Is it more advantageous for children of immigrants to hear a natural, grammatically sophisticated, lexically nuanced, culturally authentic non-English immigrant language at home than to be exposed to parents’ developing, emerging English? The answer is probably: it depends. It depends on what we mean by “advantage,” advantageous from whose point of view and for what purposes, and at what stage and phase of the children’s development. What we know for sure is that children will hear the family language – heritage language is always part of the family linguistic repertoire which is what the family is made of, whether they like it or not. Furthermore, heritage language is a moving target: it is used differently by different generations of the family and is used differently at different stages of the family’s immigrant experience. Undergirding language choices and language practices is the inseparability of language and culture: in the CHL household, who guards and transmits the heritage culture?
3.1 The Need for a Grandmother
Whereas, in the U.S., families are increasingly more diverse in structure and family relationships across several generations are becoming increasingly important as more and more grandparents and other kin fulfill family functions in the twenty-first century (Reference BengtsonBengtson, 2001), in China, mutual dependence across generations beyond the nuclear family is the norm. Young parents in China can often lean on grandparents for help with childcare (Reference Mehta and ThangMehta and Thang, 2006; Reference Mjelde-MosseyMjelde-Mossey, 2007; Reference QiaoQiao, 2014). Chinese grandparents are typically ready and willing to babysit. The reasons are twofold: first, in mainland China, the mandatory retirement age is sixty for men and fifty or fifty-five for women (women who are in senior and highly professional positions retire at age fifty-five). At such a relatively early retirement age, many people are eager to do something useful – helping raise grandchildren, especially when their children are under high pressure from work, thus becoming a very natural choice. Second, there is a long Chinese cultural tradition of living with their elders and having grandparents participate in child rearing. Even when urbanization and migration (both domestic and global) are quickly breaking up multigenerational households, the norm of leaving children with grandparents persists. In many cases, grandparents reside with children as a matter of tradition and honor rather than merely out of financial necessity. Such an arrangement makes parents feel less stressed and safer than if they had left their children with strangers; it allows the parents to focus on their careers, where they face increasingly stiff competition for high-paying jobs; and it helps the entire family to save money.
When Meiping and Donghua immigrated to the U.S., they brought with them this parent–grandparent joint-parenting cultural model of child raising and benefited greatly from it. Grandmother is happy and proud that she is playing a critical supportive role in the success of the family. Meiping always cites her mother (rather than her husband) as her secret weapon. Because she feels completely safe and supported leaving the children with Grandma, she is able to attend the business of the store with undivided attention, taking charge at the store whenever Donghua needs to be away, shopping for the family, and taking care of herself (participating in yoga classes at the gym, going to the hair salon, and attending ESL conversation classes offered by the local library). The cumulative financial gains from the business’s gradual success and from the savings from childcare, in turn, enabled Meiping and Donghua to help Meiping’s parents renovate their apartment in China and to eventually pay for the children’s extracurricular activities, such as Andrew’s drawing lessons and Angela’s ballet classes. In the context of immigration, where the parents are usually the “first”-generation immigrants and the grandparents become “subsequent-first”-generation immigrants (or “sojourners” following the lives of their children), the impact of this parent–grandparent joint-parenting model extends beyond the material aspect. This model plays a significant role in shaping the linguistic and cultural landscape at the CHL home as well as the CHL socialization trajectory. This chapter explores the cultural, linguistic, and emotional ramifications of such a common childcare model for CHL households.
Let us meet Andrew and Angela’s maternal grandmother.
The first time Grandmother came to the U.S., she was in her mid-sixties and Angela was a newborn. During that year-long visit, Grandma got up every morning at six. She drank a large glass of water and did a few tai chi exercises on the deck. She loved the freshness of the morning and freshness of the air in America in general. At seven, she started making breakfast for everybody: her daughter Meiping, son-in-law Donghua, grandson, Andrew and granddaughter Angela. During the day, she fed, played with, changed diapers for, and talked to Angela. Then, at three, she took Angela to meet Andrew’s school bus. Afterwards, she supervised homework, taught, cooked, played make-believe games, and read to her grandchildren until well past eight, when Meiping and Donghua returned home from work.
Grandma’s love for her grandchildren was immediately self-evident. She beamed when she recalled the day Andrew, her first grandchild, was born. Clearly, it was one of the happiest in her life. He was so precious. I held him the same way I held his mother when she was a newborn, Grandma said. My staying home with the grandkids definitely leads to my entire family’s success. Just look at how much money my daughter and my son-in-law can make! Grandma explained proudly. To her, the decision to provide childcare for her grandchildren was not difficult. When she learned that most American grandparents value their own independence and prefer not to be involved in their children’s and grandchildren’s lives, she was very puzzled. “These grandparents should care more about the entire family than just about themselves,” said Grandma. “My daughter and son-in-law are doing well at work. Their business is successful. They bought a nice house in a nice neighborhood. They provide a nice place for the children to grow up. This is the most important, the most important to the whole family. As a grandmother, it is of course my duty to support them. That’s why I came to America to help my daughter. If old people are still healthy and have nothing to do, and young people in their prime earning years are forced to stay home, that will not make any sense. It will be a terrible waste for everyone!”
Beyond the materialistic, financial implications, Grandmother played a critical role as the guardian of Chinese cultural traditions, as an advocate for the “advantages” of the Chinese educational values and practices, and as an important resource for the children’s CHL acquisition and maintenance. The degree to which the family’s bilingualism was sustained during the children’s early years was largely contingent upon the presence of Grandmother.
