Language Issues

My parents weren't very good at English, so while the kids would speak to each other in English, we would speak to them in Chinese for the most part. My knowledge of spoken Chinese is limited in that I was born in Hong Kong, and our family moved to the States just after I turned 3, so my Chinese was learned only from what my family spoke to me. I remember that as we grew up, my parents were often irritated when we the kids spoke English to each other, especially when it was something that didn't involve my parents so it wasn't like they needed to understand what we were saying.  They would have wanted us to speak Chinese at home all the time, which would have severely limited what conversations I could have.  I probably had the vocabulary of an elementary school kid when it came to Chinese?  The example I often used is that I wouldn't know words like "auditorium" in Chinese, but I could say "the big building where people gather to do things", which would generally get my point across. I was living in the States, going to an English-speaking school, so it would seem to me to make sense that I was learning a lot more English, and it wasn't like there was a concerted effort to necessarily teach me Chinese other than what I learned listening to everyone talk around the house.  Occasionally, my parents would use a word I didn't know, and I would ask them what it meant. Sometimes I'd remember and sometimes I wouldn't, depending on how often they used the word.

I remember at one point, my father used a word, and I didn't know what it meant, so I asked him. And he got angry because I didn't know this word for a very common thing. It showed how much I didn't know enough Chinese, he said. Well, my parents spoke a different dialect than my siblings and I did. My parents usually spoke our dialect, so that's what I'd learned.  Sometimes, they'd  speak their own dialect, and I learned some of those words as well. But in this case, my father had used the word for "ice", but he'd said it in his dialect instead of the dialect I knew. The word in his dialect and in my dialect sound completely different (for example, the word in his dialect was more like "bat" but the word in my dialect was more like "shoe"), so it's not like you could guess what it was because it sounded similar, and he'd said it in some way where the context didn't give you any idea what the word meant. I'd literally never heard him use that word before, which I told him, but that didn't matter, he was still mad at me.

Both of my parents, but moreso my mother, often lamented the fact that I couldn't read or write Chinese. All of my siblings could to some degree (the next oldest from me, a brother, was 9 when we moved to the States, so he would have already had some schooling in Chinese). I'd had none. My mother would often mention that there were Chinese classes in Chinatown and then voice her disappointment that I never took any, especially if the child of one of her friends (or rivals) at work did take a class.

Of course, there was never any mention of exactly how I was supposed to get to a class. From where we lived, it would take maybe half an hour by car to get to Chinatown. I was clearly not old enough to drive. My father worked weekends, so he couldn't take me. My mother didn't know how to drive. There was no way that my siblings were going to drive me. Was I supposed to get on a bus that would take however long to get there and back? I think my mother started harping on me about the classes starting from when I was in Junior High School, which I guess is called Middle School now. She'd come home from work and tell me how this person or that person was talking about their son or daughter going to Chinese school and I wasn't. And if I asked, it always turned out that they lived in Chinatown and could walk to class on a Saturday.

And it's not like my mother got the information about classes and then tried to work out with me how it could happen. I only knew that there were classes being held somewhere in Chinatown. I didn't know when or how much they cost. And it wasn't like there was the internet readily available in those days to look that kind of information up.

Mind you, none of my siblings took any additional Chinese classes once we got to the States. I don't recall her ever telling my next oldest sibling, the brother who is 6 years older than me, that he should go to Chinese school. So I got chastised for not going to classes that I didn't really have a way to get to, that would have cost money that I'm not sure they would have been ok with paying (we didn't have a lot of extra money for non-necessities), and that no other kid in the family had been expected to go to. Whenever the subject came up, even as I got older, if I mentioned that I had no real way of getting there, that was dismissed as just an excuse.

I am Not My Brother's Keeper

With my oldest siblings out of the house, it was just my brother and me left in the house with my parents. I keep trying to work out how old I was based on the memories I have. I think I was 17 or so, and my brother is 6 years older than me. It had to be on Saturdays because my mother worked on Saturdays, but my brother did not. My mother would come into my room on Saturday mornings before she went to work, and she'd wake me up and tell me whatever she wanted to tell me. And usually, she was irritated because I was still in bed, on a Saturday morning when I didn't have school, I guess. I'm half asleep, trying to understand and remember whatever it was she was telling me. Oftentimes, she would tell me things that she wanted my brother to do, and I was the one who was supposed to tell him.

