Michelle goes to intensive language school
Plus, Jeremy Lin scores 50 points in an amazing game and a book drive to support women's prisons in Taiwan
Hello everyone,
Michelle here. I wrote something about taking intensive Mandarin classes while being a mother and daughter-in-law in a new country. Thank you for reading.
In February my mother-in-law lost her ability to speak. Possibly irreparably, though it feels like bad luck to say it out loud. Since last year she hasn’t been able to walk; now she can’t talk either. Well, not with her voice. She talks with her eyes, which grow bright when she’s listening intently. And she talks by nodding. Usually we find a way to understand each other, but there are occasions, like last Sunday, when she appears desperate to communicate something I can’t grasp. The other day, when I kept guessing, wrongly, she began to moan. All I could do was caress her tuft of hair.
Meanwhile, just as she’s lost speech, baby P. is on the cusp of it. Even a simple sentence—“I want milk”—is extraordinary: Albert and I will stop whatever we’re doing and turn to each other. Did you hear that? Sometimes she mixes Mandarin and English—“Wo yao milk”—which prompts even greater amazement. Paradoxically, P.’s separation anxiety appears to have worsened; whenever Albert or I leave the house, she cries intensely, body shaking, and simply won’t let us leave. She can say, “I no want Mommy go!” But if you ask her why, she falters, unable to find the words.
So here I stand, awkwardly, between these two people in my life and their opposite life stages. And in some small way, though I know it’s not comparable, I know how they feel. I fail at communication every day. In Taiwan I’m the foreigner, the inarticulate tourist scratching her head, a Huh? etched tragicomically on her face when she doesn’t get the joke. (I feel not only inarticulate but also ugly when I can’t find the word I’m looking for.) All of this floods me with old, familiar feelings: in kindergarten I was almost held back because I spoke so little. Family lore insists that I learned to speak late, while my brother spoke very early. You had a speech impediment! Your brother was a genius! Haha! In Taiwan I revert to this earlier wordlessness, this paralyzing dumbness, the vague corridors of a life before fluency.
I find myself trying to remember when and where and how I learned to talk. Because I did learn. One of the last sentences my mother-in-law said to me was “You were a lawyer.” She knew we’d come here for her; she didn’t want me to give up something so hard-won—a livelihood, at that, whose meaning comes from speech and writing. I squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, Mom,” I said. “I’m finding my way here.”
*
In my desperation to learn to speak and write, I’ve been taking intensive Mandarin classes. My classmates are half my age, blithe and youthful with perfect skin and agile brains. When I walked into the classroom on the first day, one of them asked, “Are you the teacher?”
The course is three hours a day, five days a week, with quizzes every other day. I haven’t had to take a quiz in twenty years. And these quizzes are tough: the teacher says a word and we write it down. Because Chinese is pictorial, you can’t guess. You either know it or don’t. Miss a little dot? Lose a point! Draw a slanted line instead of a horizontal one? Lose a point! Maybe you think, as I did at first, that what you’ve written is close enough. But no, that little error alters the meaning of the word entirely, transforming a conjunction into a rabbit, a shell into a leaf.
On the day of my first quiz, I was so anxious that I forgot how to write part of my name. Later I recounted to Albert, one by one, the words I thought I’d gotten wrong.
“Do you think I passed?”
“Sounds increasingly like you didn’t.”
*
I study after I’ve put baby P. to sleep. I untangle her pudgy, surprisingly heavy arms from my chest, rise, and get to work. To memorize characters, I invent stories. Sometimes the meaning is already embedded: pirate contains the symbols for “water” and “vessel.” Chirping is three mouths atop a tree. Even in the middle of night, I find myself smiling. Other times I have to make everything up: “The dog is getting thirsty outside a house…” I mutter little nonsense exhortations to myself: Don’t forget the antlers… And the little whiskers…
Learning Mandarin has been a kind of backwards time travel. My parents spoke it at home; my grandparents, who lived with us for four years, spoke it too. My grandma taught me to read and write. Like many heritage language learners, I’ve tried and quit Chinese a dozen times: college courses, research in Beijing, novels purchased aspirationally and never touched again. Once I bought Charlotte’s Web in translation, thinking I’d absorb Mandarin out of love for the book alone; it turns out lines like “Where are you going with that axe?” aren’t exactly helpful for everyday life here.
What surprises me, though, isn’t how much I’ve forgotten but what I remember. Certain words and strokes I can draw without thinking. Time and space mingle strangely. I’m forty-one but feel like a child again. I live not far from where my grandma lived, but she’s not here. In getting older we grow into our past, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes. But in learning your parents’ tongue you don’t just grow into it—you hurl yourself in.