However, the language and cultural challenges are many. First, when grandchildren are American-born and their parents and grandparents are immigrants, a sizable generation gap can exist. Second, when the older generations are not conversant or not fully functional in English, another barrier to closeness arises. Finally, together with more than one language and one set of values comes more than one locus of authority, which could cause confusion and even conflict. Below are some insights from Grandmother’s perspective, shared with me four to five years later when she visited Meiping’s family for the second time, when Andrew was in third grade and Angela had just started kindergarten.
3.1.1 It Is My Duty
When my daughter Meiping was little, I was busy with my job and left her to my mother to take care of. Now it is my turn to take care of my grandchildren. Honestly, I am not experienced. You know, in China, you can find a nanny. But things are so expensive in America. So it is my duty to help out my daughter and my son-in-law.
A couple of years before Andrew was born, I retired. My daughter Meiping left for America to study with her husband and left Andrew with me. I was glad. That gave me something important and meaningful to do after retirement. I was a nurse all my life and I had always been taking care of other people. Now this was my own grandson. Of course, I was very happy with the arrangement. Taking care of a child during his first years of life was a demanding full-time job with no breaks, but I didn’t mind at all. My old mate supported me too.
When my daughter and son-in-law told us that they were ready to bring Andrew to America, I was sad and worried. I had become inseparable from Andrew. I also worried that my daughter might not know how to take care of Andrew properly, that Andrew might not like American food, and that he might be miserable without knowing a word of English. My daughter assured me that all would be fine, that she and Donghua had been reading a lot about child rearing, that they almost always cook Chinese food at home, and that children learn languages very fast, much faster than adults. After Andrew left, I would have dreams about him. In my dreams, I often heard him call out in a loud voice, “Ah-Po!” Other kids’ first word is “mama,” but Andrew’s mother was not around, so his first word became “ah-po,” for waipo [maternal grandmother].
Later I was overjoyed to hear that Andrew was to have a meimei [younger sister]. When my daughter asked me if I was willing to come to America to help with the kids, I said yes immediately. I stuffed two big suitcases with lots of things for my grandchildren – traditional Chinese clothes, kites with images of Peking opera masks, Chinese picture books, cassette tapes of pinyin lessons, and even Chinese brush pens, tian-zi-ge notebooks [exercise books with square boxes for writing Chinese characters], and foldable red lanterns. My old mate said, “They live in America. Why are you packing so many of these things?” I said my grandchildren are Chinese no matter where they are and I must share with them these Chinese things.
When I first arrived at my daughter’s home, oh, I said to myself, how can this be a home? Dirty clothes and toys all over the place, pots and bowls not washed, and worst of all, Andrew was napping on the floor in front of the TV! How can a kid not catch a cold like that! Soon I realized my daughter and her husband were just too busy. They simply had no time. I’m glad I could lend them a hand. I took care of the kids during the day, cooked, and cleaned the house whenever I had a little bit of time left. My daughter and son-in-law worked six days a week. Sometimes they wanted to take me to a nice meal at a nice Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. But I didn’t want to. Nothing compares to homemade food. It’s cleaner, and cheaper too. Where my daughter lived, there were not many Chinese people. The store was not far from their home. My son-in-law said business was much less demanding there than in Chinatown.
3.1.2 What’s in a Name
Generally, for people in the Han ethnic group – which is over 90 percent of the entire Chinese population in mainland China – a Chinese name consists of two to three Chinese characters. Contrary to English names, the family name always comes first in a Chinese name. Therefore the first character in a Chinese name is always the family name, except for a few unique family names that have two characters. After the family name, parents form the given name by choosing one or two characters out of more than 5,000 Chinese characters. There is no standard list of names where parents should choose from, which allow Chinese parents to be quite creative in naming their children.
Andrew is my eldest grandchild. His Chinese name is 安德 An-de. It took me a long time to get used to calling him Andrew. There must be many beautiful names in English. Why Andrew? It is not even pronounceable. Anyway, his parents gave him that English name after they brought him to America. I asked my daughter Meiping what “Andrew” means. She said it has no meaning. That made me like the name even less. How can a name have only sound but no meaning? An-de in Chinese means “peace and virtue.” These characters have existed for thousands of years and their meanings are profound. They tell us the kind of life we should lead and the kind of person we should become. If you are persistent in saying these words and wishing for their meanings to come true, they [the qualities of “peace” and “virtue”] will become true. But my daughter said An-de needed an English name so that things would be easier in school. When meimei [younger sister] was born, they gave her an English name only, Angela. This time my daughter said, “Ma, Angela means angel. It’s a perfect name for a girl, and it rhymes with Andrew!” I said good, but this child is Chinese and she should have a Chinese name as well. So they gave her a Chinese name too, 安琪 an-qi, which is a transliteration of the English word “Angel” and also has an auspicious meaning in Chinese, which is “peace and beauty” – not too bad.
In traditional Chinese families, naming a child is a big deal. In the old Chinese agrarian tradition, an extended big family that shares a surname – passed down from father to child – also has preassigned names for each generation. A respected elder will write a verse that describes the family’s values and wishes for the family’s future, and each new generation will use the next character of the phrase in their names. So, usually, a name has three parts – the surname, the generation name, and finally the individual’s name. In some cases, the practice only applies to boys’ names; in others, it is followed for all children. The custom enables family members to identify which generation they belong to so that everyone knows their place in the big family and their responsibilities. Some parents even took the trouble of seeking out fortune-tellers to help name their children. The traditional belief is that, depending on the time of birth, the human body might lack one of the five elements – metal, wood, water, fire, or earth – which can affect health and even happiness in life. A fortune-teller can advise parents how to select a name that counteracts this deficiency, for example by using a character that incorporates a pianpang (radical) representing one of the elements (metal, wood, water, fire, earth). Some would even offer counsel on how many strokes should be in each character of the child’s name. But when it came to Meiping’s generation, these traditions were broken.
