Mother Tongue

Meditations on a multi-ethnic upbringing

My trilingual 3-year-old nephew Yi is a fascinating case study of language acquisition: he was born in Budapest to English- and Mandarin-speaking parents, Chinese grandparents, and Hungarian babysitters. He can use perfect Hungarian grammar and seamlessly transition from one language to another, understanding that a table is a table but also an asztal and a 桌子. It is interesting to see how malleable his brain is to his environment, and how his time spent listening to, talking in, and reading along stories in each language is directly proportional to his ease with that language; e.g., how his talkative Hungarian nanny influenced him to be most fluent in Hungarian first, and how his lagging Mandarin immediately saw improvements once my parents started reading Chinese children books to him during visits. 

Witnessing Yi’s rapid language learning progress has prompted me to reflect on my own experiences with language acquisition. I grew up with two mother tongues, speaking Hungarian with my nanny and at weekday Hungarian school and Mandarin with my Chinese parents and at weekend Chinese school. At my Hungarian school, everyone started studying a foreign language in second grade — mine was German — which I temporarily dropped when I switched to learning English at an international school in fourth grade but picked back up by the next academic year. At Chinese school, it was a given that everyone spoke at least two or three languages, and we lived with co-existing cultural identities without second thoughts. Sure, sometimes other kids made fun of our flat noses and long almond eyes, but we were largely accepted as simultaneously Chinese and Hungarian, the two rarely clashing beyond occasional comedic translations such as 明天没有学校 (there’s no school tomorrow), implying that our school is set to disappear into thin air overnight.

In high school, I spent many hours watching TED Talks and pondering about how language affects our perceptions of the world. I enjoyed a constant Easter egg hunt for linguistic commonalities like cognates (e.g. doctor in English and Doktor in German and Hungarian) and umlauts between Hungarian and German (ü, ö), as well as even finding untranslatable words like 涩, describing that rough, scratchy feeling on your tongue when you eat a lot of raw spinach.  

When I got the opportunity to attend college in the U.S., I was eager to immerse myself in this immigrant land singing of freedom and diversity. But when I arrived, I quickly realized what it meant that only a tenth of the undergraduate population was international, and an even smaller fraction of that minority was European, not to say from a conservative and relatively geopolitically insignificant Eastern European country. Even though the faces I saw were many degrees more diverse compared to the  >90% white and East Asian faces I grew up seeing in Budapest — when I was a kid, a family friend’s 5-year-old son saw a black man for the first time and pointed him out as “巧克力叔叔,” translating to ‘Mr. Chocolate’ — I found myself plopped into an aggressively English environment. I experienced one of my few cultural shock moments when I tried to get an ethnically half-Chinese, half-American classmate during orientation to speak Mandarin with me, and after a lengthy amount of playful nagging that I thought he’d succumb to, he still adamantly refused. At that point, I began realizing that people here do not share my enthusiasm for linguistic pluralism, that they often plaster over their ethnic backgrounds with monolingual American patriotism, that there is a certain shame in speaking your mother tongue outside the house. In the other extreme, I found that race and ethnicity are political identities that must be constantly reported to officials via at least three separate fields, and fought for to eradicate institutional discrimination.

I’ve found that many immigrant parents in the U.S. worry about multilingualism interfering with their kids’ ability to assimilate and learn English like a native. I’ve seen resentment for ethnicities taken to the extreme by immigrant parents who married an American spouse, completely denying that there’s anything non-American about them. Friends with immigrant parents from the same place typically speak a baby version of their mother tongue, often supplementing in English when certain words elude them. Although I often wished I could do the same when speaking Mandarin with my parents, I am glad that they’ve always refused to accept any Hungarian or English, pushing me to keep up my Mandarin even if it means I have to pull up Google Translate during our calls.

When I was temporarily adopted by a Wasian friend’s family for my first American Thanksgiving, we (inevitably) talked about my upbringing and the various languages I speak. In most of Europe, especially Hungary, being bilingual is a given, and trilingualism or beyond is not uncommon. In the U.S., however, proficient multilingualism is always a topic of fascination — given that the person also has a baseline native English fluency. My friend complained about how it was such a missed opportunity that his mother didn’t teach him French growing up. But she defended her decision, “I wanted you to have a mother tongue,” she said. “I wanted you to be able to master a language and not struggle with going through life feeling like you aren’t native in any language, like me.” Because she grew up amid the Khmer Rouge and had to flee to France as a child, then later married an American husband and moved to the U.S., her languages were primarily self-taught and motivated by survival. She had little use or respect for the language that tied her to her family’s persecutors, and after she moved to the Southern U.S., French also became a nuisance producing funny pronunciations that aroused jokes and scoffs in American society. 

