Megan C. Reynolds at Literary Hub:
I was born in the United States and therefore speak American English, because, aside from a brief few years in my childhood when my father assured me that my first language was Mandarin Chinese (my mother’s native tongue), I was raised in an English-speaking household.
Despite the fact that my sister Jenny and I heard English for most of the year, when we lived with my father, summers spent with my mother in California weren’t multilingual. My mother spoke Chinese as often as she needed to, and in the Bay Area in the mid-nineties, there were plenty of opportunities. She “charmed” the hostesses at various restaurants and used her outside voice on the phone to her family in Taipei. My two younger sisters, Tessa and Shaina (half sisters, if we’re being technical, but I am not) went to Chinese school on the weekends and, at various points in their lives, were sent to live in Taipei with my mother’s family—an ersatz language immersion program, if only because everyone around them spoke Mandarin, so they had to keep up. My sister Jenny and I don’t know enough Mandarin to do anything useful, but I like to tell myself and anyone who is listening that I can sort of understand it.
More here.
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