Bilingual

English is the ocean where I drop my anchor and Chinese is the continent that holds my

roots. An island, which I grew up on, is somewhere in between.

When I think about English I imagine an encyclopedia of phonemes floating across the

Pacific like alphabets in a giant bowl of cereal. The cadences rise and break like waves, various

accents merging in torrents of Southern drawls and nasal Bostonian yawns. I look up the history

of this book of sounds and find that it was first printed in the depths of Hollywood, published

through various pipelines and channels, and finally found its way to Taiwan, an Asian island

drifting away from its continent, where a little girl holds a television to her ear like a seashell and

listens.

When I think about Chinese I see calligraphy brushstrokes carved on soft earth and

mountains and the four intonations of my mother’s voice. The same brush paints characters

scrawled on dirty store signs in the streets of Taiwan advertising betel nuts and computers, neat

rows in my textbooks and the spiky scribbles on my teenage journals. When I think about

Chinese, I hear my grandparents’ enunciated lilt defying the years they lived away from

Mainland China and the flattened slurs of my generation. Together all these things, traditional

and simplified, form the language.

When I was growing up my father reminded me again and again that English is

extremely important, that if I speak it fluently I can go anywhere and be anyone. I can make a

fortune teaching English in Taiwan, I can go to America and become a doctor, I can have kids

who grow up inside white-picket fences, I can leave the little confused island caught between the

past and the future, almost independent but not quite. The world would be open to me, he said,

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like a book.

So I read. English is the bookshelf in my room holding Little Golden Books and

Dickens. When I was little, whenever I finished reading an English book my mother would put a

sticker on the spine and date it. I would feel a tingle of pride as I looked up at the orderly rows,

little stickers together forming a multicolored line. So I read and read and read English books

until the spines grew thicker and my mother stopped keeping track, telling me I should read more

in Chinese—how could I misuse this four-character idiom, had I really never read that classic

myth?

Chinese is the wobbly desk in my high school, an overweight backpack and ancient

poems to recite. I memorized the poems, carried the backpack, studied and fell asleep at the desk.

Occasionally I would come across an essay or a poet that would make the center of my

breastbone vibrate with an age-old love that is locked in the heart and lungs of the language. I

would roll the characters along my tongue and familiarize the contours of my teeth with the strict

rhyme and meter. I would trace my fingers along the symbols, trying to decipher the evolution of

their shapes, how they once were simple drawings of sun, tree, grass, roots.

English is Sesame Street, Disney and HBO. Chinese is the subtitles my father duct-

taped over on the TV screen so that I would be forced to listen.

I listen to the encyclopedia floating across the Pacific, train my ear and tongue on

teenage ‘like’s and ‘um’s, measured sarcasm and upbeat ‘how are you’s. Somewhere along the

way words like ‘spatula’ and ‘futon’ mysteriously get lost and I scrabble and scramble to find

meaning in context, in a country where sometimes I am taken out of context. Occasionally

syntax slips and becomes confused, and I line my English with a Chinese accent, a disclaimer.

But this does not happen often because my parents have taught me well and in the right

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ways. English opens books and doors to the other side of the Pacific, but sometimes I wonder

why this journey had had to take place: my grandparents away from the continent, I from the

island, my children from the language and the characters that documented our past. Our roots

move from one syntax to another. History is a series of departures, lives leaving words leaving

mouths.