In Which I Realized, Finally, That I Will Never Be Fluent In Chinese

While picking up some wine for a Christmas Dinner I'm going to this evening, I witnessed a rather discouraging exchange.  I was in line at City Shop, a supermarket that primarily attracts expats for its reasonably varied selection of Western foodstuffs.  In front of me was a foreigner -- German, I'd guess, but what do I know -- who was paying for his Christmas Eve grocery run with a young girl of about 6 years, who I assumed was his daughter.  The staff at City Shop usually has passable English, but this particular cashier was struggling to express herself, so she just gave up and started speaking in Chinese.  I wasn't really paying attention, so I didn't catch what she said.  Neither did the customer, who looked bewildered for a while before calling his daughter over.  The cashier repeated herself to the young girl -- this time I was paying attention, and still couldn't figure out what she was saying -- and the girl calmly looked up at her dad and said "Oh, she just meant that we should hand our receipt to the parking guy over there when we're driving out of the garage."

I've always known that young children have a linguistic advantage over adults; if you don't learn a language by the time you hit puberty, you will probably never learn to speak and understand it in an even remotely native fashion.  But I had always hoped that the only two things standing between me and Chinese fluency were practice, and immersion -- I could overcome my linguistic senility by simply throwing myself into the Chinese scene, and allowing my brain to mop it all up like a sponge.  That clearly has proven to be a lesson in naivete.  Not only do I not practice enough (nobody's fault but my own...and Shanghai's, I suppose, for being an enclave of English speakers), but I also have 5 years of formal Chinese training under my belt.  And as it turns out, while my studies gave me the basic toolkit for basic, conversational Chinese, it actually hinders my pursuit of fluency.  I think - in English - before I speak in Chinese, desperately searching for the correct combination of verbs, nouns, and adjective clauses to form a perfect sentence.  I do this naturally; if I didn't, and I just was able to speak, and listen, I would be much better at Chinese.  But I can't, primarily because I didn't start learning the language until I was 18, a senior citizen from a linguistic perspective.

Clara Mei, the two year old daughter of a couple that came to Moganshan with us a month ago, is Venezuelan, but she has grown up here in Shanghai.  Her ayi, the Chinese housekeeper who takes care of her while her parents are at work, speaks to her in Chinese.  And whenever she's around other foreigners, English is, naturally, the primary language.  The result: Mei Mei can speak Spanish, English, and Chinese, as fluently as any two year old can speak any language.  She's too young to really understand the difference between the three languages, so she ends up jumping between the three without realizing it.  It's adorable -- and it's also the reason why the ceiling for my Chinese ability is, I realize, so low.  She, like the daughter in City Shop, were exposed to the language before they were able to process that it was a separate entity from their native tongues.  The girl in City Shop is likely old enough now to know the difference.  But the look of immediate recognition that flashed across her face when the cashier spoke to her (in a strong, fast Shanghai accent) told me all I need to know.  This girl, like Clara Mei, doesn't need to translate.  She hears Chinese as if it were her mother tongue, something I was never able to do in Spanish during the five years I studied it in high school, and something I've certainly never been able to do with Mandarin.