Leafing through my textbook, I suddenly stop at the page with the characters for grandpa and grandma. I know I know them, even if I can’t immediately say what they are. It takes a moment. Then I remember. They’re some of the first words I learned. As a child I wrote them all the time, on letters and Christmas and New Year’s and birthday cards. They’ve been stored away in my unconscious, surfacing finally, now, in middle age.
*
“This seems like an abusive relationship,” says my friend Jeff, watching me copy out a word for the tenth time. Jeff is “like” me, born in the states to Taiwanese parents, but for various reasons he speaks not just with fluency but with authority too. He can read academic texts and his handwriting is gorgeous. “I need to tell you something,” he says, scrutinizing with a frown. “This character doesn’t have a hook. It’s a blunt edge.” He shows me how to write it.
Actually, Jeff has told me many revelatory things about my Mandarin. For instance, there are basic words that I’ve apparently been mispronouncing all my life, having never learned the right sound. I’ve dropped consonants and added syllables that don’t exist. When he corrected me a few weeks ago on a simple word I use all the time, I was genuinely shocked. I turned to Albert and glared, as if to say, Why have you let me humiliate myself this whole time? Don’t you love me?
In reply, Albert shrugged and smiled. I should take heart, I suppose, in his conviction that the way a person speaks is not grounds for appraisal or humiliation. As Jeff puts it, “Albert thinks accents are a total social construct.” Albert is a man of few resentments, but among them are the term FOB; the ideology, especially prevalent among former empires, that certain languages reflect civilizational superiority; and, relatedly, the belief that “good” Mandarin means a Beijing accent.
For these reasons, Albert is minimally invested in my language learning. And he’s utterly bored by my homework. My teacher thinks I get help from him, but I get no help whatsoever. When I ask him a question about my homework, he yawns and says he’s tired and maybe I can ask him tomorrow?
But Jeff has the spirit of a language teacher. “What happened to your third tone?” he asks with contempt as we walk together. “What do you mean?” I say, then fold, confessing that I can never tell the difference between second and third. “Repeat after me,” he says. He says a word in the third tone; I repeat it; he says it; I repeat it. We do this for at least half a block, both of us sounding angry even though we’re not, just concentrating.
*
On our first quiz back, I got a C minus. I peeked over at a classmate’s paper to see her grade, but she was sitting too far away.
I reflect, with humility, that the way to become a better teacher is to go back to being a student. Sit in a class at a cramped desk-seat and remember how vulnerable it feels to learn. To fret over your limits, to wonder whether you’re fundamentally uncoordinated, untalented. At the heart of it is the risk you’ve taken in having shown up: it means you want something. You want to get better. Language learning, in particular, is humbling: it’s what you do as a child, before most other learning.
And then there’s the notion that this is your language, the language of your household, one strangers presume you know because you look like a local. But why can’t you speak, people ask me. Didn’t your parents teach you? Well, they taught me, but I grew up in America, and… I usually trail off. A few weeks ago a nine-year-old Taiwanese kid looked at my writing and in half a second found a mistake. He changed a hook from an inside one to an outside one. “Thanks,” I said, taking it in stride.
Attending a recent event at the university where I teach, I ran into several of my law students. Since I lug my study materials everywhere, it’s easy to show them my work, which I know will provide amusement. They’re so self-conscious about their English that it seems only fair.
“Your handwriting’s so funny,” one student said.
“Why?”
“It looks like a child’s.”
“What age?”
“Ten.”
“Ten? That’s pretty good!”
In language class, a cluster of possibly random details—often related to your first week’s vocabulary words—come to define you, acquiring a sort of totemic, totalizing quality. One classmate is the flautist who hates romance movies. Another is a runner who loves horror movies. The class is at once personal and impersonal, requiring you to reveal a lot about yourself—your hobbies, your idea of dream vacation, your nightmare roommate experiences—while also allowing you to reveal nothing. Your speech and writing are never judged on depth or shallowness, just on whether or not you’ve correctly used the required word or grammatical construction.
My first big assignment was an oral report on a favorite television show, containing twenty vocabulary words and five grammatical constructions from Lesson Four: tragedy, comedy, challenging qualities, because, therefore, otherwise, a phrase meant to be a rhetorical question. But how could … have a basis in reason?
My report turned out pretty well, I think.
The work of a meth dealer has many challenging qualities.
Although Breaking Bad is a tragedy, it is sometimes a comedy.
