Mother Tongue

by Christine Gilbert

  “Why do you want to learn these languages, anyway?” Drew asked me.

  I didn’t answer him.

  I wondered if Marco Polo complained the entire way to Asia. Maybe if he had a head cold. I had been sick since the first week. I’m allergic to dust and dust mites—was I simply allergic to China, too?

  I did want to learn these languages. My project so far seemed impossibly hard and not at all fun. But there was only one thing to do: try harder.

  I swapped out all of my websites for Chinese ones. I would read the news in Mandarin, even if that meant translating the entire thing with an online translator. I started using some of the Chinese social media sites, too. I scrolled through endless Mandarin blog posts and memes. I signed up for an online Mandarin course, produced out of Shanghai, and downloaded Mandarin podcasts to my phone. I watched only Chinese television and movies.

  I started working on my characters, signing up for another online course, this one focusing only on hanzi, or characters. It allowed me to start with ten characters, and as I memorized them, it would slowly add in more.

  Five days a week, I spent eight hours working on my Mandarin: four hours with my tutor and at least as many studying. In my studies, I rotated through all of the core disciplines: I read chapters on grammar, I completed exercises, I listened to music or watched movies, I practiced my characters, I memorized vocabulary, I practiced saying the tones, I tried to write basic sentences in Mandarin, I did a little translation, and I read to Cole from the children’s books I had acquired, which was surprisingly helpful because I could actually understand the basic grammar and vocab used in books for little kids.

  During my lessons we mostly spoke. My tutor Xue was college-aged, with long glossy hair, shy even by Chinese standards and seemed wholly uncomfortable sitting on my couch, based on the way she sat erect next to me, perched on the edge of the cushion. I spent most of the time reading lessons aloud to my tutor, completing verbal exercises, and having my pronunciation corrected. I even struggled with her name, which starts with a sound that doesn’t exist in English, something between sh and a hard j, that required placing your tongue just behind your teeth.

  The hours I was putting in meant I was quickly ramping up on vocabulary and grammar rules, and after six weeks my tutor said she thought I could pass the infamous HSK 4 test of Mandarin profiency in a few months. The HSK exam doesn’t test speaking skills, only listening, reading, and writing. I was well on my way to learning Mandarin, purely through brute force. I was spending almost all my time studying, but if I continued at this rate, I would be looking at six months to reach proficiency instead of two years.

  There was just one tiny little detail. I couldn’t communicate.

  In my lessons with my tutor, I could understand her perfectly, as long as she was reading from the workbook and I was following along. If she said one of the twenty-five vocabulary words we were working on for that chapter, I could understand that, too. But if she went off script? Called back to a word from a few chapters back without warning? It went straight over my head.

  There were two major obstacles to my Mandarin studies. The first I had been warned about: the tones. Mandarin has four different ways of pronouncing each word, and it changes the meaning completely. I was prepared for that. It was daunting for sure. The word cao said one way means “grass” and said another means the F-word. Tricky.

  The second obstacle only became clear to me once I got deeper into my studies and continued to struggle. The homophones. The damn, damn homophones. Single-syllable words that sound exactly alike and have the same tone. In English we have them, too, like bear and bare. In Mandarin it’s worse. Every word, every single word, without fail, is a homophone. It’s stunning. It’s maddening. It’s the one thing no one talks about.

  I finally clued into how vast the problem was when I came across a soundboard from my online Chinese course (Chinese Pod). The soundboard was a downloadable file with a large grid. Down one side were all the individual morphemes, the smallest root words in the language. Words like ting, dong, bu, and so on were listed in alphabetical order on the left. Across the right were four columns, one for each tone. Ting, for example, was said four ways, with a level, rising, departing, or entering stress on the syllable. I counted the list. There were only 400 sounds. Total. For the entire language. Even when you multiplied this against the four tones, that just gave you 1,600 possible sounds to create the entire Chinese language. Compare that to the average English speaker’s vocabulary of 20,000 words, most of which are not homophones, and you’ll begin to realize just how many sounds have to repeat in Chinese in order to let people say whatever they want to say.

