learning chinese

Now that I finally have a break from Monday to Friday Chinese classes, I've been wondering more and more about why it is I'm even learning Chinese, especially considering how much time it takes up. It's a question that often gets brought up in class as a way to practice grammer structures so I have a few spitfire answers always prepared. They include: it's interesting, I'm a Chinese-American and I want to learn about my ancestral culture, I took it in high school and wanted to continue. It'd say that easily the one that intrigues me the most is the second one (not that I don't think it's interesting). I'm a Chinese American, so it's like a pseudo obligation to learn the language, right? Ironically, my dad's side of the family speaks Cantonese (dialect from South) and my mom's side speaks Shanghai dialect, and here I am learning how to speak Mandarin...I do realize that everyone learns Mandarin now so everything else is dying, but clearly the "ancestral" part of "my ancestral culture" is not really there. So why as a fourteen year old about to go to high school did I decide to take Chinese instead of continuing with Spanish? And why as an eighteen year old about to go to college, did I decide to continue? It's not as if I didn't understand the dialects thing, I did - but Mandarin is pretty much the only dialect you can learn anywhere anyways. It wasn't a hate of Spanish either, I'd always enjoyed it.

That leaves me stuggling with the age old question of did I start Chinese because I felt like I needed to? Was it all those times when kids asked me if I knew Chinese and I always had to say no? Was it all the other ABCs (American Born Chinese) mocking me for not knowing any? Maybe. And maybe there was a part of me that did feel obligated to take Chinese, even if it's not the closest connection to my heritage, it was something. I can't avoid being Chinese right? So might as well embrace it. I'll probably never be able to actually figure out why I started taking Chinese and I'll probably never have perfect tones, but I can still say that I'm glad I've taken it. For all the hard work, it's really cool to be able to carry on a conversation in a language, and it wouldn't have mattered if that language were Chinese, or Spanish, or Urdu. Plus, as it turns out, Chinese is a good language to learn considering how many people speak it and the likelihood that at some point I end up back in China.

So maybe now, it doesn't matter if it started out as an obligation, because it isn't one anymore.