Or, how I learned to make peace with raising a mostly monolingual kid.
Mothering is such an all-encompassing word. For Chinese mothers who live overseas, helping our children learn Mandarin can feel like an integral part of our parenting obligations. And often, this means a lot of work.
The most obvious rationale here may be that we’re Chinese, so we must want our kids to learn the Chinese language and understand our culture and heritage. But really, when I talk with other Chinese moms, the reason they typically give is that they want their children to be able to communicate with their monolingual parents back in China, and that an ability to understand and speak Chinese is crucial for the kids to develop a strong emotional bond with their extended family.
And, also, just look around. Our friends who are second- or third-generation Chinese Americans are painfully studying Chinese in their 20s or 30s. They resisted Saturday Chinese schools when they were children and are now grieving the loss of their cultural roots. One of the more successful tactics I’ve found for conveying the importance of Chinese study to my eight-year-old has been pointing to my friends’ struggles with the language. “See, if you don’t study Chinese now, you’ll grow up like them!” I say, channeling my elementary school teachers in 1990s China.
To be clear, not everything boils down to heritage. Often, our motivations are no different from other middle-class parents who want their children to study a second language: Fluency in another language is a form of social capital and an asset on the job market; learning a second language at a young age can stimulate children’s brains and give them a leg up when they get older; and learning a language provides a gateway to minority cultures outside the dominant white American culture.
To an extent, having our children study Chinese is no different from having them study Spanish, take up violin, or practice figure skating. The difference for immigrant mothers like myself is that we did not grow up in a system that taught us these activities, and therefore we have no insider knowledge to share with and assist our children. But we do have the advantage of bilingualism, so why not take advantage of it?
Of course, that’s easier said than done. The most basic Chinese teaching method used in all overseas Chinese homes is to speak Chinese and only Chinese to our children. We’ve all heard the tall tales in which Mom A pretends she doesn’t know English for 10 years straight, or Mom B refuses to talk to her kids unless they speak to her in Chinese. It’s a pedagogy I’d love to imitate, but I’ve never figured out how Mom A talks with the neighbors, or whether Mom B has an extraordinarily easygoing child. Certainly, when my child was a toddler, she so rarely responded to anything I said that I took what I could get, regardless of language.
Besides, communicating while raising a child is often too fast-paced to worry about things like language, especially when both parents are equally involved. Maybe it’s a bit easier when the couple share a linguistic background, but my spouse doesn’t speak much Chinese. Ideally, I would speak to my child in Chinese and then translate it, but that’s only feasible when things are happy, slow, and peaceful, which is somehow very unusual in my household.
Sometimes I wonder if my inconsistency in speaking Chinese at home is holding back my child’s bilingual development. Fortunately, every time my self-doubt rears its head, I’ll hear from a Chinese mother — even some whose spouse also speaks Chinese — that their kid quickly became monolingual once they entered an English school or preschool. Speaking Chinese at home is simply not enough, or at least, not according to the multiple social media groups dedicated to “raising bilingual children” that I’ve joined.
Once you adventured into the domain of structured schooling, the real game starts. Level one: Select the most affordable and effective online tutoring platform for your child while testing the limits of both the tutors’ skills and your child’s attention span. Level two: Search for Chinese storytelling events at local libraries, and if you’re so lucky, you might even find a Chinese afterschool program or weekend class. Level three: send your child to bilingual English and Chinese grades schools.
Of course, because these kinds of schools are usually located in major metro areas, this limits where you can live. I know some parents who moved to urban centers to send their kids to bilingual schools, and now commute two hours a day to their jobs in the exurbs.
There are other costs, too. When I graduated from my Ph.D. program, my child, Fig, was just six months old and I was at the peak of my anxiety about her linguistic future. Desperate for her to grow up in an area with a large Chinese population, I quickly realized that this limited me to jobs in places like Seattle, Los Angeles, or New York City. Soon afterwards, I decided to leave academia and look for jobs in these metro areas.
Seven years later, I don’t regret the career change, but I feel much more relaxed about Fig’s Chinese. When she was three, English became Fig’s dominant language. I felt disappointed and defeated. But then she started reading English books and dreaming adventurous stories in English, writing notes like “I love you, mama” and “You made my life better,” telling me English riddles and jokes that she learned from her friends at school, and doing end-of-day check-ins in bed in which she and I took turns describing the feelings we experienced that day and the moments we had those feelings.
Eventually, I realized that her willingness to share her world and feelings with me was enough, regardless of which language she used. If anything, the fact that English is now Fig’s dominant language and that she uses it in such beautiful ways has changed my relationship with it. Seven years studying in a humanities Ph.D. program at an American University strengthened my English but also made me hate the language. To love Fig — and by extension Fig’s English — was a kind of turning point. Just like Fig is learning Chinese because Chinese is her mother’s language, I’m enjoying English more because it’s the language of my child.
Last year, my friend Josh Hou — a Chinese-Malaysian American also based in Seattle — and I formed a Mandarin songwriting group called the Good Luck Rabbits. One of the pieces we wrote, shuangyu baobao, or “Bilingual Baby,” is based on a demo Josh sent me that had such a sweet melody. I got to thinking, what words would be sweet enough to match the tune? I started with Fig’s first Chinese words: “mommy,” “hug,” “daddy,” “I love you,” and “ice cream.” The more I wrote, the more the lyrics seemed to take on a life of their own, and I was finally able to unload what was in my heart: “Even if and when you grow up, and you forget all these, I love you more than language, identity, and everything.”
It was a love song to my child, as well as to my fellow overseas Chinese mothers. Mothering is hard, and society never tell us that we are enough. But after all the hard work we put in to connect our children to our language, culture, heritage, and family, I believe the love between us and our children is more important than anything else.
Zhou Shuxuan is a writer and scholar based in Seattle.
Editor: Cai Yiwen.
(Header image: Visuals from VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)