I’m bilingual.
I was educated in one language and migrated early to another. English is my principle medium for introspection, and I am ostensibly no different from native speakers in my other language – Chinese. Perhaps due to the fact that my formative identity was constructed in English, it is the main channel through which I communicate a more authentic self.
I exhibit different personalities in my two languages – as a peculiar illustration, I am an unrepentant potty mouth, but I can’t swear in Chinese. I’m not able to write this blog in Chinese either… even if I can articulate similar thoughts, to make it my language of confession feels… hollow. I also find it strenuous to speak in a mixed language, and would lose my train of thought when I switch mid-sentence. It’s as if my two languages occupy parallel channels that rarely intersect.
My language is intricately linked to identify – and to the crisis therein. I was the first ever Asian student at my international school to take A-level English, a scandalous decision at the time. I was 16 and largely inarticulate. Our English teacher had already successfully dissuaded a Korean classmate from what the same ill-fated aspiration, so my determination to be an outlier was not well-received. That very summer, thanks to months isolated in my room writing Harry Potter fan-fiction, I had a spurt of fluency. The teacher regarded my new-found literary skills with suspicion and threatened before the whole class to Google my first essay of the term sentence-by-sentence, lest I confessed to plagiarism. It simply wasn’t conceivable that one can quickly become proficient in an adopted language. Maths and science may be universal, but language was proprietary. It was a right assigned by birth, to fellow members of the tribe, to which I am a guest. Who was I to upset the natural order of things?
He didn’t phrase it quite like that… and when my grades consistently topped the class, he finally acceded, acknowledging that I might actually boost the average performance of his class instead of dragging it down.
But I have felt a sense of transgression ever since. My mere use of the English language carried with it a secret shame – as if by appropriating the language of another culture, I am rejecting my own. Chinese should be my language of contemplation and deliberation, and my inability to do so was a form of disloyalty.
Had I simply regarded English as a second language, an assistive tool, it probably wouldn’t be this complicated. But English is ingrained in the roots of my sense of self, even more so than my mother tongue. Had I fully embraced the identity represented by either one of my languages, I might feel more grounded. But I reside in the discursive space between two cultures, and I feel more aimless than ambivalent. To be bilingual, bicultural, suggest a bifurcation of sorts, yet I am not torn between two sides, but disconnected from either.
That sense of disconnection has become all the more apparent since my repatriation to China. For the past three years I have lived in a bubble at the interstices of local and expat life, tuned into the daily goings of both, attuned to neither. My only connection to both sides is the languages. I understand, but could not participate. It is the quintessential burden of a third-culture kid: to feel like a stranger in your own home.
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