Because Walt is very good at chemistry, he made very blue meth.
But, you might be wondering, how could selling drugs to make money possibly have a basis in reason?
Because America doesn’t have health care like Taiwan; therefore, a high school teacher must sell drugs to pay his medical bills. Otherwise the debt will ruin his family.
Like the other Americans, I made a totally unnecessary PowerPoint presentation to accompany my talk.
“Wow, it really is very blue,” the teacher said, peering at the meth on the screen.
*
At first I didn’t like the teacher, which caused Albert to say I had a bad attitude. At our favorite coffee shop, he and the barista poked fun at me. “She thinks the teacher doesn’t encourage them enough.” He paused. “Welcome to Taiwan!” They both started laughing, very hard.
Welcome to Taiwan, indeed. If you tell our teacher she looks nice today, she’ll reply, “That’s not going to get me to add points to your grade!” The first time she said this, I was shocked. But then I realized she was also trying to teach us about the local culture: Taiwanese people, she explained, find ways to avoid accepting compliments. (She poked fun at how Americans might respond: “Why, thank you! I do look quite nice today.”)
Sometimes I still find this confusing. Is she satirically performing Taiwaneseness in order to critique it, or is she just saying what she thinks? In one class, while teaching he word regret, she said, “I feel regret that I didn’t study computer science, because my friend who works at Google took me to their office in Taipei. You know they eat Haagen Dazs every day? You open the fridge and it’s all Haagen Dazs! Taiwanese people love Haagen Dazs.” Was this a lesson about Haagen Dazs or the prestige of Google, or just an example of how to use regret?
Her bluntness about family also cut deep. Teaching the word role, she said, “Look at Michelle. Her role used to be lawyer. Now she’s a mother! At home her role is a mother! And a wife!” I replied that I was a person, too, but she seemed unconvinced.
Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but I’ve decided to like her. She’s indefatigable, funny, direct, and easygoing. My initial aversion, I realize now, was so irrational that perhaps she had become a repository for all my hang-ups—a classic case of transference. She was correcting me constantly because she cared, and because it was her job. That’s what my parents thought, too.
And now I’d landed in their native country. If my parents had been on my home turf in America, now I was on theirs. In our perpetual battle for dominion, my willingness to learn is a major concession as well as a necessity. When I got into a fight with my mother on a recent visit, we didn’t speak for an hour. Finally, on the metro, I broke the silence by pointing to a sign and asking, “What does that say?”
She told me what it said.
Then our fight was over.
*
I do get down when I think about all the things I’ve done in English, things that have made me feel proud and distinguished, distinctive. An application for a pardon of a prisoner. An application for asylum. A dissent. An oral argument in front of a judge. A legal brief. And, come to think of it, an essay where I compared Breaking Bad to Paradise Lost. I can still do some of these things in Taiwan, but others aren’t possible.
On top of this, I’m not a spring chicken anymore; on bad days I think to myself, “By the time I get good at this language, I’ll be a senior citizen!” My textbook reminds me pointedly of this. Its sample sentence for beizi, which means “lifetime”: My sister is 40 years old; her lifetime is already half over. Thanks, textbook!
My friend Bill told me it’s typical for writers—and lawyers, probably—to feel more shame when they try to master a new language: we’re so much harder on ourselves. We’re fussy about words because we care about them. And we’re repulsed by mundane usage, even though mundane usage is the core of language learning. “The answer is,” he said, “be dumber in English.”
I think he was onto something. At the heart of the idea of mastery is the ideal of dominion. This is precisely what Albert instinctively, emphatically refuses. Learning a language, he knows, should not be about dominion.
The structured monotony, the vocabulary lists, the quizzes and assignments, the repetitive class jokes about our totems—all of it makes my life outside of class, in which two of the most important people in my life struggle to speak at all, appear even more chaotic, unruly, uncontrollable.
My household is a reverse of the one in which I grew up: English on the inside, Mandarin on the outside. People often joke that pretty soon P. will be teaching me Mandarin. There’s a tenderness to this image, the child carrying home what she’s learned, sharing the most precious of public currencies. And I do look forward to what she’ll teach me. But part of me is uneasy. Do I have trouble with my parental authority being undermined? Do I not want her to see me struggle? Does it arouse some repressed guilt for the way I failed to sympathize with my parents? How many times in my life, I wonder, have I corrected my parents’ English in a less than kind way—a way that functioned as a power move, a way to shut up their nagging by saying This is my country? Maybe this is my karmic repayment. If P. is a gentler teacher than I was, I hope I feel deserving.
