In Chinese, the U.S. is commonly referred to as 美国 meiguo, literally, the beautiful country. The Chinese transliteration of its full official name is even more adoring: 美利坚合众国 meilijian hezhongguo, or the United States of Beauty, Benefit and Strength. This is a land to which the Chinese have come to chase their dreams. The Chinese were among the first to immigrate from Asia to the United States during the California gold rush and today are the largest population (23 percent) of Asian-Americans (Pew Research Center, 2012). From the early immigrants who were largely physical laborers to the more recent immigrants that include large numbers of educated students, scholars, professionals, and entrepreneurs; from the anti-Chinese federal and local laws of the nineteenth century to the Stop Asian Hate grassroot movement during the COVID-19 pandemic; from the “yellow peril” to the “model minority,” Chinese-Americans have been an integral part of American society for one and a half centuries.
Iris Reference ChangChang (2004) divides Chinese immigration to the U.S. into three major waves. The First Wave was in the nineteenth century. Chinese immigrants then worked as laborers, particularly on transcontinental railroads and in mining. They suffered racial discrimination at every level of society. Industrial employers were eager for this new and cheap labor. This resulted in many White people losing their jobs and becoming angered by the “yellow peril” in a land considered for Whites only. The immigration laws then led to their concentrations in “Chinatowns.” So hostile was the public sentiment toward Chinese laborers that in 1882 the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting immigration from China, which is the only U.S. law ever to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of country of origin, which played a crucial role in the systemic and institutionalized racism against Chinese throughout American history (Reference CasselCassel, 2002; Yung and Lai, 2006).
The Second Wave of Chinese immigration took place roughly during the period from 1945 to 1979. When the United States and China became allies during World War II, the situation for Chinese-Americans began to improve, as restrictions on entry into the country, naturalization, and mixed marriage were lessened. In 1943, Chinese immigration to the United States was once again permitted – thereby repealing sixty years of official racial discrimination against the Chinese. Large-scale Chinese immigration did not occur until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted national-origin quotas. During the late 1960s and early and mid-1970s, ethnic Chinese immigration into the United States came almost exclusively from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The Third Wave is generally considered to have started in the late 1970s, when restrictions on emigration were removed in mainland China as a result of Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy, leading to the immigration of many of the best-educated Chinese – college students and professionals, who have come with considerable cultural capital and, more recently, with financial resources. These Chinese immigrants from mainland China have tended to live in suburban areas and avoided urban Chinatowns. In addition to students and professionals, the Third Wave immigrants also include those who came without “proper” documents, who came to the United States in search of lower-status manual jobs. These groups have tended to concentrate in heavily urban areas.
Today the ethnic Chinese-American community is the largest overseas Chinese community outside Asia. The 2016 Community Survey of the U.S. Census estimates a population of single- and mixed-race Chinese-Americans to be over 5 million. Members of the Chinese-American community may have vastly different sociocultural experiences depending on the wave during which they or their parents or grandparents came to the U.S., whether their places of origin are located in mainland China or elsewhere (such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and so on), whether or not they come with privileges and resources, whether or not they have good command of English, what dialect(s) they speak with the greatest ease, whether or not they are of mixed race, and how much they know or care about “traditional Chinese culture” (many know little, just as many European-Americans and African-Americans may know little about the original cultures of their ancestors).
Whereas no single book can capture the full experience of Chinese immigrants from the nineteenth century to the present, Iris Reference ChangChang (2004) and Reference ChenJack Chen (1981), supported by archival materials and informal interviews, have provided the most comprehensive and detailed account to date. Their accounts support my own understanding that, due to the large spectrum of socioeconomic–educational backgrounds of Chinese immigrants, the intermittent nature of Chinese immigration to the U.S. since the nineteenth century, the cultural disruption and devastation caused by the Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which many of the Third Wave immigrants grew up, and mainland China’s longtime geopolitical separation from Taiwan and Hong Kong and isolation from the West, students and scholars from mainland China who came to the U.S. would in fact have little to share in terms of cultural memories and histories with the laborers who came during the First Wave or the students from Taiwan and Hong Kong who came during the Second Wave. Those who came during the Third Wave would find Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior or Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club to be surprising and strange. Many of them may have heard of the Nobel laureate in physics C. N. Yang or the great architect I. M. Pei, but most likely not Anna May Wong, and not even Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death by two White men in a racially motivated assault in 1982, as the Third Wave of Chinese immigration just began.
Given such diachronic and synchronic complexity, the discursive construction of people, places, language, and life also varies greatly. What is common is that, as adults, they may leave their native land, but they may never leave their native language.
The parents of Andrew (aged eight) and Angela (aged six), Meiping and Donghua, came to the U.S. in the late 1980s, during the first decade of the Third Wave. They were born in the 1960s in China, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of cultural and social catastrophe which crippled the economy, suspended college curricula, ruined millions of lives, and thrust China into turmoil, poverty, bloodshed, hunger, and stagnation. Gangs of students and Red Guards attacked people wearing bourgeois clothes on the street, imperialist signs were torn down, and intellectuals and party officials with dissenting views were murdered or driven to suicide. It was also a period of tight thought control, and, consequently, language control. Much like the “Newspeak” depicted by George Orwell, thought and speech were forced to exhibit a progressive and proletarian spirit by making constant reference to Mao Zedong’s Selected Works, as well as Quotations from Chairman Mao, both diction and meaning being determined by the Chinese Communist Party in the service of the authoritarian regime. The English language was taught in highly restricted institutions to students who were prepared to use English as a weapon to fight against American and British imperialists. Tens of millions of urban Chinese youth were sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, presumably to develop solidarity with the peasants and contribute their labor to the revolution. Years of living in the countryside meant that this generation lost out on educational opportunities and that its intellectual capacity was underdeveloped. During that time, not only was emigration unheard of and unimaginable, but also anyone with any ties to foreign countries was subject to accusations of being a counterrevolutionary and to being sent to the countryside to engage in harsh rural labor in addition to their political indoctrination. Listening to “enemy” (i.e., Western countries’) news broadcasting in foreign languages via shortwave radios constituted a sufficient basis for political persecution.
