Habitude

I know I'm weird, because one thing I've noticed in the past few years is when I find myself proverbially wringing my hands in turmoiled distress, or thinking things through slowly and methodically (like working through new techniques in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes), an automatic coping strategy is to soothe myself in French. On the odd occasion, I'll even startle myself by blurting out phrases from some of my various other "comfort" languages. Case in point: This afternoon, when I found myself absently muttering, "Mi scusi..." to a stranger at Fred Meyer while trying to pick out a support brace for Silly Ankle, I was smacked with yet another reminder I'm stressed to bits and not in my usual happy-go-lucky headspace... but at least it made me laugh and gave me even more food for thought.

(At the same time, the possibility I may be stark, raving mad becomes increasingly apparent as the days go by. See paragraph above.)

The entity of different languages ~ and their various roles in our lives ~ has been playing around in my mind lately. Because I converse and write somewhat fluently in English and French, function in spoken Cantonese, giggle helplessly with my pidgin Mandarin (using lots of hand gestures to fill in the gaps), and play around a tad with odd bits of Italian, Spanish, and German, I'm beginning to see what role each language plays or triggers in my mental and emotional landscape by what pops into my head when I'm in a given mood or situation. This is always especially telling when I find myself yammering away while locked in the throes of intense dreams, and the languages I end up vocalizing help indicate what I'm really feeling/fearing/intuiting. (Unfortunately, I can be somewhat of a noisy sleeper as well.)

What fascinates me about my own language usage is what I discover about myself when I explore the nature of my associations and relationships with them, how and when they come into play, and what of myself I am channelling through them. I can easily imagine that language centres in the brain are triggered by a cocktail of emotional/hormonal impulses, which can then potentially release a form of communication bundled with mental association (language) as a psychological coping response to life situations.

In my case, some background is necessary to work out my theory: Both my parents were born during the uncertain times of the Second World War. My mother was raised in Hong Kong, moved to England at 18 to become a nurse and midwife, then to Vancouver when she was around 27. My father was born in Amoy, raised mostly in Taiwan, worked for Air America during the Vietnam War (where he was further emotionally damaged), went to McGill University in Montréal for his engineering degree, and then moved to Vancouver, where he met my mother. Despite how my mother always loved to work her British English (The Avengers was a show I grew up excitedly watching with Mom) and my father continuously exalted the beauty of the French language, my very first spoken languages were Cantonese and Mandarin... which are vastly different dialects if you've ever heard them in comparison.

(To give you an example, to count from one to ten in Cantonese, you'd say, "Yut, yee, sahm, say, mmm, loakh, tzhut, baht, gow, sup." In Mandarin, it's "Eee, euh, san, sih, ou, liew, tzhee, bah, zho, shieu." In written language, though, it's identical across the dialectical board, and Japanese Kanji is virtually written Chinese. Always kills me at tattoo parlours when people want their stuff in Kanji and have no idea they're actually also getting Chinese tats. So in short, if you dumped an illiterate Cantonese speaker in Taiwan or Shanghai, the poor guy wouldn't have a hope in hell of getting around based on verbal language alone, but if he were literate, he'd get around anywhere in China and Japan with few problems.)

Anyway, family folklore dictates that my first full sentence was ~ rather fittingly ~ "Kahn-kahn... fey zhee!!!" ("Hey, look... Airplane!!!" in Mandarin.) Because we were brought up in a home with two dialects plus English, we often found ourselves speaking an unconscious mish-mash of languages, but it all kind of worked out just fine.

At some point, however, formal education struck; its blow to the life of language in our home was significant. My sister is five years older than myself, and so the year I was born, she began kindergarten. Unfortunately, since she essentially spoke mostly Cantorin with my parents, her teacher sent home a note and asked my parents to speak more English with us as she was having communication difficulties at school. Thus, compared to my older sister, my early exposure to Chinese was strongly compromised as a result of my parents making a concerted effort to speak more English at home. So, despite years of having to take afterschool classes to learn Chinese conversation and literature, English eventually became my dominant language.