I cannot for the life of me remember why she didn't just tell him. Maybe he wasn't home for some reason? Maybe he'd been out the night before so he was still asleep and apparently, it was ok for him to be asleep and not woken up, but somehow, I was the one who needed to be woken up to be told what HE was supposed to do that day.

It could be a particular chore she wanted him to do, or something different she wanted taken care of. Whatever it was, it wasn't something I could do, or at least it would require both of us to do it. So I'd have to remember whatever she told me, as I went back to sleep for a bit after she left, and then later, after my brother woke up, I would tell him what our mother had said for him to do. These were probably things he wasn't keen on doing anyway because they were chores of some kind. But can you imagine how happy he was to be told by his six-years-younger sister what chores he had to do on a Saturday instead of whatever else he might have wanted to do, because it wasn't like there had been any warning or notice ahead of time that our mother had wanted him to do these things.

And the day would wear on, and I'd tell him again about the things our mother wanted him to do. How keen do you think he was about that? There was no way that I was going to be able to make my six-years-older-than-me brother do something he didn't want to do, even if it was something our mother wanted.

And then he might go out on a Saturday night before our mother got home from work. And he might have done one of the things she wanted but not everything or maybe even none of it. And I would be the one to get in trouble. I'd get scolded because things hadn't been done. I'd tell her that I told him, but that never mattered. I mean, I never got punished for it, but it was clear that she was unhappy, and she voiced it, and I was the one who had to deal with it.

It wasn't like she never told him directly when she wanted him to do something. But on the many occasions when she would tell me to tell him, and he didn't do it, I don't recall a single time when she was angry or irritated with him that it wasn't done. She was either ok with it, or she'd be mad at me. I had zero control over whether or not the thing was done, but somehow, it was my fault for not being able to get him to do it.

It's My Fault For Not Being Able to Move

No one likes being blamed for something they didn't do. That's not a revelation, right?  Who would be ok with taking the blame (and possible recrimination and punishment) for something that someone else did?  But I was noticing that I was reacting much more strongly to those situations than seemed normal.  And it wasn't until it had happened a few more times after that revelation, and I started to think about it more, that I realized the reason.  I've been blamed for things consistently in my life that I don't believe were my fault.  Now, I suppose it's possible that I'm just refusing to take responsibility. There are some situations where I do think I deserve some blame, but I don't think I deserved the amount of blame (and consequences) that was handed out to me.

I think maybe I was 11 or 12.  One of my sisters was giving me a haircut in the dining room.  I was sitting in a barstool chair with a sheet draped over me, hanging in the back so that the hair that was cut off wouldn't stick to me and would just drop to the floor.  We were kind of in the middle of the room, and the small TV was on, sitting on the counter.  I was turned so that when I faced straight ahead, I was looking at the TV, but when my sister had to turn my head to cut different parts of my hair, of course, I couldn't necessarily see the TV.

So I'm sitting there, watching TV, getting my hair cut. My father comes in the room, and he stops to see what's on the TV. Mind you, the TV wasn't just on, I was actually watching whatever show was on.  The main TV is in the living room, and I don't know if it was on, and if it was, who was watching it or what they were watching. He stopped right in between me and the TV, completely blocking my view.  I asked him to move.  He didn't.  I asked him again.  I tried to get his attention, calling him, telling him I couldn't see, and asking him to move.  And he didn't.  After a few more times, he got angry, went over to the TV and abruptly turned it off, saying that I was being loud and belligerent and that I didn't deserve to watch TV and walked out of the room. It was one of those TVs that had a knob that you pulled up to turn it on and pushed down to turn it off.  I remember that he pushed it down hard because the sound of the knob going down was pretty loud, kind of like slamming a door closed.

