The Accidental Foreigner
By: Julia C. Tsai
Tags: Taiwan, Immigrant Stories, Immigrant Families, Life Change

The Accidental Foreigner

Growing up in an immigrant family comes with “language settings,” much like how foreign films/television shows and video games do, even down to the subtitles. Is the family going to emphasize English so that the children can assimilate faster? Is the family going to insist on speaking the mother tongue to reinforce cultural ties? Will the parents compromise by speaking to their children in the mother tongue while the children answer back in English? Each family’s calculus is different, but for Taiwanese families, the consideration turns into a quantum physics like calculation because there are three languages to select from.

My first language is actually Taiwanese, a language that originated from the Chinese mainland and comes from the same family of languages as Mandarin and Cantonese but is unintelligible from Mandarin and Cantonese, much like how Spanish and French are both Romance languages and are unintelligible from each other. Mandarin was brought to Taiwan by the losing side of the Chinese civil war in the 1940s, and most of business and society in Taiwan has been conducted in Mandarin ever since.

The older generation of my household speaks Taiwanese amongst themselves and prefers to speak Taiwanese to others. Though my parents continue to speak to me exclusively in Taiwanese, I answer back with a mix of Taiwanese and English, more skewed towards English because my Taiwanese has sadly devolved. As a bratty child, I asked them why I had to learn Taiwanese while we were living in America. Their response was always “How will you communicate with your grandparents?”

My grandparents grew up during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan (1895–1945) and grew up bilingual, speaking Taiwanese and Japanese. By the time Mandarin became the official language in 1949 due to martial law, all four were solidly adults and probably found learning another language difficult — not to mention it was the tongue of yet another oppressor. Thus, none of my grandparents spoke Mandarin fluently. My parents, who grew up during martial law, lived a different bilingual life than that of my grandparents — speaking Mandarin and Taiwanese. However, speaking Taiwanese in school brought them punishment and ostracization, and I think it is this experience that largely determined what language setting my parents chose for our family.

My household is not alone in choosing Taiwanese within the overseas Taiwanese diaspora; there are others within my generation who speak/understand English [or Japanese, French, etc.] and Taiwanese but not Mandarin. This surprises many local Taiwanese my age or younger, who grew up speaking almost exclusively Mandarin and under the belief that speaking Taiwanese is “backwards,” especially with superpower China next door. Now that I think back on it, I didn’t even question why we never spoke Mandarin at home, even though I knew people in Taiwan mostly spoke Mandarin. I always thought I would pick it up on my own somehow…? (I was also naive as a child, clearly.)

In the 2000s, the Taiwanese government insisted that schools teach children Taiwanese as well as other mother tongue languages, so the trend is slowly ticking towards Generation Z speaking Taiwanese. There is more Taiwanese spoken in day-to-day life — on public transportation, in banks, in department stores, on podcasts, and on television shows. It is now seen as “cool” to speak Taiwanese in part because it denotes loyalty to the island as opposed to loyalty elsewhere, like across the Taiwan Strait.

I have never ever thought it cool to speak Taiwanese; it landed me in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes that I was wrongly placed in (thanks, institutional racism), and I don’t find it particularly pleasing to the ears. I am hoping my living in Taiwan will help me love and relearn the language. I came to Taiwan primarily to strengthen my Mandarin skills, but through osmosis, the Taiwanese that I speak with my parents is slowly becoming more fluent as well.

Will I be able to pass on Taiwanese to my own children? Doubtful. I’m already dreading figuring out what my family’s language setting will be (e.g. Mommy speaks English, Daddy speaks Mandarin, but then what about Taiwanese? Or Mommy speaks Mandarin, Daddy speaks Taiwanese, but then what about English? And let’s face it, Mommy’s Mandarin isn’t great.) Will this new and cool Generation Z be able to keep Taiwanese from dying out? I’m bullish on this, if only in the hopes that my children can learn Taiwanese from them.