I'm Scared to Use My Own Language

A personal essay on language, identity, & loss.

This week’s newsletter is much different than the usual format of Everybody Talks. I wanted to write a more personal piece on language loss and linguistic insecurity in my own life. If you’re looking for more academic topics in linguistics, feel free to skip this one and check out last week’s newsletter on cross-linguistic onomatopoeia instead. No hard feelings! For those of you who remain, thank you for reading, and I would love to hear your own thoughts and experiences in the comments below. See you next Tuesday!

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Taken by the author at Rainbow Village (彩虹眷村) in Taichung, Taiwan.

In my everyday life I rarely speak my own language.

It’s not English, the one that flows effortlessly out of my mouth, bursts onto the page, swirls all around my world without a second thought. It’s the one that has been with me since I was a child — the language of my family, the language of my mom, the language that I feel is at once embedded deep inside my soul but is also clunky, awkward, and incomplete.

I recently ordered takeout from a Malaysian restaurant, and as I waited, I eavesdropped while the servers chatted in Chinese. I heard them refer to me as xiao mei nü — “pretty girl” — once my order was up, and I mustered up the courage to squeak out a timid xie xie in thanks as I grabbed my food. But before I could look at their faces, register their reactions, relish the opportunity to have a brief conversation in Chinese, I scurried out the door. Something inside of me is scared to use my language. Something always holds me back.

Aside from Chinglish phone conversations with my mother or small interactions like these which rarely warrant substantial dialogue, I almost never use Chinese. And I feel the lack of my language in my life. Chinese lies dormant in me, silenced. I want to use it to express myself, to connect in new ways, to feel more whole.

Last weekend I got spam texts in Chinese from a Mr. Liu claiming to have gotten my number from a Jenny ayi, who wanted us young people to get to know each other. Normally, I’d immediately block texts like this. But I held on to those texts for longer than I should have. I never replied, but as his texts rolled in — asking me about my weekend, asking why I hadn’t replied — I felt an atrophied muscle stretch in me as I read every word that I could, as I Googled his use of chengyu that I didn’t quite understand.

Despite my desire to use Chinese, to be known through Chinese, I know exactly what shoves it back under the surface, what keeps it from clawing its way out and screaming that it exists. And it hurts to acknowledge the truth: that force, that thing that stops me, is in part my own self.

I hate the fact that I am surrounded by people who know Chinese, and yet I can’t bring myself to speak with them in Chinese. My Chinese classmates want to talk to me in my first language, while I want to talk to them in theirs, and in the end, their confidence wins over my insecurity. I can’t blame them. I know it’s my own timid self that secretly clamors for safety in English, that will do anything to avoid the risk of saying something wrong in Chinese and looking like a fool.

Even when I’m with my childhood friends who I know speak Chinese, who know that I speak Chinese, who use it with their parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents — we never speak it with each other. We can’t help but default to English, the language that we have established relationships in, the language that our lives take place in. When Chinese comes up, it might be to exchange a few phrases, crack a joke or two. But we rarely go beyond that.

I wonder if they feel the same longing as I do. I wonder if they also feel like a part of them dies a little whenever Chinese peeks out and is swiftly escorted back inside.

Because of this, I’m also terrified of something in the far distant future: I am afraid that I may never pass my language on to my children. I feel this fear so acutely even though my children don’t even exist yet. I feel this pressing fear even though my mother successfully passed on her own language and made it a part of me, too. Ever since I was a baby she called me beibei, xiaobei, bei’er, planting names in me that are now seared into my being. Even if people don’t call me by those names, they are unchangeable, they will always reflect me, exactly me.

But I worry that someday, I will be unable to do the same for my children. Part of it comes from wondering if the language has wilted away so much inside me that I cannot create a new speaker from scratch. But another part of it is seeing a crucial component of the childhood my mom crafted for me that I’m already missing, and that I’m scared I’ll never find: I have no community of people who speak the language, who use it, who bring their children with them, who create situations that necessitate that language. I am part of a community of “speakers” who do not speak. It feels like there’s no need to, not when English does the job perfectly well.

Are they also scared? Nervous like me to form those special sounds, to sing those tones, to scavenge for words that are shielded in dust?

Because of this, I find myself fearing that my own language might slowly be lost. Not in the world — it is Chinese, after all — but in myself, in my future children, and maybe in my shared generation of Asian American kids. The kids who grew up complaining about weekend language school. The kids who moaned and groaned whenever their parents make them switch languages to tell a story. The kids who started to feel the dull pain of language loss as they grew older — because language is culture, language is identity, language is who we are — and decided to take language classes in college, just to salvage and revive the language that is burrowed deep inside them. The kids who might just be feeling the same fears as me now.

Because now we are adults, and we are at a crossroads. Will we use it? Will I use it? Or is this part of me, this part of us, really going to die?

I am determined to not let this go, because losing my ability to speak my own language will feel like losing a part of myself.

But I am terrified that it will somehow slip away.