When the Cultural Revolution ended in the mid-1970s, Meiping and Donghua were attending middle school. The extreme policies of the Cultural Revolution were reversed in the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Communist Party proclaimed that China would now progress to “socialist modernization,” which in practice meant opening up to the West and transitioning to (Chinese-style) capitalism. Deng Xiaoping’s policy ushered in greater economic freedom, a faster pace toward Westernization, unparalleled exuberance to reboot education geared toward modernization, and stronger links with the outside world. The late 1970s and the 1980s in China were characterized by pragmatism, liberalism, considerable freedom of speech (including openly criticizing the Communist Party), the proliferation of culture from the West, and capitalism. University entrance examinations (高考 gaokao), previously canceled during the Cultural Revolution, were reinstated. Young people who had been sent to work on communal farms returned to cities en masse. Agricultural production skyrocketed after the government opened the market, and imported goods suddenly became available, adding flavor to people’s previously monotonous lives.
By the time Meiping and Donghua came of age as college students in the mid- and late 1980s, there was an unprecedented sense of freedom for people to interact with foreigners (particularly Westerners), which had been forbidden during the Cultural Revolution, to learn their cultures and to speak their languages, and to engage with the influx of Western content and ideas, information and entertainment. On college campuses, English corners (英语角 yingyu jiao) mushroomed, which were grassroot platforms whereby those interested in learning English got together and practiced their language skills. English corners are usually led by either a native Chinese speaker or a native English speaker. A session of English corner typically lasts for anywhere between one and two hours and there is usually one central topic introduced by a featured speaker to the crowd. The individual hosting the English corner often introduces the topic (any topic, such as food, leisure, movies, hobbies, holidays) and provides as much vocabulary and background information related to it. At the end of a featured talk, everybody can ask questions or there may be an activity such as pair-up conversations. In pop culture, there were television shows from Japan, movies from the United States (with Chinese dubbing), and music from Hong Kong and Taiwan. It was then that English, the language of the previously perceived most evil imperialists, became the symbol of progress and hope.
This was when Follow Me!, a series of television programs produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk and the BBC in the late 1970s to provide a crash course in the English language, became extremely popular. In 1983, 100 million people watched the show in China, featuring Kathy Flower and Hu Wenzhong (BBC Radio World Service, n.d.). It was also the time when many Western instructors (外教 waijiao) and students entered the Chinese university campuses. Most Western instructors taught English as a second language (ESL). Most Western students went to learn Chinese language and culture. During their college years, Meiping and Donghua had never had a chance to take an English language class with a waijiao (because there were too many students and too few waijiao), but they did have a couple of opportunities to interact with international students from the U.S. during New Year’s Party organized by university officials.
Directly prompting Meiping and Donghua to leave China upon college graduation for further studies in the U.S. was Deng Xiaoping’s initiative since the late 1970s to send students and scholars to study abroad in large numbers as part of his broad modernization efforts. According to a 2008 briefing paper of the Institute of International Education (2008), during 1985 and 1986, 15,000 students from China came to the U.S. for further education; by 1993–1994 the number had gone up to 45,000 (the Pew Research Center put tReference He, Montrol and Polinskyhe 2021 number at 312,000). Chinese students who came to the U.S. for further studies have been funded in two ways: a small number of students were funded by the Chinese government with obligations to return to China and serve China upon completion of their studies; most students were funded by the U.S. universities in the form of research assistantships or teaching assistantships with no conditions attached by China. Meiping and Donghua belonged to the latter category.
When Donghua and Meiping left, they packed in their suitcases not only clothes but also Chinese–English and English–Chinese dictionaries, as well as systematically internalized knowledge of their native language and deeply ingrained ways of using it. The linguistic challenges they were bracing for were not only those of acquiring English, but also those of assigning a proper place for Chinese in their new lives and, subsequently, their children’s lives. In fact, long before their physical relocation to the U.S., the tussle and tangle between English and Chinese had already begun. The shift from Chinese only to Chinese–English bilingualism started with their first imitation of “Hello, how do you do?” in their first English lesson and with their first imagination of a future far away from home, geographically, culturally, and linguistically.
Here is the story of Meiping, in her own words.
2.1 Preparing for Departure
2.1.1 Upbringing
I was born in a mid-sized city in southern China in the mid-1960s. My parents worked at a factory there. My father was a technician. My mother was the factory nurse. I have a younger brother. Being Chinese, my parents valued nothing more than education. They were very frugal, never wasting anything but they were very generous with me and my brother whenever we needed anything for school purposes. I remember in those days every semester we had to pay 5 yuan, called “xue za fei” (learning-related miscellaneous fees). 5 yuan was a lot of money, considering that my parents’ combined monthly salary was no more than 60 Yuan then and that my brother, being a boy, ate a lot. My mother would save on her own clothing and always put aside our “fees” first. She would buy me those nice pencil boxes with soft covers and magnet locks but would not spend money buying ice pops in summer.
