Well... after a prolonged obsessive bout of Chinese writing, I am now finding some comfort in expressing myself again with English.
I find English and Chinese constantly at struggle within me... like a Type A personality married couple dwelling inside my brain, english and chinese usually co-operate well together and one cannot do without the other... yet at the same time, they do fight for household dominance...
chinese has its way most of the time, but English snatches at opportunities to take authority over for certain periods and does not give expression to Chinese at all.
I still remember the whole of Yr 12 when I forced myself not to read any Chinese books, to improve my pidgin-English to some presentable level... yes English novels and papers were enjoyable as I slowly began to understand all its beauty and nuances... only that as soon as the English exam finished, heartless me swept all English things to a corner and immersed myself in chinese books... hoping that english would never come to haunt me again...
Unfortunately in the meantime... english and chinese got married... and its hard for them to file a divorce... so english now has its own permanent spot in the household... perhaps doing more good with chinese than either of them on their own.
Was thinking about making my msn space bilingual but then decided against it... after all i am not posting ECC Bilingual congregation newsletter... and it feels too much of a try-hard... showing off english in front of chinese reading ppl? showing off chinese in front of english reading ppl? that would be really sad to say the least...
as I was at work these 2 days... kept on reflecting so many things... things that happened to me.. things that happened to other ppl...
then I concluded that there are so many things in life, as we experience them... turn out to be so non-conventional... so anti-cliche(but sometimes a completely dramatic cliche is also an anti-cliche)... so beyond imagination...
suddenly the following words jumped into my head:
Life is strangely so...
Life is interestingly so...
then i realised here are some English words I cannot put in equivalent Chinese without losing some of its meanings...
and hence this blog post.
Dear Lord, I find that You really do have a brilliant sense of humour as You lovingly plan out many aspects of our lives. Help us to develope a sense of humour too as we look at our lives. Help us to see your humorous planning as you intend them to be, and not to see them as pain, frustration and misery.
Life is strangely so...
Posted by
YN
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
2 comments:
=)
keep writing!
You are so lucky to be bilingual. I think you should recognise it as an asset! For me, in the last three months I have hardly spoken Chinese at all, and find myself frustratingly not be able to express anything of significance when talking to my parents on the phone. I don't think in Chinese at all anymore... and it's sad.
I wish I were able to express myself better in Chinese. Yet it's so hard to try to improve in multiple languages at once. I find that my French is improving quite a bit here (tho still mostly 'book-French' because I don't have a lot of opportunities to have conversations with native French speakers) but my Chinese, as described, is going downhill. I feel that if on the other hand I devote myself to reading Chinese books, my Chinese might improve, but I will almost certainly lose French... which makes me sad because I love languages and value the ability to speak different languages as a really cool skill...
Thus I envy people like those who grow up in Montreal, who grow up speaking French and English; and envy people like you, who can be so fluent in more than one language at the same time.
I dunno... perhaps I should've gone to China on exchange, to work on my Chinese? If I'd done that I might be fluent by now... sigh... why didn't I? Some westernised sentiment of distrust of the Chinese society?... of fear that I won't be able to fit in?... even a kind of almost mild contempt for the way Chinese people think... a kind of intellectual racism... that's been engrained in me by my western education... sigh, my own people, my own country, perhaps I should have gone there...
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