Very Little To Say…


Other than having my nearly six-year-old son reading me his bedtime story, instead of the other way around, is nice. Not that he’s willing to do it every night, just some, and not that he doesn’t need some help on the words–but still. In my parenting experience, so few things go right and are purely satisfying, that when they do–gloat! That is all. Have a nice weekend.

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How to Raise a Bilingual Child

PS 20 in New York. Photo by Lan Trinh. Click for original context.

We rarely give actual advice on this blog, and for good reason: We generally don’t know what we’re talking about. This post will not be much different, except that it’s loaded with hubris. In short, I’ve spent the past two weeks with my 3-year-old daughter here in Taipei, and I’m seriously impressed with her ability to communicate in Mandarin with her grandparents, her 4-year-old cousin, and those strangers she’s not to shy to talk to. So, I figured I’d give all of you a short tutorial in how to do what I’ve done.

N.B.: This advice applies in a very specific case—when one parent is foreign-born (and therefore foreign-talking), and both are living together in the United States, preferably in a cosmopolitan urban setting. The rest of you are screwed.

1. The foreign-born parent must speak the foreign language to the kid as often as possible. This isn’t always easy. My wife, Jean, is as comfortable speaking English as she is Mandarin, and frequently lapses into the former with Sasha. But probably 70% of the time, they converse in Mandarin, and when Sasha responds in English, Jean will often demand she switch languages. Sometimes this causes Sasha to pause and think of the appropriate Mandarin equivalent; other times Sasha flips out, refusing to speak Chinese. But Jean stands her ground, and Sasha always eventually gives in.

1a. It doesn’t matter what the other parent (i.e., me) speaks. I speak primarily English, but my Chinese is good enough to converse on a basic level with Sasha, and anyone else who doesn’t mind my sounding like a retarded preschooler. Although occasionally Sasha will hear my accent and yell, “You don’t speak Chinese!” But really, it doesn’t matter.

2. You must surround the kid with foreign-language material: books, yes, but especially songs, movies, and TV shows. Like it or not, pop culture is part of your kid’s life, and if you can ensure the pop culture exists in the right foreign language, the kid will want to partake of it. This is great, in that the material doesn’t necessarily have to come from another country. Sasha loves Dora the Explorer, Diego, Winnie the Pooh, and Miyazaki movies—all of which she watches dubbed into Mandarin. Are there any Taiwanese shows she likes? Not that I know of, and it doesn’t matter. Disney may be evil, but at least they’re globally evil. Take advantage of it. (Also, then any time you want the kids out of your hair, you can plant them in front of Chinese Dora and call it educational. Awesome!)

3. Bilingual preschool. Find one, and enroll. Don’t worry about what the curriculum is exactly. As long as half the teachers are underpaid FOBs who have difficulty communicating in English, your child will get the appropriate exposure to the foreign language.

Honestly, that’s about it at this stage, and probably up to about 5 or 6 years old, when kids start learning how to read and write and things get linguistically more complicated. But if you want to ensure your child can talk to Grandma back in Lahore, Lagos, or some other foreign city beginning with ‘L,’ then you should follow my instructions.

There is, however, one weird aspect to this that I have to remark on. The other day, when Sasha and I were walking down the street here in Taipei, she started speaking to me in Chinese—and in complex enough language that I truly didn’t understand what she was talking about. I asked her a couple of times to switch to English, but she didn’t, perhaps because she doesn’t understand that English is called English.

But during these few moments, I had this terrible premonition of what life must be like for immigrant parents who arrive in whatever country not speaking the language fluently, only to watch their children effortlessly master it—so much so that those children fully live in the new language, and are effectively cut off from their parents by it. As Sasha babbled in Chinese, the very real possibility that I might one day no longer understand my daughter hit me—crushed me, almost.

Then again, I think this happens no matter which language we all speak, and even if we all speak the same one. Eventually—if we’re lucky—our children become strange to us, their lives different from, separate from, and, we hope, better than our own. How they speak to each other (and one day, to their own children) will and should remain a mystery. We can’t hold onto them forever.

Boys And Girls: Mini-Animals and Mini-Humans

Sons!

Let me start off by warning the readers of this post that I am about to be sexist, and what’s more, that I will also engage in outdated, demonstrably untrue gender stereotypes. And yet I believe them and I’m trying to be funny, so being an archaic moron is okay, right? Nice thing about blogging: rhetorical questions.

So, all that said, let me jump in. Ellie, my sweet little girl, is approaching 17 months, the stage at which it is said that a “language explosion” takes place for most children. This is the point at which they progress from being moaning and grunting little beasts and start expressing themselves, sipping espressos, and declaiming the ethical shortcomings of Kantian philosophy.

Ellie seems ready for this to happen. She’s been saying a few words here and there for months now, and has built up a fairly large vocabulary, including a few two word phrases, not all of which are intelligible to people outside of her nuclear family, but I’m counting nonetheless.

Very, very cool stuff, even when she cries “No” and flings blackberries at me, or when she yells “Eew” and points at the crap she just made in her diaper. Cute is the word, and if she were yours I bet you’d agree.