When I was home in China, my parents spoke our dialect – Jingzhou dialect, something very close to Wuhan-dialect. They spoke to me and my brother in that dialect, and we would always reply in Putonghua, always. Because that was what was taught in school. Not exactly the real standard Putonghua that you heard on the radio, but the kind that our teachers used, you know, with heavy local accents. My parents write a combination of simplified and traditional characters. They actually do not know pinyin [the Latin alphabet-based phonetic annotation system] that well; me and my brother used to teach them pinyin. I think when they [my parents] were in school, pinyin was not invented yet, and simplified characters appeared after they finished school. My father does calligraphy as a hobby and he loves traditional characters. They don’t know English. Maybe a tiny little bit now like “bye-bye” and “thank you,” but definitely not when I was growing up. When my parents were in school, China and the former Soviet Union were great allies and Russian was the only foreign language to learn in school for everybody.
2.1.2 Learning English in China
At school I was not a star student but I always tried hard. When it was time for high-school graduation, I put in all my efforts studying for the nationwide college entrance examinations. The competition was extremely fierce. It was said that at that time less than 10 percent of high-school graduates could make it to college. I was one of the lucky ones. I was admitted by a decent regional university. I majored in electrical engineering. It was a male-dominated field of study. In my class of over fifty students, there were only four girls. I don’t know why, but I always liked engineering, doing things and building things. My weakest area was English. English was always my greatest fear. I think I scored less than 30 out of 100 in English on the college entrance exam. Good thing that for admission to my major, the English language test score did not count toward the final total score.
During my junior year in college, I learned that some upperclassmen were making plans to study abroad for graduate school. Some were going to the U.S., some to Canada. I had never thought about leaving China before, but I was inspired by them. So I discussed it with my then-boyfriend Donghua, who was also my classmate. He said he was also thinking along the same lines. So we decided to prepare together. The first thing we needed to do was to study for the TOEFL and GRE tests. My English was really bad. Donghua’s English was even worse. We never had a good teacher. Our school started to offer English in maybe fourth or fifth grade, but the textbook was so bad and the teacher knew little more than we did. She basically asked us to repeat after her as she read the text, which was often about things that in retrospect sounded really stupid, like “Comrade Li, how do you do?” the kind of thing that no normal person would say in English. We learned nothing about the places, peoples, and cultures connected with the English language. Our college English language instructor used to teach Russian. She really shouldn’t have been teaching English. Even I could tell that she had very bad pronunciation. No one taught us good pronunciation and we had no opportunity to speak in English. When left to our own devices, we would annotate English words with Chinese characters to remind ourselves what an English word sounds like. For example, the word “school” would be annotated with 死过 si-guo (“been dead”), “guess” would be 该死 gai-si (“deserve death”). Yes it was hilarious! We basically taught ourselves English by watching programs such as Follow Me! and listening to English language learning programs broadcast over the radio.
But that was not enough. In order to get a good score on the test, we signed up for an evening TOEFL prep course, taught by a recent college graduate with an English major. She was quite good. She gave us lots of drills, explained grammatical rules, and asked us to use flashcards to help memorize long vocabulary lists. I would carry my vocabulary cards with me all the time. I would take them out of my pocket and study those words when I was waiting in long lines in department stores or when I was waiting for the bus. On those cards, I would put the English original, the sound annotation (using Chinese characters or hanyu pinyin), and the Chinese translation. I memorized hundreds of English words that way. My parents also supported me. They knew that I needed to practice listening skills. So they bought me a shortwave radio (a luxury item in those days), so that I could listen to VOA and the BBC. In the end, Donghua scored about 450 on the TOEFL, the minimum required for admission to American graduate schools those days. I got, I think, 500; I beat him on the TOEFL test! I was quite happy. I must have done well on the grammar and vocabulary parts, because I know my listening comprehension was pathetic.
2.1.3 Applying to American Graduate Schools
Donghua and I got married right after we graduated from college and soon I was pregnant with Andrew. There was no internet or anything like that those days. And we didn’t know anything about American universities, except for the names of Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Our college friends told us that we can look up the relevant degree programs in a reference book called The Peterson’s Guide to Colleges and Universities in the U.S. Our university library did not own a copy of the book. We had to go to the library of a better university near us to find the book. So we applied to many universities that have EE (electrical engineering) graduate degrees. Of course we couldn’t afford application fees. Many schools were very nice. They waived our application fees. In the end, we picked CSIU, located in the Midwest, which accepted both of us and offered us research assistantships. But things didn’t work out the way we had planned. I didn’t come to the U.S. that year. Donghua came first (when he first arrived in the U.S., he had only fifty U.S. dollars in his pocket). I requested a one-year deferral, gave birth, took care of the baby, and then left the baby with my parents, and joined Donghua one year later, in 1989. I remember that I packed a thick Chinese–English dictionary in my suitcase, which was really quite stupid, because I almost never used it. You know, when you have an urgent need to say something and you don’t know the word, you are always somewhere where you don’t have access to the dictionary.
