The Pain of Losing Your First Language

What else did I lose to assimilate?

I’m trying to learn a language I’ve forgotten.

On a Saturday afternoon, I’m in a remote Cantonese class, sitting at my desk with my laptop open and a book in front of me. The class is small, and I’m the only Chinese person in it, aside from our teacher. He’s patient and calm, and his Cantonese is smooth. Which is surprising, because everyone in my family speaks Cantonese one way: loud, forceful, and full of spit. I mimic those same harsh tones when I try to speak it, but my uncle says I sound like a five-year-old.

“Who wants to read the next exercise?” the teacher asks. There’s a long pause and blank stares, but he just smiles and waits for one of us to volunteer. “I’ll go,” I say. The words are written in Jyutping, a romanization of Cantonese. I’ve never seen the words I heard as a kid translated to English letters. I only know them through sound. I drag a finger across the page and read them out loud anyway. “Nei . . . hai . . . bin dou . . . jan . . . a?” I feel like a fraud. I wonder if our teacher thinks I’m a fraud too.

There are five other students in this class, all learning Cantonese for someone else—a fiancé or a girlfriend or a girlfriend’s grandparents. I’m sort of here for someone else too. I’m six months pregnant and I tell everyone I’m learning Cantonese so I can teach my kid his roots, teach him where he came from. I want to learn phrases beyond Nei hou? (“hello”) and Ngo gong siu siu gongdongwa (“I speak a little Cantonese”). I’d like to be fluent, but fluency feels impossible. The language apps haven’t worked. YouTube hasn’t worked. Asking my mom to translate phrases over the phone doesn’t seem to work. I give up every time. But here I am, still trying to make it work.

Maybe that’s because I recently read about a study on Chinese children adopted by French parents and felt hopeful. These children were separated from their families as babies, mostly during China’s one-child policy in the 1980s. “So their first language is abandoned,” Fred Genesee, a psychologist and bilingualism researcher who worked on the study, tells me over the phone. “There’s no behavioral evidence that they still know their birth language.” And why would there be? They were babies when they left China. But then something happened. Genesee and his colleagues hooked the children up to MRI machines to measure their brain activity, then exposed them to Chinese. To their surprise, he tells me, parts of the brain associated with language apprehension were activated in the same way that they were activated in native Chinese speakers.

*

When I was four years old, my mother and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Houston. My aunt lived in the unit below ours, and my grandparents lived between both of us. It was like Melrose Place, only we were a small, quiet Chinese family in a shoddy apartment complex. My grandma taught me, and no one else, a Cantonese dialect called Toisanwa—which she spoke in the village where she grew up in China. My mom sometimes joked that no one knew what Grandma and I were talking about. It was like we had our own secret language.

I’d like to be fluent, but fluency feels impossible. 

She called me Kiss-i-tin—her translation of my name to Chinese, and she had a deep laugh that sounded more like a grunt. Language was more than a way of communicating. It was something that tied me to my grandmother’s generation, to the ancestral history of my family.

When I was four, I sat on her lap and ran my tiny hands over her face, examining the wrinkles in her cheeks. Her cheekbones were high, like my mother’s. We had the same nose. I gave her face a light smack. “How cute!” I exclaimed—“Hou dak ji!” I learned this from her. She loved to smack my chubby arms and exclaim, “Hou dak ji!” She did it so often, it became my favorite thing to say. I said it about hamsters, I said it about The Smurfs, I said it about Grandma’s cheeks. “Kiss-i-tin,” she said, “don’t be so violent.” I wish I could remember the words she used to say it.

As a kid, I knew I was speaking a language others couldn’t understand, and, even then, I switched back and forth at my convenience. Like the time I slept over at an English-speaking friend’s house. It was my first sleepover, and I got so homesick I called my mother and whispered in Cantonese, “I hate it here, come get me.”

Genesee says being bilingual changes your brain. Even when you speak as fluently as everyone else, you’re always different, for better or worse. “You function like a native speaker, but the brain processes that underlie your use of English are still different from [monolingual] native speakers,” he says. This is especially true for kids who are exposed to second languages in the first year of their life. And when children learn a second language, they often lose their first one, especially when the second language is English. This happens because the brain inhibits the old language to make room for the new one—it’s a way of adapting. Researchers call this process language attrition. “First-language attrition provides a striking example of how it can be adaptive to (at least temporarily) forget things one has learned” explains researcher and psychologist Benjamin Levy.