  If you pick up a Chinese-to-English dictionary, you can see how complicated this gets. If I look up the word star on the English-to-Chinese side, it points me to xīng, with a flat, sung first tone. If I look up xīng on the Chinese-to-English side, it shows me three meanings for that one word, all with the same tone: star, prosper, or having a fishy smell. Same exact word, same pronunciation. Only the Chinese character (hanzi) is different for each. This means that while written Chinese is precise, the spoken language is dependent entirely on context—you can figure out what xīng means only by what words are around it. On top of this there are compound words, dozens of variations, like xīngzuò (constellation) or xīngjiàn (to build). So if I hear xīng, I can guess it means star, maybe prosper, or less likely a fishy smell, but I also have to be careful about what the next word is because from my rough count in my pocket dictionary, depending on the second syllable there are twenty-four possible meanings. That is, of course, if I’m correct in detecting that the word xīng was said with a high, flat tone, not one of the other tones, which could point me toward xíng (punishment), xìng (apricot), xng (wake up), or any of the dozens of variations for each one of those, giving me over a hundred potential matches.

  Someone might say to me at the checkout line, “Zh huò sùliào?” (Paper or plastic?) (although no one ever asked me this—China hadn’t caught on to protecting the environment) and the feeling I would get would be as though they had said, “254, 345, 123, 998.” The sounds in Mandarin are so similar and used so frequently that it became like memorizing numerical placeholders. I had no hook. I couldn’t create a mnemonic like I might in Spanish (for example, to remember the Spanish word for king (el rey), I might picture a king with rays of light shooting out from his crown, which works because ray and rey sound the same, so I could connect the two and cement the memorization). How can you do this in a language where individual spoken words are not unique? It’s hard to describe how this is different from English or even Spanish, but I couldn’t get my brain to latch on to them as words. I would feel myself collecting the sounds—Zh-huò-sù-liào—and then racing to hold them in my brain like a phone number while also trying to quickly translate them. What’s zh? What’s huò? Are they separate words or together? Frequently, I had no idea.

  Other times, I did pick up a word, like the sound zhōng, which is one of the first characters you learn because it’s how you say China: Zhōngguó or, literally, middle country. (The United States is Měiguó, or beautiful country—you can see that the grammar itself is quite simple). The morpheme zhōng means “middle” and is represented by the Chinese character , which is easy to remember, since it looks like a line drawn through the middle of a box. I became an expert at hearing the sound zhōng and I noticed it all the time when I was reading the Chinese character subtitles scrolling along the bottom of the TV.

  Recognizing was a thrill. It felt like progress, but it bought me nothing in comprehension, since I couldn’t understand any of the words around it. Zhōng written could mean “middle,” or it could refer to the Chinese language, Chinese people, or China if it’s part of a larger word. As just the sound, it can mean “among” or “in.” It could mean “heart” or “bell” or “clock.” It can mean “death,” “termination,” “all night,” or “win
e cup.” It could be part of a larger word like Kōngzhōng fúwùyuán, which means “flight attendant,” or línzhōng, which means “on the verge of death.” If you look at the word for “flight attendant” and you do the most literal translation possible, this is what Kōngzhōng fúwùyuán really means: “air middle clothes service person.” Each syllable represents an opportunity for a language learner to go astray.

  Here, finally, was the beautiful irony of spoken Mandarin: It requires context to understand the meaning, which requires understanding to get the context. I was a snake eating my own tail.

  • • •

  THOUGH I WAS PROGRESSING QUICKLY on reading and writing, despite my hard work, my daily attempts to understand what was being said to me continued to fail. When Mei Hong came over to me each day around noontime and asked me, I assumed because of the context, “What would you like for lunch?” I had no idea what she said. I might pick out three or four individual sounds that I recognized, but it was like fishing with a spear. My reflexes were too slow and by the time I started stabbing at the water, the fish had disappeared.