2.2 Getting Adjusted
Meiping and Donghua came to the U.S. in the late 1980s, prior to the explosive growth of the internet. Their knowledge of the U.S. was limited to what they had learned from the handful of 外国人 waiguoren (foreigners) they had ever met on their college campus and in tourist spots. Prior to actual arrival, their idea of the U.S. was that it was a place where everyone had blond hair and blue eyes, where skyscrapers lined the streets, and where everyone spoke the kind of textbook English recorded on cassette tapes that they had studied and had been tested on. When Donghua first arrived at his university in the Midwest, he could not believe his eyes. His university campus was surrounded by immense cornfields! It appeared much more rural than the city he had left in China.
2.2.1 Language Diversity
While Donghua’s initiation into the U.S. and U.S. education bears much similarity to that of other Chinese international students in terms of motivation (Reference Austin and ShenAustin and Shen, 2016), the preparation, the shock due to the huge economic disparities between China and the U.S. at that time, the excitement of leading a new life, and the emotional attachment to China (Reference Qian and ZhuQian and Zhu, 2014), he was also surprised by the demographic and linguistic diversity in this small college town. The university attracted students from over ninety countries. He could hear all kinds of languages and all flavors of English on campus, spoken not only by international students like himself but also faculty members of international origins. Upon his arrival, he needed to take an ESL placement test, a test that was required of all international students from non-English-speaking countries which consisted of two parts – a short essay and a short conversation. Apparently, the TOEFL score itself was not sufficient for the university to determine whether an international student was linguistically prepared for academic work. Donghua tested out of the lowest level and it was deemed necessary for him to take two English language courses spread over two semesters, course credits which did not count toward his graduate degree. He was happy with the result and appreciated the opportunity to learn English more formally, from “people who actually know how to teach English.” By the end of his first year, Donghua felt at greater ease when speaking English and he credited his ESL instructors for his improvement.
His lab-mates included students from Korea, Canada, Germany, and Hong Kong. Even though the person from Hong Kong was also “Chinese,” that person spoke Cantonese but not Mandarin, so Mandarin-flavored English and Hong Kong-style English were used when the two talked to each other. The greatest language barrier Donghua had was when he took a course taught by a professor from Turkey. At the beginning of the semester, Donghua felt so miserable that he thought he might not be able to pass the course. However, by the end of the semester, he was able to understand most of what the professor was saying, and also picked up some of his Turkish accent!
2.2.2 Communicative Coping Strategies
Donghua’s adviser, whom Donghua refers to as laoban (boss), was very nice to him. He knew that Donghua was very smart; it was just that his English was not that great. Donghua usually found his classes to be quite easy to follow; simply by looking at the equations and problems the professor wrote on the blackboard, he could quickly figure out what was going on. However, one day, for some reason, the professor ran out of chalk, so he was talking to the class for well over half an hour without writing anything on the board. And Donghua was completely lost. It suddenly dawned on him that he had been relying on his math and engineering background and not on his English listening comprehension abilities to do well in class.
During his first year, Donghua did his grocery shopping at the Walmart Supercenter on the edge of town, because, he said, things were cheaper there and he was used to a simple and plain life and had no need for anything fancy. The problem was that many cashiers spoke so fast that Donghua often had a hard time catching their words; and when Donghua spoke, the cashiers could barely understand him. So Donghua’s strategy was to avoid speaking and use more gestures when there was an absolute need to communicate. Communication with his landlord was also a challenge. His landlord was from Puerto Rico. A very friendly person, Donghua said, except that sometimes Donghua couldn’t be sure whether he was speaking English or Spanish. For small talk, Donghua would simply smile and let the misunderstanding or the missed understanding pass; for things important such as paying the rent and renewing the leasing agreement, he would rely on the written document. The person Donghua enjoyed spending time the most with during his first year was his fellow student and lab-mate Kim, who was from Korea. Kim was very amicable, spoke better English than Donghua, was easy to understand, and gave Donghua many opportunities and strong motivation to practice speaking English.
2.2.3 New Ways of Speaking
By the time Meiping arrived at CSIU and joined Donghua, the university no longer had a research assistantship for her. So she didn’t get to work on her graduate degree after all. They couldn’t afford it.
In Meiping’s own words:
Donghua received some support as a graduate research assistant by working on his professor’s project. But I couldn’t find any support. The two of us were living on Donghua’s $800 monthly stipend. Through a friend, I found a part-time job in a Chinese restaurant. The owner asked me if my English was good; I said no. So he gave me a job as a kitchen helper, doing dishes mostly. I was paid $3.00 per hour. During that period of time, even though missing Andrew made me very sad, life was actually not bad.
But I missed my baby so much. International long-distance phone calls were very expensive then. And we had very little money. We would save and try to call every week, just to listen to Andrew making yi-yi-ya-ya baby sounds. Two years later, when Andrew was almost three, we brought him over from China to be with us. At that time, Donghua had finished his master’s degree and we had moved to the East Coast. Then two more years passed by, and we had our second child, Angela.
Definitely, language was a huge barrier when I first came to the U.S. I am a college graduate, reasonably smart, and yet back then I must have looked really stupid to others. All the years of learning English in China didn’t prepare me well at all. The first time I heard people say “Hi,” I was surprised. The expression “Hi” never appeared in any of the English dialogs that we had studied. When our landlord sent a handyman to fix some plumbing problems in our tiny apartment, I actually got nervous and a bit scared. Donghua was in his lab and I was home alone. The handyman was rough-looking. He brought with him some tools and said lots of words, none of which I could understand. I remember thinking to myself, what if he does something bad? I must call the police. Dial 911. But I wouldn’t know what to say if I had to dial 911.
