The language barrier between the immigrant generation and the 2nd generation is not easy to overcome.
It was only when I left for college and then graduated that I realized how much I wanted to connect with my parents. And how hard the language barrier made it sometimes. In high school, it was all about rebellion. My teenage self wanted desperately to get away. I wasn’t thinking about communicating at all; in fact, it was the opposite—I wanted nothing but to cut off my communication with my nagging, overbearing parents.
Fast forward a couple more years. Sure, I called home once or twice to cry to my parents when the worst of college and failure hit me. But when I graduated, found a job and stable community, started working full-time… all of a sudden, I realized how fleeting time with my parents actually was. I found myself wanting to hear how they were doing. I had made decisions and choices about my life that I desperately wanted them to understand. I wanted to connect and share my life.
But, there were so many barriers.
I wasn’t used to calling my parents regularly, so it took conscious effort for me to make family a priority. When we did manage to set aside time for each other, we ran into communications issues. My mother loves to ask about the practical and the specifics: “did you eat yet?” “are you healthy?” “is your financial situation stable?” are all on her repertoire of questions to rotate through. Unfortunately, though I know she asks about those things out of concern and love for me, I hate talking about any topic that I find to be mundane and overbearing. I admit too that I struggled with reserving energy and patience for those kind of conversations, especially since I often called home after a long day of work. Any small thing could trigger my extreme impatience and just give up for the day.
Recently, with a global pandemic and also an upcoming wedding to plan, I’m painfully aware of how much gets lost in translation and the limitation of only being able to speak in baby Mandarin to my parents. It just makes everything harder.
High school life was fine—I know how to carry on basic conversations around food and what we were eating for dinner, time and days of the week I needed to be picked up, simple things like my emotions and the weather and things I did at school. But adult life? I’m not able to share the nuances of my job and what I do for 40 hours a week. I don’t have any language at all to talk about politics. Some of the words I use to explain my faith and my experiences trying to participate in church life and follow God sound hopelessly naive or hollow. Even talking about an upcoming wedding is painful when I don’t know the words to basic relational terms. Conversations are derailed by abrupt tangents to ask, “how do you say this in Chinese again?” Emotions are heightened as frustration builds, a frustration not even about the topic at hand or of differing opinions, but from simply not being understood.
It takes a lot of energy to respond to someone who is completely misinterpreting what you’re saying. Continuing the conversation is like photocopying an image over and over again—the image only gets blurrier as time goes on until you lose all resolution of what you’re actually trying to communicate.
It’s sad to me. I have the intention to connect and share with my parents, but the extra friction of not having the right words, frustrations arising out of miscommunications, makes it a lot harder to find those conversations where we are both on the same wavelength. It’s not even just the language barrier, too. There are so many other dimensions in which meaning gets lost: generational differences, pop culture references, manner of speaking and living, different outlooks and life stages.
We are learning what it means to adjust our relationship from a strictly parent-child relationship to a more adult to adult one. We are learning what it means to love each other in our different respective love languages (practical needs vs. emotional support, for example, or empathy vs. advice). We are respecting each other’s needs and still trying to make each other a priority in a distancing relationship. The intent is there, but the gap in between us is not always easy to traverse.
Be First to Comment