By all accounts, my Chinese is good. My accent is almost indistinguishable from what it should be; I can always follow spoken words so long as I’m not speaking to a scholar; my understanding of the written word is fair—I can actually read Jin Yong to some extent.
Of course, when I say “good,” I mean compared to other Chinese Americans or flat-out foreigners. Compared to real Chinese people, I’m on par with a seven-year-old. Because that’s what I’m not: a real Chinese. It’s clear in the way I just always hesitate that tiny bit when I try to participate in conversations; in how clumsy I am, like a Bigfoot stumbling through a forest inadvertently scaring the birds into flight, when I’m with Raine; in the way I’m always unable to convey the exact meaning I want because the word I want is one in English; in the way my little cousins half my size need to tell me what word I’ve lost on the tip of my tongue.
I always feel as if my extended family judges me for my Chinese. It’s a disaster in the making. Who wouldn’t judge it? Mom is certainly always telling me to speak Chinese, though that never lasts long and I invariably revert to English after a few uncomfortable minutes. And Dad enjoys making me and my brother listen to Chinese poetry where each line is an idiom that I pretend to understand for him.
They probably don’t judge me, of course—they’re far too nice for it.
I don’t judge Mom’s English, either, but I also think that that’s a far different thing. After all, her English is fantastic, really, for having only learned in school. I hardly notice unless I think about it—and I don’t—while Dad’s is so perfect it’s not worth mentioning.
Sometimes, I even think her Chinese-ness makes her language better in its own way. After all, she’d never start calling Arvind “oven” nor Mr. Kramp “Mr. Crab”—both in Chinese—if it weren’t for the little quirk that comes from not being fully white; fully American.
I and other “good” English speakers are like vanilla ice cream, you see, while she’s realized that she can add the tiniest bit of spice to give the dessert a bit of kick that one would think tastes horrible until you actually give it a chance. She sprinkles in those spices so carefully that I can’t even tell they’re there, only that something is there that suddenly brought everything to a whole new level.
I can’t bake spicy mooncakes. I can hardly bake mooncakes in the first place and they always turn out absolutely ugly, but I especially can’t bake spicy mooncakes. In all honesty, I don’t even know if spicy mooncakes exist, only that I can’t bake them at all. It’s a scary game, trying new things, one that I’ve so often been so afraid of and also so often unable to play.
So I avoid mooncakes as a whole, really, until that certain time of year comes around for family and mooncakes.