Letting go of English and other language stories
Plus, book club on Claire Keegan's novellas and Claire Messud's THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY
Michelle here. I recently finished co-teaching a course at a juvenile detention center in Taipei (台北少年觀護所) along with a librarian, Peggy Huang, and a college student at NCCU, Rebecca Hsu. I have no illusions that I changed any lives; the class was too short, the conditions in their lives can be crushing, and I still don’t know much about the young women or what they’ve been through. But it’s amazing what you can do with students in one hour, if you’re intentional about the time. This in turn has reminded me how precious an hour can be.
We wrote poems from the perspectives of objects. We invented dialogue for scenes from graphic novels. We acted out other scenes. (I played a hungry meowing cat, then a guy who hates cats.) We imagined writing books about our lives, creating tables of contents with chapter titles. We decorated our notebooks with pretty sticker tape. (Everybody loves stickers.) The last day, over apple juice and cookies and Haribo bears, we shared our favorite moments from the class, wrote each other blessings, and put them in envelopes.
After the class, my co-teachers and I spoke to the center’s guard, who seems to have a positive relationship with the students. She said they looked forward to our class and hoped we could come back. “When I first heard you all were coming, I was doubtful,” she told us. “I thought your education level would be too high. Sometimes teachers come, they’re too educated, and everybody ends up feeling frustrated.” She described some of the students’ life circumstances and said she was glad we knew how to let them be kids.
The guard’s words struck me. Why is it that the more educated some people become, the less likely they are to connect with those on the margins? Isn’t that another way of saying you become a worse teacher the more you learn? It ought to be the opposite, of course: the more we learn, the more open, versatile, empathetic, and resourceful we should become. The guard was saying something else, too: that people who live in the margins don’t get to be kids.
The class was taught in Mandarin, a language I’ve learned and quit learning a dozen times. Paradoxically, even though my speaking level isn’t fluent, the linguistic barrier created new kinds of connections. Imagine a teacher walking into your classroom and saying, in an accent you can’t place, “Don’t worry, you speak and write better than I do. We’re here to be together and learn together.” Maybe you’d think, Is this person even qualified to teach me? God, we get the worst teachers! But maybe, if you’ve had negative or traumatic relationships with school, or you associate it with punishment, it would be a little freeing to see a teacher cede power so openly.
Conversely, how do you establish teacherly “authority” when you speak and read and write badly in the language of instruction? This was an interesting question, once I got over the humiliation. As the students put pen to paper to answer our little creative prompts, I said, “Don’t be nervous! I can’t correct you. And you’ll need to read to me what you write, because I can’t read all of it.” At this they visibly relaxed, focusing on the writing process rather than fearing the judgment of the red pen.
Being unable to help my students improve their writing in a technical way has made me rethink my teaching, which has often embedded the promise that I’d help students become better writers. Even when the class ostensibly had nothing to do with writing—a college course on, say, the politics and law of punishment—I would try to help them feel more confident. I’d point to my favorite line and say, “Write like this!” or “This is your voice!” And with the writerly students who craved that sort of feedback, the game was on: Let’s make this perfect.
Nothing’s wrong with that; feedback is good. But there’s a danger of getting carried away, as I sometimes did. I tired of my own desires. “One more thing… about this line… something’s not working…” I wasn’t negative, but I could be a perfectionist. And the thing is, perfection isn’t the most important value, or even a value at all. It definitely isn’t the most important value in a classroom. Teaching in another language reminded me of this. The sort of classroom I love lets each of us become a person we respect, a person who practices her own values. One reason I care so much about the prison classroom is that, in the context of incarceration and state power, our values—equality, justice, imagination, friendship, mutual knowledge—become urgent and self-evident.
As for writing, the best teacher is reading. I’ve taken to explicitly telling students, “There’s no secret to getting better as a writer; you just need to read a lot. Books are better teachers than I am.” It’s obvious, but we forget to say it. You can do this without me, you really can.
A friend told me that writers have trouble learning new languages. We don’t like to make mistakes. When we do, we prefer to make them in private, on paper or a screen, where we can erase them before they see the light of day. To learn a language you must make mistakes all the time, out loud, in real time.