You see, during the Cultural Revolution, the old traditions were considered bad; instead, everyone gave their children names that reflect not tradition but “revolution.” I was hoping that we could get the old tradition back with the next generation, my grandchildren’s generation … Well, now that they live in America, it looks like we are now losing this tradition forever. Here in the U.S., we don’t see much tradition or etiquette! Every morning Meiping took Andrew to the bus stop. Every afternoon I took Angela with me and we waited for Andrew to return at the bus stop. The bus driver was a lady. My heavens, she looked older than me! Was she still working at this age because she needed money? Did she have grandchildren of her own to look after? I often wondered. She was very nice, always smiling. Andrew loved her and called her “Fanny.” Well, I said, given her age, you should call her Grandma Fanny. No, just Fanny, he insisted. I think, in America, children are very polite. Every day, before going to bed, Meiping asks Andrew and Angela to say “Good night” to me. In the beginning I was not used to this. I didn’t know what to say back to them. And they always say xie xie [thanks], even at home they say xie xie to their parents and to me. But when it comes to address terms, they don’t show proper respect to their seniors. Shushu [uncle], Ayi [aunt], ye-ye [grandpa], nai-nai [grandma], ge-ge [elder brother], jie-jie [elder sister], these terms they do not use [not for non-family members]. They call everybody by one same name –“Hi.”
3.1.3 Food and Festivals
Time flies. Soon, it was time for Andrew to start school. His mother dressed him up in a nice outfit and bought him a nice backpack. The school sent home a nametag so that Andrew could hang it around his neck and this way he wouldn’t get lost. Meiping told me that the tag also had our home phone number. I reminded Meiping that the home number was no use. If something happened to Andrew and the school called home, I wouldn’t be able to answer the phone and couldn’t help. So she changed it to their store number. What about lunch? I asked my daughter. She said the school had a cafeteria where kids can buy lunch and, if their income were a bit lower, Andrew would have qualified for reduced-price meal plans. But I still made lunch for Andrew and packed it in the lunchbox, not just to save money, but more importantly to eat healthy. Chinese food has all the nutritious elements – protein, vegetable, starch, nicely balanced, well cooked, and easy to digest; American food? McDonald’s? Hamburger? Raw vegetables? No, not good.
Normally, I make Chinese food for everybody and Meiping makes some American food for the children too. But when it is Chinese festivals like the Spring Festival [Chinese New Year], I tell my daughter that we all must eat Chinese food during that time – or else what is there left for Chinese culture? To be honest, when we were in China, we didn’t really make a big deal. When my own kids were little, I didn’t do much special for them during traditional holidays (such as the Spring Festival, the Mid-autumn Festival, the Duan-wu/Dragon Boat Festival). It was just some time off from work, getting together with family, eating nice food – whatever was available, getting some new clothes at most. In those days, we had no time, and very little money. I never gave my own children hong-bao [the red envelope] – during the Cultural Revolution, these traditional Chinese cultural practices were considered “feudalistic, capitalistic, and revisionist,” something bad that should be eradicated. So, in a way, I have to try to recall what my family did when I was small and I don’t remember much because it’s been so very long. I do what I can. Dumplings, rice cakes, meat pies, steamed bread, red braised pork belly, these basic things, but better than nothing. You see, even though they are in America, they are still Chinese, physically, and they have Chinese stomachs. Chinese stomachs need Chinese food.
And oh yes, I make sure that the children wear traditional Chinese clothes during Chinese New Year. I brought those clothes from China. I put the clothes on them and took pictures. When our relatives [in China] saw the pictures, they said that Andrew and Angela look more Chinese than Chinese children in China!
3.1.4 “Capable Children”
While Grandma was taking care of the children, the children were helping Grandma too.Footnote 1
When I was busy with meimei [younger sister, Angela] and house chores, Andrew usually watched TV. Sometimes he made “ji-li-gu-lu ji-li-gu-lu” sounds to himself as he was watching. I guess he was mimicking what he was hearing. It was all English. I don’t know English at all, not at all. Sometimes he was so absorbed in the TV programs that he didn’t want to learn arithmetic with me. Sometimes he didn’t want to obey my words. He would shout, “No!” I asked him what is “no”? He said it means I don’t want to. Oh, I said, my good grandson, you can be waipo’s English interpreter now! And an interpreter he truly was.
Whenever the weather was good, I’d push Angela in a stroller for a walk and Andrew would walk with me. Our favorite destination was the playground about five minutes’ walk from home. There was a sandbox, a seesaw, and a couple of swing sets. We would spend as much time there as possible until I needed to get back home to cook meals. Other families in the neighborhood took their children there too. Because we went often, we saw each other all the time. I don’t know where those families came from. Definitely not from China. Some of them are not White either. My daughter tells me that they are Spanish [Hispanic], Mexican, and many other kinds of foreigners. It reminds me of the American international airport. So many different kinds of people, speaking different languages and wearing different clothes. You always hear that America is a country of many different cultures; that is not false at all. Andrew would dig sand and sometimes play on the seesaw together with those children. Children don’t need language to communicate with each other. They just play. But sometimes the adults greeted me. I didn’t know what they were saying. I just smiled back, which was usually okay except for one day a kind-faced lady handed me a baby bottle and said something. I didn’t know what she wanted and didn’t know what to do. At this point, Andrew said to that lady, “No.” I reprimanded him right away. I said, how can you be so rude and disrespectful? Andrew explained to me that the lady was asking if the bottle was ours. You see, was my grandson capable or not?!
