Exile of Xingnan

I wanted to paraphrase myself, as my tummy is in knots just thinking about going back:

Am I important to her? I would like to think I am, that she thinks of me, but I really don’t know anymore. Self-loathing rises in me, that I can’t just be the grateful, content adult adoptee everyone expects of me, that I want to reach out to existential ghosts that I cannot communicate with. Self-loathing rises in me, because my language skills are so poor I would need a third party to say anything of value.

It’s been ten years. Ten years of silence.

I wonder if my Mandarin is still good enough that I can survive.

I have always been the most afraid of greeting my mother, of disappointing her, wondering if I am simply disrupting her emotions/life every time I step back in. She has always seemed happy to see me, but still…

The world is in a dire state.

Three years after I made my last post… I’ve moved, I have a stable job, I’ve saved up thousands of dollars. Amazing what a difference just a few years can make. For those of you who don’t know, I made two trips – one in 2009 where I stayed at my family’s residence, and 2011 for almost an entire year. My 2011 visit was originally intended to be a one-way trip to start an adult life in my birth country and due to adoption/household complications, I ended up taking two semesters of Mandarin immersion instead.

So why did I dust off this old blog again?

My parents are old now. They are in their early seventies. And my stable job will allow me just enough time to return for a 1-2 week vacation. (Hopefully)

I don’t know how much time they have left; they could have ten years, or two years. This worries me tremendously. I also worry that they might not remember who I am as they age. The only photos I’ve seen of them in the past decade are when my oldest nephew was maybe three years old, and then again, at the age of nine. They weren’t the best photos either – zoomed in while nephew was moving, Mama not looking at the camera, or taken with a slightly blurry effect. The most recent photo was about a month ago but due to the cloudy skies and the face mask, I couldn’t even see their expressions.

So I guess picking up this old blog seemed like the most logical thing to do, in light of the pandemic and my thought process.

I sent up a request on the Chinese subreddit asking if anyone was conversationally fluent in Hokkien/Mandarin to see if they could translate (or get the gist of) the clips between Mama and Xiao-Ping from five years ago.

I know I was referenced in a few of them but I still haven’t figured out what they were saying. There’s also a lot of white noise, which doesn’t help.

I’m a little apprehensive and scared that they were saying things about how I was stupid for coming to Taiwan when my Mandarin is remedial, or how I should give up and go back to Canada because I “only” speak English. Or that they don’t like me for whatever reason. Baba used to poke fun at me because “ni dou bu hui jiang hua.”

It’s also possible that even a conversationally fluent speaker won’t be able to make out the entirety of the exchanges – the audio isn’t clear and there’s a considerable amount of commotion. I can only make out that Xiao-Ping remarks “She likes coming here” and “She can’t speak Chinese” and that’s it. I also remember telling Xiao-Ping she should come to Canada, and Xiao-Ping replies that she can’t. I tell her I can help her visit, and Mama thinks that Jianada Mama & Baba gave me money to visit Taiwan (which wasn’t true, but my language limits didn’t allow me to correct that notion).

But still, part of me is scared. I don’t know what they said about me.

I am afraid that one day, she will be too old to remember she lost a daughter to adoption. Or I will visit, and she still remembers me, but doesn’t remember why I don’t speak the language…

Do you still think of me?

Do you remember what it was like, having me over? Baba used to joke about how I “should go back to Canada” because I couldn’t communicate, and I thought he was serious, I thought he didn’t like me because my Chinese was remedial.

Do you remember our “talks”? Do you remember when I sat in the living room during your first rest day, and you pointed to me and said I was the same as Xiao-Ping, and I had Gege’s eyes?

I’ve seen the videos Dasao took of my nephews and I can hear you laughing and talking in Hokkien to everyone else. You seem happy with how your life turned out, that now you get to watch Gege and Dasao raise your grandchildren.

I politely requested Dasao to tell you I said “Ni hao” and that I “miss Taiwan”, and she never got back to me – but I know she is busy raising two little children. Sometimes she responds, sometimes she doesn’t, sometimes she just sends little emoticons in response because my Chinese is too pitiful to understand, or maybe she is busy watching her children — I just wanted you to know I still thought of you.

It feels a little awkward having sister-in-law relay messages for me, since I didn’t really interact with her when I visited, but she is the only person who doesn’t treat me like I’m an unimportant background item.

It’s been five years and I’ve been trying to organize language exchanges because I don’t know how much longer I will still be able to retain what listening comprehension I have left — the phonetics are noticeably harder to pronounce, and I falter when combining two different clauses. I noticed, when trying to describe my weekend errands to a Chinese-raised native speaker, little things like “window” or “shoes” or “jacket” slip my mind — but I’m trying not to forget. My grammar is stagnant, but my vocabulary is slowly disappearing.

It isn’t like I would be able to impress you with my toddler’s syntax, and my nephews’ speaking abilities would already surpass mine. But it’s something. It’s holding onto what I don’t want to forget. If I ever go back, I still need to be able to converse in Mandarin.

I still wonder, amidst all that, do you ever think of me?

I’ve attempted to “leave” the world of adoption, to put it all behind me.

And in a way, I suppose I have. I don’t write much anymore. I barely read adoption blogs. I’ve been re-watching Wo Ai Ni Mommy in the hope I would be able to translate Sui-Yong’s Mandarin without having to read the subtitles, with varied success… and upon reading other adoptee memoirs, I realize I’ve been projecting.

