My dear Slow Burn friends,
How have you all been?
I’ve been traveling, revisiting old places and going to new ones. One of the new places was Qingdao. Even though I’ve left, I can still smell the dried fish warming in the sun, the salty taste of tap water when I gargle, and the sweet citrus pang of fruity beer on my tongue.
It is typhoon season in this part of the world now. Similarly, I’m also in the midst of the winds of change, and I’m digging my heels down when I have moments of feeling untethered.
Today I’m sharing something that’s been brewing for a while. It’s quite personal (and very specific??), so I would love to know if it resonated with you in any way. Drop some long happy comments down below 👇🏼 you know I love to chat.
Sometime in between high school and university, I lost my English, then found it again after several years.
Let me tell you how it happened.
English is the language I’m most fluent in. I grew up speaking English as a toddler (with a distinct Malaysian accent) before learning Chinese for practical purposes to attend school. I thought and dreamt in English. I wrote, pushing my lead pencil tip into the page in that hard deliberate way children do, in creatively-spelled English words. I devoured novels in English. From Harry Potter, to Enid Blyton, to Lord of the Rings, to chick lit, detective novels, to then Hemingway and Fitzgerald in secondary school.
Growing up on the tail end of British colonialism, a lot of nineties kids in Hong Kong were raised on a linguistic diet of British teachers and American television. Our accents unsurprisingly skewed towards the latter. However, I still lived in a relatively culturally homogenous world.
Based on my TV/book consumption, I imagined the Western world to be like a literary salon across the centuries brimming with passionate ideas, whether debating in togas in the Agora, or in a Victorian salon, pacing back and forth gesticulating with cigar in hand, or in between strumming lazy guitar riffs at the Chelsea hotel.
My world, in contrast, was mundane– one of rolling orange mountains in supermarkets, of wet floors, flapping discount signs and the curly smell of dried cuttlefish. It was a world of indifference to anything beyond the most pressing needs of the day. Anything else was frivolous. I hated that indifference and the drudgery of my sensory world. The Western world seemed lofty and intellectual in comparison, and I couldn’t wait to come into contact with it.
The first time I had a one-on-one conversation with Westerners out of a teacher-student context was on holiday in Vietnam in secondary school. I had joined a day tour to Halong Bay, sat next to a middle-aged American couple on the bus, and we got to talking. They cracked a couple of jokes and we exchanged small talk about very practical, mundane issues like how many days their trip was, where they went prior, what they considered worth visiting, what they thought was a bit of a rip-off… and that was it.
Where were the Kafka-esque existential anxieties that I’d read about, or the churning passions underneath a cold facade like in Jane Austen or D.H. Lawrence novels? I was at least half-expecting them to quote a few lines by Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan on what they said about the Vietnam war and talk about how they felt as Americans coming to visit a country where the effects of war, only one generation removed, still remain.
Now that I think about it, it was a bit unfair that I put the entire weight of Western intellectual civilization on this holidaying couple. It’s not that they would have expected me to spontaneously start reciting Three Hundred Tang Poems on the spot for them either, or somersault, kung-fu style, down the steps of the tour bus.
I was, in fact, a literary tourist. Only having known the world of books, I was traversing into the real world of Western conversation for the very first time. I thought I knew the insides of their minds, the recesses of their thoughts because I’d read Western authors filling hundreds of pages with them, but instead found myself stumped at the first question they asked me— “how’s it going?”.
In all the novels I’d read, no one ever asked “how’s it going?” before.1
It was only later, when I began to talk to people from different cultures and learn the art of small talk (it really isn’t a thing where I live), that I began to realise— I was brought up on Western literature but not in Western culture. I wasn’t socialised on Western culture, I was socialised on Asian culture in English, and they’re two very different things.
Back to the holidaying couple. They also praised my English, which kind of had the opposite effect of what they intended. They were praising it because I was, in spite of my upbringing, good at it. Suddenly English stopped becoming the natural skin of my expression, and became the clunky, borrowed, lifejacket we buckled ourselves into for the upcoming boat ride. Was English fluency something to be proud of? Maybe it was. Ethnically I was Chinese; furthermore I wasn’t raised in the Western hemisphere to qualify as an “ABC” (American/Australian-born Chinese) or a “BBC” (British-born Chinese).
I felt like I was stealing, borrowing their language. And perhaps it was this weird sort of cultural shock from a) the difference between socialising in Western culture versus what I’d read about it, and b) feeling imposter syndrome speaking in English, that instead of a means of communication, speaking with them in English became a need to prove myself.
As the boat ladies of Halong bay rowed nimbly with their bare feet, callused toes grasping the oars, I stumbled over my grammar, doubted my accent and tripped over my words, second-guessing everything, sounding as clear as the milk-tea muddy waters the boat skimmed over.