When it is bedtime, I say “Good night” to my grandchildren. In English. They taught me that word. It sounds nice. We Chinese usually don’t stand on formalities. When we go to bed, we just go to bed. We don’t say much, nothing much beyond wo shui le [I am going to sleep]. Here in the U.S., children speak sweetly. I like that. Their parents speak nicely to the children too. I would definitely learn English if I wanted to stay in the U.S. long-term.
3.2 Bearer of Chinese Culture
Besides taking care of Andrew and Angela’s meals and diapers, Grandma also played a crucial role in the children’s early education. For in Chinese wisdom, taking care of the mind and taking care of the body should always go hand in hand.
Everyday as I watched over Angela, I tried to squeeze some time to teach Andrew something. He was not a baby anymore, almost five. In China, many children at this age are already learning to read. Those in better financial conditions have even started taking private chess lessons, drawing lessons, music lessons, and English language lessons. I knew my daughter would have liked to sign Andrew up for those types of lessons too, but I also knew that they were financially tight and that classes in America are much more expensive. So I volunteered myself. I said, let me teach him arithmetic. Learning anything is better than learning nothing. That’s how I became my grandson’s first teacher.
3.2.1 Jibengong (Foundational Skills)
I firmly believe that children must have 基本功 jibengong – foundational skills such as the ability to work with numbers and the ability to read. 语文 yuwen [the study of words and texts] and 算术 suanshu [the art of arithmetic], whatever the culture. In Chinese culture, we have 千字文 qianzi-wen [a learning text consisting of a thousand different characters] that children are encouraged to read and recite. Once they commit the text to memory during childhood, they will never forget it for life. Whenever you need it, these words will come to your mind to help you read better, write better, and speak better. For arithmetic, children do many many arithmetic problems, from easy to difficult. By the time they finish elementary school, they are quite good with numbers. So I began with numbers. I teach when I play with them. I used nursery rhymes such as this one: 你拍一, 我拍—, 两个小孩坐飞机 ni pai yi, wo pai yi, liang ge xiaohai zuo feiji [You clap one, I clap one, two children ride an airplane – “one” and “plane” rhyme in Chinese]. Andrew liked it a lot. Sometimes he didn’t understand part of the rhyme. I’d ask him to repeat after me and memorize it anyway. He is very bright and learns very fast. Very soon he was doing simple additions and subtractions and I started teaching him the rhyme for the multiplication table 一一得一, 一二得二 yi yi de yi, yi er de er [one by one makes one, one by two makes two] … He didn’t understand multiplication, but I thought memorizing the table would give him a good foundation and a head start. This is what I believe. We Chinese always put education first. Wherever you are. Whether rich or poor. Know the story of 孟母三迁 mengmu sanqian [“Mencius’ Mother Moved Three Times” – the mother of the great sage Mencius moved houses three times in order to find the place best suited for Mencius’ education]. We do our best and provide all the resources for our children’s education. Besides numbers, I also teach the children how to read Chinese characters. I use the vocabulary flash cards for young children that I brought from China.
3.2.2 The Curious Question of Creativity
I asked Andrew what he learned at school. He often said “I don’t remember,” or “We just had fun.” And he didn’t seem to have much homework. No homework and no one to play with after school, so he played lots of computer games. His father knows a lot about computers. He got him games to play at home. I don’t know what those games were, but his father said they were not just for fun but also educational. He said education in America focuses on independence and creativity. I don’t dislike independence and creativity. But what about jibengong? To be a good writer, you must first learn from the best writers, commit their writings to memory, and internalize them as your own. To be a good math problem solver, you must see and study the solutions to thousands of different math problems. To be a good athlete, you must get up early everyday and practice, and practice, and practice. This should be common sense, right? Without jibengong, what will be the basis of your “creativity”? The best time to learn, to memorize, to practice is when you are young, at the age of around seven. If we just let kids play, how can they learn?
But I must admit that children born and raised in America are smart. I read Chinese stories about 神农 Shennong to Andrew and Angela. Shennong is this legendary person in ancient China who is considered to be the father of Chinese agriculture and Chinese herbal medicine. In those stories, Shennong is said to have tasted hundreds of herbs to test their medicinal value before writing a comprehensive book about Chinese herbs. Andrew asked me, how come Shennong was sick so often? I said no he was not sick, he was just tasting and testing the herbal medicines. Andrew said, if he was not sick, how did he know that the medicine worked? You see how smart this kid is?! In Chinese culture, children are told stories and they listen and accept the stories. They don’t ask so many questions. In this regard, I think America is better than China.
I tried to teach the great Chinese history to my grandchildren, such as the “four great inventions” (compass, gunpowder, paper, and print). The Chinese are very creative. Two thousand years ago during the Han Dynasty, a man named Can Lun made paper out of trees and plants. He broke down the plant fibers by repeatedly beating them and then soaked and bonded the fibers in water. Then he drained, flattened, dried, and pressed the pulp of the broken-down fibers. The result was a writing surface that was smooth and light and could be folded or rolled. I told the children all this. So, one day, Andrew was making a mess. He put vegetable leaves in the bathroom sink and it was wet everywhere. He said 我在造纸 wo zai zao zhi [I am making paper]!
