Speaking a language like a native isn’t solely to do with whether you get the right tone, the right grammar, the right sentence structure and so on. I have discovered that the older my child gets, the more he changes not only his speech, but also his personality, depending on which language he is speaking.

Not long after we moved to this apartment, we had a small children’s gathering in my courtyard, a public one which is great because there are dozens of steep, uneven stairways, broken bikes and other hidden dangers to play around to one’s heart’s content.

Most of the children who came were my son’s Chinese classmates. They were all playing quite nicely and we mothers were enjoying a couple of Yanjings and some hairy beans with half an eye on which child was throwing stones at which bikes, when suddenly I heard this whining banshee that screamed in pitch until I’m sure a few windows started cracking.

The voice was demanding something from another child, and the Beijing hua issuing forth was relentless, painful, excruciating. Swinging around to try and stem this eardrum blasting, I realised with horror that the voice belonged to none other than my very own child.

In English, I demanded an explanation for this tirade. He immediately switched to sweet, pure English and explained in a very soft tone that one of his friends had thrown his Ben 10 doll down one of the stairwells and into a pile of rotting cat food.

Chinese playground hollering transformed into English parent-child communication: a case of adapting to circumstances.

Me, on the other hand, no matter what situation I find myself in, I just stick with the English phrasing, the English politeness, the English reserve and the English inability to be understood. I will never be able to switch character according to language, no matter how much it would help everyone else’s comprehension.

For the rest of the afternoon I listened and realized he has a completely different personality in Chinese. By the way, it’s not a pretty one either.

Petulant, ordering, overreacting to everything, getting moody. Astonishing. He does not behave like that with his Western playmates – and if he did, I’m sure he would have none left. 

But it’s not just him – it seems to be the way Chinese children have to play – perhaps because there are so many of them in the class, at the park, in the playground, on the bus, in the toy shop – they simply have to whine to get what they want.

And at the end of it all, when it’s time to go home and everyone has moaned and shrieked and squabbled for three hours, everyone agrees they had a wonderful time. All that had gone before was clearly just normal behaviour.

It’s all fascinating to observe, and will continue to be so until we leave in August. I just hope when we do, we take the right personality with us.

Photo by mdanys via Flickr

I always thought there would be some way of making my child pay me back for the hours and money I spend on him, the sacrifices my body has made, and the many nights he has kept me awake.

I mean, I know there’s the love and all that, but really, I was looking for some recognition in cold, hard cash.

There are ways of getting “revenge” on children when they are young like dressing them in ridiculous clothes and keeping the photos for future use.

They do have some useful functions: One of the best is how easy it is to blame them for things. Need an excuse for arriving late to work or not attending some boring party? Just blame the child. That’s what they’re there for.

As my son got older and his Chinese skills surpassed mine, he actually started becoming more helpful.

Because Chinese people adore children so much, I have been able to manipulate this and his ability with their language to strike far better bargains with my landlady who hasn’t raised the rent in three years. At Yabao Lu, he scores far better prices than I ever could just by wowing the vendors with the Chinese that comes out of his quite obviously European little face.

That’s nice payback for those early months of hell.

What I hadn’t realized was that while I was using my child’s ability with Chinese for personal gain, he was using my incompetence with said lingo to score his own victories.

My son is in the first year of a Chinese primary school, and I had started to wonder why his Chinese homework, while so far, not particularly strenuous, had recently ceased to exist.

My character-writing may just about match that of a drunk Mallard duck, but at the moment, I recognize far more characters than my seven-year-old; and if I couldn’t, I would be giving up my HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test, a national standardized test for  non-native speakers) attempt at the Live the Language school in Beijing forthwith.

He knows this.

So when I was chatting to his teacher after school one day, my child pulling at my sleeve rather worriedly for some reason, she volunteered a rather astonishing statement.

‘We don’t worry that your little boy doesn’t do any of his Chinese homework, we know you can’t help him with his characters because he’s told us you don’t read any Chinese.’

Not “not much Chinese” but  “not any Chinese”.

She produced pages and pages of yuwen that he had been excused from doing in his own time because his poor stupid laowai mother was incapable of helping him.

There are ten years or so before I can legally send the little horror out to work, and even then, the options are rather limited now that chimney-sweeping is a thing of the past.

But while he isn’t doing his homework, I can at least bring him to the Silk Market.

Debbie Mason has lived in Beijing for more than ten years. She thought her Chinese was okay until she realized she could not understand her son and his Chinese playmates. In a bid to try and keep up with her 7-year-old, Debbie is taking Chinese classes at Live the Language. Follow her progress with her blog posts on beijingkids.

Photo by storyvillegirl of Flickr

It’s calmed down now, but for the first two months we parents were subjected to reams and reams of daily text messages detailing what the children had done at school, what we had to buy for them, what after school clubs there were available, and yes, what the dreaded homework was for that day.

Bringing up a child in a foreign land has many advantages. To me, the major one is that they grow up learning another language without trying to.

My child was born here, has been to Chinese schools since kindergarten, and at nearly 7 years old speaks Chinese and English equally well.  His Chinese is, of course, far better than mine, his tones are spot on, and he has no trace of a foreign accent. While I can still stamp my authority on him, I find myself constantly reminding him that my English is still better than his.

At the moment, I can just about understand everything he says, though it gets tough with a Chinese friend in mid-play.

But what I hadn’t bargained for was a shift in the balance of power that comes with the ability to not only speak the language, but to speak it like a native.

In the depths of winter, it’s cold walking back from school. One afternoon, we stopped to speak to a neighbor I’d known since I was pregnant. She was with her toddler.

No sooner had we stopped to say hello than the conversation was simply snatched out of my mouth.

– “Boy or girl?” piped up my 7-year-old.
– “Boy.”
– “How old?”
– “A year and a half.”
– “Nice and fat, isn’t he? I should think he eats well.”

And so the conversation went on, from general chitchat about her son to my own son’s school, the food, the teachers, and so on.

After ten minutes on the sidelines stamping my feet, I heard myself whine, “I’m freezing, can we go home now?”

“In a minute, I’m just talking,” chided my meter-high master.

A week later, we passed a classmate of his on the back of her grandmother’s bike. She is picked up from school every day by her grandparents. On this particular day, her grandfather had been too busy to come.

I was just about to call out to the little girl, “See you tomorrow!” when a voice rang out from the child seat behind me:

“Her grandfather hasn’t come to pick her up today, then?”

He didn’t address his own peer; it was Grandma he spoke to, who simply answered, “No, not today.”

In this simple greeting, he showed how he knew exactly how a Chinese greeting would be made.

Where I called out the Western “See you tomorrow,” he stated the obvious – just like when you bump into a neighbor, they are likely to ask “Come back then?” when it’s obvious you have just returned home.

Last week, a toothless old man smiled at him in a park.

“What happened to your teeth?” immediately piped up my little boy.

“Oh, they just fell out,” said the old man, with no trace of offense.

If a Western child had said that to a Western old man, his mother would have scolded him for being rude, but here my son had already worked out that as he meant no offense, the old man wouldn’t take any.

I started feeling quite grumpy about this talent as we got home.

Then, suddenly: “Mummy, I can’t open the door, and I’m hungry, and I want some milk, can I have a lollipop?’

Well, at least between ourselves I still have the power.

Debbie Mason has lived in Beijing for more than ten years. She thought her Chinese was okay until she realized she could not understand her son and his Chinese playmates. In a bid to try and keep up with her 7-year-old, Debbie is taking Chinese classes at Live the Language. Follow her progress with her blog posts on beijingkids.

Photo by ernop via Flickr