Thursday, February 20, 1997
CULTURE:
Discovering Chinese language, roots in most unlikely of
placesAnn Mah
Call me Ma Lan. For nine long, humid, brain-breaking weeks that
was my name. Yes, though many of you know and love me as Ann Mah,
this pithy label was sacrificed one summer in the search for my
Chinese identity. Like many, many others before me, I left the
comfort of Southern California to seek my cultural roots.
My quest did not begin with the Great Wall or Imperial Palace. I
did not visit Beijing and I have never been to that village in
Guangdong where my grandparents were born. Instead, my pursuit took
me 2,000 miles away to Vermont.
Keeping in mind that I’ve heard all the amazed comments "You
went where? To do what?" and all the snide jokes about the size of
Vermont’s Chinese population, let me acquaint you with the fact
that, though the Mountain State is known for its breathtaking
scenery and dynamic ice cream duo, it also boasts a small college
called Middlebury. For nine weeks in the summer, Middlebury College
runs an intensive language school where you sign your life and
native tongue away to master one of nine languages.
Though I would love to attribute it to high moral aspirations,
my decision to attend this exhaustive program was based sheerly on
the manipulations of my mother. For, while I viewed the summer
between my sophomore and junior year as a period of tanning,
socializing and relaxing, she viewed this time as a golden
three-month opportunity for me to learn the language of my
ancestors. And so, after all my camp counselor applications had
been rejected, my options were limited to filling out an
application and writing an essay entitled "Why I want to learn
Chinese." I boarded that plane to Vermont with grave misgivings and
heavy parental prodding. Mom stood at the gate waving, smiling and
calling out "Zai jian!" I felt a vague twinge of annoyance upon her
use of foreign language, but this irritation was rooted mainly in
the fact I couldn’t understand her. An image of myself at nine
years of age, being dragged away to Saturday morning Chinese school
kept floating through my mind. I recalled the crocodile tears,
tantrums and pleadings with my parents to let me stay home to watch
cartoons. Finally, I stopped attending. I had won. Or had I? For,
beyond the triumph of a 9-year-old, lay the sneaking suspicion that
my parents were actually correct in their specious acts of cruelty.
And now, 10 years later, I had begun to pay for my war crimes.
Middlebury Language School was outrageously difficult. I felt,
at times, like a Chinese automaton performing dialogues,
conversation drills and grammar workshops. We were quizzed daily
and tested weekly. Resentments and worries were driven out of my
mind by thousands of Chinese characters. When I closed my eyes to
sleep, visions of words flitted through my mind like slides.
English was strictly forbidden. Sunday newspapers were smuggled
in and out of dorm rooms in backpacks. In particular fits of
rebellion, I would close my door to read, over and over, the one
English book I owned: "The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald." I
became a telephone nut  calling friends, great-aunts,
second-cousins, the operator  not because I enjoyed
chit-chatting but because on the phone, I could speak English. One
red-letter day, I received contraband material from my cousin,
tabloid magazines! Immeasurable excitement ensued over John
Travolta’s alien baby.
The mundane conversations one usually has at dinner, in the
bathroom or walking to class became upon expression in Chinese,
generally hilarious. Once translated, names of restaurants, foods,
movies and pets took on a tinge of the absurd. Stress was relieved
in trips to local dive bars, hangovers were valiantly concealed by
both professors and students the next morning.
My fellow students ranged from college students to businessmen
to army sergeants. As a young woman in search of her cultural
roots, I was viewed as something of an anomaly. I studied Chinese
as a diversion, a caprice, a nebulous search for identity and my
colleagues studied for career advancement, capitalist enterprise
and secret spy missions. However, we all shared a common scholastic
goal and as a result, ageism, racism and social boundaries were
discarded in favor of linguistic accomplishment. The ideals of
Communist China were at work in the hills of Vermont.
And so, nine weeks later, I emerged thinner, paler and with
deeper bags under my eyes yet also confident that 20 years of
Barbie Doll influence had swirled down the drain. I had made
friends who felt, along with one billion other people, that China
was the center of the universe. I had discovered a world which
thought the color of my hair and the shape of my eyes was charming
and alluring. Mandarin Chinese ceased to be a discordant disquiet
of four tones and instead became musical in its austerity.
When people ask me if I speak Chinese, I answer affirmatively,
but I wish I could inform them that my linguistic skills were not a
part of my birth right into a Chinese family. Assumptions are
dangerous things, and I would like to tell these acquaintances that
I worked hard, lost hair and gained pimple scars from my studies.
But most people do not ask, and I do not volunteer the
information.
Vermont is an odd place to learn a language and it is an even
odder place to discover your heritage. My search took me far from
my California beginnings. Yet somewhere in the middle of that
mountainous state, between Burlington and Stowe, I found another
home. I did not need to travel to China to discover that I am
Chinese.
I had discovered a world which thought … the shape of my eyes
was charming and alluring.