BY JING-JING HU
*Editor’s note: The following story was a runner-up in our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest. This year’s theme was Chinese identity – read more here.
As a kid, I once sat in a car with my parents and heard them speak a language I could not understand. “Oh, you have a fantasy language, too?” I asked, as I thought they had made it up–just like my siblings and I would occasionally add new twists to familiar words to turn them into a secret. “No, that’s Cantonese,” my mom smiled. Which language she spoke in, I no longer remember.
“Do you speak Chinese at home?” the other kids would sometimes ask. Home, back then, was a light pink house in a quiet town in southern Germany. It’s where my four siblings and I grew up, alongside my paternal grandparents and an auntie that we called Momo. I knew that Momo was not related to us. But when I told my mom that a teacher had asked if she was a nanny, she quickly said, “No, Momo is not a nanny, she is part of our family,” and told me not to mention it again. I didn’t quite understand why, but I didn’t question it either.
Whether we spoke Chinese at home or not, sounds like a simple question. But we were one of two Chinese families in town, and they spoke a different language. It makes me smile just thinking about it now, but my childhood sure was full of mystery.
By the time I first visited China in my teens, I knew that the language we spoke at home was similar to Wenzhounese, one of the dialects most different from Mandarin. The Wenzhou region in southeastern China is full of mountains, hills, and valleys. The further you travel from one town to another, the more varied the language becomes. Both my grandparents are from Yuhu, a place known for being home to many Chinese in Europe. Momo, as I later learnt, was from a town nearby.
I first visited China in the summer of 2007. My mom, my sister, and I landed in Hangzhou, while my brothers followed our grandparents to Yuhu.
When we arrived, the sun was burning. Breathing felt more difficult, and it took my sister and me at least a week before we could finish a meal without upsetting our stomachs. Once we left the air-conditioned apartment we were staying at, we were surrounded by rows of honking cars and people carrying umbrellas. We crossed the streets glued to our mom, who somehow found a path amid an endless stream of moving cars.
In the supermarket, we saw people walking around in sleepwear, as if they had just woken up. “That’s normal here,” our mom told us, while we giggled at the sight. We continued to wander the aisles, exploring new products on the shelves. People would occasionally turn around and look at us. They were not used to seeing faces like ours speaking a language so different from their own. That, at least, felt familiar.
A few days into our trip, our brothers called. They told us that the town they were in was dirty, without proper roads, and didn’t have WIFI. There was also a market in front of the house that woke them up every morning. They were surrounded by mountains, but there wasn’t much to do. “At least you get to experience city life,” they said, without even trying to hide their envy.
What Yuhu was like back then, I cannot imagine, because the first time I went there was for my grandpa’s funeral seven years later. By then, the government had poured some resources into the region to make it more pleasant for tourists to visit. The roads were fine, and my siblings and I would meet our cousins at the only café with wifi. What stayed with me is just a blur of traditions that I struggled to understand at the time: a parade of people making noise and wearing white. People bowing, and us having to say specific things at specific times.
I never talked to my siblings about our Chineseness or lack thereof back then. But I am sure that they, too, could feel that we didn’t really belong. In Germany, we at least knew the language. In China, we couldn’t even read the signs.
The first character I ever learned was my name. My grandpa had shown me how to write it, though he didn’t tell me that the spelling was wrong. I only realised when I started learning Mandarin years later, and the teacher mispronounced my name. It’s written “Jing-Jing” but pronounced “Qingqing” (青青), which confuses Germans and Chinese alike.
But I cannot blame my parents, because they, like us, could not read or write Chinese. When my grandparents emigrated to the Netherlands, my parents were still kids. They grew up speaking Dutch and learned Mandarin and Cantonese on the go. They later moved to Germany to open Chinese restaurants. But the majority of the family stayed. So before we learned English, my cousins would sometimes talk to us in Dutch, while we responded in German. The two languages sounded more similar to my ears than Wenzhounese and Mandarin.
Ten years after my first trip to China, I moved to Beijing. By then, I spoke Mandarin well enough to survive on my own. But it didn’t protect me from the feelings of foreignness I felt at first. My Mandarin was too slow, too simple, and some of the words I used unusual. I was met with similar questions and faces of disbelief when I told people I was from Germany. One cab driver drove away angrily, thinking I was pulling his leg. He just wanted to know where I was “really” from.
My Mandarin improved over time, but that didn’t seem to convince people either. When I asked a local friend why she thought it was so obvious I was not from China, she said: “That’s cause you always ask us how we are. No one who grew up here does that.” This made me think of my grandparents, whose first question was always if we had eaten yet, and never how we were feeling.
Living in Beijing helped me connect many such dots between my family and the country they used to call home. It made me realise that the languages we speak are a reflection of the experiences we have lived.
It was only last week that I learnt that “hocho” is not actually a word in our dialect. Someone in our family had probably derived it from “goed zo”, the Dutch expression for “well done”, because it almost always came with a thumbs up. My grandparents had done this more than just once: they had taken words from another language and fit them in so naturally that we didn’t notice until much later.
In the end, it’s not just what we say, but what we understand that truly matters.
This much my family knows.
About the author
Jing-Jing Hu is a political analyst turned product engineer and freelance journalist based in Berlin. Her writing has appeared in Business Insider, Raconteur, and The Times. She is the creator and host of “You Rice Me Up”, a podcast exploring the stories of Asian Europeans, and the author of “Farewell to my 20s”. She holds a master’s in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford and a bachelor’s in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Manchester. You can find her on LinkedIn, Twitter: @_jjhu, Instagram: @_jing.h and @youricemeup.podcast. Photo credit: Jing-Jing Hu.