Connecting With My Father, and My Heritage, in Mandarin

I’ve learned that word before, but it disappears the moment I need it. I can feel him waiting while I rack my brain.

Eventually, I stumble through the sentence in a mixture of Chinese and English: Chinglish.

I’ve been wondering for a long time why I never learned to speak my heritage language fluently. I’m trying my best, but I can’t help but feel like I’m a failure.

Speaking complete sentences in Mandarin is new for me. Until a few months ago, I could barely do it.

My mom is a white American. My dad is from a small town in Hubei Province, China. After meeting my mom while they were both teaching English at Yangtze University, he moved to the U.S. in 1995.

When they were expecting me, my dad imagined raising a bilingual child.

“You have the roots in Chinese culture,” he would say. “Ideally, I expect you to be in both cultures.”

For the first few years of my life, my dad spoke to me exclusively in Mandarin. However, like many other American-born children of immigrants, my dad said we ran into one roadblock.

“When I would speak Chinese to you, even when you understood, you were always responding in English.”

He assumed I would become bilingual naturally. Instead, I resisted.

As a kid, I obviously didn’t understand what I was rejecting. I felt out of place at weekend Chinese school as the only biracial kid in class. The other students’ parents were both native Mandarin speakers.

Simultaneously, I wanted to fit in with the kids from my elementary school, whose parents were both native English speakers. They spent their weekends playing instead of memorizing characters. To me, learning Chinese was an onerous obligation.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad’s lap in the back of a Chinese school classroom, crying over a textbook I couldn’t understand.

I remember feeling embarrassed, like I was already failing at something I was supposed to inherit.

As I got older, my dad stopped speaking Mandarin to me altogether.

We then communicated mostly in English, talking about practical things like rides or schedules. But now that I’m in my twenties and my dad is getting older, I’ve started wanting something more: a closer relationship with him.

Sometimes I wondered if my rejection of his language felt, to him, like a rejection.

Last semester, while attending graduate school at UC Berkeley, I enrolled in a Chinese for Heritage Speakers course. The class was designed for students who grew up hearing Mandarin at home but never fully learned to read or write it. For some students, it’s an easy A. For me, it was anything but.

One assignment required us to record two-minute video blogs in Mandarin. For the first vlog, I did more than 30 takes — I kept mixing up shū, meaning “book,” and shù, meaning “tree.” Every mistake felt like proof that I was light-years behind everyone else in the class.

But my professor, Cai Weisi, known to her students as Cai Laoshi — “Teacher Cai” — said many of her heritage speaker students share similar feelings.

After more than 15 years of teaching the course, she’s heard countless stories from students who grew up resenting weekend language schools or feeling ashamed of not speaking fluently. They’ve shaped how she’s raising her own daughter to learn Mandarin.

“From the very beginning, I already decided to not send her to any Chinese school,” she told me.

Pushing children too hard, she said, can sometimes drive them away from their heritage languages altogether.

Hearing that felt validating.

I wasn’t the only one struggling. One of Cai Laoshi’s past students, Sofia Guo, told me her first Mandarin vlogs mortified her. But as her language skills improved, she said her relationship with her parents did too.

“I can see my parents as people, adults who have their own personalities and they express themselves better in Chinese than in English. Of course, they could say all those same things in English … but you can see it on their faces. They light up.”

Listening to her, I realized I wasn’t just missing a connection with my dad. I was missing a connection with an entire side of my family.

For years, whenever my dad called relatives in China, I was too ashamed of my Mandarin to chat. Three months into my class, I decided to try.

My dad called his older sister, my gūgu, who still lives in our family’s hometown of Songzi. Her internet connection was spotty, and her accent is different from the Mandarin I learned in school. But for the first time in a while, I could understand enough to keep up.

I told her I wanted to visit China.

“Huānyíng nǐ huí jiā,” she said. We will welcome you back home.

I always knew Songzi was where my family came from. What surprised me was realizing that my relatives there considered it my home, too.

Before we hung up, my aunt told me my Chinese sounded good, and my dad agreed.

My dad and I are far from having deep philosophical conversations in Mandarin. I’m still a beginner — I forget words and mispronounce tones.

But my dad said something has changed.

“For a while, I felt like we were a little distant,” he told me. “Now I feel like you’re getting closer to me.”

This Father’s Day, I’ll tell my dad something I’ve never been able to tell him before in his native language.

爸爸，父亲节快乐。bābā, fùqīn jié kuàilè

Happy Father’s Day.