3.2.3 Tinghua (Being Good)
In my observation of the interactions between Grandma and the children, one of the most frequently used expressions by Grandma is 听话 tinghua, which is a bit challenging to translate into English. Literally, it means “listen to [children’s caretakers’] speech.” In practice, it is a transitive verb phrase but is used as an adjective. In the context of praise, as in “Andrew 真好 zhen hao! 真听话 zhen tinghua!” (“Andrew is doing such a good job! So tinghua!”), it is meant as a compliment on children’s behavior and has little to do with the literal sense of “following (caretakers’) instructions” or “obedience.” Such usages can be found in both specific settings in relation to specific activities and in generic contexts where, for example, an adult compliments a friend’s child whom the adult has just met. Conversely, when a child is not behaving properly such as throwing a tantrum in public, the expression is 不好 bu hao, 不听话 bu tinghua (“not good; you are not being tinghua”), which suggests that the child is not following rules and norms for desirable or acceptable social behavior. These rules and norms could refer to something the adult expects the child to know by heart from previous experience or something that the adult has just told the child in a specific setting.
Children need to learn to be tinghua. If they don’t practice being tinghua, they won’t know what is right and what is wrong. They won’t know how to control themselves and exercise personal discipline. They won’t respect parents or teachers. And in the future, they will not be ready to take on responsibilities. What if the parent or the teacher is wrong, I asked. Grandma’s reply: if children don’t practice being tinghua from a young age, they won’t even be able to tell if the parent or teacher is wrong! When you are young, you should be tinghua, so that you learn and when you grow up, you can correct others’ mistakes.
Grandmother is a sojourner. She came to the U.S. on a temporary basis with the clear purpose of helping take care of the grandchildren at the beginning of the grandchildren’s lives, thus fulfilling an important social and cultural role for Chinese older adults (Reference Chen and DennisChen and Denis, 2015; Reference Ishii-KuntzIshii-Kuntz, 1997; Reference Treas and MazumdarTreas and Mazumdar, 2002; Reference Xu, Chi and QuahXu and Chi, 2015). She always believes that China is the best place for her and her husband to live in and the U.S. is a place for young people. She has no intention to stay in the U.S. long-term. Whereas in traditional Chinese culture, grandparents often care for their grandchildren, and children in turn are expected to respect and care for their elderly parents, such a reciprocal relationship may not be possible in immigrant families like Andrew and Angela’s. Because of the global dispersal of family members, there may arise increasing cultural gaps and language barriers, anxiety, and sometimes alienation between the three generations of grandparents, parents, and grandchildren (Reference QinQin, 2006; Reference Vo‐Thanh‐Xuan and LiamputtongVo-Thanh-Xuan and Liamputtong, 2003). Grandparents may feel that they have become peripheral family members and are no longer authority figures in families (Reference Wong, Yoo and StewartWong et al., 2006). Andrew and Angela’s family presents a glimpse of whether and how Chinese sojourner grandparents maintain close relationships with their grandchildren, as well as an understanding of the important role they play in the family’s language and life.
Like many older Chinese immigrants, Grandmother’s social network revolves mainly around the family as she settles into domestic roles as homemaker and caregiver of grandchildren. With almost no ability to speak English, no professional work experience in the United States and no social network beyond the family, she invests heavily in interactions with grandchildren. As a result, grandparents like her play a significant role in grandchildren’s socialization in their early years, especially socialization into the language of the family’s origin, either directly (Reference BraunBraun, 2012; Reference Sandel, Chao and LiangSandel et al., 2006; Reference ZhanZhan, 2020) or through translation (Reference Wang and Curdt-ChristiansenWang and Curdt-Christiansen, 2020), and into cultural values such as filial piety (Reference Liu, Ng, Weatherall and LoongLiu et al., 2018).
The United States is the number one host Western country for Chinese immigrants and has been seeing a big continuous increase in immigrant Chinese older adults in recent years (Reference Rosenbloom and BatalovaRosenbloom and Batalova, 2023; Wang et al., 2006). In the context of Chinese immigrant families, the middle, parental generation are the first-generation immigrants, the children are obviously second-generation (or generation 1.5) immigrants, and the grandparents are also first-generation, but in a way different from the parental generation, in terms of timing, purpose, and length of stay. Grandparents come to the U.S. later than the parents, typically when the parents have settled down and started a family. For Meiping and Donghua to bring Meiping’s mother to the United States for multiple short visits for childcare while they work is not an uncommon practice among first-generation Chinese immigrants. Some immigrant parents encourage their children to stay in China with their grandparents as long as possible when they visit. Some invite their elders to join their annual family trip in the U.S. to replace the visit to China. These arrangements are made because many Chinese Americans want their children to be influenced by and acculturated in Chinese culture. Because many of the Chinese immigrant grandparents do not speak English, grandchildren under their grandparents’ care learn, or at least try to speak, more Chinese at home, resulting in fewer non-canonical forms (errors) in children’s narrative production (Reference Xiang and MakarovaXiang and Makarova, 2021). It also means that the grandparents may have a ready-made audience for information about their culture, language, and traditions. And that certainly made Andrew and Angela’s grandmother very happy.
