The kangaroo did it

by Thom Yee

Arrival images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Most people don’t know this about me, but I didn’t grow up speaking English. That might not be a huge, shocking surprise given my Chinese last name and the… let’s say, inward-looking nature of my people, nor is it likely a huge stretch of the imagination to conclude that my first language might be Chinese. In my specific case, it was a dialect of Chinese that you probably wouldn’t even recognize if I specified which (and I’m not going to), and looking back and thinking about my parents, both second-generation Canadians more comfortable speaking English (if at all?), it seems like a strange choice to have tried to raise me in a Chinese-speaking environment. What I remember most about speaking Chinese in my first few years was a great deal of isolation from most of the people I met followed by learning English at age four, in the process completely forgetting Chinese, and then a great deal of isolation from the Chinese community of which I was allegedly a part, a feeling that continues to this day. I like to think sometimes that those early experiences with conflicting languages and incompatibilities of understanding gave me a unique perspective on grammar and the process with which I’ll put a sentence together, but really, I think it might have just made me hate everyone and the world around me. Continue reading →