I was thinking about writing a short story, but for days, I don’t know what to write about. I cannot even start a story with a short story prompt, then why not start writing something about me?
English is one of my favorite languages, I mean, Chinese is my other favorite, and don’t get me wrong, I do love my own culture and Chinese is a beautiful language, especially when you write things out. However, English has its own charm.
I still remember that the first time I learned about the English language is from movie lines. There was this channel in China, it is an education channel. There was this program, from 7:10 to 7:30pm, they pull English slangs from movie lines and explains them. At that time, I didn’t understand any of those, but still, I would sit down and take notes. That lasted for about 5 years, I used about 8 notebooks with those notes, but still I couldn’t say anything.
Then finally, my parents agreed to let me learn English. It all started with A, B, C, D….the English teacher I had was from England, and I was shocked by how much praise I got when I first start learning English, English became my favorite subject. My Chinese wasn’t good, cause they made us to learn those really hard Chinese characters, and we are suppose to learn how to pronounce them and learning them, trust me, they are hard. My math wasn’t good at all, every time when I was asked to stand up and answer a question, I would froze, I had problem concentrating as kid, even now I have the same problem. Not really sure why this kind of things happens. English was the only subject that stands out for me, my grades were always something like, Chinese 75, Math 80, English 98, Science 78. Everyone was laughing at me, saying that I am learning something stupid and nonsense, cause we live in China, and everyone speaks Chinese, never ever there was a chance that you’d speak English. I start using English as a defense mechanism, I would talk bad mouth behind people in English because they wouldn’t understand. I was this mad kid in class whisper things in English that no one understand.
English, my first American movie was, please don’t laugh, American Pie. In China, there is this Channel CCTV6, it is the movie channel, probably only the channel don’t have to care about censorships. In the early 00s, there it was, American Pie, they did voice over with Chinese, but everything was so graphic, a teenager who don’t really understand any of those things yet, actually quite enjoyed that movie. Then there was Lizzie McGuire, my biggest childhood crush was Gordon from Lizzie. This inspired me to find the original show in English. Using the computer at my family need privilege, my dad would always look over my shoulder and see what I was typing, we only had one computer in the house, and everyone shares, the good old windows 98. It actually helped me found the English version of Lizzie McGuire with Chinese subtitles, I had to stop line by line so that I would understand what they are saying, cause I…read slow, per episode, it is about 20 minutes long, but it would take me about 40 to 50 minutes to finish, cause it always takes me longer to understand. Maybe it is because all of the western movies I watched, all the TV shows I consumed, my value aligned with what’s in the movie, it is also because of that, I was an outcast.
English, most of the words can be spelled out if you know how to pronounce it, which is vastly the opposite from Chinese, that’s also why I took my interest in English. The way English express an idea across can be straightforward, but it can also be expressed in sub-contexts. The difference is you have to read in between lines. I still don’t fully understand English as a language, as time goes on, there are still a lot to learn. I speak in English during the day, I write my diary in Chinese, so that I don’t lose my roots.
Finding a balance in between two cultures is hard, as I am still trying to find mine.
P.S.
From where I was to where I am now, some people say I have a talent in English language, they say that it is because I have a talent therefore I can learn English so fast. The part that they don’t know was the endless memorizing that I went through; watching the same movie over 20 to 30 times to the point that I memorized pretty much every single line of that movie; it is also copying the English textbook for over 10 times to get better at the grammar. Not just that, the amount of money my parents have put into this and the amount of support I got from them is tremendous, all of those got me to where I am now.