Saturday, October 09, 2004
For external use only. Keep out of the reach of children.
You never realise how important something is till you are separated from it. Gradually, and rather painfully, I have become more aware of my linguistic inadequacies. I was never competent in my Mandarin and over the years made minimal efforts towards improving it. There was always schoolwork, english novels to read and music from the West to listen to. Chinese characters are elegant, rich in historical meaning and excellent calligraphy material but for many years they have remained like this to me - beautiful, and detached from me. Always setting a distance between the language and myself; respecting its depth and breadth but not eager to plumb those dimensions. I was always the babuschka looking with fascination at the multiple miniature versions of me, realising they all make up me but yet are not part of me, because I keep pushing them out of me. Mandarin becomes that, fragments of my identity waiting to be understood and accepted, not some appendage I can throw away and ignore at will.Here in Melbourne the value of knowing how to speak read write a mother tongue, or other languages for that matter, is made startingly clear. Suddenly I realised that I have to go back, reexamine my relationship with Mandarin and renew my interest in it. Not only because it is an obligation or that others will respect me for it but more because I know I want to. Knowing that I have access to many other languages on top of English unlike many monolingual aussies has made me proud of where I come from. Wherever it is. The only problem for me now is procrastination. How long will I wait for the moment when I can confidently start picking up the pieces?
lux at 10:56 pm