American Born Chinese Kids

[gougou]

Mum, who is Malaysian Chinese never had the foresight to force cantonese down us.

I'm half French, half German. I grew up in Germany, but spoke French with my mother for the first few years. At around age 5 or 6, I told her I was not interested anymore and we switched to German. Although I regret that enormously now (as my French wouldn't have the ugly German accent it now has), I am happy that she didn't force it on me - I'm afraid that then I would feel appalled by French culture as a whole, which I am now (re)discovering as my own.

[md1101]

yeah i must admit i dont know if i would have been willing to continually speak cantonese even if my mum spoke to it to me. maybe at a young age i would but as i got older i might have thought there's no point. after all it seems a lot of aussie born chinese i've met here don't speak very good chinese, if any at all. hmm that makes me feel better about not speaking cantonese

anyway learning chinese is fun! if i already knew it i wouldnt have all the great learning experiences. and i have no interest in learning cantonese anyway... doesnt sound very nice.. in my humble opinion only.

[WilsonFong]

It's nice to see this thread brought back up again, since I find it to be a really interesting topic.

Anyway one thing I notice from reading a few of these posts on this forum is that there are some overseas Chinese whose parents speak a non-Mandarin dialect as their first language but they themselves are solely learning or mainly focusing on learning Mandarin. What's up with that? If you want to connect to your cultural roots wouldn't you want to learn your parents' dialect as well? I admit that I focus a bit more on Mandarin in my studies but I also try to keep my Cantonese from getting rusty by learning the Cantonese pronunciation of most characters I learn and by watching HK dramas and movies (no matter how bad they are....).

[md1101]

What's up with that? If you want to connect to your cultural roots wouldn't you want to learn your parents' dialect as well?

well maybe you're right. but i know i'm not learning mandarin to 'connect' to my cultural background. so that probably explains why i'm not interested in learning cantonese. my 'cultural' background is all over the damn place. ireland, malaysia, some southern province in china and early convict australia.

[Quest]

I think the difference between Chinese and Korean/Japanese kids in terms of conversation and reading/writing skills has everything to do with parenting and upbringing. I despise many American Chinese parents. But then a lot of them are barely literate themselves... and very 市井。

[choisum]

> Every immigrant group to the US, from diverse geographic locations and from

> diverse linguistic traditions, seems to lose their original language in the same

> basic pattern. Why would Chinese be any different?

Your observation is correct, a critical mass of people is needed to maintain a language. However in today's world, technology is very good at linking the diaspora.

[md1101]

I despise many American Chinese parents.

thats a bit harsh quest. why? because they didnt force chinese culture and language onto their kids? hey i'm sure a lot try! but they have a lot to compete with. tv, school, the kid's friends, the kid's desire to fit in with their friends and be like their friends. maybe they can't afford a trip to china every month either. the children don't necessarily want to be shoved off to chinese school every weekend while their friends are playing sports. plus maybe the parents themselves have become quite americanised. and you don't hear people saying they hate american french parents or american german parents. they move, assimiliate and the 'white' kids are considered fully american. but then the asian kid.. no he has to learn chinese because... well look at him! he's chinese! of course it would be good if the parents did, by some great method, teach the kids chinese but its not an absolute must... so much so that if they don't then you have reason to despise them.

[bhchao]

Still, it is hard for them to teach me and constantly use Chinese at home b/c they aren't accustomed to and also I live in predominantly Caucasian area. If I lived in Flushing, Queens, it would be a different story. It's a matter of assimilation and the willingness to practice and keep your customs and language....

Every immigrant group to the US, from diverse geographic locations and from diverse linguistic traditions, seems to lose their original language in the same basic pattern. Why would Chinese be any different?

These are very good points. The environment that one lives in, and the types of people or cultures they associate with in a particular environment, plays a major factor in influencing one's chosen language of preference.

When I lived in Taipei during my primary schooling years (the equivalent of kindergarten through 5th grade in the US), I spoke entirely Mandarin with my parents and my schoolmates. After my family and I settled in the US, English began to be used more often. Fortunately my capacity to retain knowledge and what I learned is very good. Ironically I was able to continue preserving my Mandarin speaking abilities through conversing with my Korean grandmother.

I also made a lot of friends in high school in the US who were born in Taiwan (they were considered FOBs then ), whom I spoke Mandarin with in school, and a few of them remain my very best friends to this day. I didn't make much friends with other ABCs in high school.

One of my coworkers who is a third generation Italian American cannot speak or understand Italian. When I asked her why, she replied that her immigrant grandmother wanted her children to assimilate into American society. Assimilation being an advantage in gaining an edge in American society.