When I first arrived, I noticed that Donghua had changed. He had become … nicer. He picked me up from the airport, driving a very old, used car which he had bought with 500 U.S. dollars. He hugged me in public and opened the car door for me. And he mixed some English when he spoke to me, especially when he talked about his studies, his work at the lab, and his professors. It took me a while to get used to it.
Donghua’s boss (professor) was very good to us. The first year I arrived in the U.S., he invited us to have Thanksgiving dinner with his family. That was my first Thanksgiving, and my first formal visit to an American household. We put on our best outfit and brought longjing tea as a gift. There were a couple of other international students that day too. After everyone sat at a large dinner table, the professor’s wife said that it is their family’s Thanksgiving dinner tradition for everyone to share what they are thankful for in the past year. So we went around the table. When it was my turn, I was so nervous that I almost forgot how to speak English. I wished that the ground would open up a hole so that I could just disappear and hide underground. I was definitely not used to verbalizing my feelings, in public, and in English. You know in China we were all very shy; we didn’t talk about our feelings, not like that.
The university had a “Host Family” program for international students. Donghua didn’t join the program when he was by himself during his first year; he said he was too busy with his studies. After I arrived, he signed up for the program. Our host family had three members. Wife Judy, husband Craig, and their daughter Maria. Judy was a retired ESL teacher. Craig was some type of businessman. Maria was adopted from South America. We were invited to Maria’s fifth birthday party, a church gathering, and a couple of dinners. I liked Judy very much. Judy spoke slowly and nicely to us and taught me many words related to cooking like “baking,” “marinate,” “icing,” “paper towel.” I particularly liked the way she talked to Maria. She would bend down, go down on one knee, and ask very gently why Maria was upset or how Maria wanted to arrange birthday candles on the cake … My parents certainly loved me very much and would do everything for me, but they would never talk to me like that.
2.2.4 Authentic Input and Interaction
Upon completion of his master’s degree, Donghua initially had a job with a small tech company. He was doing well. His company even sponsored his application for the green card. But then something went wrong with that company and he was laid off. Eventually he took over a small Asian grocery store in a suburban area from a Chinese friend of theirs.
Meiping says,
I helped Donghua with the store. It was then that my English improved tremendously. We had all kinds of customers, White, Black, Spanish [sic: Hispanic], Asian, any color, any race, you name it. Some spoke really really fast. Many mumbled words I had never heard of or could not even hear clearly. Things were a little better when the customers actually came to the store, because I could usually guess what they wanted by looking at their gestures and asking them more questions.
Donghua always knew what the customers wanted. He was very good when communicating with real people face-to-face, even though he scored poorly on standardized English language oral tests. For me, the worst thing was when people didn’t come in person but made phone calls. For a very long time, I was afraid to answer the phone. I knew there’d be something I couldn’t understand. Every time after taking a phone call, I would sweat, seriously. For business reasons, we kept lots of folders and files. Donghua would use English to label those files and I would use Chinese instead. To me, what is said in English does not feel real enough; I must know how it is said in Chinese to feel that something is real, is actually there, and actually says what it does.
The grocery store is located in a small shopping center, amidst a dozen other small businesses that include a bakery, a salon, a Karate school, a dry cleaner, and a pizzeria. People are friendly, generally, especially the owner of the karate school, Fred, an American GI who once served in Asia. Meiping didn’t know which part of the U.S. Fred came from but noticed that he speaks somewhat differently from the other White people in this area. Fred said he loves everything Asian. He uses “chop suey font” for his Karate business logo. Every time he sees Meiping, he says konnichiwa (“hello’’ in Japanese), even after Meiping explains to him that she is Chinese, not Japanese. And he encouraged Meiping and Donghua to add Chinese characters to their storefront signs (which Meiping and Donghua did not do due to extra costs).
Some of their loyal customers inadvertently became their English language tutors. Meiping told me about a White lady who visited their store every week to buy tofu. It turned out that that lady’s son was vegetarian and consumed large quantities of tofu. Every time the lady visited the store, she would spend time chatting with Meiping, sharing with Meiping about her family, her travels to Asia, her weekend activities, her yard sales, her cooking … She was also interested in learning how to make Chinese dishes using the ingredients from the store. Meiping called this lady her best English language teacher and said that in return for the lady’s help, she should not charge her for groceries!
2.3 Speaking Differently
In a large-scale quantitative study of Asian-American acculturation processes involving close to 3,000 participants (recruited in 2002 and 2003) whose home languages included Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and English, Reference Lueck and WilsonLueck and Wilson (2010) investigated social and linguistic predictors of acculturative stress. Their results showed that high levels of English and native language proficiencies, a bilingual language preference, high levels of family cohesion, and favorable conditions for exit from the home country were predictive of low acculturative stress. Among these factors, language proficiency constructs had the largest effects on acculturative stress. Lueck and Wilson examined not only the impact of English language skills but also the impact of native language skills and bilingual language preferences. They found that the loss of the heritage language contributed to higher acculturative stress. They conclude that language barriers are a result not merely of a lack of English fluency, but also of a lack of bilingual options. Acculturation is a process by which individuals incorporate beliefs, behaviors, identities (including linguistic identities), and values from the new host culture into the context of beliefs, behaviors, identities, and values from the native culture. Therefore, as Lueck and Wilson argue, while it is true that the inability to speak English can negatively affect the adjustment of Asian immigrants, it is important also to pay attention to the languages that are associated with Asian cultures.