Doubt is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m also not the sort of person that can overcome it with positive affirmations, but something did arise a few years later that did result in a breakthrough.
University swung around, and it was our first summer break. Other kids applied for internships; I chose something wholly indulgent and completely irrelevant to my major– three golden nerdy weeks studying literature in the UK. Shortly after I applied, I received an email from the university saying they couldn’t accept me until I had proven I could speak and read English.
Ouch. They weren’t mean, nor did they doubt me, as they emphasised in their email; they simply suggested I could take the TOEFL exam to prove I was literate in English.
Never doubt the power of an angry, well-written email in reply. After outlining my various secondary school and college-level qualifications in English, they accepted me in the end, without having to take the TOEFL.
Huh, I thought. So I could write. That was how I began to reclaim English for myself. While I was still figuring out the art of small talk, I kept writing. When I wrote, I was free from people passing judgement about how I spoke. I didn’t have to think about whether I sounded good enough to pass for a native speaker.
The imposter syndrome of speaking English still hangs around like an offshore thunderstorm, sometimes threatening to come inland on shaky days. I doubt it will ever go away completely. But writing gives me the anonymity to hone my craft, to reclaim confidence and joy in expressing myself in this language.
By not having a face and a body to look at when you read, writing also gives me freedom from being objectified. As a young female, I often feel I have to say certain things or hold myself in a certain way in physical company, and when I speak, it is with the double intention of speaking to get a point across, but also with an awareness that what I say will fit with your perception of me and how I look. That what I say also reinforces that I fit in the correct box of ‘young female’, so to speak. My tongue perpetually sits on that dancing knife edge of to see | or to be seen, and that knife, more often than not, cuts out the sharpest words to avoid conflict.
There was a girl at university in my class who was tall, whip-smart and whom all the guys hated. They insulted her as she came and went, loud enough for her to pick up on it but not to make out what they said. The girls, on the other hand, had no problem with her. I had an inkling why the guys felt this way– it was because she said whatever the f*** she wanted to. She didn’t act coy or giggle when the guys teased her; she teased them right back or called them out on it. She made snide remarks all the time, puncturing young male egos like balloons. She talked like a guy but her appearance was very feminine; she was messing with gender roles before gender fluidity had emerged into the public consciousness of us university students then, and the guys hated that dissonance.
I didn’t have her thick skin or her panache. But I shake off objectification and the need to sound demure and cute when I write. I’m not being looked at when I write. I can write like a man! Get in the head of a man, have the desires of a man, or hold a quivering hamster in the palm of my large hand, oh so delicately, my strong veiny forearms deliberately withholding destructive strength and having people love me for it.
Or not. I can write whatever. When I write, the societal and internalised pressures of having to prove myself or having to sound a certain way are taken off. Without this self-conscious filter, I can be free to root around freely for the hidden glittering threads of resonance lying in my subconscious, that I’m sure, when unearthed, will be the truest form of expression I’ve shown yet to the outside world.
My secondary school English teacher once told me a story I’d never forget. She once worked in Dubai as a teacher. Every day, she wore her normal clothes to work, until one day she decided to try and wear a burqa. In a burqa, she felt the opposite of what she expected to feel— instead of feeling oppressed, she felt free. Free to wear whatever she wanted underneath the loose cloth, free of leering gazes or judgement about her looks and her clothes, and the freedom to disappear, if she wanted to, in a crowd. The freedom to be anybody.
And that’s how I feel when I write.
Thank you to and for helping me find the most glittery roots in this piece🌳
And a big thank you to the folks at Asian Writers Collective, in which I would never have gotten around to writing this if not for them.
Just like how no one goes to the toilet to just pee in movies.
Enjoyed reading this. I have a similar story w.r.t. English. Colonial hangover in India. A family that wanted me to be better in it. Convent school. Read a lot of English fiction. At some point it became as comfortable to me as my mother tongue - Tamil. And over time perhaps even more comfortable than my own mother tongue since all the time I spent online was in English. Work demanded it. I thought it it.
But I realized two things: 1. Knowing english came with vague sense of superiority in India as if people who could speak it were better. This annoyed me immensely over time. 2. My culture (very much your point) was still very India and even more so Tamil (in fact, I find cultural alienness in many parts of India more so than in some other parts of the world). I really embraced my cultural way of thinking more because the english world I knew emphasized individual aggrandizement whereas in Tamil way of life it was often veering towards humility. Also, I embraced the idea of rooting for the underdog which is a very Tamil way of life. So, essentially its a mess of ideas and cultures right now that I probably fit a bit everywhere and never perfectly anywhere. :)
Welcome back, Clare. Looking forward to more of your reclamation of the English language (and maybe even some angry emails too!)