a few words closer to home

ABC: American-born Chinese.

I am beyond excited every summer when I get to visit Taiwan – there are cheap clothes, beautiful sights, and delicious food. I've decided that my fashion needs to level up somewhat before college: gray sweats and solid-colored hoodies every day cannot do – UNIQLO and pop-up stores in Ximending have been my friends in this process of rediscovery. I've always grown up a picky eater, but I've tried to be more open-minded this summer, exposing my Western-trained taste buds to soy milk and squid noodles.

Truly, the greatest part about Taiwan is the people. I've never seen such genuinely kind souls. It's in the little acts of young adults giving up their train seats for elders or a hawker stand gifting my mother an eighth mochi ball when she only paid for seven.

Every year, I feel a little bit more Taiwanese; I feel increasingly more at home.

But simultaneously, I feel as if I'm approaching a cultural asymptote, and there's something I have to achieve before I can be fully immersed – the language.

I was born in Berkeley, California. Moved to New York some months later. For some reason, English became the only language I spoke, even when my parents talked to me in Mandarin. For that same reason, I spoke Chinese better at 5 years old than I do today. Some of my other ABC friends went to Chinese school but hated it, and after hearing some of their horror stories, I'm not sure I would've enjoyed it either.

I didn't think much about it for nearly a decade. It was just words. And I lived in America, anyway. It's only now that I'm beginning to see true consequences, consequences deeper than simply being unable to order food by myself.

As often as I visit, I'll always feel some degree of separation from the people of Taiwan, but most importantly, from the people I love: family. I have many relatives here on this small island. Uncles, aunts, little cousins, big cousins, and a 98-year-old great-grandmother, who all – despite barely knowing a lick of English – care about me. I get gifts from them, food from them, a roof from them, and in exchange, what do I give them? A smile? A "xièxiè" ("Thank you") because that's the only thing I can sputter out?

I am so deeply grateful for this wonderful family and support system I have across the world. I just wish I could do more than smile and nod. I wish I could talk to them, and I mean really talk. Tell my great-grandmother that her stories, translated in fragments through my mom, make me want to be a better grandson. Tell my cousins that I'm amazed by their artwork and that I'm proud of them for graduating from elementary school.

But instead, I watch conversations unfold like glass behind a museum exhibit. To be frank, I look like an idiot just sitting there, slumping into my chair away from the table, unable to decipher, unable to feel.

Often, I'll hear my name and my brother's. They're interested. They care. They really do. And that makes the guilt of my silence ever more suffocating.

I used to think language was a means to an end – a way to get around. But here, it feels like something else entirely: it's "presence." Without it, I'm always arriving, but never truly there.

So I want to learn. In college, abroad, through Duolingo, whatever. Not for perfection – for proximity. A few inches closer to the table. A few words closer to home.