glass_icarus | on language and appropriation: a story told backward.

Here in the United States, there is an English as a Second Language exam that they administer to multilingual students. I have always had a certain facility with languages; even though I moved to America two years before I was enrolled in kindergarten, my familiarity with English was so far beyond my peers that I never had to take it. I was reading chapter-books and learning dinosaur names by the time most of my classmates were learning to spell. I have no memory of even being approached on the subject of ESL, although eighteen years have passed since then and my memories of elementary school have always been rather hazy and attached to a feeling of general boredom/isolation.

I speak, I write, I read English as if it were my first language because I love languages, yes. What the ESL test and the American school system don't recognize: I do so also because I lost my mother tongue when I was three.

My clearest memories of my early childhood are these:

I never went to Chinese school on Saturdays with all the other children in our area. My mother tried to take me once, but I was so intimidated that I cried inconsolably until the teacher called her to take me home again, not an hour later. I never set foot in that school again. My mother tried to teach me herself, for a while: there were a few times that she brought out her brush pen and ink and wrote strokes for me to copy on paper. I dreamed of music though, as a child, and because my parents loved me and were indulgent, I spent all my weekends thereafter learning to play the piano and the violin, until the pens and inks were eventually put away.

I went to kindergarten, curious and very small and as shy as I was eager to make friends. At the age of five, I wanted to be like everyone else, so much so that on my first spelling test, I misspelt "apple" deliberately so I wouldn't stand out too much. My teacher knew that I knew better, so she confronted me in front of my parents. My mother shouted at me then, not understanding, I think, my need to be liked; was it not better to excel? Was it not better to learn more, better, faster than everyone else, so that I could go somewhere, become something? Something beyond all the other (white) children, she didn't say; somewhere I would be recognized and lauded despite the color of my skin. I realize these things only in retrospect, of course. Back then, I simply nodded and turned in test after perfect test, and mostly sat alone reading my books during recess.

There are Chinese picture-books that I remember reading before I ever set foot in an American school. I had a set of books about a family of mice, beautifully illustrated; I had a set of Chinese folktale books. I vaguely recall a book with animal butts as well, though the subject escapes me now. I even had an audio version, in Mandarin, of Journey to the West, which my parents played in the car sometimes when we were driving long distances. I'm certain there were many others, lost to time and circumstance. My parents read to me on occasion because it was a thing we all enjoyed, but I spent many afternoons sitting by myself, happily devouring page after colorful page, word after beautiful word.

My mother likes to tell these stories: how she taught me over 2,000 characters when I was a baby, using flash cards, and how I pointed to each word with perfect comprehension as she spoke. How I read piles of books voraciously- both silently and aloud- all by myself. How I once recited flawlessly all the Tang poetry I'd heard from my mother. How I once spoke Mandarin with a perfect Beijing accent, that curl of the tongue which neither of my parents possess. How the sum of my knowledge, at three years old, was greater than the pieces left now to crumble slowly in my hands. If I picked up one of those picture-books today, I wouldn't be able to read a single page, in its entirety.

There are some losses that I cannot now remedy. I am ten years past the optimal learning period, and though my language skills are not entirely lost to disuse, the grace by which I learned during childhood, at least, is long gone. I have tried both in high school and in college to reclaim my language; both times, I had to prioritize absorbing science over re-absorbing my mother tongue. But even if I started, at this very minute, to learn Chinese again, I could not now recreate the wonder of reading those picture-books for the very first time, or ask my grandparents- three of them now dead- to tell me their family stories. I could not now think or dream in Chinese the way that I do in English, the thought-patterns of my early childhood irrevocably overwritten. Even if I started now to learn the poetry of Du Fu and Li Bai, most of the nuances and secondary meanings would still be filtered through the knowledge of my tutors or of my parents, absorbed secondhand. Even if I reclaimed my mother tongue today, I would always have these caveats, my mastery always fragmented and not-quite-complete.

English was my second language, but it might as well have been my first. Even though I was never tested, these are the scars that I will always bear.