*

My mom met my stepdad when I was six. When I was seven, we moved from Houston to a small town just outside of it, where nobody looked like me and everyone thought my last name was funny. People stared when we shopped at the local Walmart. When new friends came over, they recoiled at my mom’s steamed fish. My stepdad was white and could only speak English but encouraged us to keep up with Cantonese. “If you don’t practice, you’ll forget,” he told us. He urged me to hold on to my Chinese identity, but my Chinese identity had started to feel like a burden.

One morning, I walked to the bus stop on my block. Two boys in my neighborhood paused their conversation and giggled. “Asian delight,” one of them said. They burst out laughing like I wasn’t even there—I wished I wasn’t. “She looks like a pug,” I remembered a kid saying once. “That’s because she eats them,” another laughed. That day, I went home and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes looked so slanted, my face so flat. I pulled out the bridge of my nose and pushed down the corners of my eyes, like my face was made of clay, and wondered what it would be like to look white. When I let go, my features returned to their natural state. Why do I have to be so Chinese? I cried.

I wanted to fit in. I wanted to not be noticed at all. So when my mom asked me questions in Cantonese, I started replying in English. When strangers asked if I spoke Chinese, I shook my head. At dim sum, I refused to order chicken feet. Instead, I asked for the most American-looking food I could find: dan tat, a sweet egg tart that looked like a mini pumpkin pie. It was never my favorite, but I learned to like it.

Language attrition is another way of assimilating. In one study, a nine-year-old Russian girl was adopted and brought to live in the United States, where she was isolated from contact with the Russian language. The more English she learned, the researchers reported, the more Russian she forgot. I wonder what Cantonese words my brain pushed out when I started speaking mostly English at age six. And is attrition limited to words? What else did I lose to assimilate?

I was eight years old when I gave up on Cantonese. On a Saturday morning, I sat at the kitchen counter drawing while my mom made egg sandwiches. My stepdad looked over a writing assignment I brought home from school the day before. My teacher marked it in red, noting that I kept misspelling the same words. Mainly, I spelled the word only with a g.

“Why would you think it’s spelled that way?” my stepdad asked. I shrugged and kept drawing. He smiled and turned to my mom. “I bet it’s because you say it that way!” he laughed. I looked up—it clicked in my brain that we had an accent. “What do you mean?” my mom joked. “That’s how I say it! Ongly!” I said the word out loud. On-ly. Before, it felt rooted to the back of my tongue. Now, the word just spilled out of my mouth. On-ly. I said it over and over again until it stopped feeling strange.

But I didn’t realize what I was losing.

“Nei gei seoi laa?” my grandma would ask at family gatherings. How old are you now? The older I got, the more often I would turn to my mom and ask, “What did she say?” Grandma would wave her hand and mutter something in Cantonese.

But I didn’t realize what I was losing. 

At Christmas one year, I gave her a hug and was hurt when she laughed it off and pushed me away. “Chinese people don’t like to hug,” my mom assured me. My grandma muttered something to her. “What did she say?” I asked my mom. “She said you’re so American.” The cute, wrinkled face I used to pet started to look like a stranger’s.

*

Ten years later, our family gathered at her funeral. The family formed a line to pay our respects. When she saw my grandmother’s small body lying in a casket, my aunt let out a wail. The sound was filled with so much agony and desperation, it triggered my own tears. My mother elbowed my side. “Bow,” she said. I bowed three times. “Kiss grandma’s forehead,” she said. I reached over the casket and touched my lips to my grandmother’s cold skin. Everyone whispered in Cantonese, and I wondered what they were saying.

My grandmother looked the way I remembered her: small but powerful. Like she could get up at any time and shout at us for making a fuss. They put her in a dark-green-and-gold dress, and her hair was short and thin. I examined her cheekbones, remembered her nose. It was the closest I’d ever been to death, and I forced myself not to look away. What if we’d never stopped talking? I wondered. Who would I have been? What would we have shared? What stories could she have told me?