  In immersion situations, this was okay, I decided. I called it “fake it until you make it,” and because I could reasonably assume that she wanted to know my preferences for lunch, I could just pretend like I understood. At first, I’d start out with something translated, a little phrase to impress her, like “Why don’t you make some traditional Chinese food?” and then when she didn’t understand that, I’d move into caveman-speak, just listing ingredients: “Miàntiáo, shūcài, jī” (noodles, vegetables, chicken). More often than not, she’d look at me blankly. Too ambitious. Finally, we had to decide between miàntiáo and fàn (noodles or rice) until I realized that fàn was synonymous with “food.” Rice is so essential that it is a placeholder word for food itself. Wo yao chi fan literally means “I want to eat rice” but more generally means “I am hungry” (with a hint of impatience). In fact, “Chi fan le mei you?” (Have you eaten rice?) is a way of saying “hello.” After some practice, I had two words down to the point where she could understand me: miàntiáo, noodles, and bāozi, a steamed dumpling my husband especially loved.

  After a few weeks, it became clear: She had not understood my Mandarin in our original interview, and she constantly needed to correct my pronunciation for simple words.

  This wasn’t immersion so much as oil and vinegar.

  In my research on Krashen, he’d been quite clear with his theory that grammar study can negatively impact the student’s ability to learn. Around now was when I started seriously questioning that. In my case, it was a distinct lack of extended education that seemed to be hurting me most. While it might be easy to pick up a Romance language like Spanish by hanging out with a family and taking some lessons, it was impossible to simply “immerse” in China without some serious education behind you. Even with my six weeks of intensive study, it wasn’t enough. I started to look at pronunciation as the real gateway to speaking the language.

  With my Chinese soundboard, I could look at the totality of Mandarin pronunciation within discrete units. For each morpheme, the four tones were recorded and I could click the button to hear the sound. I began to visualize how each tone sounded, like an action I had to perform. The level sound was flat, but I thought of a bell ringing out, clear and straight. The rising tone was like pushing the word up to the top of a roller coaster, slow and steady. The departing sound felt like dipping below the water level and then rising above it, back into the sky. The entering tone was like pushing a box off the top of a building.

  I used these visualizations to help me re-create the sounds because when I listened to them enough on my soundboard I heard certain intonations that I hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t enough for me to remember “rising tone = goes up” because that interpretation, by my English-speaking mouth, wasn’t quite right. There was something else, a subtle way that it was spoken that wasn’t so simple. It seemed to change the word and where it landed in my mouth.

  I spent the better part of a Saturday, at least four hours, repeating the sounds one by one. I wore headphones and stayed with each one until I could reasonably reproduce it. Sometimes I’d say it two dozen times. I did this with all 1,600 sounds. By the end, my throat was a little raspy, but I was starting to get better. When my tutor came for my next lesson, my pronunciation had vastly improved.

  I began to think of Chinese as being like singing. It’s one thing to hear the note C played on the piano and to sing it back. It’s another thing to hear that note, walk out of the room and return the next day, and then sing it back. Even if you get one note perfectly memorized, try taking a string of notes like C/B flat/D sharp and sing that in tune. The musicality of the language might have been the piece that I was missing. While Krashen was focused on pure input, if my native language didn’t recognize the music of the language, then I couldn’t hear it. If I couldn’t hear it, if I was literally indifferent to those sounds, then the first thing I needed to do was to learn how to hear.

  Seven

  Wake up, Christine.”

  “Mm-hmm, in a minute,” I said, snuggling Cole a little tighter.

  “No, come on, come look,” Drew said, like it was Christmas morning.

  “What?” I slipped out of bed, trying not to wake my sleeping son, and followed Drew into the living room.

  Snow.

  The industrial vista stretching out in all directions from our apartment building was covered in the lightest dusting of white powder. There was the fine veneer of soot from the never-ending waves of pollution that still, even in this moment, hung over the city, like a low-lying, brown-tinted rain cloud. But through the haze, I could faintly make out the tiniest of snowflakes making their way toward the earth.

