On Language, Life, and Learning
「天下無不散的筵席」——“All good things come to an end”
A couple of months ago, Michelle Kuo, law professor extraordinaire and one of the authors of A Broad and Ample Road (a fabulous Substack newsletter than everyone should check out!) published a deeply personal account of a topic that has been a steady fixture of my own life: language learning.
Michelle has plenty on her plate: she recently moved to Taiwan, she is a professor at National Taiwan University, she is mother to a toddler, and she is deeply involved in caring for a family member in declining health. In her recent newsletter, she wrote an extraordinarily moving account of yet another item on her daily to-do list: for the past semester, she was enrolled in an intensive Mandarin program in Taiwan.
Having spent the past several years alternately bashing my head against the brick wall of foreign language acquisition and wondering to myself if brick walls are soluble in tears, much of Michelle’s account felt completely familiar. But her account also reflects on the way that her Chinese-American background complicates her relationship with learning Chinese.
This latter issue is obviously fundamentally different from my own experience of language learning. And yet, as someone who grew up overseas largely in non-English-speaking environments, Michelle’s reflections on language, identity, and belonging have continued to tickle at the back of my mind.
I began writing the opening section of this post in early June as I sat waiting for the start of the graduation ceremony from my own intensive Chinese program. Although I have nothing nearly so profound to contribute to this discussion as Michelle, I thought that this moment of transition would be as good a time as any to reflect on my own experiences as a lifelong language learner.
Is That a Compliment?
Upon arriving in Taiwan 15 months ago, one of the first things that jumped out at me was the general reaction to my Chinese. The surprise of others was not surprising to me. Often, a semi-passable “ni hao” (“hello”) in a convenience store is enough to win kudos for (visible) foreigners like me. While this may be good for my self esteem on days when my morale is low, it hardly reflects years of effort sunk into language study.
What did surprise me, however, was the most common response to my Mandarin: “Wow, your Chinese is so standard!” (你的中文好標準!)
In some ways, this is clearly a compliment, one that validates years spent eliminating aural signs of foreignness that my lexical choices, grammatical limitations, or face inevitably betray. But on another level, it reveals the tensions around linguistic standardization here in Taiwan. For the decades of KMT rule in Taiwan, “good Chinese” was spoken with the curled tongue of a Beijing accent, something that is largely absent in the local phonemic repertoire. It is also absent in the place where I first learned Mandarin, Shanghai.
The increasing disidentification of younger generations of Taiwanese with Mainland China has reflected itself in local language usage. After decades of Taiwanification, standard Mandarin is no longer a prerequisite for getting ahead in life. As such, an ever shrinking proportion of young people take the time to mask their Taiwanese accents.
In a recent conversation with one of my Chinese instructors, I learned that this trend has even impacted language school hiring. The program in which I studied continues to hew tightly to “standard Mandarin” pronunciation, and this has created problems as the school tries to expand its ranks of faculty. For example, even though many prospective instructors in a recent search were gifted pedagogues, almost none of them possessed the “standard Mandarin” pronunciation that is a prerequisite for the job. As such, the multi-position search failed, and the school was left severely short-staffed.
Let me be clear, every single one of the interviewees was Taiwanese, a native speaker of Mandarin. But they were eliminated based on pronunciation standards established in the 1950s by a government that felt its legitimacy was still bound up in its claims to the ancient capital of Beijing.
As I was writing the opening of this post, the sound of a teacher speaking with her student drifted down the hall. Using the waning minutes of the quarter to deliver her parting pronouncements, the teacher said in an accent that would have done any Mainland Chinese newscaster proud: “Your grammar is fundamentally fine. The issue is your tones—they’re not distinct enough, particularly your second and third tones.” This is a common enough refrain in classes. When in doubt, you can always criticize a student’s tones, or express skepticism that their tongue is really curled for that piratic arrr sound. As such, I initially didn’t think much of this exchange.
When she continued, however, my ears pricked up, “If you want to find a job in Taiwan, it won’t be a problem. Taiwanese people have really bad second and third tones. But if you want to get a job in the Mainland, nobody will understand what you’re saying.”
There’s a lot that we could critique here. The idea that “all Taiwanese” get it (i.e., their mother tongue) wrong. The myth of a monolithic Mainland pronunciation system. The assumption that every student does or should want to approximate a standard of pronunciation that has little bearing on their day-to-day experience of the language, not just in Taiwan, but pretty much anywhere outside of northeastern China.
Most importantly, though, the teacher said the part you’re not supposed to say aloud. She had admitted that the decision to continue drilling tones in the closing quarter-hour of a long, intensive school year, was all in service of a linguistic ideal propagated primarily by a government in Beijing that would happily see all of Taiwan’s hard-won political freedoms erased.
