The Bus Stop
march 2023
There I stood, under the bus stop, Google Translate in hand because I could not speak in a language that I considered my mother tongue. English was never my first language—Mandarin was. Yet when approached by an old woman asking me if the 52 bus would take her to what I would find out to be the BART station, I stared blankly ahead, unable to answer her honest question. 
It was a frustrating reality—I understood her, but was unable to string the right characters into a coherent line. The jagged words that tumbled out were coated with a thick foreign accent, and I could only grimace at my ineptitude.
“Wǒ de fùmǔ shì cóng Táiwān, dànshì wǒ zài Měiguó zhǎng dà, suǒyǐ wǒ de Zhōngwén tèbié chā,” I explained. (My parents are from Taiwan, but I grew up in America, so that’s why my Chinese sucks.)​​​​​​​
She chuckled lovingly, and I could feel hot embarrassment creep up my cheeks as I came to the realization that I could no longer deny it—I had assimilated into Western culture so effortlessly that I never noticed the fluency of my culture slip away into the abyss.
I remember in elementary school, when my classmates ran off at recess, I was held back in ESL—English as a Second Language. I grew up enveloped in the characters of Mandarin but foreign to the complex phonetics of English. I felt inadequate, as if my identity as a second-generation kid was labeled “needs improvement.” When I tried to speak English the “right” way, others would crinkle their nose in disgust, as if I had just opened my lunchbox filled with pickled bamboo and cold dumplings. English—hollow, obscure, tasteless. It washed away the sophistication of my tangy culture and left me as a brittle, empty husk.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
But as the years roll by, I have been collecting life’s little nuggets of wisdom tucked behind the most unassuming corridors. One such lesson was this: to gain, you must first let go. I got a Western education. I had American friends and American food and American clothing and American songs and American media. Everything I consumed was Westernized. Was my Western upbringing a byproduct of assimilation? Probably, but I have come to recognize it as the privilege of growing up in a land my immigrant parents considered “The American Dream.” 
In the same way your teeth shift when you forget to wear your retainers for a long time (speaking from experience), something once marked as a cornerstone of your upbringing, too, can crumble under the foundations of your newfound identity. In middle school, when my parents realized that my sisters and I were slowly losing our grip on the kite of our second language, they would always remind us, “說中文! 說中文!” (Speak in Chinese! Speak in Chinese!) every time we spoke in English. I blew it off every time—it’s so inconvenient and not that deep, I remembered thinking to myself. But before I realized it, my kite had indeed flown away.
On the bus ride back toward campus, I collected the remnants of my lost language—scraps of Chinese 6 from high school—and tried to catch the flying words of the grandmother that ricocheted out of my dusty wok. I learned that she used to be a math teacher back in Hong Kong for eighth graders, had two kids in the States, and was trying to visit her son in San Francisco.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
“你在大學學什麼?” (What are you studying in college?), she asked.
“Yīngyǔ hé...” (English and...) my fingers flew from letter to letter in Google Translate, “bǎohù hé zīyuán yánjiū” (Conservation & Resource Studies), I meekly replied.
“很好，地球快要死了，所以將來會變得很有用。” (That’s very good. The Earth is dying, so that will become very useful in the future.) she responded.
Of course, the Asian auntie focuses on the more STEM latter half of my studies. But I smiled at her approval, nonetheless.​​​​​​​
Arriving at the corner of University Avenue and Kala Bagai Way, I instructed her to head two blocks straight down to get to the BART station. She smiled and thanked me profusely for my help. My broken Mandarin was a wobbly bridge, complete with missing floorboards tethered with stringy ropes—but it got an old woman across to her American son.
As she hobbled off the bus, she turned around and said, “很高興見到你，我希望再次見到你!” (It was very nice meeting you, I hope to see you again!)
“Hěn gāoxìng jiàn dào nǐ, zhù nǐ píng'ān huí jiā!” (It was very nice meeting you too, get home safe!), I echoed.
I was late to my next class, but I was one experience wiser. ​​​​​​​