As an aside but not really, racial discrimination is a strange beast. A major reason I credit for helping me lose any early interest in my cultural heritage and Chinese language skills is simply racism. Whenever I was complimented on or received awards for my piano playing, academic achievements, and even artistic abilities, some key kids would cruelly sneer, "Show off! It's only because you're Chinese that you can play piano/get grades/draw like that. Chinese kids are always good at that kind of stuff, but you all suck at sports! You and your glasses are SO UGLY, and it looks like your mother cuts your hair."

Shockingly, it didn't take long before I became paralyzingly nervous and embarrassed to play piano in public for fear of being an undeserving showoff, got all shifty and hid high-scoring papers at school because my scholastic abilities might get mocked, avoided letting anyone see my art, and even began eating my lunches silently in bathroom stalls ~ chicken pies tasting of salt from tears. I tried to avoid associating myself with any of the other Chinese kids, would've died to have perfect vision, chestnut-coloured curls, and new clothes, and longed for a father who didn't regularly beat the shit out of me and a mother whose pleasure I didn't have to try to earn through over-achieving accomplishments. Suffice it to say, it was rather awkward trying to look crap at everything for the schoolkids I was trying to impress while trying to not piss off the parents by really screwing up. Needless to say, the verbal and physical abuse fairly rained down from most quadrants until I figured out how the hell to navigate my young life. Whenever I spend too long recalling my sometimes suicidal childhood, I often come to the same conclusion: Kids can be such fucking assholes, and lots of people should never breed.

Is it any surprise my favourite word is "échapper" ("to escape")?

Ah, but I digress. Back to language. Because of budget cuts, French wasn't taught in my particular elementary school as it was in so many others, but I eventually got to learn it in high school. Despite my late start to learning this second official language of Canada, I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Not only did it lack the gutteral roughness of Cantonese, but it also wasn't Mandarin, which was what I'd often hear screamed at me while getting whipped for something I didn't really do. While I relished the grace and elegance of the soft language, I began to find it incredibly difficult to grasp as it got more advanced, but I stubbornly stuck with it because I saw it as a form of eventual salvation. How I was convinced of this as a fifteen year old I'm not entirely sure, but strangely enough, my intuition came to sweet fruition and I'm still enjoying its many rewards.

In Canada, there's a bursary programme funded by the federal government to encourage bilingualism, and if you're enrolled in a university with demonstrated academic ability and shown interest in learning the "other" official language, you get to go to a Francophone province to learn French if you're an Anglophone, and vice versa. Thus, at the age of 18, I escaped the confines of home and flew off to fairytale Québec City, where I spent my entire summer out of high school at l'Université Laval, living on campus and receiving $95 a week in federal cash to spend on "food." (It was Sapporo Ichiban all the way so we'd have money to spend on liquor at the dépanneur and at the most excellent 18+ clubs). The only caveat of the programme was if you got caught speaking anything but French three times by any of les moniteurs or monitrices during the time you were enrolled, you were forced to quit the programme, would receive no university credit, and had to pay the government back for whatever funds you'd already used up. Luckily, the only person I ever knew who got sent home was actually booted out for getting caught shagging one of les monitrices, not for speaking English.

Not content with spending just one summer away travelling, I went the next year and did the programme in Chicoutimi, which was actually far more interesting culturally; Chicoutimi is a pulp and papermill town of less than 60,000 residents deep in the heartland of séparatiste Québec, is potentially the whitest place I've ever experienced, and the people there are intensely militant about protecting their language and heritage. As a result, my French just continued to improve in such an immersed environment since almost virtually no one spoke any English, and this experience went on to prove incredibly beneficial in unexpected ways.