Soon after Meiping and Donghua came to the U.S., and especially since the arrival of Andrew and Angela, the linguistic repertoire in this household began to expand and the linguistic preferences began to shift, swiftly and surely, for complicated reasons. First, there was external pressure to speak more English, pressure coming from workplace needs as well as from suggestions made by the children’s schoolteachers to speak more English at home. Second, both Meiping and Donghua firmly believe that English is important and indispensable for their children’s future success, whether in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world. Third, as they get older, Andrew and Angela often explicitly ask that their parents speak English, especially in public. And finally, as the family interacts more frequently with English-speaking non-Chinese persons, it is often pragmatically necessary to use English in order to show respect and inclusiveness toward non-Chinese-speaking co-participants in shared social encounters.
2.3.1 Perceived Language Needs
Here is Meiping’s account again:Footnote 1
We knew from the very beginning that English would be very important for our children. They are going to need it for school and later for life. Our English is not good. So we cannot teach them good English. When Andrew was young, he didn’t have much exposure to English, except for watching TV programs such as Sesame Street, Barney, and Blue’s Clues. I had wanted to send him to preschool so that he could learn properly, but it was too expensive. In the beginning we took him to work at the store, where we kept a separate space for him to play, sleep, and watch TV with his baby sister. Sometimes our customers would play with him or give him some little toy. Somehow he could figure out that they didn’t speak Chinese and he would always say to them the only two English expressions we taught him: “Thank you” and “Bye bye.” Then my mother came to help us and lived with us for over two years. So we would leave Andrew and Angela at home with Grandma when we attended the store. We worked long hours those years. When we finally got home for dinner, Andrew was usually almost ready for bed. I would bathe him and read him some stories when I was not too tired. The stories were mostly in Chinese, like 孙悟空 (“The Monkey King”), 葫芦娃 (“The Gourd Boy”), 盘古开天地 (“Pangu and the Beginning of the World”), 女娲补天 (“Nüwa Patches the Sky”), and so on. We had some children’s books in English too, from some of our kind customers and from garage sales. But I always felt funny reading them. I never actually read them to Andrew. Reading English books was unnatural to me and I felt like a fake, and I felt somewhat embarrassed too, I guess.
Andrew was a pretty smart little kid. He learned from Grandma how to count in Chinese and he was even able to do some rudimentary math such as two plus three and, later on, two-digit additions and subtractions. He was very observant and very talkative. He was reading a little bit in Chinese too. I don’t really remember exactly how he learned English. It must be the TV. Or maybe it was from the other kids that he met in the play area in the neighborhood. I still feel bad that I didn’t do anything about his English in those years. You see, we were so busy and we had no money and sometimes I was in a bad mood [due to stress from managing their business]. I now regret it. Kids grow up once, only once. If I had known better then, if I had had the ability to educate him more in English, he would be even better today.
With his sister Angela, it was better. I knew better. I took her to our local library for the “Mommy and Me” program and other activities for toddlers. For Andrew, I did nothing. I only remember one day he started calling me “mommy” instead of 妈妈 (mama). I was surprised. But I was happy too. I know an excellent command of English is the key to a bright future. Maybe our own life goals cannot be fully reached because of our English language deficiencies, but our children should have no reason not to fulfill their dreams.
2.3.2 Demands from School and Social Life
When Andrew first started school, he was very quiet at school. His teacher told me that he would not say anything in class and he inappropriately pushed his classmates while playing during recess time without using his words. During a parent–teacher conference, his teacher told us that we should speak more English to him at home because otherwise he would not be able to succeed at school. We all knew that Andrew is smart and the teacher thought so too. So we believed the teacher was right and we followed her advice. In the beginning, it was really tough because my English was so bad and I was not sure whether I was actually helping him or hurting him by speaking bad English to him. But anyway I had a sense that he also preferred that we speak English to him. I remember one day at a soccer practice, I was saying something to him in Chinese and he stopped me right in the middle and said “Mommy, speak English!” I guess he felt embarrassed. So after Andrew started school, we all started speaking a lot more English. Donghua said that we must speak more English so that Andrew would not fall behind in school. And I totally agreed. When I checked Andrew’s homework and when I took him to school events and soccer games, I always spoke English. My accent was still really bad. I mixed up all the words. I suppose it’s okay at home, because I know he understood what I meant. But I don’t know how he felt when we were outside; I suspect he was embarrassed by my bad accent too. Well, accent or not, sometimes it’s just more natural to use English, because of what we were doing, you know. When he had friends over to our house, we all spoke English, because it’s rude, right, it’s rude to speak Chinese in front of others who don’t understand Chinese because they would probably think that we were saying something bad about them.