I just sat there and tears started. I was stuck in my position. It wasn't like I could move since I was getting my hair cut.  That would seem pretty obvious.  I wasn't yelling at him. At first, it was a regular level of speaking when I asked him to move. Eventually, yeah, I probably got a little louder, as sometimes, my father couldn't always hear very well, but we were in pretty close proximity, so it seemed unlikely that he couldn't hear me. It's not like it was a show he had been watching. He couldn't even understand the show, as he didn't know English very well. He would just be watching out of idle curiosity to see what it was. But of all the places he could have stopped to watch, anywhere since he had no restrictions on where he needed to be, he stopped literally in the only spot that blocked my line of sight completely. And when I asked him to move and kept telling him that I couldn't see, he didn't budge, until he got angry and blamed me for being loud and apparently bothering him, and my punishment was that I couldn't watching the show I had been watching before he came into the room.

Shortly after he left the room, as I sat there silently crying, my sister made a disgusted noise, walked over to the TV and turned it back on.  I don't remember if she said anything else. I don't think I paid any attention to the rest of the show. She finished giving me a haircut in silence.

Which "you" are you, and when?

If you asked ten different people who know me to tell you about me, you're likely to get 10 at least slightly different answers.  The answers would vary depending on whether you spoke to someone who was just a co-worker, someone who was a co-worker but a bit of a friend, someone who was an acquaintance, or someone who knew me a bit better.  You'd also get different answers depending on whether it was someone who spent more time with me in person versus someone who I interacted more with over electronic means.  And you'd definitely get different answers if it was someone who knows me but who isn't necessarily friends with me.

We all show different sides of ourselves to different people, depending on the circumstances, the kind of relationship it is, how much we reveal of ourselves to any given person.  We might be quieter with some people, more boisterous with others, more reserved with some, more brash with others, depending on our comfort level and how we might closer match with the personality of the other person.  That doesn't mean you're showing a false version of you. It just means that different people bring out a different side of you.

In my case, while I think you'd get a range of answers, I don't think you'd find two people who would describe me using polar opposite words.  Well, at least I don't think so.  I guess you'd have to ask the people who really dislike me to answer that question, but I don't think that you'd get a Jekyll and Hyde description of me from two different people.

What made me think about this situation in particular is something that happened a few weeks ago.  I ended up reading an article about someone I know.  And the person described in the article was in fact not someone I know.  I've never seen that person to exhibit those qualities in my interactions with them.  While I didn't spend a ton of time with this person, I was around them more than just casually, and while I did note differences in their behaviour depending on who they interacted with, I was absolutely floored by the person as depicted in the story.  The person in the story was kind, caring, compassionate, fun, easy-going, and seemed genuinely a good person to be around.  While I'd seen a bit of that behaviour exhibited towards some people, I'd also seen the person be very negative, outright condescending, unabashedly rude, and sometimes, even vicious, and all of those things happened more than once, and more than to one person.  And that was all before any of that behaviour was turned on me.  It was actually because I started to notice that behaviour to others and started objecting to it that things changed, and eventually, their behaviour towards me turned into something I had to discretely manage.  At the time that the person depicted in the article existed for the person writing the story, this same person was also in the worst part of their treatment towards me.  In reading the article a few weeks ago and knowing the time period when that all was happening, and thinking about the behaviour that was directed towards me at the time, it was really hard to accept that it was the same person.

I suppose it shouldn't really come as a total surprise, since there are so many situations in the news when someone does something, and people they know are interviewed, and often, their response is that they would have never expected something like that, and they would never have expected that kind of behaviour from the person they knew.  This situation isn't nearly on that level - no crime was committed towards me. But it was hard to reconcile the person I was reading about in the article with the person who had decided to target me. And while not a physical threat, there was a level of threat that it was possible the person could have inflicted on my life, given the nature of our interaction, and at times, it was problematic trying to figure out how to best avoid the land mines while still needing to make it across the field.

I think I was particularly aware of the difference in the perception of someone's personality because it's come up in other situations. Someone who comes across really nice and friend to all, but you know things about them that not everyone does, and it dampens how you feel.  Or someone who might appear "odd" or difficult but you know something else about them so have more sympathy to overlook moments of them being less than gracious.

