Every Saturday, from the ages five to 13, I spent my mornings at school. Monday through Friday I was earning teacher’s praise and good marks but come Saturday I was the illiterate badass. My parents sent to Chinese school in an attempt to salvage the relationship I had with my estranged maternal language. In Grade 2, after I reading a story aloud to my seventh-grade reading buddy, he declared, with slight astonishment, that I was a really good reader. In Chinese school, my teacher held me back a half-hour after class ended making write and re-write the character for “many” on the chalkboard while she had a talk with my Dad about me.
This summer I’m finally returning to Chinese school. I was accepted to the Taiwan Government Information Office Chinese Learning Scholarship Program. From June through August, I will be studying at the Mandarin Training Center (part of the National Taiwan Normal University) in Taipei. Before school starts, I will spend May with my parents visiting relatives, touring China and going back to my place of birth, Hong Kong, for the first time in more than 10 years.
Returning to Chinese school voluntarily is something I never would have imagined myself doing at 13-years-old. This flies in the face of all the times I whined learning it was useless since we lived in Canada and the times I secretly relished my failing grades, hoping they would convince my parents to let me quit. My adolescent self would be even more horrified to find out she would be living in a city that doesn’t speak Cantonese and have to learn Mandarin from scratch.
At this time, about two years ago, I did an interview to go on exchange. I remember explaining my top location picks to my exchange coordinator and one of my journalism professors. Studying in the European Culture and European Journalism program in the Netherlands is exactly me, I said, raving about all of the interests the continent embodied. My professor interrupted me in mid-sentence. “Why isn’t Hong Kong on your list?” she asked. “What are you running away from?” I managed to come up with an answer that was true and believable enough. But inside I reeled a little bit, stunned that she could tell.
So what have I been running from? We’re about to find out.
