Revised Essay #1
The Absence of Chinese
My relationship to language is complicated and a little disappointing and I consider myself completely fluent in English.When I was little I knew Chinese well and there was a language barrier at first, but I soon adapted to American society. As I grew older I’ve felt more obligated to learn more about where I’ve come from. I’ve tried to dig up my Chinese culture, but I’m still trying to self-motivate myself to keep it up. My journey towards reconnecting to Chinese culture and language has been through it’s ups and downs throughout my life.
When I was adopted from China in 2001 I was only three and a half years old. All I knew when I came was strictly Chinese. America was a huge culture shock for me, both socially and language wise. I don’t remember anything about the orphanage I was in for the first three years or when I was adopted, but I love listening to stories my mom tells me.
She once told me that the first time I got into a taxi from the airport in America was the first time I had ever rode in a car so I vomited on her lap. Not one of my best moments, but looking back it fascinates me because many American three year olds experience car rides on a daily basis. My mom also told me a story that always cracks all her friends up. Apparently when I was around four years old we had some family friends over and they had two twin boys that were a couple years older than me. They were upstairs while my mom and their mom were in the kitchen talking and all my mom said was that she heard me full on yelling at the boys in Chinese because they were playing with my barbies. These stories really impress me because I wish that I had the fluency of Chinese that I had when I was just four years old. In comparison to Amy Tan there was a language barrier between me and my family. My mom told me that I used to point at something in the fridge and talk in Chinese when I wanted something. Tan mentioned that the language barrier affected her mom and her communication but nothing else. I think it was the same way between my mom and I when I was little too because she took off work to take care for me, held me when I was crying every night, and loved me even though we couldn’t talk to each other. Our language bond was slowly forming when I would listen to her English. Now, I know I was only four and four year olds don’t have full on conversations with their moms, but I think she was worried that we wouldn’t have that mother-daughter bond like you have when you are first born. Looking back at it now, language wasn’t a huge problem for us, because we were family and that’s what Tan emphasizes about most.
When I entered Preschool my mom took me to English classes so I could talk with other kids. She was very surprised I grasped it within months, but after I switched to English I lost all memory of my Chinese. I didn’t only adapt to the American language but also the life style. All my friends growing up were American raised and my parents didn’t have a “home culture”. I was considered “whitewashed” and I didn’t mind one bit. It wasn’t until the end of 8th grade I was making my schedule for the first year of highschool and I had to pick a language class. I wanted to take Spanish because all my friends were going to take it and I heard it was the easiest class. I had to go over my schedule plans with my mom and I just remember her saying, “Karina, you can’t take Spanish your Chinese! You should know Chinese!” I rolled my eyes and was like fine I guess I will try to learn it again. She tried to tell me that once I try learning Chinese again it will click and I’ll remember it because it was my first language. Back then I didn’t think I had a sense of culture, especially not Chinese.
The first day of Chinese class in my freshman year I found out that my friend from 7th grade (only Asian friend I had) was in my class. I started in Chinese 1, but the thing was that everyone in the class knew Chinese pretty fluently including my friend. See, Chinese parents make their children go to Chinese school outside of regular school throughout elementary and junior high. I didn’t have that foundation so I was always five steps behind everyone. During Chinese 1 you also have to have a Chinese name to go by in the class and that is when I was thankful my parents kept mine as my middle name. My Chinese name is Wenlian (when-lee-yawn). I felt like that was the only thing that connected me to Chinese. Even though I was so lost and behind in Chinese I stuck with it all four years of high school.
The only thing is that I don’t know more than one sentence if you asked me a question today. I strongly feel like teachers are the make or break factor when it comes to learning, especially a language. My teacher knew everyone was only taking Chinese because they knew the language and it was an easy A class. She only briefly taught the class Chinese and mostly just helped you master and polish your Chinese. Appearance wise, I look Chinese on the outside, so in class I was treated like I was an expert, but I had no clue how I passed. I got really frustrated with her and the language itself. I took the class for four years and didn’t learn the basics like how to ask where the bathroom is. This lead me to continue to be non-fluent in Chinese just like I was when I had started.
Starting from square one, it was disappointing and one of the most challenging aspects about learning Chinese was my home life. Chinese lasted 50 mins, 5 days a week for me. Once that bell rang I was back to living my normal American life. I was at a disadvantage when it came to Chinese at home. My mom is Italian and my dad is British; neither of them have accents. My mom’s family background was pure Italian but she didn’t adopt the language or culture. My dad was also adopted by a couple in Michigan but his birth parents were British so we have distant cousins in England. I love having a British and Italian family, but I think having the lack of Chinese influence at home and the stereotype my teacher created for me held me back from learning it. I was never motivated to do my Chinese homework because I didn’t understand it and I felt like it was a waste of time. To me being “whitewashed” wasn’t bad to me at all because I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for my family, but it made the relationship with Chinese harder. Min-zhan Lu talked about her experience with school versus home life and I can relate to that as well because my Chinese class was like day and night compared to home. She writes: “ I knew she was referring to the way we had been brought up in the midst of two conflicting worlds- the world of home….and the world of a society”(150). I never spoke about Chinese or what I learned because my progress wasn’t worth mentioning. During school in English all we did was polish our English, reading, and writing skills. I think during Chinese class I didn’t try that hard because English has always been my safety blanket in my everyday life and in school. I was too busy perfecting English; I didn’t have time to struggle learning another language. This made my relationship with Chinese in high school a struggle because I didn’t have motivation to learn it because I was already so behind and knew English really well because it was “the world of home” (Lu 150).
