Chinese School

On Sunday afternoons, my six year old son attends Chinese school. I send him because one of my great regrets in life is that I do not speak a foreign language fluently, and I know if he learns now, he will speak good, perhaps even accentless, Chinese as an adult. The school is run by the local Chinese Association of Tallahassee and uses donated space at the University. His teacher, Miss Joy, is a delightful native Chinese speaker with a background in early childhood education. So we are very fortunate. Already I notice that when I try to say something that I've heard in his class, he corrects me, and I do not understand the difference between what I've said and what he is saying, and I know that I'm simply not hearing the tonalities of the language.

It is interesting to experience this type of deafness, this type of "mind-blindness." I will never really be able to help him with his homework. It makes me appreciate the experience of immigrants who stuggle with language barriers and watch their children grow up and away from them into a new language and culture. To the extent we introduce our children to places we can't follow, we lose control over them, but I suppose we will always lose control over them at some point anyway.

Funny, I now know a little bit about how my mother felt when my sister announced she wanted to become a physicist. My mum, who was raised in rural Saskatchewan without electricty or plumbing, said, "You can't do that, I don't even know what it is." Everybody wants their children to have opportunities, to have access to more, to be more than the previous generation. It's just that exposure also means that the children become more cosmopolitan, and make choices that we don't understand, because we don't know anything about the area they explore.