2.4 Accent and Identity
“Accent” was a constant theme emerging from Meiping’s narratives. Like many first-generation Chinese-Americans, Meiping blames the problem of having a hard time being understood by laowai (“foreigners” – her way of referring to non-Chinese Americans, particularly Americans of European origins) on her “Chinese accent.” She told me that her Chinese accent in English is so strong that her Chinese friends could tell from her English which particular Chinese dialect she speaks! I explained to her that everyone has an accent, including so called “native speakers” of English. I also shared with her the long-documented challenges and biases in listening comprehension due to “accents” (Reference CargileCargile, 1997; Reference Major, Fitzmaurice, Bunta and BalasubramanianMajor et al., 2002) and, in particular, findings from two studies. The first is Reference RubinRubin (1992), which shows that when listening to the same audio recording, the audience reported speech intelligibility problems when shown an Asian face but no such problems when shown a European face. The second is Reference BaumanBauman (2013), which suggests widespread negative social evaluations of Asian-accented English as sounding less clear, less confident, less credible, less likable, and less honest.
Meiping was surprised by Reference RubinRubin (1992); it had never occurred to her that non-language factors could contribute to lack of speech comprehension or that the problem of noncomprehension could be due to the characteristics not of the Asian speaker but of the American listener. With findings from Reference BaumanBauman (2013), Meiping was visibly upset. That is not fair, she said. People from other parts of the world also have accents but why are Asian accents singled out and perceived negatively? Even though she did not like the findings, she said that she was not entirely surprised. She actually experienced discrimination because of the way she sounds. In the department store, if she asks for help, the help she receives is often late and brief, compared with how other customers are being helped. So I try not to speak much, she said. She does not want to be perceived as “stupid.” However, she added that, as far as their own Asian grocery store business is concerned, her Chinese accent is actually “helpful.” People who buy from their store appreciate the Chinese cultural authenticity not just of the items they sell but also of the way the owners talk. I have trouble understanding my customers sometimes, but they don’t have a problem understanding me. This suggests that the processing cost commonly incurred in the context of Chinese-accented English in other settings (Reference Melguy and JohnsonMelguy and Johnson, 2021) may be offset by the customers’ specific communicative goals in this particular setting and their knowledge and appreciation of Meiping’s ethnicity and language background. In their neighboring town, there is another Asian grocery store that is not doing very well. Meiping believes that is because the owners act and speak too “American.” It does not look or sound like an Asian grocery store, she said.
Given such linguistic ambivalence and challenge, I wondered what kind of impact shifting from speaking Chinese only to speaking considerable English has had on Meiping, as a person. That language learning and identity construction are intertwined is now conventional wisdom. In contemporary theory on language acquisition and language socialization, the identity of the language learner is conceptualized as having multiple (and sometimes contradictory) dimensions, constantly evolving across time and space, and dynamically re-enacted and revised through interactions with others in the target language. Consequently, heritage language development does not simply take place within the head of the individual learner depending upon childhood experience and memory (Reference Au, Knightly, Jun and OhAu et al., 2002), personalities, learning styles, and psychological motivations, but rather through engagement with the diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts in which language learning takes place. A language learner may choose different identity positions to influence language learning; conversely, various outcomes of language learning may provide the learner with different identity options.
According to Meiping, over the years, she started to see herself not merely as a “foreigner” from China, but more as Andrew and Angela’s mom, deeply involved in their activities and in communication with other parents (e.g., co-ordinating playdates, sleepovers, birthday parties, and soccer events) and sometimes teachers (e.g., parent–teacher conferences). Paradoxically, this shift from a global, culture-oriented identity to a local, activity- and role-based identity has afforded her space and flexibility to reimagine herself, no longer as a Chinese person who speaks English poorly in the U.S., but as a parent, like any other parent, who manages complicated lives, embracing many challenges, of which language is but one. In other words, parenting in the U.S. has given her a means to gain access to mainstream U.S. society and to find a greater sense of belonging and legitimacy in this society.
While Meiping initially thought that she would forever be “a 100 percent Chinese person” even when she decided to pursue further studies in the U.S., as her communicative needs and speech communities have evolved over time, especially in relation to her children’s growth, her sense of linguistic and geo-cultural identity also has also shifted. As she put it,
Back then, it never crossed my mind that I would become an “American.” I mean, that was not my original goal for coming to the U.S. I was merely hoping to get a better academic degree and to have greater opportunities, for ourselves and for our child. And my English being so terrible, I never thought I would be “an American.” Even after I arrived in the U.S., almost all my friends were also from China. We helped each other move places, went shopping together, cooked together, sang karaoke together, and checked out local parks together during weekends and on holidays, all the time speaking Chinese. At that time, if any of us spoke English among us, we would think that that person was weird – maybe that person was trying to show off. But then, one of my best friends got married to a laowai [a “foreigner,” non-Chinese] and he (the laowai) was nice. Because he also came to our gatherings, we had to speak a little bit of English too. I remember that he would call my best friend “honey.” Oh my god, if my laogong [husband] had called me “honey,” I’d have goose bumps all over. You know what I mean? English was just for work, for school, for survival. I had no feelings attached to it. When I read a really good piece of writing in Chinese, I could be moved to tears. But when I read something in English, I just made sense of the words but I felt no feelings. The only exception was maybe English songs. I like English songs. During my college years, I liked the Beatles and the Carpenters. With my children, I learned some children’s nursery songs and I liked them too.
But things started to kind of change after Andrew joined us in the U.S. When Andrew was little, he was really cute. Wherever we took him, people would smile at us and say nice things to us. When it was just my laogong and me, I felt that laowai didn’t really care about us; it was as if we didn’t exist. It was so strange, but after Andrew came, laowai appeared friendlier and nicer. They began to talk to us. Small, little conversations initially, and then longer conversations. Especially after Andrew started schooling. He had friends from school. His friends’ parents talked with us about schools, teachers, school bus, soccer games, and I actually found out that my own English was not the worst. Some of the other parents are first-generation immigrants too from other countries and some of them spoke in ways I could barely understand. So, Chinese or not, I am first and foremost my kids’ mother. And I needed to do all the things that all mothers do, no matter where we come from.