  “Snow!” I croaked, and then coughed.

  “Snow!”

  “It’s a winter wonderland!”

  I started to laugh, but it tickled my throat and sent me into a coughing fit instead. Drew ran over to the kitchen and grabbed the pills, a series of vitamins and cold medicine in foil wrappers, with Chinese characters written across each one. I dutifully swallowed them one by one, hoping that they were indeed the medicine I needed. I was dubious, though; I had spent an entire week using a moisturizer that I later discovered was just whitening cream. I knew my skin felt tighter after using it, but I didn’t research it until I saw a photo of myself with skin so white it looked like I was a French mime with tiny wrinkles around my eyes when I smiled from the tightening (I don’t think you’re supposed to leave it on).

  I looked at the snow again. “Let’s go out today. I can’t stay in this apartment anymore.”

  “Er . . .” Drew hedged.

  “Come on! We need a jailbreak! This is not healthy!”

  “Yeah, but Cole hates the cold, and there’s nowhere to go, and he’ll just start coughing again.”

  But I’d been locked in this apartment, hiding from the cold and the pollution, for too many weeks. Nothing could dissuade me. “Drew! You are the one who wanted us to come to Beijing in winter.”

  Cole started crying in the other room. I ran over and slid into bed next to him, lifting my shirt to breastfeed in a single motion. Drew followed me and watched us from the doorway.

  “We need to get out,” I whispered again to Drew.

  “Well, okay, why don’t you go out?” he replied in a whisper.

  “And leave Cole?”

  “Sure. Mei Hong and I can watch him. He loves her.”

  I mulled it over. “And then if he cries, then what?”

  “Mei Hong knows how to handle him, and I’ll still be here, too. It’ll be fine.”

  I pictured wandering the snow-covered city alone. It was a lonely image. “Why don’t you come with me? We can . . . um . . . go ice skating! And we’ll bring Cole. I don’t think I’m ready to leave him alone with Mei Hong just yet.”

  “Er . . .�
�

  “Drew!”

  He relented. “Okay, fine, let’s go!”

  There’s a moment in every marriage when you know exactly how your partner feels about a thing and you both agree not to talk about it. We had been dancing around the issue of staying in Beijing since we arrived. Neither of us was having a good time here, but was it worth leaving what version of home we had made here, just to run away from the pollution? I looked into other cities in China, but it turned out Beijing wasn’t even among the top ten most polluted cities in China. I researched Harbin, in the north—the place where the ice castles were. To my dismay, I found an article from a few years earlier about a 2005 chemical plant explosion in Jilin that infected the water, including that in Harbin. Another article, this one from New Scientist, warned that the chemicals in the leak, benzene and nitrobenzene, could cause cancer or bone marrow problems. Was the water safe now? If we left Beijing for the ice castles of Harbin, would I be bathing my child in only slightly cancer-causing water or definitely cancer-causing water?

  Even as I researched other cities, I found similar levels of pollution to that of Beijing. In fact, even leaving China completely wouldn’t be enough to avoid the smog: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a report stating that on some days as much as 25 percent of the pollution in Los Angeles comes from China. It was unlikely that moving to another city in China was going to improve our lot drastically if the smog could make its way across the Pacific.

  I finished feeding Cole and got dressed. I pulled on black pants and a black shirt. I lined my top eyelid in black eyeliner, the same way all the other women in Beijing did their makeup. I slipped into the black shoes I bought at Walmart—a place that looks exactly like Walmart back home but is filled with completely different things, from Peking duck to illegal copies of DVDs—because I quickly noticed that almost no one wore white running shoes like the ones I had arrived with. I still had my bulky L.L.Bean jacket, but only because I couldn’t find one of those puffy jackets with the belt cinching in your waist that all the women seemed to be wearing—at least not one that would fit my taller-than-average frame. I didn’t blend in completely, but it seemed like people stared at me a little less.