The summer after Chicoutimi, I spent a chunk of it in Paris, where I arrived so much more fluent in French than I had been for previous visits there, and that just made a massive difference with how much richer an experience I enjoyed that time around. Six months later, I scored a work/study co-op for my degree in Ottawa, and was given a special stipend on top of my regular salary since I tested to be proficient enough in French to be of even more use in my government job. And this autumn, when I visited Saint Cat in DC, I was killing time at Banana Republic as I waited for SC to get off of work, and I met this incredible employee from Cameroon whose English wasn't the strongest, but we hit it off merrily in French. He was beyond delighted to have someone with whom he could chat beyond small-talk in his native language, and I was thrilled to meet someone so lovely and excited to tell me all about his life in Africa. As I was getting ready to catch the bus to go back into the city, he couldn't stop grinning and hugging me with joy, and my heart was singing with the look on his face. How great is the ability to speak a different language when it results in imparting so much pleasure for yourself and others through meaningful connection and relief?

Thus, French is my very handy little hattrick, even though I definitely speak it far better while inebriated or in sweet slumber. What I love is how even the tone of my voice unconsciously drops and becomes richer when I speak those gorgeous words; I get to tap into other parts of my personality without too much effort, and self-soothe as well.

In defence of the purported rudeness of Parisians and many Francophone Canadians, I've generally only ever experienced incredible friendliness from sympathetic natives who can tell I'm at least making a sad effort. People would actually sometimes appear a little started to hear English-accented French coming out of someone who looks like she should giggle into her hand and say, "Konichiwa!" But seriously, before you are deluded into thinking I'm incredibly fluent in the language, I can assure you I am not. I just find myself babbling in it, shamelessly make up words to substitute for the ones I don't know, and will even resort to franglais when needs must. I still need subtitles for the majority of the French movies I watch. And strangely enough, I speak it more fluidly than I can understand it when it's being spoken, but I hear that just comes with practice, and it does vary with peoples' accents. It would probably also help to not have hearing destroyed from testing out loudspeakers at full volume to check for distortion as I was growing up...

As for the other languages... intensively studying classical music and travelling through nations like Switzerland, Germany, and Austria has given me a few useful German words and expressions, and living in Miami for a full year and watching countless, mind-numbing episodes of yappy Dora the Explorer with my kids has been somewhat helpful with giving me some rudimentary Spanish.

Italian, however, is another beast altogether. Spending an entire summer travelling through Italy with my siblings as one last hurrah before my sister lost her free flight benefits has filled my heart with an abiding adoration for the comfort and beauty of that stunning country, and the luscious syllables of the spoken language enthrall me to the point where I absolutely have to read everything out aloud with voluptuous, overly-exaggerated fruity tones. Give me a bottle of Italian wine or package of imported cantuccini and I will shamelessly go at the text with giddy gusto.

Thus, the subconscious associations I make with language unwittingly seep into my everyday life, and I have a feeling that communicating in Cantonese and Mandarin tend to bring me too emotionally close to my childhood, so I therefore kind of avoid them and (tragically) don't make a concerted effort to teach them to my children; French ~ which eventually allowed me temporary reprieves from life circumstances and introduced me to independence, as well as some of my best friends ~ is my comfort, escape, and comedic language; and all the other ones are just there because learning languages is just so fucking fun, cool, and practical. They also connote travel and explorations into lands and cultures beyond our own. And truly, can you even *think* of a more useful phrase in daily life than, "Passe-moi la puck?"

To add to sheer linguistic joy, Coyote Girl and I have pledged to learn a language together neither of us yet knows, and at this point we've decided Latin is going to be one of our exciting projects. Although motets were essentially my favourite pieces to sing in choir, I can't possibly even begin to claim to know much Latin at all, and it's always been a subject I've wanted to study. Thus... Latin! (Though I wouldn't mind Italian and ancient Greek, while we're at it.) We'll soon be able to crack ourselves up silly during BJJ with stuff like, "Stipes vestri armo illic" ("Post your arm there"), or even better, "Aufero vestri manus manus ex meus papilla!" ("Get your hand off my boob!") Oh, the fun.

Huh. I wonder if, once I get proficient in our "new" language, I'll start freaking out quietly in Latin instead?


The above piece is called "Double Dragon," and was painted by my penultimately favourite artist from Vancouver, Michael Abraham. During the eighteen months we were living back there, Sweet Boy actually bought for me one of Michael's earlier works for my 31st birthday, back from the time when I knew the artist (and that's another blog altogether!). Needless to say, it's amongst my most treasured belongings.