2.5 From Necessary to Natural
Along with the influx of linguistic resources and possibilities and as their immigration experiences unfold, Meiping and Donghua gained new information and developed new feelings and perspectives which they in fact find easier to express in English, the language used in the context where these new information, feelings and perspectives are gained and developed.
This is how Meiping describes sending Andrew off on his first day of school:
Andrew started Kindergarten when he was almost six. The first day of school, I walked him to the bus stop. When the bus pulled up, I said to him, “Have a nice day!” – something I heard our store customers say often. As he boarded the bus, I added, “I love you!” I would never say such things in Chinese. It’s strange. I never felt comfortable with English, but those words simply slipped out of my mouth and expressed precisely how I felt. As I watched the bus leave, tears rolled down my cheeks.
Meiping’s generation did not grow up in China with a communicative norm that is rich in the expression of emotion in their native language. So when it is necessary to convey to the children parental feelings, expectations, and aspirations, rather than teaching and preaching, the discursive resources that parents have in Chinese are sometimes not sufficient enough for them to either transfer or translate into English. Here’s what Meiping has to say:
When I was growing up nobody ever asked me in Chinese whether my feelings were hurt or whether I was sad. My parents never apologized verbally even when they knew they did something wrong to us. So when I need to communicate to my children regarding those emotional aspects of life, it almost seems as if it is more natural to use English than Chinese even though my English is full of mistakes. It just feels so much easier to say “Did I hurt your feelings?” in English. To say the equivalent in Chinese would seem so odd.
These and other changes are quite subtle, and not necessarily linguistic in nature. For example, before the children go to school to take a test, a Chinese parent in China might conventionally encourage them to do well and to score high on tests. It took Meiping years to learn to say instead, “Have fun! Enjoy your test!” – utterances for which it is difficult to find equivalents in Chinese. She said, of course it makes so much more sense now I come to think of it. Why should we give children so much pressure? Chinese parents are unrealistic and unfair, always demanding perfect test results from their children. So long as children do their best, we should be happy.
We may now begin to understand why, at least at some point in their family life, many first-generation immigrant parents speak to their children in obviously labored and often lackluster English. The English they speak embodies their dreams while in their native land, their struggles upon arrival in the U.S., their perceived needs and challenges from their children, and their expanded experiences and new roles as their immigrant lives unfold.
When they were in college in China, Meiping and Donghua had what researchers call an “instrumental” motivation (Reference Gardner and MacIntyreGardner and MacIntyre, 1991) to learn English; that is, they wanted to learn English for the practical purpose of satisfying the foreign-language requirement and passing the GRE test in order to be accepted by American graduate schools. They arrived in the U.S., maybe not with financial resources, but with intellectual and cultural capital, including the Chinese value of education, imparted from Meiping’s parents and her parents’ parents, and the indomitable will to learn and to grow. And their instrumental motivation continued to play an important part in their improvement of English as their achievement in English would clearly and directly correlate with their success first as graduate students and then as employees and/or business owners in the U.S. However, their motivation also turned more “integrative,” as they gradually settled down and integrated into mainstream society. By the time they had children, Andrew and Angela, Meiping’s use of English was not merely instrumental and integrative, but also “identity-bound,” in the sense that her command of English contributed to who she is, whether or not she is an effective parent from the perspective of the society and that of her children’s schools, and what kinds of senses and sensibilities she is imparting to her children. The day Meiping said “I love you” to her son Andrew as he boarded the school bus for the first time, she was not translating from Chinese to English; she was not merely selecting the English language over Chinese; instead, she was saying something that she could not have said in Chinese, something that only the English language, within her repertoire of linguistic resources, would enable and inspire her to say. In other words, she had found new meanings and new emotions afforded by her second language and new impetus to use them. From then on, her English, though still halting and hesitant, became an integral and indispensable part of her as a parent.
Hence, over the years, Meiping’s use of the two languages (Chinese and English) has changed in purpose, audience, setting, and significance. The inevitable symbiosis of the two languages paralleled her effectual adjustments to and evolving aspirations in life. It has been a quest, a conquest, a triumph, and a setback, all at the same time. This shift of stance from unease, reluctance, and embarrassment associated with the use of English language to unconscious selection and embracement of English on the part of Meiping is truly remarkable. It tells us two things. First, it shows the micro reason for language shift. It is not so much the social, economic, or political forces but rather the evolving and expanding life experience that must find expressions in a language or languages that is or are evocative of the sentiments associated with those experiences. Second, immigrant speakers are not moving from language A to language B, but from repertoire A to repertoire B. While the shift would not be possible without (developing) competence in English, it is neither defined nor delimited by language proficiency. That Meiping speaks more English in more contexts is less motivated by her growing English language skills than by her engagement in and exposure to activities and tasks that take place in English.
Hence maintaining an immigrant language, in spite of the intention and the will, can at times appear to be an elusive, idealized pursuit rather than an actual, everyday practice, in a multigenerational immigrant family which in effect becomes a meeting place of persons traveling from different linguistic origins and along different linguistic paths. What is keeping them together is the relentless holding on to culture, to which I turn next.
