Shame Of Being Monolingual

One of the burdens of being a Chinese-American is that everybody you meet expects you to speak Chinese. Relatives at family parties, friends of friends, total strangers all assume you speak an Asian language just by your face. My wife has to constantly remind acquaintances at parties that I don't speak Mandarin, which always leads to a quizzical look, an embarrassed laugh, and the inevitable question, "Why not?" There have been countless times where I've walked into a store or restaurant and the greeter starts speaking to me in a foreign tongue. The sense of inadequacy is much more acute when I go to Asia. When a Caucasian or other non-Asian goes to China, naturally nobody expects him to speak Chinese. But when I go there on vacation, the waiters and store clerks start conversing to me in their native tongue, which is not native to me. When I look at them blankly, they instantly assume I'm retarded or hard of hearing. When I try to pretend I understood what they just said and simply nod, the acute humiliation this entails for answering incorrectly just makes the situation worse.

Why don't I speak Chinese even though I'm Chinese-American? Why should I? I live in the United States of America. I'm definitely more American than Chinese. My parents moved here when I was just a toddler. They didn't speak Mandarin at home so I promptly forgot all the pre-K Mandarin I knew. Things weren't so bad while growing up in the Midwest as hardly anybody there were Asian. But once I went to college and then moved to the cosmopolitan Southern California, suddenly the inability to speak what by all appearances should be my second language became an embarrassing liability.

I attempted to relearn the language. I even took two years of Mandarin in college. However those lessons just didn't stick. I can now speak Jin tian hen hou, but anything more complicated than that leaves me stumped. Frankly, despite the dishonor to the race, I don't really understand why I should know the Chinese language. Sure it will come in handy someday when China dominates the world and we are all working for some Chinese mega-corporation, but in the meantime I am still living in a Western country. Isn't it kind of racist to expect all Asians to speak a native Asian language? After all, when I see a white person, I don't expect him to speak German or Italian or Irish. I would be shocked if I met an African-American and he knew Kenyan. So why should I feel such discomfiture for not being able to speak Mandarin?

In the meantime, we are determined not to allow our children to suffer the same embarrassment that I've lived through. We take them to Chinese school every week, which they hate. They take summer vacations in China every year, which they love. Now their mastery of Mandarin far surpasses mine. So now I also have to suffer the indignity of them talking about me behind my back to their mother while I'm standing in the same room because they know I don't understand a single word they're saying. Oh the shame.