It’s 1995. I am a kindergarten student at Carlingford West Public School, waiting for a door knock from my ESL teacher. Mrs Woodhead is middle-aged, Jamie-Lee Curtis hair, loose cardigan, jeans.
Three times a week, she knocks on my classroom door and takes me to a small room near the teacher’s staff room, walled with gridded alphabet posters and quartered images of the seasons. A for Apple, B for Bat, C for Cat. A sunny beach, deciduous trees, snow-covered houses, a field of blooming flowers.
Our daily exercise was simple: one page of journaling per day. A tiny ritual that would soon take me further into English, and away from my mother.
Jessie Tu and her mother Source: Supplied
My journal, in Kindergarten, began as a shopping list of events.
Today we went to Carlingford Shopping Centre. Mum didn’t let me buy RollUps.
When I was eight, I won an award for five lines of poetry about falling Autumn leaves. I received a red ribbon at the school assembly and returned that day to show my mother. She couldn’t read those five lines — since she never learned English — but appreciated the subpar drawing next to the poem. In high school, my journals graduated to an unstowing of grievances. English gave me the means to describe the plain, excruciating pain of unrequited love.
As I became more articulate and expressive in English, I moved into a space that was inaccessible to my mother. Gaining eloquence rewarded me with attention from those in power — teachers, principals and neighbours. Though any thrill from this quickly turned into guilt, since it was something I could not share with my mother.
As I became more articulate and expressive in English, I moved into a space that was inaccessible to my mother.
My love for English also bestowed me with new responsibilities. At home, I translated bank bills, insurance letters, medical diagnoses for my parents. Countless migrant children go through the same motion. I am remarkably unremarkable — the uneasy interpreter between two worlds.
We are third-culture-kid-millennials, jogging across two cultures. Recently, at the Wollongong Writers Festival I watched writers Omar Sakr and Michael Mohammed Ahmad share their understanding of language, old and new and its unique place in their lives. I imagine all those people who have lost their ancestral language, out at sea, cradling a middle-ground, a no-man’s land. When you can’t express yourself in your mother tongue, where do you belong?
When I was 16, I signed up to Extension Two English: a privilege I know was not afforded to many of my friends whose parents insisted on knowing what was best for them.
That year, I was introduced to Henrik Ibsen’s play, ’’. Nora, the heroine of the story, liberates herself by walking away from her despotic husband and her young children. I remember the door slam at the end of the play more powerfully than the first time I let a boy inside my body. Though the play was translated into English from Norwegian, I encountered it as the opening to a new landscape, where anything was possible — and I can build and inhabit that world with language.
At home, I translated bank bills, insurance letters, medical diagnoses for my parents.
Nora became my first and greatest feminist icon. My love for English unlocked a whole canon of literature that gave me the courage to travel the world alone. It untethered me from the roles that have traditionally laboured upon the women in my family — wife, mother, child-bearer.
But liberation has its toll. There were times when I’ve felt the pain of being so far removed from my parents, and pangs of loneliness, like a pain across the chest, a shock that left me paralysed for whole days. Other times it felt like an old illness for which there was no cure. In those times, I reach for the pen and note pad and begin to find myself again in words.
My mother continues to speak Mandarin at home and we continue our lives separated by language. I see how isolated she is. Perhaps years ago, I’d seen that isolation too, and had recognised it as something I didn’t want for myself. Words can connect us or segregate us. I used to feel ashamed when anyone asked, “She’s been here for 25 years and still can’t speak English?’” It’s difficult to explain something you don’t understand. But my favourite writing reminds me what it is to be human: not everything makes sense, and we have to accept this ambiguity. Especially when it comes to those we love.
This article was edited by Candice Chung, and is part of a series by SBS Life supporting the work of emerging young Asian-Australian writers. Want to be involved? Get in touch with Candice on Twitter
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