I love looking at pictures and hearing stories about when I was younger because I feel like a totally different person. I think Chinese has lead me to the amazing family I have today and got me out of that orphanage. If it wasn’t for Chinese I wouldn’t have learned English and adapted to the American culture. I also thing the struggle of learning Chinese in high school opened my eyes to how hard it is.
Today I kind of gave up on learning Chinese. I got discouraged after my four years wasted in high school trying to learn it again. Although, when reading Malcolm X’s writing I felt motivated to later one take time to learn Chinese again. It was pretty impressive how he started from the basics and self-educated himself. I don’t think I can self teach myself chinese, however, taking a few Chinese classes in college will get me to a good understanding of the language that I didn’t learn in high school. One of my goals is to be fluent in Chinese and Malcolm X achieved his goal to read and write even in the strangest places. He notes, “ ...during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.” He also had no teachers and started from a bad foundation and I can totally relate to that from my high school teacher because I might as well have not had a teacher. However, I did take away from what I learned a little sense of the Chinese culture. Last weekend I went to Chinatown and it happened to be the mid-autumn festival and I stood in line to buy a mooncake. That may not be a huge step into the Chinese culture, but for me I felt connected to the festival because in class we would watch videos of what the mooncake would symbolize and how they are made. I think I will continue learning Chinese on my own time and really put the effort to learn it instead of doing it just for the tests and homework.
My relationship to language is confusing but I think the connection I have with Chinese has gotten stronger even though I struggled with it in high school. I don’t have the home life and culture to help me advance my Chinese, but after reading Malcolm X’s essay, I feel like I am also self motivated to work on becoming fluent. If it wasn’t for my mom telling me stories and pushing me to take Chinese class I wouldn’t have thought for a second about re-learning Chinese. In the future I plan on learning Chinese, going back to China to visit my hometown, and maybe incorporating Chinese in my career. I don’t experience Chinese in my day to day life but I want to integrate it into my future and pass it on to my kids. The Chinese culture is something that has grown more important to me as I grow older and I think the way back in is through the language . If I get a good sense of the language it could open many doors in my future.
Essay #4 Reflection
The definition of “academic reading and writing” has definitely changed for me over the semester. Going into the class I thought “academic reading and writing” was a structured five paragraph essay that is talking about a certain book we read in class. That was what I did throughout high school and going into college I didn’t know what to expect. Now that the semester has come to an end I’ve learned a lot about “academic reading and writing” and have come up with a different definition. To me “academic reading and writing” doesn’t have to have a strict structure but needs to contain: TEA, your voice, a “so what”, and a conversation between you and the reader or an author. I learned how to revise and annotate my readings which made my writing better.
I admit, before entering into this class I was not a fan of reading. I’ve never really found the fun of reading and in high school I would be forced to read the books assigned, some of which I didn’t actually read. I always got distracted while reading and sometimes I didn’t even understand what I was reading. This class taught me the importance of annotating. In high school I rarely had to annotated readings and I thought it was so tedious. It is, but it helped me tremendously on my idea drafts and essays. I really saw how much I annotated when writing the rhetorical essay because I kept saying things like, “I underlined the whole sentence and then circled the word ‘attitudes’ and rewrote it in the margin”(1) and “when I was annotating I just underlined the whole sentence and noted ‘code meshing’ on the margin”(2). I could look back at my annotations and notes on articles that popped out at me when I read it the first time. Annotating didn’t only make reading go by faster but also kept me engaged in what I was reading.
Annotating was a tool that was used a lot in this class with our annotation blogs, but I also integrated it into my other classes.History was one of my hardest classes this last semester because we were only graded on tests and quizzes. The quizzes were hard because they would be ten questions on a four hundred page book! As I was reading these boring four hundred page books I found myself annotating every chapter. It helped me understand what was going on and allowed me to express my initial thoughts of quotes in the margins. I did this for both history books I had to get through and wrote bullet points at the end of each chapter so I could look back and see when events happened exactly. Annotating and the annotation blogs were tedious but I think the most helpful tool for “academic reading and writing” I learned this semester.
My writing also improved throughout this class because of the peer review and revisions. I liked how we would take our essay step by step together and got to get our own peers’ feedback on our writing. This built up my confidence when I was rewriting for my final drafts because I got to see where I needed to be more detailed and clear. I also got better at reading others’ essays and writing notes for them to improve and expand on. Peer review workshops made it also easier to move onto to my final draft. When I had trouble on my rough draft I would always experiment and see what the peer review would provide.
Reading has always been a challenge with me and in my school work but I have learned to annotated during and even after I read to digest it better. We didn’t have to read a lot of books in this class and I like that because I read one really interesting book that I got to choose. I think the class benefited me in every area especially academic reading and writing. I have learned that I should experient in my writing and discovered that informal writing is my favorite. I wrote about Young’s academic writing in essay #2 and I wrote, “ I don’t think this article is academic because we’ve been taught that academic writing has to be formal with correct spelling and grammar”(4). After this i countered it by explaining how it is academic but I think this quote of mine is interesting because this class has really taught me that my ideas matter than perfect grammar.
I’m so glad I took english 114 with you, Professor Dan, because looking back at my work I see that I have really grown as an academic reader and writer. My essays don’t sound forced and they project my voice. I’m really proud of the work I have done in this class and I can say I also successfully managed a blog.