Now, owing to the Mandarin I’m using every day, I make mistakes in English all the time too. “That’s wishy,” I say. Pause—something’s wrong. “I mean fishy!” Describing Albert to someone, I said, “He has a sugar tooth.” On a day without rain: “What a nice weather to walk around.” To a friend: “I welcome you with warm arms.” What’s the phrase again? I welcome you with… I welcome you with… I wonder while my arms simmer.
Some of this slippage may be due to having a four-year-old, with whom conversation is sometimes limited to unicorns and kitties. And I don’t think I’ve ever had a real grasp of idioms—the cat calls the kettle black, like two ships sailing—a failing I cheerfully attributed to my immigrant parents. I always assumed I’d learn them some day; now I don’t think I ever will.
And incredibly enough—considering that when I got to Taiwan and a friend told me my English would deteriorate, I felt like she’d thrown a hatchet at me—I’m unbothered by these changes. These days I no longer notice when a word’s pronounced “wrong,” no longer notice a “thick” accent. Or that’s not right: I don’t no longer notice, but I notice differently. I wonder how grammatical structure works in the speaker’s native language; instead of hearing the English I hear the sound, the singsong of a Burmese friend, the pleasing low laughter of a Japanese visitor. When a Taiwanese person asks me about rules of English—why the plural of luggage isn’t luggages—I say, “Gosh, some parts of English make no sense.”
To be clear, I don’t mean I’ve switched affinities to another language, as a traveler swaps the dollar for the euro or the yen for the peso. I mean something else entirely. I mean I think I’ve ceased to view English a certain way, as a thing to master. I continue to savor it. The heavenly things ignite and freeze. / But not as my hair falls before you. (Linda Gregg.) The beloved / old dog / finding it and harder to breathe. (W.S. Merwin.) But I can distance myself from its power instead of wanting to seize power over it. Isn’t the desire to master, even a language, the desire to dominate? Had I wanted to dominate English because I witnessed how it dominated my parents? Isn’t the language we use to describe other people’s struggles with language unfair, laden with judgment—as though English can be “broken” like dishware, as though an accent can be “thick” like a soup?
How often did I used to say to myself “I just want to write a perfect sentence”? This too reminds me of a line of poetry: I had been taught how to be perfect but not how to live. (Alison C. Rollins.) Once you decide you want not to become perfect but to live, a spaciousness settles and spreads. And once you realize the fictions of what it takes to learn the language you’ve been taught—mastery, domination—you teach differently. It’s not all about revision, the final product. Yes, all that will come for the writer. But first: openness to the world, to the act of inscription, to the radical risk in letting yourself go.
So, whether in English or in Mandarin, I care a lot less now about making mistakes in public. Thanks to five successive colonial regimes and totally uninspired methods of Chinese instruction, Taiwanese people on the whole don’t feel Chinese is a civilizationally superior language, which makes it easier to learn, I think: they don’t judge you as lesser when you speak poorly, as they might, say, in France. As for English, so what if an American in the audience thinks I grew up in Asia? This is a sea change for me. Part of my identity growing up in the U.S. was the double consciousness of my physiological appearance, which I countered with the “nativeness” of my accent. As a child, saying I was from America wasn’t just a factual statement; it was also an assurance, possibly a xenophobic one, to others around me. I’m not a foreigner!
How marvelous to enter middle age having vanquished that part of myself. Indeed, when I traveled in March to an innocence conference in New Orleans with Taiwan Innocence Project, a Taiwanese NGO, I was sometimes asked where I was from, and I hardly blinked. I didn’t think, Microaggression! I thought, Here’s my chance to tell people about Taiwan. Who’s to say, anyway, that English is even my mother tongue? Weren’t the first words I heard spoken in Taiwanese from one set of grandparents, in Mandarin from the other? All of them held me as a baby, helped to raise me.
