Everyone has their own version of growing up as a 1.5-generation immigrant, and this is my story.
I was born in 1988 in Taipei, Taiwan, where it’s common for people to grow up speaking or at least understanding a mother tongue—whether that’s Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, or one of the Indigenous languages—and then learn and use Mandarin at school.
My parents and both sides of my family speak Taiwanese Hokkien, which means that English, technically, is my third language.
But wait a minute. Taiwan was once under Japanese rule before the Republic of China took control in 1945, so our grandparents’ generation would likely have had some exposure to Japanese as well. Taiwanese Hokkien also contains quite a few Japanese loanwords, which can make certain Japanese vocabulary feel surprisingly familiar to Taiwanese speakers.
When people talk about learning English, they usually describe it as learning a second language, or ESL. But for me, English has always been a third language. I just didn’t realize it at the time.
Growing up in Taiwan, being able to speak a mother tongue at home while learning and using Mandarin at school was so normal that I never really thought of myself as multilingual. It was simply the way life worked.
Now I wonder: did growing up between multiple languages have anything to do with the confusion I later experienced around language acquisition—and the additional identity crisis that came after my family moved to the States?
Maybe this is where my story begins.