[ABCinChina]

Interesting read and great topic! Anyways, growing up I hated Chinese school and wasting my weekends so I told my mom to quit sending me so she did. Now, I wish I had gone so that I would be able to write. (I've forgotten it all)

*Also, I think fobs are sensitive on the term fob.

[hunxueer]

to wilson, yeah, i see your point, and that's what drove me to start studying cantonese on my own, which i did for about a year, though not very intensively, and i stopped quite a few months ago. i seem to have difficulty maintaining motivation to study a language if there's not an immediate need for it. even when i went down to hong kong/guangzhou for a few days i could get around easily with mandarin (though i did attempt several times to use cantonese, with varying degrees of success, and the times when i was understood were very rewarding). it would be nice to be able to talk to my mom one day in cantonese but the little bit i've tried, she'll start getting too complicated too quickly and when i can't answer or start answering in mandarin she'll just say, nevermind! too hard! speak english! haha. of course it's a struggle for her to remember vocabulary and stuff in a language she's barely spoken the past 40 years. i came to china not specifically to study language actually, but since i'm here i've been more and more motivated to pick up the language of the majority, which is mandarin (well, ok, sichuanhua, but it's logistically easier to study mandarin).

[redmini]

In primary school, all my mates were caucasian so I never had a chance to speak Cantonese at school. But I was forced to speak Cantonese at home, and this was made easier by the fact that I could then watch Hong Kong films and all their infamous TVB series

It has everything to do with upbringing though.. My parents were very firm on maintaining the Chinese culture side of things in me and making sure I understood my origins despite growing up in Australia . Back then, I was a "it really doesn't matter to me one way or another" child but it's something I appreciate so much more now. Plus, when you look Chinese, people tend to have the expectation that you have some degree of fluency in your mother tongue!!

[SChinFChin]

Very interesting discussion. Both my wife and I grew up ABC.

I am bilingual, Cantonese/English, and can manage Mandarin. By all measures, I shouldn't be. My dad grew up in the USA, and spoke perfect English in the 1950's, a rarity. Americans would react in shock when he spoke English back then, the same way if a Chinese person today encountering a "gweilo" on the street speaking perfect Chinese. The school I attended, had only 2 Chinese students out of several hundred, in an all white neighborhood, where we live. At the time, there's open hositility to bilingualism, where people give us dirty looks when my dad and I converse in English. Teachers even scolded him for speaking Chinese to me saying "how is your kid to learn English if you speak Chinese at home".

Anyway, only Chinese, not Chinglish is spoken at home. No English words are allowed to be spoken, so I can't even use common English words like TV, radio, subway etc. in conversation. Our upstairs neighbor, Italian, by contrast, the kids speak English in reply to all of their mom's spoken Italian.

My parents speak Taishanese (Hoisan in our dialect), but my parents take me to Chinatown on weekends to watch Cantonese movies. I go to summer Cantonese school. I speak Cantonese with a slight Taishan accent early on. They had me study an hour or two of written Chinese every night all the way till the end of high school. I can manage a Chinese newspaper nowadays.

In my wife's home, they speak Cantonese, and she went to 6 years of Cantonese school though she forgot most of it. Her Cantonese diction is perfect though her vocabulary is weak. I speak better Cantonese nowadays as she corrects my tones.

I studied a year of Mandarin in college. Fortunately, the company I worked for partnered me with a Taiwan co-worker at around that time, and I asked him to speak to me in Mandarin, to better it, which he did. I was able to speak Mandarin rather adequately even though I studied it very little in comparison to Cantonese.

A few years ago, I found my Cantonese getting a bit rusty. There was a Cantonese speaking enclave a mile from where I worked, so I detoured by the area each morning, and spent half an hour there to have coffee and Chinese pastries, at a Chinese coffee shop. At first, I just sat to listen to the conversations. As time went on, seeing me there each morning, the locals engaged me in converstations on all topics, including politics, home repairs, etc.

I was talking about global warming one morning to a lady, in Cantonese, and she was shocked that I leanred the info from a "gweilo" paper, and was more surprised I even spoke English. I beleive this was due to my not including any English words in my spoken Chinese.

Thinking back, I hated my parents for speaking Chinese and home, and at the time, endured the stare of neighbors. Now, being able to speak Canonese, Mandarin, and teaching my children the language, I felt they did the right thing. I wouldn't be bilingual without their shear determination.