Every immigrant story is unique. However, conversations with second- and third-generation U.S. immigrant friends revealed a surprising consistency of negative sentiments their parents had surrounding their ethnicities. The story usually goes like this: the immigrant parents came to the U.S. and found themselves scoffed at because they looked different, ate different food, and struggled to master the American accent. They build up resentment towards these quirks that set them apart and don’t want their children to experience their pains of discrimination, displacement, and alienation, so they look only forward, revealing little about their past and letting their children speak English at all times; buying them Lunchables so they can one of the ‘cool kids.’ Because they believe that to realize any kind of American Dream, their children foremost have to live, breathe, and think American. 

When I started undergrad in the U.S., I was conflicted. By then, eight years of American schooling had phased out much of my mother tongue fluency, and I started feeling like a foreigner as soon as I stepped outside of my school gates. So I welcomed the tug of U.S. life pulling me away from the peripheries of being only somewhat Chinese and Hungarian and into the comfort of a single American status quo. It was a guilty relief to exclusively speak English and not have to be frustrated with my stuttering Mandarin, underdeveloped Hungarian, and half-comfortable German. My unidentifiable international accent made it easy to blend in and forget about home, and I began to be increasingly proficient in inserting American slang like ‘stan,’ ‘highkey,’ and ‘that’s lit’ into my speech. In America, I could finally be a default person defined by habits like what time I work out, academic interests like sustainability, and creative passions like filmmaking.

At the same time, the longer I stayed, the more I felt unnerved by the widening separation from my cultural roots and being carried toward a kind of plastered self-assured American identity that I was drawn to yet didn’t feel I truly fit into. As much as I loved being taken for who I was and not how I looked, I also felt uncomfortable about everything being about me and my opinions — what I liked or disliked, what I supported or opposed, what I’ve accomplished or wanted to achieve — and felt self-conscious about being a jack-of-all-trades who lacked dominant talents and self-defined identities that could make me stand out in the friendship marketplace. I also got sick of the constant need to take a stance and defend my views as objectively right, often resorting to silence and declaring ignorance rather than trying to formulate a thought out loud and risk getting canceled. 

Ironically, it was only after being unbound by my cultural background that I began to miss those conversations I’d have with multicultural Europeans about where and how we grew up, and the casual way we could jump into conversing in a different language without fearing embarrassment or offending the native speaker with our rudimentary proficiency.

I want to recognize that the desire to assimilate is universal among most immigrants moving to countries more ‘developed’ than their native land. In a recent conversation with my dad, he talked about how glad he was to have chosen Hungary as the place to build a new life when he left southern China at the age of 30 with a single duffel bag and $100 in his pocket. “If I had moved to America, Germany, and perhaps even elsewhere in Eastern Europe, I would’ve forever been seen as an idiot for not mastering the local language,” he told me. “Maybe because Hungary is such a small country with a notoriously difficult language, or because there were so few Chinese people in the 80s, but either way, Hungarians were always really friendly and curious towards us.” 

It’s true. As a kid, I didn’t experience much discrimination based on my race, and even teasings about my looks rarely felt malicious, but rather, more results of ignorance and fascination. Even today, locals often compliment my Hungarian and I’ve learned not to take offense when they ask how I speak it so well given that I look Asian. Perhaps I got lucky with where I grew up, and perhaps, my parents were socially savvy. Still, I hope that my nephew Yi can continue thriving multilingually and multi-ethnically, growing up in a world where he won’t have to tip-toe so much around the question of where are you from; where he’ll learn to empathize better with others by exchanging imperfect third and fourth languages; and where the question of ethnicity will less often be a defensive trigger and more so just another means of understanding what makes each of us unique.

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P.S. I was recently struck by Ezra Klein’s interview with Joseph Henrich, in which they discussed the emergence of the ‘WEIRD’ (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) demographic, characterized by a particular psychology centered around:

“The idea that we have a stable self that exists across all contexts, that a person’s intentions should be central to any evaluation of their actions, that guilt is a widely felt emotion, that self-esteem is crucial for happiness, we treat all these as truisms, but they’re not.”

There is a lot to unpack here so I’d encourage you to give it a listen and let me know your thoughts, but I felt validated in my observation of there being a peculiar emphasis on self-definition in the U.S. that I haven’t experienced this intensely in European or Chinese cultures.