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Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
[鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|[alt: 黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui] @sh.itjust.works

Emotional abuse of immigrant children by their immigrant parents probably contributes a lot to to why the kids hate their ancestral language(s).

Source: Me.

I'm trying to hang on Cantonese and Mandarin as much as possible, but it's so fucking hard because Cantonese is so triggering of my traumatic memories, and Mandarin just reminds of the CCP. Like... in my mind its so hard to separate langage from parents or a regime.

17 comments

  • Oh yeah, this is super relatable.

    I have a very complicated relationship with my heritage. (I come from a Middle Eastern country.)

    As a teen I would stay up at night wishing I was white (because my white friends’ parents were OK with me being queer. They showed me a kind of love my life was so sorely lacking in.)

    Whenever I’d come home I’d have to put the proverbial mask back on, but no matter what, I couldn’t work my way out of being a disappointment to the family. I felt like a prisoner in my own house and I knew other people had it different.

    My mother also used to throw my medication (antidepressants) away because “chemicals bad” and it’ll “ruin [my] brain”, essentially. And so I’d deal with withdrawal too.

    I was victimised by a combination of difficult life circumstances, and (really, mostly) a rigid, conservative, and intolerant culture.

    As an adult now, my feelings about this are not so black and white; I am proud of where I’m from. But I do feel for younger me. And I’m still damaged from my childhood. Always will be.

    • As a teen I would stay up at night wishing I was white (because my white friends’ parents were OK with me being queer. They showed me a kind of love my life was so sorely lacking in.

      My mother also used to throw my medication (antidepressants) away because “chemicals bad” and it’ll “ruin [my] brain”, essentially.

      Oh yea this is a big part of it.

      Idk why, but like everyone in my extended family seem to just distrust psychaitry. Nobody takes depression seriously.

      Apparantly, one of my uncles/aunts/cousins managed to "get over depression" without taking medications, now my mom is using that as a role model. Like... the fuck.

      I'm called weak for not having the "willpower" to "just get over depression". The fuck lol.

      Like... I read about some of the international adoption thing and, despite the potential problems that could cause, I feel like some random white European/North American/Australian family would, statistically, probably be more understanding and tolerant of depression, more empathetic. Like I know I probably sound a little bit "internalized racist", but it's not really about the race thing, its the extremely conservative culture of a lot of Asian families. Like you go to my home village... omg people like just gossip and badmouth about that one family with the disable kid and think of him as a "burden" to the village. Like they'd have false pity, like "omg so sad" ... "so sad that this useless eater is wasting resources".

      This is why, Taishanese (台山话 a variant/"dialect" of Chinese from Taishan, Mainland China, not to be confused with Taiwan, which is a different place) is kinda a dead language in my eyes.

      Its just... (1) my parent never really spoke Taishanese to me and (2) a speaker of Taishanese is probably rural, and very conservative. Nobody in the cities uses that.

      So while I can understand it, I just don't care for it. I don't wanna speak it.

      As for Cantonese... I guess I can think about Hong Kong and how there are a lot of more liberal open minded people there. So maybe I wanna hold on to Cantonese. As for Mandarin... well there is Taiwan... and I just... hope that like out of 1.4 billion people, that there is a silent majority out there that wants a better government than... you know... the current one. A lot of Mandarin speakers are urban, more educated, a lot of intellectuals At least I hope there are alot of intellectuals out there that secretly wants change.

      So... I guess I'm trying to make up the reasons to justify keeping Cantonese and Mandarin. I try to remind myself that my parents and the authoritarian government of China don't own these languages. But its hard to get rid of the subconscious negative associations.

      As for Taishanese, yea I lost hope on that. Its pointless. Statistically, 99% of people speaking Taishanese are gonma have extremely fucked up rural conservative views.

  • Probably not more than the society they are being assimilated into hating immigrants and their language and culture.

    • Ironically, it was actually the adversity I faced when I first arrived in the US that, at first, made me more attached to my language. I remember just writing down the Chinese characters of my name just to kinda "show off" a bit, that I'm unique. I even learned the traditional characters to make it look "cooler". I wrote it on my notebook covers and on assignments, right next to the "Pinyin name". Even though I kinda forgot like basically all other characters (can read, can't write, characters are hard, no time to practice lol).

      I remember like sometime I'd write stuff in Pinyin for fun. Nobody in school can read it. Like a secret code.

      Then over time, as I moved up in school, after I finally learned English. And also as you get older, kids tend to mature and are less racist. Then the scale shifts, suddenly, the emotional trauma I faced at home is worse than what I faced on the outside world. So now, even if I just hear a Cantonese song, that I actually like, and it still, it keeps remind me of my parents.

      Like, you see. 99% of interactions in Cantonese are with my parents and older brother. they suck. so that feeling naturally is associated with the language.

      For English, its only 50% bad, 50% good or at least "fine", so I feel more negativity about Chinese languages. Even with Mandarin, which I don't speak at home. I hear all their WeChat shit on loudspeakers. It reminds me of CCP. One Child Policy, I'm the 2nd child. So that's why. So the Chinese languages are just "tainted" in my mind, subconsciously.

      It's complicated, hard to explain.

    • This was the main reason my mom's side didn't pass language down. Not even food! Just assimilate 🤷‍♂️ But they were peasants in a new country so best to make it work in the easiest way possible. It sounds like OP has it pretty rough 🙁

  • I feel this way about Spanish. Most latinos are very conservative and religious and super judgy about how I speak the language.

  • Do you think emotional abuse is more common from immigrant parents? I feel like I see a lot of comments about the stress and pressure that immigrant parents put on their kids, but it's not something I know anything about.

    If so, why do you think it's like that? Is it just that families that immigrant are often in difficult financial situations, without lots of social support so the parents are super stressed? Or that the kinds of people who are willing to immigrate are aspirational and so demand a lot of their children? Or is partly that their way if parenting would be normal back where they grew up, but for its difficult for their kids growing up in a society with different standards and expectations around childhood?

    • I think people that want to leave their country are probably from countries that are less developed in terms of like civics. Like Human Rights, democracy, equality, disability rights, open-minded ness. So these are generally more conservative.

      The less developed the civics are, less less desirable it is to live there, thus the more desirable it it to leave that country.

      So... conservative families... need say more?

      Statistically, they are very strict and have an authoritarian household system.

      Literally, like every Asian classmate I've met, like not just East Asia, but also like Southeast Asia and South Asia, by the way they all describe it, it all sounds similar in terms of authoritarianism of their household.

17 comments