Thus, when confronted with the statement, “Your Chinese is so standard,” I can’t help but feel uncomfortable. On the one hand, I did not have the ability to choose my Chinese teachers. The fact that the vast majority of my instructors in the years leading up to my move to Taiwan were all graduates of Peking University is something that was beyond my control. But this pedagogical history has clearly imprinted itself on my voice. And it feels like it adds a second layer to my foreignness in Taiwan: as a visible foreigner, any level of Mandarin proficiency tends to be noteworthy; as a visible foreigner with a comparatively Beijing-approved accent, it creates a disjuncture between expectation and reality that is noteworthy again, and again, and again. And although the comments on my standards-conforming Mandarin are deployed in a way that is clearly meant to be complimentary, it is not always clear to me that it is that simple.
Is That True?
I should be clear: I know several Westerners whose Mandarin is worlds better than mine. Nevertheless, when confronted with Mandarin that exceeds the very low expectations for foreign language proficiency, many people look for reasons.
“You’ve been in Taiwan for a long time, right?” (A year and a bit is a universally unsatisfactory response.)
“So you’ve studied for a long time, right?” (Several years is more acceptable, but even sustained diligence elicits a certain degree of dubiousness.)
Very occasionally, if placed under intense interrogation, I divulge that I lived in Shanghai as a tweenager.
“AHH! No wonder!”
Every time I supply this tidbit about my life history, all doubts about my Chinese melt away. Of course I speak Chinese better than most foreigners.
Oddly, my time in Shanghai has been used to explain both my very “standard” Mandarin, and some of my struggles with “standard” Mandarin. One Chinese teacher said that my second and third tones were weak, but that wasn’t my fault. It was Shanghai’s fault, because the Shanghainese have weak second and third tones (forcing me to wonder, is there anywhere other than Beijing that has good second and third tones?) Another teacher went so far as to dub me a “semi-native speaker” (半母語者).
Is that true? I don’t think it is. In fact, I’m quite certain it’s not. I first encountered Chinese at a comparatively late age, and I attended an English-language school, so it’s not as though I absorbed Mandarin unconsciously. And after living in China, my degrees in music took me down very different linguistic routes: German, French, and Italian were requirements of various music degrees; I added in some Czech and Russian phonetics, because why not?; and I took a year of Swedish because I fell in love with the art songs of Wilhelm Stenhammar and Jean Sibelius (Barbara Bonney’s album Diamonds in the Snow remains a fabulous gateway drug to that repertoire—go check it out!) This is a long way of saying that I and Chinese parted ways for more than 15 years, and we were not reunited until the beginning of my second doctorate. Put differently, between roughly the end of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and the beginning of The Crown, my Chinese learning was precisely nil.
But this isn’t the first time that people have sought explanations for my odd combination of linguistic aptitude and haplessness. Shortly after I enrolled in my German master’s degree, I submitted an essay that was returned only with the ominous heading, “See me.”
After class, the words that came out of my teacher’s mouth surprised me: “Are you Swiss?”
Obviously I’m not Swiss. Clearly. “That’s interesting, because your essay is full of Swiss German.”
Alright, I confess, I lived in Switzerland for all of elementary school and the beginning of middle school. Nevertheless, I remain not Swiss.
Later that same term, another teacher made the comment that teaching me German was more like “reminding” me of things I already knew. But like the “semi-native speaker” assessment of my Chinese class, this comment doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head. During my master’s degree, although I clearly had certain advantages in my German speaking, I learned structures, writing styles, and “standard” usages that I had never studied in school. What’s more, given that my environment outside of school was a Swiss German-speaking environment, with vocabularies and grammar structures that differ from standard High German, I most certainly didn’t encounter these things in my day-to-day life.
Assessments of my foreign language capacities that place me in a category similar to a native speaker or a heritage learner, whether German or Chinese, have one final problem. While they may provide a satisfactory narrative as to why I have proficiency in the language, they ignore my very real linguistic failings.
To me, these linguistic weaknesses are as much a product of my background as my strengths. You see, growing up in international schools, the focus of most language instruction tends to be very pragmatic: lessons are long on asking for directions, prices, and ambulances, and short on farm animals.
There’s a good reason for this, of course. Children (and their parents) are plopped down in a new cultural and linguistic context, usually with little advance training, and often for very limited periods of time. In an environment where most people stay at a post for only two or three years, it’s important to get kids up to speed quickly so that they can fend for themselves in case they need help.
A side effect of this functionalist imperative, however, is that foundational skills like endless drilling of verb declinations, tones in Mandarin, or even the “standard” way of saying something (rather than the way that everyone on the other side of the school windows actually says it) tends to fall away. Did you just confidently announce “The foot is hurt you help thank you”? Not to worry. We know your foot is hurt, and we know you’re asking for help. Congrats, everything will be fine.