I was especially attune to these kinds of differences in many recent high-profile cases in many different arenas, where someone is accused of doing something terrible, and there are testimonials from others in their support saying that this person has never done that to them, implying that the person therefore could not have done it to their accusers. I've never understood that.  If the person has never done this particular bad thing to you or in your presence, it means only that.  You cannot extrapolate that to mean that they have not and cannot do it to someone else during the many hours in someone's life when you're not around. The example I usually use is that there are many people that high-profile serial killers met and interacted with and didn't kill.  That certainly doesn't mean that they didn't kill the numerous people that they are convicted of killing.

While I know that different people have different perceptions of me, a realization that I accept, it's still interesting to think about it in terms of other people, especially when confronted with reading about someone you know and seeing a completely different person.

What's For Dinner?

A lot of people have had to make a lot of changes to their lives because of the current pandemic, and most people are spending a lot more time at home. I'm fortunate in that I've been able to work from home, so that's one adjustment that's been relatively easy to manage. One of the major changes that have come out of being home pretty much all of the time is that I'm doing much more cooking than I used to. Because of the hours I was keeping at work, as well as the commute time that was terrible, as is common in the Los Angeles area, I wouldn't get home until much later in the evening, so for the most part, the husband and I handled our meals on our own, except for weekends. And even then, cooking has never been my thing. It's no secret that I'm fond of food and am interested in food-related subjects, but I don't generally find the pleasure in cooking that a lot of other people do. Well, I like watching it, but I'm not as interested in doing it. Other people are much better at it, so why not take advantage of that.

Because I have more time now, I generally do some sort of cooking maybe twice a week. On other days, we might do take-out or leftovers or simpler things from the pantry or refrigerator. My form of cooking is currently very simple and mostly consists of Chinese cuisine. I'll admit that I never really learned to cook, which is why I can only do fairly simple things. I was never taught to cook as a child. Being the youngest of five kids, I was tasked with the simple jobs, which usually consisted of washing things. As I got older, I would sometimes be allowed to prep or cut certain vegetables but really only if it was easy. When it came to actual cooking, I was rarely given the chance. Occasionally, I would get to stir something, but otherwise, my parents were too impatient to actually teach me or let me do stuff because it would take too long to explain it. Even when I'd ask, they might let me do it for a little while, but in explaining what kind of seasoning to add or how long to cook something at any particular stage in the process, they would usually get tired of explaining and waiting and just take over. End of lesson. The stuff I taught myself to cook when I lived on my own were pretty simple, and there's not much incentive to learn to cook more when you're just cooking for one. And, as I mentioned, cooking really isn't my thing, so there wasn't much of a drive to teach myself more.

My mother would often lament my lack of ability to cook. How was I going to catch a husband if I couldn't cook for him? Because that's apparently all I'm good for. Because a grown man isn't expected to be able to feed himself, but it's my responsibility to make sure he's fed? And, if it really was so vital for me to be able to cook in order to snag a husband, wouldn't you think it would be fairly important for my parents to teach me that essential skill? Yeah, there was never an answer when I would bring that up. It was my fault that I didn't know how to cook because no one taught me.

So when I cook now, some of it is experimenting with regard to what things go well together, how long to cook things, seasonings, and the like. The husband happens to like Chinese cooking, but some of the things I've made for him are things he's not really familiar with, so my advantage is that he doesn't know how the dish is *supposed* to turn out. He doesn't know if I made it "wrong" - he can only go by what the finished product looks and tastes like. He's not particularly forthcoming with his feedback, so I have to ask specific questions to find out what he likes and what he doesn't. If there's something he isn't fond of, I either don't use that ingredient the next time or I use less of it. I know there are certain things and tastes that he does like, so I can take that into account. Occasionally, I'll make something because I want it, even if it's not something he's keen on. Those nights, he figures out dinner on his own, and he's fine with that.

I'm looking at recipes and things to try to branch out into non-Chinese cuisine, partly because it gets repetitive cooking and eating the same things when you're having every meal at home. For those things, the husband will obviously have more familiarity with how they're supposed to be made, but he seems pretty flexible.