p***y
发帖数: 18037 | 1 撇开他的身份，这篇是有真感情的，写得真好。
When I was a child, I hated going to Chinese school on the weekends. Why did
I have to study these chicken scratches and learn how to say the same
things I already knew how to say in English in a different way? Rote
memorization of the characters was hard, boring, and … did I already say it
was boring? Well, in case I didn’t, let me say it again – learning
Chinese was boring. So, when I hit my seventh year of watching my friends
spend their Friday nights relaxing after a hard week of school, I put my
foot down in a colossal fight with my parents and Chinese school went the
Way of the Dodo. Good riddance, I smugly thought to myself.
After my junior year in high school, I had random inspiration to head down
to rural Ecuador and work on a public-health volunteer project for eight
weeks. It was the first time I had ever left home, my family, and the States
– and it was everything you might have imagined for a wide-eyed fifteen-
year old kid. I was scared shitless, but eventually left with some of the
most lasting impressions that I still carry with me today. And, after total
Spanish immersion on top of the five years of classes I had in California’s
public school system, I actually spoke passable Spanish when I returned to
the States.
Shortly after returning home, my grandmother happened to be visiting from
Taiwan and we went out to eat dinner at Hong Fu’s in my hometown of
Cupertino, the home of Apple. When my grandmother asked me a very simple
question in Chinese (“how was South America?”), I involuntarily responded
in Spanish – and I couldn’t think of a single word in Chinese to even
answer the question in a basic manner. The dark place in the back of my
brain where I stored those few Chinese words had been replaced by Spanish.
My grandmother never said anything, but the expression on her face said
everything. “I understand that you are American, having been born and
raised here, but if you are going to take the intense amount of time and
effort to learn a second language, why would you learn Spanish, instead of
Chinese?” It was at this extremely embarrassing moment that I resolved as a
lifetime goal to be able to communicate and function effectively in Chinese.
When college admissions and selection time came around, for a variety of
reasons I discuss in other writings, I elected to challenge myself
differently and attend an American military academy. Senators Dianne
Feinstein and Barbara Boxer nominated me for both West Point and Annapolis,
and I ended up choosing West Point largely because Annapolis didn’t have a
Chinese language program back in 1997. They only taught Japanese for some
reason (which, for some reason, West Point didn’t offer). So, despite the
cooler looking Navy uniforms that were tugging at my seventeen year-old
brain, I went north to the Hudson River in New York, where I endured four
harsh years at West Point, my rockbound highland home. And, when I graduated
in 2001 and took my place amongst the Long Gray Line, I was proud to say
that I passed eight classes of Chinese language and literature on top of a
demanding computer science curriculum, under the famed “Dragon Lady”, Dr.
Martha Gallagher, my most enduring professor-student relationship still
today.
But, even after four years of college-level Chinese courses, I still didn’t
feel like I could express myself the way I wanted to, and with Dr.
Gallagher’s help, I was the first West Point student ever to attend
Princeton-in-Beijing’s summer intensive language program – normally, after
four years of brutal round-the-clock pressure and heavy academic, military,
and physical requirements, newly-minted West Point graduates take a couple
of months off to rest and to relax with their families before shipping off
worldwide for their first duties in the United States Army. Me? I paid
several thousand dollars out-of-pocket and headed off to memorize nearly 100
characters a day in a furious and frenetic course with Princeton of a year
’s worth of material crammed down our throats for eight weeks, immersed at
Beijing Normal University.
But, even after finishing those eight weeks in Beijing, I felt like I had
only cracked the door slightly open – I still wasn’t able to push the door
completely open to be exposed by a whole new world, but rather, I just
bumped it ajar enough to see how much further I had to go before I could get
a full look at the other end. But, with working full-time as a U.S. Army
officer, there was hardly any energy at the end of difficult, punishing days
to be motivated to study Chinese on my own. And, let’s not forget to
mention a few short months later, a few highly motivated and extreme
individuals flew two large planes into the Twin Towers in New York City on
September 11, 2001, which changed my life irrevocably as the peacetime U.S.
Army I joined went on a warpath for the next decade.
When I abruptly left the U.S. Army and Special Forces in 2009, I wasn’t
sure where to go and what to do. I had been accepted into both Harvard
Kennedy School of Government and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies, but wasn’t sure if I was really ready to just head
back to the States. Instead, I felt that at thirty years young, this was
probably my last opportunity to fulfill that lifelong dream I had of being
able to truly communicate in Chinese, and I headed off to National Taiwan
University’s famous program, the International Chinese Language Program and
studied Chinese intensively for a year. And even beyond that, I ended up
selecting to spend a year with Johns Hopkins at their Nanjing campus, where
all my class lectures were in Chinese from Nanjing University professors,
and all my papers were submitted in Chinese.
It was only after all this that I finally realized that there was no need to
continue to study so formally. I learned that language is a lifelong
endeavor, and no matter how much time I spent studying Chinese, I would
always encounter words and phrases that I did not know. Even after all that
study, I still stumble in Chinese from time to time, and say very odd things
that get me funny looks all the time during business meetings in China and
Taiwan, or even worse nowadays, during television interviews and speeches.
And now, I’m just comfortable in that fact – knowing that I will be
studying this language forever, just as I subconsciously study English every
day as well. Studying and finding Chinese is simply a part of me now, and
will be forever.
As a Chinese-American boy growing up, unable to speak Chinese intelligently,
I can honestly say that I never had an actual, real conversation with any
of my grandparents during my childhood, adolescence, and even adulthood. And
it saddens me to say, but frankly and honestly, we didn’t know each other
at all. I have no idea how they thought about things, and they had no idea
about how I thought about things. Obviously, we visited as a family and we
engaged in small talk, but I never had an actual relationship like I observe
either local Chinese or local American families where language barrier isn
’t an issue. I was always jealous of that aspect of observing those outside
of the Chinese-American experience, where we seem to be more limited than
most by our heritage because Chinese is so difficult to learn.
