Back to the Motherland

Hapa Mag - February 12, 2020

By Stephanie Jack

A big breakup last year left me hungry for a dramatic change. Since leaving Australia at 18, I had moved to four different countries in pursuit of university degrees, an acting career, and boys. I was a cultural chameleon with no solid identity. I decided the time had come to move to China and learn Mandarin and kung fu. I was ready to be a good Hapa girl, and become the next Maggie Q.

On my 27th birthday, I land in Shanghai. I decline the offer of a cigarette from my taxi driver, who enthusiastically spits out the window into the thick hazy yellow-grey air. In China you are never more than a few metres away from a man vigorously clearing his throat, ready to hurl a spitball. I complained about this to my mother and she told me that even my beloved grandfather owned a personal spittoon.

“Where are you from, měi nǚ?” my driver asks in Mandarin. Měi nǚ means “beautiful woman.” I was flattered until I realised in China they use this term to refer to any and all women.

“Australia, but my mum is Singaporean Chinese,” I answer.

Let’s rewind. The last person in my family born in China was my grandfather. He hails from a mountainside village near Fuzhou. Well into his thirties, a series of convoluted events found him living in Singapore. He married my then-16-year-old grandma, born in Malaysia to a Fuzhou family. My mother grew up in Malaysia and Singapore. In her thirties, she was whitewater rafting in Taiwan and through complete happenstance met my father, an Australian man of Scottish and English descent. They tied the knot, and she migrated to Australia. This unlikely series of events conspired to bring me into existence in the old Australian gold mining town of Bendigo in 1992.

For a brief time, I had the honour of being the most ethnically diverse kid at my primary school. My mother would introduce Chinese traditions to my schoolmates. At one school assembly she demonstrated Chinese New Year customs. I was her dutiful assistant, dressed in a red qípáo, holding mandarins. I was caught between pride and mortification.

“Your mother is overseas-born Chinese?” my taxi driver asks, “She speaks Chinese?”

When my mother gave birth to me, she had a dilemma. My Chinese grandparents didn’t speak a word of English. My father didn’t speak a word of Chinese. Saying “Chinese” is an oversimplification. I’m mostly referring to Mandarin, but there are a multitude of mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects. Aside from her fluent but somewhat quirky English, my mother speaks Fuzhou dialect, Mandarin, Cantonese, and some Japanese and Malay. What language should she pass down?

In the end, Mum decided not to speak to me in Chinese lest it affect my English (we now know it’s perfectly possible to raise bilingual children). At 6, she sent me to Chinese class. It was too late; I picked up barely anything. I never had a proper conversation with my grandparents before they died, I just knew how to say wǒ ài nín (I love you). It was a testament to non-verbal language that we built such a close relationship.

“So you’re mixed blood,” says my taxi driver matter-of-factly.

I couldn’t converse with my grandparents, yet here I am at 27 chatting to a complete stranger in Chinese. In the weeks preceding, Mum has zealously taught me as much Chinese as possible, including some ‘70s pop songs in case I find myself in a karaoke situation. We arrive and the driver tells me it’ll be 500 yuan, more than double the estimated fare. He has a meter receipt to prove it. I’m too exhausted to argue.

In my no-frills student accommodation, I meet the dormitory ayi. Ayi (aunt) is a familiar term for all women of a certain age. My ayi speaks no English, but somehow gets me settled into my room. That night I eat instant noodles and cry. Was I expecting to be fluent in Chinese through sheer osmosis? The next day I take a Chinese placement test. I get two questions correct on a four-page test paper. I’m in level A.

At this point, I want to rewind the clock and tell my mother to speak to her baby in Chinese. This experience is more humbling than necessary. My half-Chinese genes aren’t helping me learn the language. No one in China even thinks I look Chinese. They mostly guess Hispanic.

But I soldier on. True to my aim of becoming the next Maggie Q, I start kung fu classes with a bilingual teacher. I quickly gain respect for every actor and stunt person who has ever done a kung fu movie. Most classes I’m a sweaty defeated mess, glaring with envy and awe as Chinese teenagers fly casually through spinning kicks.

Then there are practical difficulties. While setting up a bank account, I sign several mysterious forms entirely in Chinese and hope this won’t come back to bite me. Paying for anything and everything is streamlined by WeChat Pay, but I now need a VPN to access Google, Facebook, Netflix, you name it. At best, it makes using the internet such a process it’s like returning to the days of dial-up. At worst, it’s utterly isolating.

Yet over the coming weeks I fall in love with Shanghai. The city is a fascinating blend of futuristic and historic. There are more cafes and bars than I can feasibly visit in a year. My school is in the Former French Concession. Few neighbourhoods in the world boast such a fascinating mix of quasi-European architecture, tree-lined roads, shops selling steaming-hot bāo zi and heaving bowls of miàn tiáo. China might take some adjusting to, but Shanghai’s mix of East and West is exactly me. I’ve started a YouTube vlog about my life in China called “Mixed Up.” Someone comments that with every new episode I seem happier.

And then I have what expats affectionately call a “China day.” Often just an accumulation of small things that tip you over the edge. On this particular day, my Chinese teacher has called me out several times for incorrect pronunciation. My falling fourth tone sounded like a high first tone. Qù sounded like chū.

As a perfectionist, and the only person in my class with Chinese ancestry, I am frustrated and upset. After class, I call my mother and begin ranting in Chinese. I’m walking down a busy street, dodging scooters, overtaking slow walkers, and working myself into full China-meltdown-self-pity-mode. “I’m so angry, I’m so tired! When I was a child, why didn’t you speak Chinese? I don’t want to be in China, it’s so má fan (troublesome)!”

My mother just laughs. She lets me vent until I reach the braised beef noodle shop I’m headed for (because I’m also è sǐ le, hungry to death). Then she says proudly, “Your Chinese really has improved! You’ve been shouting at me for a whole 15 minutes!”

You can watch Stephanie’s China experience via her YouTube series Mixed Up. It involves her FaceTiming her Chinese mom or exploring Chinese perspectives on beauty and dating. The responses she’s received have helped shape her view on what it means to be Hapa in China and online.