'Where We Come From': Emily Kwong's Story

Short Wave

NPR

News, Life Sciences, Daily News, Nature, Science, Astronomy

4.7 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nearly 1 billion people speak Mandarin Chinese. But Short Wave host Emily Kwong is not among them. As a third generation Chinese American, Emily's heritage language was lost through the years when her father, Christopher Kwong, stopped speaking the language at a young age in order to adjust to life in the U.S. Now, at age 30, Emily's trying to reclaim Chinese by attending virtual Mandarin classes for the first time. In conversation with her father, Emily explores how being 'Chinese enough' gets tied up in language fluency, and how language is a bridge that can be broken and rebuilt between generations — as an act of love and reclamation.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, Emily Kwong here. So all year, I've been working on a story for a new NPR series called Where We Come From,
0:08.2	which tackles a question that immigrant families of color get asked all the time.
0:13.2	Where are you from? Where do you come from?
0:15.1	What seems like an easy question?
0:16.7	Oh, where are you really from?
0:18.3	Cares with it so much weight.
0:19.6	Where do you belong?
0:20.6	In the in between
0:21.6	I belong to myself.
0:23.6	It's an emotional environment.
0:26.6	Soy de aquí.
0:27.8	This is a complicated question to answer.
0:31.3	And for me, a pretty emotional one.
0:34.1	I'm Chinese American, but I haven't always felt Chinese American.
0:38.7	And a big reason why is that I don't speak my grandparents' language,
0:43.2	Mandarin Chinese.
0:45.1	I remember the first time someone called me out on this, this four-year-old kid we just met,
0:50.2	she had one white parent and one Chinese parent, just like me.
0:53.9	But after looking me up and down, she goes,
0:57.2	I'm more Chinese than you because I can speak the language.
1:01.7	And there it was.
1:02.8	This line in the sand between a more Chinese person and a less Chinese person.
	...

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