Before I arrived to Taipei in 2009, when I finally learned how to express
coherent thoughts in Chinese, three grandparents had already left us. It is
with great sadness that I reflect upon the lost opportunity to have heard
their stories from their hometowns in rural China, their stories about the
Civil War in China, or their stories about the early days when they had just
arrived to Taiwan. So, when I was in Taipei in 2009, I resolved to spend as
much time as I could with my last grandparent, my waipo, and to finally
communicate with an elder of my family. It goes without saying that my own
brushes with mortality on the battlefields I visited certainly prompted a
sense of urgency for me to connect while I had the second chance to do so.
I went to my waipo’s house once a week, sometimes twice. As my language
skills improved in class, I began to find our conversations became more and
more open each week, and waipo would share more and more about her life.
Despite being ninety years old, I was fascinated to discover that she
remembered an enormous amount even from her early childhood in the 1920s.
Certainly, there were some days that waipo was more lucid than others; some
days, conversation was challenging as she would repeat the same questions or
stories twice, or even three times. But, there were those days that she was
sharp as a whip, faster than me off the cuff with the witty retort, and
even cleaner with the barb many times as well.
In a very odd but true sense, my waipo and I met when I was thirty years old
for the first time – even while my waipo is the first person to have ever
given me a bath, the day after I was born in Massachusetts. There was always
a distinct and subtle understanding that our new relationship in Taiwan was
of one between adults, rather than grandson to grandmother. Sometimes,
waipo would forget that I was two generations beneath her, and refer to my
waigong by his name to me, and even my aunts, uncle, and mother as her silly
children, while she regaled me with stories of how she raised her family in
the early years of modern Taiwan. That always amused me, to be spoken to
almost like a peer at these times of our quiet dinners alone at her home;
just another unique characteristic in the frame of meeting your grandmother
for the first time as a grown man, rather than as a helpless child.
Waipo told me stories of how she and her younger sister would play at a
local temple nearby her family’s farming lands, chasing each other and
hiding from annoyed monks, which I had visited in 2006 with my family on a
trip back to our ancestral home in Hunan. My waipo told an amazing story
about how a tiger was menacing her village when she was a teenager, and even
happily mimicked the sound of the tiger’s roar at night, along with a claw
-like motion, which sent me into tears of laughter each time she made the
tiger gestures and growling sounds. And she talked about the hero in her
village that one day had enough of the tiger, and went by himself into the
woods with a butcher’s knife tied-down on one end of a broomstick, and
killed that tiger to protect his village. We both admired his courage and
his sense of self-sacrifice for others.
My waipo always worried about my safety; I think because she spent so little
time outside the apartment by that time, she must have remembered much more
dangerous times in her earlier life. So, she would always tell me to look
over my shoulder when I was walking down the street, because there were men
who would come out of the dark shadows and alleys and just stab me with a
knife for no good reason at all! And to which, I would always lean over and
whisper, “Waipo, I know … I’m one of those men that do the killing.” To
which her eyes would grow big, start, and then slap me on my shoulder and
call me a “big animal” or “big barbarian” and then giggle, covering her
mouth with the back of her hand.
Waipo also gave amazing advice and insight into relationships and people,
and loved to hear about my dating life and provide overly strong views. Once
, when I hesitated about asking a girl I liked out on a date because I didn
’t think she liked me back, she told me to “just ask her! Life is too
short … there is no such thing as failure, there is only feedback!” My
waipo loved to drink cognac, which isn’t anywhere near the type of liquor I
prefer, but somehow she had accumulated a massive supply of cognac over the
years as gifts. They were all so old that the cork would always break every
time I opened it, and we would always have to filter the cork out of the
cognac and serve it from a quaff. And, there were many a nights that we
would sit at her dining table late into the weekday night, sipping this
ancient cognac, and I would listen to her stories, struggling to understand
the best I could as I was learning more and more Chinese, desperately
wanting to know more about her, and by extension, learning more about myself
.
I find this language barrier aspect of the Chinese-American experience a
part that even many of my fellow Chinese-Americans and my immigrant parents
’ generation don’t often think about. With the changing times, there is an
unavoidable generation gap that most parents and children have; with
immigrants, there is also a culture gap between the old and new home
countries. But, have you ever thought about the communication gap that
exists from one side always communicating in a second language? It is
already hard enough to communicate effectively in your first language, right
? My Chinese doesn’t hold a candle to my English capability, but I realized
in my pursuit of learning Chinese on how it has unintentionally enhanced my
relationship to my parents as well.
My waipo left today, but not without having passed numerous stories to me,
having given me that final opportunity to have built a relationship when I
awakened my tongue and finally crossed that gap in communication. Even in
the final days at the hospital, she would perk up when I told her that I
went on a recent date, and she would shimmy her shoulders in celebration
from her bed. On her last day, her hands were suddenly so much colder than
all the previous days in the weeks before, but when I held it, she still
squeezed it repeatedly to let me know she knew I was there. I will always be
so thankful of not only the time that I was able to spend with her in
Taiwan, but also for raising my mother with such great care and love, and to
have given me her as well. For certainty, I will always think of my waipo
as I remember her most recently – as the wise woman who suddenly would perk
up with a twinkle in her eye with the witty retort to my tongue-in-cheek
humor or the forever elegant lady who would tell me that all the good girls
would be gone since the ones that would want me when I was older weren’t
the ones worth keeping anyway. I will miss my waipo more than words, as her
presence, her home, and her love, defines Taiwan to me; but, most of all in
the coming days, I know I will just miss my friend. |
|