3.3 Who Speaks Which Language When
Grandmother’s crucial role in childrearing does not mean, however, that the parents are no longer involved. They are. In Grandma’s words, 我们是三套车式带孩子 women shi santaoche-shi dai haizi (“in our family, we use a troika model to raise children”). Grandmother takes care of the children’s daily basic needs. Mother is in charge of the children’s food, clothes, social activities, schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and pediatric visits. Father helps mother and grandmother and is responsible for playing with the children outdoors when he is available. With three generations and two languages in one family, who speaks what and when?
It is widely acknowledged that Chinese is the most spoken language in the world, by measure of the size of its native speaking population. It is less recognized, however, that Chinese is also a most common “heritage language” used by speakers who have a cultural and ethnic connection to it in the context of immigration and migration worldwide (Reference He, Wang and SunHe, 2015a; Reference LiLi, 2016). In the U.S., Chinese (Mandarin and other varieties) is the third-largest language, after English and Spanish (Pew Research Center, 2020). First-generation immigrants such as Meiping and Donghua are all too aware of the social meaning and significance of language choices in their new country. The episode from dinnertime interaction below illustrates this point.
3.3.1 Triadic Bilingual Conversation: Dinner Table
Here is an episode from Andrew’s household when he was a third-grader. Grandma speaks no English.Footnote 2
Pasta or porridge
001 Andrew: I want that pasta ((looking across from the dining table at Mother in the kitchen area))
002 Grandma: 要什么啊? ((to Mother))
Yao shenme a
What does he want?
003 Mother: 就是那个面,给他那个面
Jiushi nage mian, gei ta nage mian
It’s those noodles, give him those noodles
004 Grandma: 面都凉了, 吃肉粥肉粥好
Mian dou liang le, chi rouzhou rouzhou hao
Noodles are cold. Eat meat porridge; meat porridge is good
005 Andrew: I want that pasta 粥
I want that pasta zhou
I want that pasta porridge
006 Mother: 外婆说了, no more pasta, 吃粥
Waipo shuo le, no more pasta, chi zhou
Grandma said no more pasta, eat porridge
007 Grandma: 粥好啊, 那巴大冷了还干巴巴的, 粥好啊
Zhou hao a, na bada leng le hai gan-ba-ba de, zhou hao a
Porridge is good. That ba-da [pasta] is cold, and dry too. Porridge is good.
In this case, Andrew asks for pasta (001). Grandma initially does not understand (002) what Andrew needs. Upon Mother’s explanation (003), Grandma suggests “meat porridge” instead (004), citing pasta being cold as the reason. Andrew protests and insists on pasta, but this time calling pasta “pasta porridge” (005). Mother (006) subsequently intervenes, (mis)quoting Grandma that there is no more pasta (Grandma did not say that; instead Grandma said that pasta is cold in 004), in an effort to make the child accept porridge. Grandma provides further justification (007) for choosing meat porridge by describing pasta as cold and dry, using a Chinese transliteration ba-da for pasta (instead of mian, as she did in line 004) and a particular adjective gan-ba-ba (dry) which has a phonetic resonance with “pasta” to describe the unpalatability (dryness) of pasta.
Hence, in this case of differences in language choice and competence (Grandma speaks and understands Chinese only; the grandson speaks mostly English but understands Chinese; mother speaks and understands both) and differences in food choice (the grandchild wants pasta, Grandma wants the grandchild to have meat porridge), both the grandchild and the Grandma make creative moves to accommodate each other’s language competence in order to maximize their own persuasiveness. The child creatively shifted from “pasta” (001) to “pasta porridge” (005), hoping to convince Grandma that pasta is also a kind of porridge and therefore also good. Grandma’s reference to pasta changed from mian (“noodles,” 004) to ba-da, a spontaneous transliteration of “pasta” (007) in an effort to show that she understands what her grandchild wants but just doesn’t think it is good enough for him. So the differences in food choice are softened by the efforts made by all parties to bring maximum common ground in verbal expressions across languages.
If we dissect this episode on multiple linguistic, discursive, sociocultural, and historical levels, we will discover even deeper significance therein. At the level of language proficiency, we may ask how much Chinese Andrew at this age actually commands. On the basis of the data transcript, we can infer that he most likely comprehends more Chinese than he can or is willing to produce. Throughout the entire episode, Andrew speaks Chinese minimally and utters but one single Chinese word, zhou (“porridge”) (line 005). However, the positioning of his utterance shows that he clearly understands Grandma’s utterances in Chinese. His speaking turn “I want that pasta porridge” (005) is positioned immediately after Grandma’s suggestion “eat porridge” (004), when Grandma was in fact speaking to Mother to offer an alternative suggestion to Mother’s request that Grandma serve Andrew pasta (“give him those noodles,” 003). Furthermore, even though he uses only one Chinese word, Andrew exhibits spontaneous dexterity with Chinese morphology. He coins a new term pasta zhou (“pasta porridge”) to parallel Grandma’s rou zhou (“meat porridge”). Finally, Andrew’s exhibited Chinese proficiency appears more sophisticated than his proficiency as perceived and described by Mother, who does not think that Andrew understands (at least not fully) what Grandma has said. She (Mother) says to Andrew (006) that Grandma has said that there is no more pasta, when in fact Grandma did not say so (what Grandma said was that “noodlea are cold” and that “meat porridge is good,” 004). Also note that in her utterance (006), Mother mixes Chinese and English with the quote from Grandma “no more pasta” being presented to Andrew in English so that Grandma, not understanding English, will have no way of knowing that she (Grandma) is being misquoted.