A moment later, someone came to close the casket and take her away so she could be buried. We bowed more. We bowed so much, my back began to hurt. “Look away,” my mom said, turning me around as they closed the lid. “It’s disrespectful to watch. Plus, it’s bad luck.” But I let my eyes linger and thought about how I’d wasted the chance to get to know her. Long before she died, I’d buried her in my mind, and I’d buried parts of myself too—when I’d stood in front of my bathroom mirror, calling myself ugly. When I’d stopped speaking Cantonese. When I’d turned my back on my culture in order to fit into another one. From the corner of my lowered eyes, I watched the lid close. Now, those parts of myself would be gone forever, I thought.

But fifteen years later, pushing my way through a crowded street in New York City’s Chinatown, I discover I’m wrong. Walking through Chinatown has always felt like contacting an old friend after years of not returning their calls. I pass charred ducks hanging from windows, coolers filled with live lobsters, thick-skinned oranges arranged in fruit stalls under brightly colored signs, written in a language I no longer understand. A vendor sells loaves of long, spongy deep-fried bread. Three for a dollar. A dollar! I remember seeing this bread at the Chinese grocery store when I was little. Sticks of them packaged in plastic. I would resist the urge to squish them with my fists. They look like churros and taste like straight-up grease—delicious. I point to a bag of them and hand the vendor a dollar. Later, my mom would remind me these are called yàuhjagwái, which literally translates to “oil-fried ghost.”

As I head back to my hotel, two elderly women shuffle down the sidewalk, forcing me to slow down and eavesdrop on their conversation. “My friend is very worried about it,” one of them says. “Tell them not to be so dramatic!” the other replies. Ha, I think. Sounds like something my grandma would have said.

It takes me a moment to realize the conversation isn’t in English. The two women are speaking Cantonese, the language I thought was gone forever. I look around and think, Can anyone else hear this? But, of course, it’s only remarkable to me because I’m not supposed to understand. I’ve managed to access the traces of Cantonese in my brain. This is called receptive bilingualism—the ability to understand a language even when you can’t speak it—and it happens because memories of that language remain in your brain. Genesee says that even when you can’t consciously or actively access those memories to speak the language anymore, the connections are still there. “So it’s a kind of reserve or resource multilingual speakers have that might make acquisition of their birth language easier.”

The two women are speaking Cantonese, the language I thought was gone forever.

In other words, the body remembers, even if the mind doesn’t consciously. Maybe I can learn it again, I think. The city feels even more vibrant, the smell of fresh fish and fried oil even stronger, as I wave down a cab and head back to my hotel.

*

“Why is there a laa at the end?” someone in Cantonese class asks. All of the sentences in the book seem to end this way, with a laa or an a at the end of the sentence. Our teacher explains that it’s a tonal thing, pronounced more like uh. It’s a way of making the question a little friendlier. I hear my grandmother in his voice. The way she would trail off the end of a sentence, drawing out the uh—“Nei zou matje a-hhhh?” What are you doing? The ends of her sentences sounded like a bee buzzing.

Like learning how to spell only, the more I look at Jyutping, the more the words start to make sense. But part of me knows better. I’ll never speak Cantonese the same way I would have if I’d never stopped speaking it to begin with. Like a phantom limb, the memory of my first language stays with me even with it gone, but that’s all it is: a memory. It occurs to me that trying to relearn this language is the embodiment of my bicultural identity. The American in me is determined to reclaim the Chinese part of myself.

We end our second class, and I close my laptop, set my book aside, and stare out of the window in front of me. My brain hurts. I think about how I want my kid to grow up learning the language I forgot, at least a little bit. I put my hand on my belly and feel him squirm around my womb. I press a spot on my abdomen and, to my surprise, it presses back.

“Nei zou matje a?” I ask my baby. What are you doing? The words zip through the synapses in my brain and escape my mouth like they were always there.

I’m trying to learn a language I’ve forgotten, but I’m trying to learn more than a language. I’m excavating memories of the person I used to be, one lesson at a time. I dig up the reflection of my eight-year-old self in the mirror, pushing down her tear-filled slanted eyes. I dig further to find the girl who chewed on chicken feet at dim sum and squeezed loaves of yàuhjagwái when her mother wasn’t looking. I’m searching for the girl who spoke the secret language of her ancestors, a language that my grandmother used when she slapped my arms and pinched the fat of my cheeks and laughed, “Hou dak ji, Kiss-i-tin.” Maybe it’s too late to find that person. But it’s the version of myself that feels most true. And it’s the version of myself I want my son to know.