In my spring course at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, students came from all over the world, from St. Lucia to Korea, Honduras to Indonesia. (I taught in English and was explicit about my chagrin at the imposition; I sometimes used Mandarin so the Taiwanese students could see me stumble.) Together we read Pramoedya Toer’s novel This Earth of Mankind, the first in a thrilling tetralogy called the Buru Quartet, whose protagonist grows up in early-1900s Indonesia, masters Dutch, and writes anticolonial tracts and stories. A friend tells him that if he really wants to start a revolution he needs to learn Malay. Malay? he replies, hurt, wanting his friend to praise him. That’s for people who work in plantations! You’re just saying that because your Dutch is bad! Still, ashamed of what he’s blurted out, he rethinks his whole relationship to Malay.
We talked a lot about these scenes, about language and power, about shame and overcoming it. I asked students what languages they spoke at home that aren’t taught in school, and their list was remarkable: Creole, Taiwanese, Hakka, indigenous languages in Paraguay and the Philippines. Many cherished their relationships with these languages, as they were spoken by aging, doting grandparents.
Rebecca, a student from Pingtung, the southernmost county of Taiwan, recalled her closeness with her grandpa, who used to take her to school. They’d speak Hakka, a minority language in Taiwan that was banned in schools alongside Taiwanese and indigenous languages. Growing up, she felt like she had to choose whether to devote her time to English or to Hakka. When she spoke English, she found, people gave her more respect, thinking her family was rich. So she chose English. But in high school she returned with a passion to studying Hakka, learning from her grandpa. She participated in Hakka events, competed in Hakka speech competitions, and researched the history of language movements in Taiwan (“Restore My Mother Tongue”). This summer she’s interning at a Hakka TV station.
Rebecca’s story about her grandpa made me wistful, as I thought back to my own. He’d moved from Taiwan to Michigan to live with us and had been charged with walking me to school. He spoke Mandarin to me—not a word of English. I thought he was stern and strange. I was so embarrassed of him that I made him walk behind me. Now I wonder if growing up in a monolingual place had helped to sever my curiosity about him. Today I have so many questions I want to ask him but he’s not here.
This summer I’m co-teaching in a French prison (technically a maison d’arrêt, a place for people awaiting trial) with my dear friend Hannah Taieb, an anthropologist from Canada who has lived in France for decades. The program she brought to Paris is called Walls to Bridges, whose motto is “we are one, not the other”; inspired by the American program Inside-Out, it brings traditional college students into prisons to learn alongside incarcerated people. The philosophy is that college is not a trophy, not a prize; it should be accessible to all who want it, including those in prison. The approach is egalitarian; the outside students are not “mentoring” or “working with” the inside students. Everybody learns together. Hannah, Albert, and I started this class at the American University of Paris five years ago, co-teaching the first one the fall I was pregnant. We brought nine students from the American University of Paris to La Santé, a prison in the fourteenth arrondissement, every week. Hannah has kept it going, and this is our third time teaching it together. (I dream of the day I can bring it to Taiwan—and I think I’m close to making it happen, fingers crossed.)
My French is even worse than my Mandarin. I depend on Hannah for many things, including translation. We plan every lesson together. I’m fond of saying how much I depend on co-teachers in both Taiwan and France, but perhaps I should say I depend on the students as well, for their patience and humor in the sometimes comical struggle of explaining things to one another. I believe we gain a larger sense of the world when we decenter language. The barrier itself prompts a discussion about power, about the languages reflected in the classroom, from Kabyle (a language of Algeria) to indigenous African languages. Monolingualism is oppressive, and attempting perfection in two languages can replicate or even double that oppression. But a multilingual classroom where we’re all stumbling together can be wonderfully imperfect, expanding our sense of the world.
Other little notes about the class in Taiwan
The class started when Peggy read my book (in the Chinese translation by Lisung Hsu) and messaged me on Facebook, asking if I’d want to teach a class together. Would I ever! Peggy also works for the same that program that supports mothers incarcerated with their children, providing books for them to read together. (Last year, as you may recall, Forward Alliance ran a book drive for Mother’s Day.)
Rather than photocopy a whole sheet of poems, Peggy would print each poem on a colored card. We’d have students draw a card face-down. Each poem was a surprise gift—uniquely theirs, since everyone got a different one. The students kept asking if they could draw more cards so they could collect more poems. Then they’d tape the poems into their notebooks.
