Mom! What are you talking about!

I have been trying to get my kids to speak more Mandarin these days. When my mother was helping me babysit them last year, they used to speak Mandarin pretty often and hence, i never had to worry if the girls will lose their roots. This year my mother was unable to help me babysit anymore, I have hence been talking to them more often in English than in Mandarin. It’s really hard to cultivate a multi-lingual environment for the children. I used to think it should be easy since I’m pretty proficient in my Mandarin but in reality, it’s much harder than it looks.

First of all, I’m English educated so I speak English most of the time. Secondly, my husband doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin and only a smattering of Khmer which does not help much. Thirdly, all children programs in Australia are in English so that’s all they hear all day. And lastly, they are starting to form friendships now in preschool and of course, none of their friends know Mandarin. So, it’s beginning to seem like a much trickier task now that they are older. Both the girls prefer to blend into their English speaking groups than to seem left out by speaking a different language.

I remember there was once my second daughter, Jeslyn, looked at me strange when I was asking her something in Mandarin. “Mommy! Talk properly!” was her order. Gosh, I didn’t even use a difficult Mandarin phrase. I thought that she had forgotten what she had learnt when she was under my mother’s care, it was only recently did I realised that she “preferred” to speak English because “all my friends speak English.”

Now I finally understand why so many Asian parents in English speaking countries find it so difficult to teach their mother tongue to their children. I used to scoff at stories of children who doesn’t know a word of their native language and saw it as a failure on the part of the parents to teach them properly. Now, I’m one of those parents.