hubbub of people, whereas what comes from birds are the sounds of nature. If I want to hear people talking, I just need to listen to what’s already ringing in my ears—what need have I to put a bird in a cage for that? What is more, even if the parrot that is most adept at talking has a tongue that can surpass a person who does not excel at talking, it still won’t be able to say more than a few words. I really cannot understand why parrots are valued over people, or why people value parrots. As for the thrush’s skill, with a single mouth it stands in for a great number of tongues, and each imitation bears a striking resemblance. When you add to that its delicate wispiness, it truly is a remarkable creature among birds.
Here are some lovely responses to our companion pieces about the journey back to Taiwan. (Michelle here, Albert here; for previous reader responses, read here, here, and here. Read the Mandarin versions here and here.)
Enyi (任恩儀), a Taiwanese writer, writes from the Netherlands about being a “trailing spouse” and the challenges she has faced:
Thank you for sharing the struggles you face. I was touched when I first read Michelle’s article “These Losers are Going Places” and again moved by Albert’s perspective. I was also moved to respond in Mandarin and to share how I experienced being a “trailing spouse.” I face a second transition soon, as my family will move from the Netherlands to the U.S. I hope we could exchange more perspectives and create a cross-national community.
You can read Enyi’s longer reply (生活在遠方:二次移居，跨洲際遷徙的波濤洶湧) here.
Sora Chung reflects on how her impending journey to Korea will affect her grieving process for her mother, who passed away almost two years ago:
In a few months, my husband and I will be moving to Korea for his job. Non-Asian Americans are excited for us that we’ll have a chance to live in a foreign country as newlyweds and Korean-Americans are excited for us to go back to the “motherland” and eat great food. Both are true; we’ll be foreigners in this country, but we won’t be completely foreign to its food and culture. My husband and I were both born there, but we grew up in New Jersey and went to school in New England. And as we prepare for our move, my emotions around going “back” to Korea are a mixture of this excitement but also of sadness of going to Korea for the first time without my mom without my mom, who passed away almost two years ago. Living near a Korea-town in Virginia, whenever I see a Korean woman that could be my mom’s age or older, I see my mom in her and I hurt not knowing what she would have looked like if she survived past her sixty-fourth birthday.
So, my moving prep also includes preparing my still aching heart to anticipate seeing millions of middle-aged and elderly Korean women and being surrounded by food and other triggers that will remind me of my mom and our memories. But, then again, maybe grieving for my mom in Korea can be special in its own way and the grief can be soothed by making new memories of Korea and lifting them up to my mother, who gave up everything to give me a better life in the U.S.
Rebecca BurWei writes about growing up “mixed,” with a mainland Chinese father and Taiwanese mother. Though challenging, this experience helped her “develop the skills to hold belonging loosely”:
Thank you for sharing such intimate experiences. (I was referred to your blog today by taiwaneseamerican.org's Instagram story.)
I have been thinking about moving to Taipei from Chicago for some time, but have put it off because of the pandemic. I am very impressed you made the move last year. I imagine it could not have been easy.
Like Michelle, I am finding that some of my family members think moving "back" to Taiwan is going backwards.
Like Albert, I have been telling my spouse for some time that I must relocate to Taiwan and hope that he will want to come with me.
My actual relationship to Taiwan and Taiwanese identity, however, is extremely fraught. My mom is Taiwanese and my dad is mainland Chinese.
I grew up in the 1990s in a Chicago suburb with a small, but growing Asian immigrant population. The Taiwanese and Chinese communities did not mingle. The Taiwanese had mostly immigrated earlier, were more established, had bigger houses, spoke better English, and generally looked down on the new Chinese immigrants. They made fun of their food, clothes, smell, accents. For a long time, I had no words to describe my ethnicity because I felt I was not good enough to be Taiwanese and so deeply ashamed of being Chinese that I could not claim that identity.
I have searched for a long time for words to describe my heritage that are politically neutral. I have come to the conclusion that neutrality is an illusion.
I am very nervous about what feelings moving to Taiwan will stir up in me. Taiwanese American identity media already gives me huge amounts of anxiety because it triggers memories of childhood pains. But I feel this is a ghost I must face.
One thing that's nice about being mixed, about growing up in a barely visible borderland, is that I've developed the skills to hold belonging loosely. I don't need to be fully accepted into Taiwanese society because I am not fully Taiwanese. I don't need to be fully accepted into Chinese society because I am not fully Chinese.
Thank you for taking the time to read my note.
Historian Margaret Ng responds to Michelle and Albert’s pieces about moving to Taiwan with a heartfelt message that touched us deeply:
My husband and I felt a lot of emotions when we started reading your blog. The negotiations, the give-and-take in a relationship, and the dynamic-fluid identities as academics, what you both wrote about brought back a lot of memories for us both. And we continue to struggle with some of these issues. Your humour and eloquence made all that so much more palatable. (I loved the washing machine bit, and we had a similar experience in Seoul where I simply hit every single button possible in order to get it to work.)
My world is immensely smaller than yours and I am envious that you and Michelle are in Taipei. I dream of what you both are doing, i.e. going back to Asia, but my son is the one whom we will have some difficulty relocating from North America to Asia. His Chinese language skills are minimal, despite both his parents’ training in classical Chinese, and his skills in Teochew or Hokkien are mostly in the profane. And he has a lot of questions about his identity/identities. Your blog has opened up a space for many of us, drifting from country to country, carrying those layers of identities, histories and baggage of all sorts. Thanks again for sharing your lives.
And finally, Michelle’s longtime friend Summer jokes:
I’m here just for the cat pix.
This one’s for you, Summer!
Shout-out to some new Substacks…
A special-shout to some new Substacks:
If you’re interested in all things French and all things weird, our dear friend and colleague Russell Williams, based in Paris, started a Substack called “French Weird.”
Writer May Ngo, based in Prague and an Australian of Chinese-Cambodian descent, writes a range of criticism at “Tangents Converge.”
Attorney Samuel Bickett, who is based in Hong Kong, writes a bilingual newsletter about Hong Kong law and policy.
This bilingual newsletter by translator Wenpei Lin, based in Taipei, will explore writing and translation, as well as the occasional post about hiking, birding, and life in Taiwan.
This one isn’t new, but it has excellent weekly round-ups on undercovered news in Asia. Check out Nithin Coca’s “Asia Undercovered.”
The Brothers Karamazov update and book club
We had such a delightful discussion about Dostoevsky on Friday night/Saturday morning, ranging across questions of free will to folk religion. We were also reprimanded by our friend Cyrus for sounding apologetic about Dostoevsky in our newsletters. (“It’s a masterpiece! There’s no reason to apologize!”) Okay, okay, he’s right. And it’s true—we don’t find The Brothers K to be a slog at all. (Well, Michelle doesn’t. Albert does.)
Our book clubs always take place on the last Friday of the month in the evening EST. Please write ampleroad@substack.com (or reply to this email) for details and the Zoom link. And if you’re in Taiwan, let us know whether we should start a Taiwan-based club too. All are welcome!
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