I was so excited that our graphic novels were a hit with the students at the juvenile detention center. We brought in Pam Pam Liu’s Trip to the Asylum and Chen Pei-hsiu For the Time Being. I’m looking forward to teaching again in the fall; if you have suggestions for graphic novels (in any language), we’re all ears!
Links
The essays by Lisa Cheng Smith over at Yun Hai Taiwan Stories are wonderful. Read the latest on Taiwan pride.
Congratulations to North American Taiwan Studies Association for wrapping up another amazing conference! We were sad we couldn’t attend, but we’ve have been following its triumphs with delight.
If you read Chinese, sign up for the Taiwan Innocence Project newsletter. Its latest shares reflections on the aforementioned conference, and I contribute a small little piece in it, too.
Two great pieces on the recent legislative reforms: Michael Turton writes that the infrastructure projects proposed by Fu Kun-chi at the KMT “form an overall program of delivering Taiwan to China.” And Frozen Garlic, a must-read as always, writes: “First, the breadth of the KMT’s agenda is a bit shocking. They seem to think their very narrow plurality of seats legislature (on fewer votes than the DPP won and clear loss in the presidential election) gives them a mandate to undo everything from the previous eight years.”
77-year-old woman living in the aforementioned Pingtung grows a giant taro! She says she cares for taro like a child.
Two Chinese activists are convicted of subversion and sentenced to prison:
A former independent journalist, Ms. Huang, 35, became a prominent voice in China’s #MeToo movement who helped women report cases of sexual harassment. Later, she traveled to Hong Kong and wrote essays about antigovernment protests there. Mr. Wang, 40, was a longtime activist on behalf of workers and people with disabilities. He also helped #MeToo victims to speak out.
Ms. Huang and Mr. Wang were arrested in 2021 and endured an unusually long pretrial detention of two years. The trial last September lasted a day.
As Yaqiu Wang writes, “This whole prosecution is just one cruel farce that only reveals how fearful the CCP feels about Chinese people's desire for basic rights.”
For readers in Los Angeles: on June 20, Vanessa Hope’s documentary Invisible Nation will get its LA Premiere! You can buy tickets to the premiere here.
A wonderful essay by Siobhan Phillips observes the relationship between writing and cooking, letters and recipes, intellectual labor and (women’s) domestic labor. She reflects on Madhur Jaffrey’s groundbreaking An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973) and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s cult classic Vibration Cooking (1970). Both were ambitious actors who regarded their culinary writing not without ambivalence. As Phillips writes,
Vibration Cooking remembers its author’s anguish at being mistaken for a “domestic” when she rode the bus to a Pennsylvania theater; why would a Black woman be commuting, went the feeling among fellow commuters, if not to cook and clean for a white family? Vibration Cooking is dedicated to Smart-Grosvenor’s female forebears who did cook and clean for white families. […]
Ambivalence flourishes in text—because of text. Smart-Grosvenor, like Jaffrey, takes advantage of that gap between description and enactment that attends words about food. It is writing that allows both women the not-quite-performance that not-quite-substitutes for related artistic aims. Writing grants them a somewhat-satisfactory profession in their somewhat-refusal of domestic jobs.
Book Club: Claire Keegan, Claire Messud
So excited about talking to you about these books! For June, we’ll read Claire Keegan’s FOSTER and SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE. For July, we’ll read Claire Messud’s THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY.
Friday, July 5th 7 PM EST / Saturday, July 6th 7 AM Taiwan time. (Note the time change.) We’re reading Claire Keegan's FOSTER & SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE.
Friday, Aug. 2nd 7 PM EST / Saturday, Aug. 3rd, 7 AM Taiwan time. We're reading Claire Messud's THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY.
If you’re looking ahead to September, we’ll read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
I really enjoy reading this piece!
makes me think: how much of 'writer's block' is the fear of writing bad sentences. And how writing only happens by writing those terrible sentences. And why the mindset of the 'amateur' is so freeing because you are expected to be kind of lousy. And the tradeoff between being a beginner and not one. Pondering this while I endure a bout of 'writer's block.' M, as always, a wonderful piece to ponder...