*
As my mother-in-law deteriorates, I’ve tried to increase my time with her, sitting by her side, telling her my mundane woes in a mixture of English and Mandarin. Recently I showed her my quizzes. “Look, I got an 83 on this one,” I said. “My last Google search was ‘Is 83 a B or B minus?’” She waited for me to say more. “I used to care about the grade,” I said. “But now I’m just glad I’m not scared to look at the signs anymore. I understood a sign the other day! It said Thank you for your cooperation.”
I keep a list of things to tell her: memories she’s told me about her past that I want to report back, about her favorite place, about the ocean near her school in Hualien where she’d go as a teenager when she wanted to be alone. She’d lie on the beach by herself, just listening to the sounds. Like Albert, she likes to be alone. “Remember when we first met and I told you that he has your eyes?” I told her recently. “You were happy when I said that because you knew it meant I loved him.”
My other list is of her anxieties. She’s fretful, like me, and needs to be soothed. One fear has to do with her children; I promise her I’ll take care of Albert, thanking her for his existence. “We’re lucky to be loved by such strong people,” I’ll say, and she’ll blink hard and her eyes will brim with tenderness while mine water. Another of her anxieties is my own happiness. Unlike Albert’s father, she didn’t want us to come to Taiwan. She knew we were coming because of her, and she felt Taiwan was full of danger for the people who love it. Taiwanese people of her generation, her political stripe, will know exactly what I mean. Indeed, I believe she gave her life for that love. “Don’t worry about me, Mom,” I tell her. “I’m happy learning.” She blinks hard again, signaling that she understands.
I know there’s a stereotype about the fraught relationships between mothers- and daughters-in-law, one embodied in the emotionally loaded Chinese phrase po-xi guanxi. But I’ve been close to my mother-in-law ever since we met. She was determined to have an egalitarian relationship with me, and to foster my own with Albert. This is my daughter was one of the last full sentences she said in my presence, introducing me to a new caretaker. Now I long for the days I failed to appreciate, when we could talk about anything.
The key to learning a language is a lot like the key to life: you can’t look too far ahead. If you think too hard about what you might never be able to do, you’ll fall into despair. Being able to communicate with the resources you have in the moment, right now, to appreciate the place where you’ve arrived and accept its intrinsic worth—indeed, its dignity—might be the most important lesson of all.
Related Links on our Substack
Michelle on parrots who won’t talk to her and her initial months in Taiwan
A eulogy for Michelle’s grandma and her remarkable life
The aforementioned language coach Jeff on forgetting how to come out
Catherine Chou’s wonderful piece about learning Mandarin and Taiwanese
A note from the future: readers respond to this essay.
Jeremy Lin scores 50 points in an amazing game in Taiwan
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Book Club for June: Joann Tompkins
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, but in June we’ll read Joanne Tompkins’s What Comes After on Friday June 30th, time TBA.
For Mother’s Day Support a Book Drive for Women Incarcerated with Their Children
If you’re in Taiwan and have picture books, bring or ship them to the Forward Alliance office by the end of Tuesday. In Taiwan a select group of incarcerated mothers are allowed to nurse their infants in prison until the children reach three. Social science research shows that the first three years are crucial to secure parent-child attachment. I have loved seeing all the books come in, especially one of my personal favorites, Harold and the Purple Crayon. Here Forward Alliance’s address: 台北市中山區長安東路一段36號9樓.
Love this one. It’s beautiful, Michelle. I send big hugs to you and Albert’s mom. BTW, I think you’re writing better than I did at ten. And based on some NTU standards, 73 is B and 83 is actually A-.
Thank you for your beautiful post, Michelle! It gave me all the emotions. 🥹 I lost count of how many times I laughed or felt the pang of recognition in your struggles. If I wrote down all my thoughts this comment would become an essay, so I won't. But I want to yell 加油 (I wish I could capitalize that) as loudly as I can, because intensive classes take so much work, and you're killing it! I took intensive classes at the MTC eight years ago (I was one of the elders in my class at the ripe age of...29), starting from level zero, and I had no other responsibilities besides going to school and studying. After 9 months, my brain was wrung dry. I don't know how I would've survived if I had, say, a child and a mother-in-law to help take care of, as well as a million other projects. In that case, I wouldn't have tried to learn Mandarin at all. ;_; I just want to remind you what an awesome and difficult thing it is you're doing. And thanks so much for sharing your experience! (Also, I wish I could've been in the room when you gave your presentation on Breaking Bad. 😆)