I gone to Guangzhou twice in the past few years, and even the locals find it hard to beleive that I was born and raised in New York, after they asked me what part of Guangdong I came from. I was never quite sure how good my Canonese is, but if folks in Guangzhou had no problems with it, so who am I to complain??

Some years back, I went regularly to a Chinese takeout, and I can tell some the staff there are Taishanese. They asked me if I was form Hong Kong. Joking with them, I could hear from their accent that the area where they come from is called "sei3 yap" (4 counties), an area where Taishan is part of. I told the older man I came from "ng5 yap" (5 counties) The man looked confused and asked his co-workers if anyone heard of "ng5 yap". Eveyone said I must be mistaken and I meant "sei3 yap".

I told him I was born is New York City and New York consists of "5 counties". From then on, when they see me, they called me the "ng5 yap" kid.

Frank

[Long Zhiren]

gato:

Yes, Chinese not having a phonetic writing system makes it much harder to learn AND to retain.

Reading and writing are always the keys to massive vocabularies. I'm helping my wife learn Mandarin. Even though she has a steel-trap hearing-based memory, I do not believe that she can get over confusion of words without seeing them in writing. She doesn't realize that homonyms are totally different words. Tones are another pain to learn. I love it when she torments misbehaving Chinese kids in stores here in California. 打屁股了! The kids are so busted.

WilsonFong:

As a sidenote, does anyone know if people in China/HK are aware of the term "fob" (fresh off the boat)?.

How about Foxy Oriental Babe?

I always hear Italian-Canadians who can speak perfect Italian and English and Latin-Americans who can speak perfect Spanish and English.

That's only as true as the rumor of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Here in California where about a good quarter of the population is of Hispanic descent, it is extremely difficult to find anyone who is good enough in both English and Spanish to be a receptionist in a dentist office. Dentist friends of mine, who searched everywhere to hire just one, tell me this. The older Mexican generations tell me that the younger generations' Spanish stinks big time.

Ian_Lee:

None of the third and fourth generation Polish Americans and German Americans that I got acquainted with in mid-west can speak any Polish or German.

bhchao:

When I asked her why, she replied that her immigrant grandmother wanted her children to assimilate into American society.

That's a big reason, especially after the 1914-1945 wars. My wife is third generation German-American. Her grandparents forbid her parents from speaking German. "We're American now. We will speak nothing but English." The Japanese Americans who went through the US experience elected strict assimilation like this too. On the other hand, it's a bit embarrassing to see new generations of Chinese immigrants to the US who don't appear to even try to assimilate. They may speak English well, but culturally, they're totally their own. They appear to use the nation and not actively contribute to it.

SChinFChin:

My dad grew up in the USA, and spoke perfect English in the 1950's, a rarity. Americans would react in shock when he spoke English back then

The newer generations of Chinese immigrants to the US have no idea. Immigration qualifications included teeth-straightness checks. Chinese were not allowed to own property in Palo Alto well into the 1960's. Chinatown in San Jose was burned to the ground and never really returned. Anyway, the chance of growing up speaking Chinese at home was not much of an option with the generations of immigrants who came in the early half of the 1900's. I have 7th generation Chinese American friends from San Francisco's chinatowns. They speak almost no Chinese [Taishanhua, or whatever, nothing] unless they studied it later on.

Redmini:

But I was forced to speak Cantonese at home

It seems like girls are much better behaved at home...

ABCinChina:

Anyways, growing up I hated Chinese school

I refused to go. Well, there wasn't much choice in growing up in Indiana in the 1960's. In any case, Chinese is my third language. When it came to the Taiwan love boat, it seemed that my Chinese language skills tested way past the bulk of that of ABC's who went through Chinese schools. My impression is that Chinese school was more of a social thing than any kind of academic thing.

Redmini:

Plus, when you look Chinese, people tend to have the expectation that you have some degree of fluency in your mother tongue!!

Oddly enough, it seems moreso in Taiwan, where people don’t want to be considered Chinese… It seems that people on the mainland are less rude and consider it more of a fascination.

[plucesiar]

I was born in HK but raised in Vancouver for most of my childhood + teenage years. My parents never really picked up English so early on I was pretty much forced to speak Canto at home.

Vancouver has a significant portion of Chinese people. The proportions vary of course from place to place, but around half the schools in my area had the majority of students being of Chinese descent. I was forced to go to Chinese school (on Sunday mornings, ugh) like many others, and fortunately there was one in the area that was quite competent. They hired former teachers who taught in HK and followed HK official textbooks, so at least the Cantonese classes were quite advanced (the Mandarin classes were crap, at least when I took it). Chinese school took out pretty much most of the Sunday mornings of my life from grade 2 - 10. Although I despised attending class, I must admit if it weren't for my parents' determination to overcome my nagging I wouldn't be able to, say, read newspapers, 金庸, watch 三國演義, 大宅門, etc, play Chinese games, or read 佛經 (sorry i think cantopop is crap. Jay Chou is pretty good though).