On the scale of sequential organization and the participation framework in this short conversation, Andrew’s utterance (005) is presented as an unsolicited second assessment, challenging and negating Grandma’s assessment (004), which is directed at Mother. In other words, Andrew produced his only Chinese word during the episode in an utterance that he volunteered (i.e., when he is not being directly spoken to). However, by scaffolding the question in English syntax and a largely English lexicon, Andrew is clearly not speaking to Grandma as his targeted interlocutor. He is speaking to Mother and recruiting Mother as his possible ally while at the same time not alienating Grandma by mimicking and approximating Grandma’s term rou zhou with pasta zhou. Here the turn-taking mechanism is used effectively to construct emerging (dis)alignment and positionality (Reference Huang and LuHuang and Lu, 2013).
On the scale of the speech event and of interpersonal dynamics, Andrew and Grandma have divergent goals. Andrew wants pasta. Grandma wants Andrew to have porridge. Mother’s stance shifts as the interaction unfolds. She begins by aligning with Andrew and asking Grandma to give him pasta. Upon Grandma’s suggestion, Mother changes her mind, realigns herself with Grandma and refuses to give Andrew pasta by (duplicitously) invoking Grandma. In so doing, she maintains her alliance with Grandmother insofar as Andrew’s food choices are concerned. She also skillfully exploits her perception of Andrew’s incompetence in Chinese and Grandma’s inaccessibility to English to maintain rapport with Andrew while denying his request. Hence, in a literal sense, this is an exemplary sociolinguistic moment where language use and code choice directly and instantaneously (re)construct interpersonal relations and power dynamics, in which Andrew is positioned as vulnerable in terms of both language and power.
Across similar speech events over time, interaction over dinner in Andrew’s household has normatively been bilingual – Andrew speaks English, Grandma speaks Chinese, everyone else (Mother, Father) speak mostly Chinese, sometimes mixed with English. Grandma speaks to Andrew directly in Chinese, whether or not Andrew understands (or appears to understand) her. Andrew rarely speaks to Grandma directly. Neither English nor Chinese is a “marked” choice. Neither monolingual utterances nor mixed-language utterances are “marked” either. They are accepted by everyone, including Grandma, as normative behavior for Andrew to not actively use Chinese.
More broadly, in terms of family interactions in general beyond dinner table conversations, communication in immigrant Chinese households in the U.S. takes place against the backdrop of global migration. In these households, typically, there are at least two generations and very often three generations who have different linguistic and cultural upbringings and who speak both English and Chinese to varying degrees and at varying proficiency levels. The grandparents usually speak Chinese exclusively. The parents are usually more comfortable speaking Chinese at home and use English primarily for work and for life outside the home. The children use English natively and speak Chinese as a heritage language. The parents’ English rarely reaches advanced or near-native level; and the children’s Chinese does not typically reach near-native attainment in adulthood. This gives rise to two broad questions: how will language shift in the household from monolingual Chinese-speaking to bilingual Chinese- and English-speaking impact the child’s motivations for and attitudes toward learning the Chinese language? And what is the prospect for immigrant child speakers to develop and maintain discourse and interactional competence in Chinese?
In informal interviews, Mother claims that Andrew never speaks Chinese and does not understand much Chinese and that she herself tries to speak English to Andrew, because Andrew’s teacher at school suggested that home support in English is important. What Mother fails to recognize is that Andrew does speak Chinese, as in the case above, at critical interactional moments when his own interests are at stake (in this case, pasta versus porridge for the meal). With such a distribution of language resources in the household, how does language socialization take place? Does, or can, English language socialization take place at home? The following two naturally occurring interactional episodes provide at least a partial answer to these questions.
3.3.2 “Imperfect” Socialization: Bedtime
The story of Goldilocks and Three Little Bears is one of Angela’s favorites. Part of the story goes like this (Reference HeHe, 2016b):
In front of her was a table with three chairs, one large chair, one middle-sized chair and one small chair. On the table were three bowls of porridge, one large bowl, one middle-sized bowl and one small bowl – and three spoons … In a little while, the three bears came back from their walk in the forest. Father Bear looked around, then roared with a growly voice.
One day, this was how Meiping and Angela (a first-grader) shared the reading of the story. The spelling of the words uttered by Meiping reflects how the words were pronounced by Meiping.
001 Mother: In font of her wass a table with three cheers, one large cheer,
002 Child: Chair, Mommy, chair
003 Mother: One meedle chair and one simall cheer. On the table were three bools of porridge, one large bool,
004 (.2)
005 Mother: one meedle bool [and
006 Child: [and one small bowl
007 Mother: and one simall bool=
008 Child: =one small bowl
009 Mother: yes – and three sipoon.
…
010 Mother: In a little while the three beers came back from their walk in the foress. They saw –
011 Child: They come back from the forest yay!
012 Mother: Father Beer look around and then (.2) rowed (.) rowed with a gow- glo- gowly voice.
013 Child: ((studying the words herself))
014 Mother: You read you can read yourself you are school now.
015 Child: Father (.) Bear (.) looked around,
016 then (.4) ≪ something something a (.2) grow-ly≫ voice.