Every time I went to a language exchange, it was in the hopes of being able to communicate with my folks. I tried to take photos of Taiwan when I was living there, and those photos hold little meaning for me now. I still remember when I took my voice clips, but I can’t understand the more nuanced ones because I was using body language instead of actual linguistics. I was projecting my need to connect with my family onto a country, and reunion doesn’t work that way.

Even though I’m not able to pick up the phone and actually converse with them. Some part of me thinks my Mama doesn’t like me, that she didn’t like me while I was in Taiwan because I couldn’t communicate. Baba used to tease me – “Ni bu hui jiang hua” – and I thought he was seriously annoyed. I didn’t realize he was joking.

Towards the end of my second reunion, I felt like a lost cause. Four years later, and I still think I’m a lost cause because it is very hard to reflect on any progress I have made. Nobody will know how much I’ve progressed or deteriorated because for my Taiwanese parents, I couldn’t communicate, and for the parents who raised me… well, they don’t speak Chinese. One set of parents who are frustrated that you can’t communicate, and another set who are indifferent. It feels incredibly isolating. Everyone says adult adoptees are a cultural bridge. I would make an awful cultural bridge.

The native speakers I’ve been chatting with claim my Chinese is good, but I’m pretty sure they are saying that to make me feel better. I still find I have to repeat myself many times, or find 2-3 other ways to say the same sentence because my grammar has weakened due to misuse. Then they tell me to use English because they can’t understand my Chinese.

I refuse to use English unless I just flat out don’t have enough vocabulary or have to use a term I would need to look up. Using English is a crutch in language exchange; I did not go through Chinese immersion class just to “cheat” using English.

Being able to become conversationally fluent enough to make a long-distance call to Taiwan is downright impossible.

I try and communicate using simple, childlike phrases, but the native speakers who talk with me, still talk fast as if I am an adult, then they become embarrassed I have a Chinese face but cannot use language like a native Chinese.

I need someone to treat me as a child who is learning to talk.

But I do like the language.

No, really, I do. I’ve grown to enjoy it for what it is. Gege and Meimei have no interest in my life, and that’s okay; I’ve started speaking to myself in Chinese from time to time. I don’t remember what it is like to “think” in Chinese, it is possible I did start thinking in Chinese while in Taiwan, but it is difficult, and four years after my second reunion, my linguistic abilities have deteriorated. But what is wrong about trying? about saying I am of Taiwanese descent?

I do hold out a flimsy hope that maybe one day I will be able to meet my Taiwanese nephew – even though he won’t know who I am – but I find that I enjoy the language a lot more when I speak it for fun, as opposed to feeling obligated.

After my own reunion, when I came across the blog of another transracial adoptee who had been through reunion, I asked the question: “How did it go?”

Much like me, that fellow adoptee had a very limited vocabulary. Much like me, that fellow adoptee’s original parents did not speak English.

Yet I still asked “How did it go?”

I mean, obviously, it went well by the sheer fact they were lucky enough to go through with reunion, same like me. It went well by the fact that original parents and adoptees are not “supposed” to be reunited and that family ties should not be broken. It went well because reunion is a privileged opportunity, ironically hosted upon by the loss because the original parents could not afford to take care of their child in the first place.

I think, on some subconscious level, I might have been asking: “Did you struggle? Please tell you struggled. And then please tell me how you made it better.”

Of course they struggled, just like me. Of course they felt frustrated and overwhelmed, just like me. My [adoptive] parents would occasionally ask me how my visits were going (it is probably intriguing to hear about reunion between parents and an adult child who do not speak a common language effectively), and then they would ask if I felt classes were helping, or my dictionary/phrasebooks helped at all, and what my parents felt.

I don’t know what my parents felt, because I couldn’t ask them, and for all the good it did – not being able to understand them – they couldn’t tell me.

Looking back on it, I would ask these other transracial adoptees how they handled the language barrier. I would ask them if they ever felt it improved. I would ask them if they ever felt hopeless.

Because if I would “just” take language classes, make foreign friends, do language exchanges, study my textbooks… shouldn’t that all result in improving?

It can, and it does.

But it wasn’t enough. It was ‘better’, sure, but it wasn’t ‘good enough.’ It wasn’t ‘good enough’ because it was surface-level exchanges reminiscent of a toddler just learning to talk. So I asked them to share their struggles so we could relate.

I asked the to share their frustrations and reflections about how they would integrate this new aspect into their lives, if at all possible. I wanted to hear how they had “made it better.” I didn’t have the answer, and some tiny part of me thought they might. I wanted them to help me feel like less of a lost cause, and I still couldn’t figure out the answer.

The answer was: “You will never be able to communicate in the way you wanted to.”

The answer was: “Your original parents did not raise you so you will not communicate in the way you would have, had you not been adopted.”

The answer was: “You can try your utmost hardest, but you learning as an adult is not the same as being immersed in your birth country all your life.”

It’s the equivalent of being told “Your parents will always be frustrated in their limits to communicate with you, and no amount of language learning will ever compensate for that.”

No one wants to hear that, or at least, no one wants to hear that without having some sort of conflicting emotion.  When I asked “How did things go for you? Please share your struggles”, what I was really asking was how to make things better. How to make it hurt less. How to feel like my effort meant something.

Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory answer to that.