Week 5 Part I: Tower of Babel Fallout

During my last few years of college, it became a cliched revelation from people that studied abroad that living in another country has changed their life for good (cue Wicked music). Until now, I’ve been a bit skeptical of such remarks, wondering how much of the experience was really “eye-opening” cultural stuff and how much of it was just because you’re in a foreign country with an easy workload and a bunch of same-aged friends looking to have the time of their life. Hopefully, my thoughts this week (a little more than a month into my time in Beijing) will help all you people who sat in the same skepticism boat understand what really can be so “eye-opening” about living abroad (in my humble opinion). Part II is waiting in the wings.

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To sum it up, I appreciate my Mandarin speaking abilities more than ever before. Living in the U.S., speaking Mandarin is something that has three main benefits as a kid:

1. Impressing/not losing face with the older generations.

2. Being able to speak in code when the situation calls for it (i.e. on the softball diamond or in a publicly crowded place commenting on someone within earshot).

3. Silly entertainment value/for fun/a common shared bond with your fellow ABC friends.

In other words, the importance of being able to speak Chinese is understandably lost to Chinese-heritage transplants growing up in the U.S. Here in China though, being able to speak Mandarin pays off tremendously in that I can actually, well, communicate with people, as well as translate things orally. People are almost always impressed that my pronunciation and speaking is so satisfactory considering that I have only been to China once before in my life (of course, I then downplay my ability and say that two of my former roommates are American-born like me and speak/read/write much better than me). My slight Beijing "qiang," aka accent, also usually amuses the non-Beijing natives.

A funny little joke one of my co-workers told me: “If you can speak four languages, you’re quadrilingual. If you can speak three languages, you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages, you’re bilingual. If you can only speak one language… you’re American.”

The lesson learned is that knowing Chinese isn’t only important if you are a person of a certain heritage. It’s important because being able to communicate with the largest population in the world is extremely useful. In addition, almost every single other country in the world has a largely bilingual population except the U.S., and it's because we're one of the few privileged countries that have the mindset that we don’t need to learn anything but English (Ex. All the fuss and political debate over laws requiring exclusive English language usage on the job. People forget Americans don’t have this problem because most can’t speak another language to begin with.).

Now that I've been in the Chinese workplace and also see how dedicated other foreigners are towards learning Chinese, I think I finally fully appreciate the value of being multi-lingual. I think my time here has cemented the fact that I will one day do my best to teach my kids Chinese, even if that means forcing them through the dreadful weekly exercise that is Chinese School. Looks like my parents were on to something forcing me to slog through those countless Sundays. Who knew!