"Third Culture Kid": A Note on My Relationship With Chinese

There is a common tale of purpose that we hear time and time again from the Chinese diaspora. The narrative exists that we have tried to preserve our culture and the brief memories of what the Chinese identity is. The people who move from China to foreign nations will soon see their new country as more of a home. There, they will try to learn their language, fail, and never try again.

Some further their connection to their homeland through school classes and replicating an environment similar to their home communities.

But I was not one of them. Instead of the classes, I was left with only distant memories.

13 years of life as an immigrant in Singapore passed in the blink of an eye. Migration is like a process: I imagine a graph that rises at a constant speed and then plateaus. There are challenges to being a migrant, one of which is the language of outsiders that once seemed like tongue twisters. At some point, these challenges will cease to exist; everything will stop being so hard. At one point, there was nothing new anymore, and things just started to look normal.

In the end, I killed the last slivers of my Chinese identity. I suffocated the existence of my language every time I chose to speak English instead of Chinese. I plundered the soul of my mother tongue every time I avoided watching Chinese shows and watched English movies instead. Through this, I lost that connection to my culture without even noticing. 

I realized the crime I had committed on my own identity was when I was in 8th grade. Similar environments are important because there’s a psychological struggle you go through when you start to become similar to the people around you, and you strive toward assimilation when you feel foreign. I chose to integrate into an all-Chinese friend group. 

These were the children of the People’s Republic of China who could proudly say so. They were the people who could tell others they were fluent in Chinese; they could be proud and truthful to call themselves Chinese citizens. 

I think it was a sense of jealousy at first – jealousy that I couldn’t read as well as they in Mandarin or couldn’t use the language on a more technical level. It then progressed to a feeling of being left behind, the true “fear of missing out” because I realized I couldn’t laugh with the same happiness — comfortable laughter of understanding and nuance — and for the first time in my life, I found myself looking up at a wall that was too high to climb: I was barricaded by a barrier to the language of my ancestors. 

The FOMO drove rationale; it drove ambition to discover why I felt left out. I began a vigorous “cultural revolution” where the sole purpose of that era was to accumulate as much Chinese as I possibly could because, in my disillusioned mind, I believed I was able to gain what I had lost. 

However, the thing about language learning is that it takes time. 

Not only does it take time, but language learning is often also systematic in the sense that there are specific steps you must follow to be considered proficient at the language. The key difference I’d forgotten was that these systematic mechanisms of learning Chinese were long gone and out of the horizon of my mental storage. If I wanted to accumulate Chinese, I would’ve needed to start from scratch. I would’ve needed to dispose of everything “English” ingrained in me to learn Chinese. 

And at the peak of all of this hard work, the burning fury that pushed me forward, and the nights of restless Chinese articles, I was asked why I even bothered trying: 

“Why the hell are you speaking Chinese?” 

“Your Chinese isn’t even good.”  

This was said to me at an overseas sleepover while we were on camp in 8th grade. Ironically, it was said by someone who had only lived in China for half of her life and spent her early middle school years in the US. 

I didn’t understand… 

If I wasn’t good at Chinese, did that mean I shouldn’t speak it? 

If I did speak it, was I being disgraceful? 

The question didn’t make sense to me because what did it even mean to be good? Did being good determine how much I identified with the Chinese identity? 

For a while, this mentality clouded my consciousness and evaporated my rationality. My “cultural revolution” had been halted, and all I could do was accept that I wasn’t good enough.

This is where I failed. 

This is where I never tried again. 

I realized that no matter how hard I tried to integrate, I never would. 

Because nuances like small talk in Chinese, accents, and the ability to read funny memes mattered. And so long as I never learned these nuances, I would be an outsider. 

The way I switched to English when talking to my friends, the lack of shared experiences because I never lived in China, and the dissipating proximity I had to my closest circle of friends all pointed to my lifelong standpoint as an alien. 

After all, I was splat in the middle of the scale of “Chinese-ness.” 

Too white-washed to be Chinese, 

Too Chinese to be whitewashed 

People are often too quick to judge. 

They assume that the common tale of purpose exists because diasporic individuals never wanted to try learning their language in the first place. It is the assumption that rejection of our culture was automatic and a choice we made to repulsively distance ourselves from the identity we supposedly no longer wanted. 

Yet this wasn’t the case. 

Because most of the time we try, we truly do try. 

We bite back tears of frustration when encountering hopelessness and trouble understanding the language, and we try because we want to understand, want to be proud, and want to live up to the name of our origin. 

I may not know how to recite Chinese poetry or speak in coherent Chinese sentences, but I love my culture, and who it makes me. 

Though I may never be proficient in Chinese or live in China, I love China, and that is Chinese enough.