EDITOR’S PICK: SPECIAL COLUMN - THE TAISHANESE JOURNEY OF A FELLOW LANGUAGE LEARNER

We have been asked many times what our motivation is in continuing to teach or learn a language. Our answer will always be to conserve the language that signifies home and nostalgia. But this answer is kind of dry ain’t it? We believe a fellow student can give us a better motivational story. We invited Taylor from San Francisco to tell her story.

Ever since I was an infant, I’ve grown up with Taishanese-speakers. As a baby and toddler, my connection with the language was at its strongest. I would spend days with my mother and great-grandmother, hearing them converse with one another at home and being fully immersed in the language on lunch outings and trips to Chinatown. Though I never spoke full sentences, from what my mom recalls I appeared to have a certain understanding of the language. I never seemed confused about what was being said to me or what was going on. I would often parrot certain vocabulary and phrases that I heard. After meals I would happily pat my stomach, proclaiming “Bao bao!” and I fondly called my hair barrettes “nip nips” (Which to this day I am unsure is a real word and could very possibly be something of my great-grandmother’s own invention.) This understanding I had during this time of my life melted away as I went off to school and spent less time at home with my family. No longer was I immersed in the language in my day-to-day life. And perhaps even more importantly, now that I am older I have developed a certain self-consciousness around my inability to speak the language. My knowledge of Taishanese was by no means gone. I still knew certain phrases and could get the gist of a conversation. However, I didn’t know nearly enough to confidently speak to anyone, and because of that I simply didn’t. At times it could be painful, having someone say something to me that I understood but having none of the words to respond. Oftentimes, I was frustrated at myself and what felt like my uselessness, though I was too afraid of further proving my incompetence by saying the wrong words in the wrong tone or being completely incomprehensible. If I could have had someone teach me all of the ins and outs of Taishanese, I would have in a heartbeat, but things were not that simple.

My mom had a somewhat similar experience to me, growing up immersed in the language only to be removed from it at a young age following her parent’s divorce. However, in the seven years that she and her parents had lived together with her grandparents, she had picked up much more of the language than I ever had. Still, she says that to this day her knowledge of the language was stunted, frozen in time at a seven-year old’s level. Because of this, she never felt she had the full breadth of knowledge to even begin teaching the language to somebody else. As for my great-grandmother, she couldn’t speak nearly enough English to attempt teaching me. Aside from the two of them, there wasn’t anyone immediately accessible to me who spoke the language. 

Because of these barriers, over the years I found myself scouring the web for any resources. As a child of the internet, I had been so used to having all the answers to my questions a few keystrokes and a couple clicks away. However, using all the keywords I could think of, I only came up with vaguely related articles and obscure low-resolution YouTube videos of conversations with Taishan locals. At some points, I was so desperate that I considered teaching myself Cantonese, figuring that maybe as another language within the Yue dialect that it could be similar enough. I wished that my family spoke a more common dialect like Mandarin, so I could have a world of resources at my fingertips with a simple Google search. Instead, I found myself at a dead end. 

Despite the language barrier that was a reality of my near everyday life, I had learned to deal with it. Living with my great-grandmother, we had a way of working around things. I understood more Taishanese than she did English, so I could easily meet her requests for water or a tissue. I knew when she was asking me whether I’d eaten or if my mom was home. Yes-no questions were the basis of almost all of our interactions, and it worked. However, I still was dissatisfied. I had this sense that there was this whole other side of her that I couldn’t see–or rather, hear–because of our inability to understand one-another. Yes, I knew her likes and dislikes, her habits and rituals. I knew she had an endless supply of fruit on her dining room table, that she set out tea for our ancestors every morning, that she couldn’t go a week without an appointment at the salon. I knew the smell of her herbal ointment and her crackly laugh and the familiar shuffling of her footsteps. But all of this I had learned from careful observation, just as little scraps I had gathered over the course of my life. I felt this fundamental, unnamable lack at not being able to simply talk to her. I wanted to ask what she was planning to do the next day, what she was going to cook, who it was that she’d just been speaking to on the phone. But, without a shared language between us, I couldn’t ask any of it. It felt devastating when she would say something to me and I would stand there in silence. After a moment she would shake her head, using her limited English vocabulary to say, “You don’t understand.” 

Even with these pains, I had mostly accepted it as a fact of life. I had come to terms with the fact that I might never be able to communicate with her as I wished to, so I just had to do my best to live with it and adapt. And while at some points I was sorely reminded of the language barrier, at others I was so used to it that it hardly seemed to hinder my life at all. However, when I did one day stumble upon a whole new world of Taishanese resources, it felt utterly life-changing. 