Here’s the rub: JP, at this age, met none of these linguistic landmarks. In fact, he wasn’t talking at all, and didn’t for quite a while after that. Forget the notion of that at his current age silence would be a laughable impossibility–he wasn’t talking then and it was something of a concern.

No big deal, though. JP is, in my humble opinion, a bright boy, and talkative to a fault. My point is that there are ways in which I view children at that age dependent on gender. Many girls, not just Ellie, tend to develop earlier than boys, and not just verbally but physically as well. To me, it has always seemed that little boys at this stage are like wild little animals–like ferrets, perhaps, or foxes, or wombats, or anything small, furry, simple, and untrustworthy with your food and possessions. Girls, on the other hand, are, for better and worse, miniature human beings with all the foibles and grace notes of the species.

Now, please, I am well aware that this is statistically hogwash–boys and girls develop at their own pace, like the little unique snowflakes gag that they are. And yet I still believe my son was a rabid wolverine and that my daughter is Diane Keaton! So there.

Sasha vs. Jesus: Taiwan Edition

Our savior?

When I married my Taiwanese wife, Jean, I was a bit of an outsider, not just because I’m a round-eyed American devil but because I’m Jewish, too. At first, this provoked conflicting responses from her family: As an American, I must be profligate, lazy, spendthrift, but as a Jew, I must also be clever, well-educated, and good with money. Eventually, the contradictions fell by the wayside as they saw I was really none of the above, and more interested in consuming the delicious pork and seafood products of primarily Buddhist Taiwan. The only time they’ve ever seen me engage in anything remotely Jewish was the one time Jean’s mother and aunt were in New York during Hanukkah, when I made a nice, traditional dinner—roast chicken, latkes, etc.—and they brought a kilo of shrimp to stir-fry as an addition to the meal. But for most of our relationship, my Judaism, stunted as it is, hasn’t mattered.

But I’m also not the only religious outsider in the extended family. Jean’s brother married a lovely woman named Charmiko, who is a Christian—a sort of generic Protestant, I believe. I don’t know too much about how the family is dealing with her religion overall, only that no one has converted, and no one in the core family goes to church. But Charmiko and I have had a couple of very, very minor religiously based interactions that have stuck in my memory: Once, she gave me a couple sets of travel chopsticks, whose cases bore Christian sayings in Chinese. And on this most recent (and ongoing) visit to Taipei, she gave us a CD of Christmas songs. (A Taiwanese version of “Christmas in Hollis” was not, alas, on the track listing.) I’ve often wondered if she sees our shared Judeo-Christian background as a shared point of reference, one she shares with no one else in this family. I’ve also wondered if she’s subtly trying to convert me. Or perhaps she’s just being nice—her name is Charmiko, after all.

Even Jean’s brother, as far as I know, isn’t into the whole church thing, although he has consented to allow his daughter, Jen-Jen, just a year older than Sasha, to go every Sunday. And this created a surprising dilemma here the other morning. Jean, Sasha, Jen-Jen and I were out at a local playground, when the hour of 11 began fast approaching. Jen-Jen needed to be at church, and we were to deliver her there, a few blocks away. Easy, right?

Not with Sasha around. For she is deeply attached to her older cousin—wants to play with, talk to, and imitate her all the time. Could we drop Jen-Jen off and somehow drag Sasha away from church? Or should we just let Sasha go to church with her cousin?

At first, I’d been opposed to this. Church! For Sasha! Hell no! I mean, it wasn’t just the theology—the idea of Sasha sitting quietly through services was ridiculous, and there was no way Jean or I was going to suffer through that Mandarin-language hogwash.

But as we walked through the empty Sunday streets of Ximending, I relented. Whatever—let her go to church! It would be a new experience, she’d have no sense of what was really going on, and it would prime her for the day, a couple of years from now, when I enroll her in Jewish Sunday school.

Then, when we got to the church itself—a multistory building adorned, duh, with a big cross—we discovered the children were in a separate fourth-floor classroom, learning Bible stories: Cartoon figures in bronze-age costumes were frozen on a video screen. Awesome! No one for Sasha to disrupt. Let her attend, I decreed!

This, however, was not to be. While the class was only too happy to take Sasha, my lovely daughter, standing at the entrance to a room of Christian education, suddenly balked, crying and complaining that she was hungry.

“Do you want to go to school with Jen-Jen?” we asked her. “Or do you want a snack?”

Sasha looked down at the ground, and in a small voice said, “A snack.”

My daughter! We smiled fake-apologetically at the Bible teacher and ushered Sasha back downstairs, where a church volunteer had set up a table with baskets of cookies. Sasha grabbed one, and we set off down the street.

Then Jean brought something to my attention. “I wonder what they were teaching in there,” she said. “They were talking about the Jews.”

“Probably about how we killed Jesus,” I said. “That’s what Christians are always talking about.”

Then we walked into MOS Burger, the Japanese burger chain, where my hungry, heathen daughter gobbled a hot dog. I can only pray it was made with pork.