“Typewriter” was one of the answers (or rather, questions) on Jeopardy today, prompting my dad to reminisce about my mom’s old typewriter in Shanghai. “She was typing in English 20 years before you were born,” my dad joked to me.
“Yet I still think in Chinese,” she replied.
I never consciously thought about which language my parents think in, but of course this makes sense - twenty years in a new country can’t quite replace the thirty years in a home country. It’s weird to realize this, though. I think “tomorrow,” they think “ming tian” - even when we think of sentences with equivalent meanings, there might be some subtlety that one of us overlooks in the other’s thoughts.
How strange it must be for your daughter to grow up with a different language than you. The words that come so naturally to you, that you’ve used to express yourself for a lifetime, are words she may never learn. It seems less weird from my angle, but that’s probably because I’ve never envisioned a future where my children won’t grow up speaking English (although according to my dad, my kids will grow up speaking Chinese so I should get used to the idea).
My parents’ lives have unfolded in ways that they literally thought were impossible when they were young. I feel like I have a much better idea of where I’ll sitting in 30 years - but I guess this just goes to show that maybe I actually don’t.