It was a fairly out-of-the-blue development, with my mom getting a notification on Facebook one day saying that she had been tagged in one of her cousins’ posts. Her cousin had reshared a YouTube video from Inspirlang, suggesting that my mom make similar videos with my great-grandmother to help preserve the language. I immediately was at my moms side, peering over her shoulder to see this video that her cousin had discovered. Though I don’t remember which video it was exactly, there was something groundbreaking about discovering an educational video featuring Taishanese. Me and my mom soon began exploring the channel, quickly discovering the link to the website, and then–most shockingly–Taishanese lessons. This was one of the most exciting discoveries to me, something I couldn’t even believe existed after empty searches in years past. In the days following, I was already envisioning all the future possibilities. I imagined the familiar words I had heard all my life tumbling out of my mouth in a natural rhythm, allowing my thoughts and feelings to flow freely. I imagined feeling more connected to my family and heritage, no longer holding this profound guilt at not being able to truly listen and talk to my great-grandmother. 

Maybe these hopes were slightly naïve, especially since I had experience in teaching myself other languages and knew just how long of a journey it could be. But, it was hard not to be overjoyed when something that had felt impossible my whole life now seemed within reach. 

I remember finally registering for the class: Heritage Taishanese Level One. Before even signing onto that first Zoom meeting, I was already awed when I printed out our first packet of vocabulary and phrases. There was something surreal about seeing all these familiar words romanized and printed on paper. My whole life Taishanese had felt like this slippery, mythical thing. I knew nobody outside my family who spoke it and few even knew what it was. It was elusive, only captured in the bounds of my home or in snatches while walking through Chinatown or Clement Street with its familiar punctuated melody. It was liberating to hold tangible proof of the language, organized neatly section by section and bound by a simple staple. There was an order and structure to all of these words and phrases that I had stored away in my mind over the years. With these tools, I now could begin untangling this unruly ball of knowledge into something workable. 

However, that’s not to say that it all came naturally or that it was the missing piece to catapult me into fluency. Every lesson, there were countless times where I made silly mistakes and wondered how I could be so clumsy speaking a language I had heard my entire life. But, I was learning to be okay with it. I finally allowed myself to step into that vulnerable position of simply trying my best, knowing all my limitations. Yes, I was still nervous every time I would unmute myself to speak, but I pushed past that discomfort because I knew I wouldn’t learn if I didn’t try. Not knowing Taishanese was no longer something that I felt invalidated my ties to Chinese culture. Rather, my efforts towards learning it proved my desire to foster a stronger connection with that side of my heritage.

Not only were the classes valuable for developing my understanding of Taishanese, but it was also validating to be surrounded by people who all had the shared goal of learning both the basics and the nuances of this language. People from all corners of the country whose experiences were so different, yet had so much overlap. It was maybe one of the first times that I had been around so many people with similar experiences to mine when it came to Taishanese and communicating with family members. 

I know that if I’d had more people to relate to when I was younger, the experience of not knowing the language of my family members wouldn’t have felt so lonely. Whenever the topic of family and language came up in conversation, it had always been difficult to fully articulate my struggles with learning Taishanese without recounting my entire life’s story and family history. I found myself repeating the same thing, something along the lines of  “Oh yeah, my family speaks this obscure dialect of Chinese, so it’s hard to learn much about it. I can understand more than I can speak.” That was the briefest, most abbreviated version of the story I could offer people, cutting out all of the dramas and complex family dynamics that had worked together to bar me from Taishanese. But in class, I felt like there was this mutual understanding of the difficulties of learning the language later in life. They too knew how it felt to try to cling onto a language fading with older generations, and they too had this special connection to it. 

At the end of the session, while I may not have instantly achieved my daydream of rattling off sentences in Taishanese like it was second nature, I gained more than I ever could have imagined. I gained not only knowledge about the language, but also knowledge that I was not alone in my experiences growing up with Taishanese. I had found a sense of power and self-confidence hearing these familiar words fall from my own lips. It was no longer something unconquerable, something hidden away from me. I could take the language and fully claim it as my own. 

As many times as I may have wished that my family spoke something more common, I have developed an unwavering love for Taishanese. It’s the sound of home, folded into the lilting vowels and impassioned cadence. It’s a key part of myself, my family, and countless others. While some might wonder about its practicality given that fewer and fewer people speak the language, to me it’s an essential tether linking generations of history. It’s a language I still hear over the chatter and clinking of dishware at yum cha and among the rich-smelling fruits of Chinatown. It still lives within the minds and hearts of many, and I hope that it continues that way. It is something that I wish to see passed down, preserved, and appreciated for all its beauty.

So what do you think? Many envision Taishanese as a language spoken mostly by old people and that it is a language of the past. However, Taylor’s efforts prove that this is not true. It is not that this language can’t catch the interest of younger people (although little) but instead it is the lack of resources to learn the language. As it deteriorates and generations move on, languages are lost silently with time. Now that the internet can provide you thousands of resources, reconnecting or getting to know these non-mainstream languages is a lot easier. You can check out our variety of resources by clicking on the images below.

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