In terms of effectiveness, from my experience I'd say that although attending Chinese school is very crucial in maintaining the very basics, you need passion in order to push yourself to be good enough to "use" it. For example, I always liked the history dramas from mainland China, and I loved reading Wikipedia articles on them, and it really sucks if you're reading the pinyin of people like Guan Yu or Qin Shi Huang instead of the actual Chinese characters. (side note: i laugh everytime when the voice actors in Dynasty Warriors pronounce "Kao Kao" instead of Cao Cao). My Chinese really took a lift when I started reading 金庸 (specifically 射彫) because there's only so much you can learn from those Chinese textbooks.

In retrospect, Chinese school was very important in forcibly shoving enough basic knowledge so that when you actually start doing something that requires a significant amount of Chinese (eg reading a novel) you would have enough background so that the enjoyment from the activity would overcome the difficulty/disappointment.

I know many friends who immigrated to North America later than I did (for example, came in grade 5 or 6) and pretty much can only count to 10. They lost it pretty quickly because they were totally immersed in North American culture and either quit Chinese school very early on or just didn't find any interest in Chinese culture, or both. But then again, there are also people who came here in maybe grade 3 and still can't write a proper English essay.

So, I guess to sum it up, things like Chinese school and speaking Chinese at home are used to drill the basics into the kid (especially conversational skills), but in order to be competent enough to, say, read newspapers, novels, and do any of the more advanced things really requires personal interest, especially since Chinese characters aren't phonetically based like Japanese/Korean.

[ablackswan]

Hi,

I am a parent of two ABC. Both of my kids are in Sunday Chinese School now. My sons mostly speak English back to us till last year, there are increasing amount of Chinese talking in the house after we took our kids back to China for their summer vacation, about 2 month.

So, we believe it is the US environment made the kids ( not only kids, everybody, including parents) very easy to think in English, therefore speak English, it is not that the ABC's hate to learn Chinese, at the end of the day, Chinese is the root, most ABCs will embrace Chinese, China, Chinese Culture, and be very proud of our heritage. Parents could provide them more opportunities to go back to China, experience China, the language will follow naturally, the passion will start from China.

There are many summer camps in China, find one that you will like, if your parents can't go back to China with you, try to join a camp, your will find there are real fun people there to connect with, how important to speak their language!

Happy Learning Chinese!

A ABC Parent.

[Hofmann]

I'm not ABC, but pretty close. My parents speak Cantonese at home. As most of what I read and hear is English, I naturally speak to them in English. They never liked it, and wanted me to speak Cantonese, but the only way they were going to get me to speak Cantonese was to make everyone else at school and stuff speak Cantonese, which is impossible.

They speak Guoyu with Mandarin speakers, as that's what they learned in school (in Vietnam). When I was young, they sent me to a Chinese school to learn Mandarin. Oh, man did they suck at teaching. I hated it. I hated learning Chinese because it always involved something stupid like writing a character over and over again, only to forget it the next day. I endured a variety of Chinese schools until I was 16, when I stopped studying for a long time.

There was little improvement until I started studying my own way, which was basically reading "real stuff" with a dictionary at hand.

[Meng Lelan]

They speak Guoyu with Mandarin speakers, as that's what they learned in school (in Vietnam).

Guoyu? In Vietnam? They speak Guoyu in school in Vietnam? I went to high school in the US with a bunch of Vietnamese girls and they told me they spoke French in school in Vietnam before coming to the US.

[wai ming]

Guoyu? In Vietnam? They speak Guoyu in school in Vietnam?

I know a lot of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who speak Cantonese at home but who also speak Guoyu, which is the form of Chinese they learnt at school - perhaps at Chinese schools rather than mainstream Vietnamese schools.

[zerolife]

I totally agree with you ... at least in the east coast

Interesting enough, all GBC (German born Chinese) I know (that actually includes me too) can speak Chinese relatively fluent, even through there a lot less Chinese schools in Germany.

I don't know enough American born Koreans to judge, but I do know a couple who don't speak Korean either

[renzhe]

I've met quite a few German-born Chinese whose Chinese was elementary and/or confined to their parents' dialect.

But many of them are actively working on improving their standard Mandarin, which is a great thing.