017 What’s that – that word?
018 What’s the name of that word? ((pointing to “roared with a growly voice”))
019 Mother: Must be bad=
020 Child: =Must be big scary sound cus he’s really angry
021 Mother: Hahhaha
Here we have a perfect case of “imperfect language socialization” (Reference HeHe, 2016a) that goes bidirectionally. Apparently, this is not Angela’s first time listening to this story; she enjoys reading it, again, with Mother, nonetheless. In lines 002 and 009, Angela corrects Mother’s pronunciation (“chair” not “cheer,” “bowl” not “bool”). In line 006, Angela completes Mother’s speaking turn. In line 012, Mother is having trouble with the word “growly” and encourages and requests Angela’s participation (line 014, “You read you can read yourself you are school now”). Sensing that Mother has some difficulty, Angela had already started looking into the problem before being asked to do so (line 013). In lines 015 to 020, Angela and Mother together speculate on the meaning of the word “growly” and clearly enjoy their collaboration (line 021, laughter).
As we can see, speaking and reading English as a second language, Mother does not have perfect command of the language. She mispronounces multiple words (some of which are corrected by Angela; many of which are “accepted”), and her reading vocabulary does not appear to be much larger than Angela’s (neither of them knows what “growly” means). Such “imperfection,” however, does not prevent Mother and Angela from being engaged in a bedtime interactional routine as a means for language socialization (Reference HeathHeath, 1982; Reference KanagyKanagy, 1999), or from sharing some enjoyable, productive reading time together.
In the next episode, Mother is checking Angela’s (first-grader) homework.
3.3.3 Collaborative Learning: Homework
Thanksgiving is approaching. Angela’s first-grader teacher gives an assignment: write a paragraph about Native Americans. This is what Angela has written:
Native Americans live in many houses. They move from place to place. They like houses that are fun to buld [build]. If wether [weather] is bad, they build strong houses. If its [it’s] sunny and happy, they don’t worry about it. The end.
001 Mother: Very nice. Very good. Write more write more. There are so much empty here.
002 Child: What else can I write?
003 Mother: You can you can say Native Native American are what kind people, have what kind of food, like what food, and something something=
004 Child: =Y’mean I can tell a story?
005 Mother: Story? Oh I don’t know. Your teacher want you write story?
006 Child: ’Kay, I’ll make up a story.
Even though Mother herself is not capable of writing “standard” English, nor is familiar with the specific requirements of the assignment, she reads well enough to know that Angela could do better – write more (001) and provide more details (003). Mother’s suggestion is, in turn, interpreted by Angela as storytelling (presumably the genre with which she is most familiar at this stage), which Mother clearly did not mean but found intriguing (005). In the end, Angela, inspired by Mother’s feedback, decided to “make up a story” to make her writing fuller.
Interactions like the above show that immigrant children can and do learn from “imperfect” parents, as the latter are engaged in teaching the former how to read, write, and converse in the language of their new country. In reading-literacy interactions with Mother, Angela uses a wide range of strategies to cocreate, correct, and crystallize what counts as possible, permissible, and preferable knowledge and skills. Socialization in “imperfect” conditions where the expert does not have full command of the target language and where the novice must constantly evaluate expert knowledge, tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, and build and test ongoing hypotheses constitutes the norm, rather than the exception, in immigrant households and other translingual, cross-cultural contexts. Whereas the socializer has conventionally been conceptualized as the expert, a constant and steady source of knowledge and expertise, language socialization in new immigrant households, however, has problematized this notion and drawn our attention to the fact that the socializer may indeed be uncertain, tentative, and in some cases needing guidance and advice, as parents and other caregivers are in fact novices in terms of the mainstream societal language and culture. In this sense, the family becomes a multilingual and intergenerational “space” (Reference Lanza, Auer and LiLanza, 2007, Reference Lanza2021) that embodies and transforms all family members’ lived experiences.
Correspondingly, the child socialized in immigrant households is not merely a responsive and receptive learner; instead, the socializee exerts varying degrees of authority and agency, depending on specific domains. Only a nuanced understanding of the “socializee” can lead to an explanation of how HL learning may engage, transform, and expand learners’ identity options in simultaneously existing multiple speech communities. Speakers like Andrew and Angela should not be seen as less-than-competent speakers of the heritage language but, more importantly, as active agents who collaborate in the navigation and negotiation of meaning in the full linguistic repertoire of the family. The parallel development of Chinese and English is a form of acquisition and socialization of a bilingual “multicompetence” (Reference CookCook, 1992, Reference Cook1995) “multi-performance” (Reference HeHe, 2013b), and of “interculturality” (Reference ZhuZhu, 2010) in the larger context of the acquisition of multilingual and multicultural competencies (Reference Ortega and MayOrtega, 2014). That said, the discursive spaces at multiple interactional, situational, cultural, familial, and societal scales vary greatly over time, which in turn presents varying affordances for the development of language competence.
It is worth noting that parents like Meiping and Donghua clearly do not see themselves as having made a conscious decision not to pass their Chinese language to their children. On the contrary, they state that they purposely react against the language shift (on the family scale), in particular, against their children’s use of English at home. Yet at the same time it is clear from their observed language behavior (as evidenced in interactional episodes such as the one above regarding pasta and porridge) that children, ever since starting schooling, are given just as much input in English as in Chinese, if not more in English, and in practice adults do not expect or insist that children speak Chinese. The reasons for such contradictions are multifold. The most obvious reason certainly has to do with the influx of English vocabulary. The words and the worlds that the children encounter outside home can be rendered more vividly and reliably through the very same language in which they experienced them. For example, in elementary schools, there is a specifically allocated class time called “sharing time,” a time for kids to share their joys, concerns, and plans with their class. This is a concept that did not have a cultural or curricular equivalency in Chinese during Meiping’s education in China. In the next chapter, we will take a look at CHL speakers’ language and cultural ecology in schools.