Thus, rather than thinking of myself as a “semi-native speaker” or a heritage learner once removed, I tend to identify with the cracks between nations, cultures, identities, and languages.
Living and Languaging in the Cracks
When I followed my doctoral advisor to Chicago, she made the comment that her eight years in her Bay Area home was the longest stretch she had spent in the same house since leaving her childhood home. Her statement struck me, because I have never lived in the same house for eight years (although I came close in Switzerland). In the past ten years, Taipei is the sixth city in which I have lived.
The experience of living in the cracks has shaped most things in my life—my attachment to objects of memory, my relationship with place, and the ways in which I self-identify. Even this blog has been affected. Several readers have commented that I have a distinctive writing style (for better or for worse). To indulge briefly in self-analysis, I would say that this comes more from the pleasure I take in playing with the sounds of language than from any quest for a particular prose style. When I make a quip, or search for a pithy turn of phrase, the combination of sounds and rhythms is often almost as important to me as the meaning itself.
This attention to sound comes from the play that emerges from learning a new language, when everyday words sound new and fun and remarkable, even when meaning isn’t always self-evident. Is a Chäschüechli a delicious lunch item? Sure it is. Is it also a riot to say? You betcha. (I couldn’t find a video celebrating the pronunciation of this classic Swiss pastry, but the video below gives you an idea of just how different Swiss German and High German are.) Is ma ma hu hu 馬馬虎虎 an occasionally useful expression of mediocrity? Every now and then, yeah. Am I tickled by the idea that the literal meaning of the individual characters is “horse horse tiger tiger”? Unendingly.
My between-the-cracksness even extends to my professional life. A bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate in performance, a master’s in German, and now most of a doctorate in music research. Am I a performer or a scholar? A musicologist or an ethnomusicologist? No one knows. I am neither researching fish nor performing fowl. I am a hybrid of archival apple and ethnographic orange.
And then there’s the inevitable question, “Why are you studying Sinophone musics?” Just like in language learning, many people grant complete explanatory authority to my personal history of living in China. Obviously I study Sinophone musics because I grew up (briefly) in China. And this is clearly partly true.
At the same time, explanations of talent, skill, propensity, or interest that are fully rooted in an individual’s lived biography run the risk of eliminating factors that are equally, if not more, important. If I study the political histories of Sinophone musics simply because I find them interesting, then what? If I speak German well simply because I put in a lot of time and effort towards my primary musical interest of German art song, does that satisfactorily explain my linguistic proficiency?
Explanations of ability that require keystone biographical experiences also run the risk of creating inviolable lanes on the path to study, career, and community. If we lean too heavily on these kinds of explanations it is easy to slip from a certain acknowledgment of linguistic, academic, or career attainment into a chain of tacit permissions. I am allowed to speak passable German because of personal history. I am allowed to be good-for-a-Westerner at Chinese, or a student of Chinese musics because I lived there. (Am I also allowed to be a proficient performer of Swedish art song or scholar of Taiwanese musical culture in this paradigm? Who knows?)
Finally, I am hesitant to accept these kinds of biographized explanations because of what it implies about my shortcomings. If I’m a “semi-native-speaker” who owes my linguistic proficiencies to passive experience rather than sustained endeavor, then my linguistic shortcomings imply that I am a flawed example of semi-native-speakerhood. Rather than simply allowing me to be a student of language, music, or society whose past experiences shape my current and future learning, I become a disappointing case that fails to draw near enough to some Platonic ideal of semi-nativeness.
Are my experiences shaped by an upbringing and adult life of constant moving and constant study? Absolutely. But are there many paths to linguistic, musical, or scholarly aptitude that have nothing to do with any direct biographical link? Absolutely. And these non-biographical paths are at least as valid, compelling, and interesting as the explanation, “I lived there for a bit.” And if we want to craft academic and professional spaces that are truly welcoming to all, it is imperative that we embrace all of the messy, arbitrary, quixotic reasons that people pursue the passions they do.
As I reach the end of my final doctorate (please, God, let it be the last one), I know that the nature of my future study and learning will change. For one thing, after decades of near-constant language-learning, I know that I have probably had my last hurrah of concerted language study, at least for the foreseeable future. In the words of the announcements screen on graduation day at my language program, 「天下無不散的筵席」——“All good things come to an end.”
Ultimately, if folks want to reduce my academic journey to a set of pins in a map, I can’t stop them. I will continue living in the cracks between countries, languages, and fields—sometimes happily, sometimes uneasily, and sometimes with great gnashing of teeth. But at least I will live in those cracks with my whole self, for better or for worse.