"Ahtomachee Achee."

Whenever I read the biblical story of the Tower of Babel about God making everybody speak different languages after seeing that they stopped listening and respecting each other when they all could speak the same language, I think about the difficulty that I had in communicating with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in Taiwan.   It turns out that relationships are pretty hard to keep up if you can't speak the same language.

When I was growing up, we spoke Taiwanese at home.  Most of my Taiwanese is baby talk - I know how to ask for milk, how to say that I want to go to sleep, how to say I'm hungry - these kind of very important phrases. I was naturally quiet, so when I attended Kindergarten in Lexington (we rented in Lexington one year) I did a lot of quiet observation.

One day, I was kneeling on the floor near a boy who was playing with wooden blocks.  My hands were by my side, I was just watching.  Suddenly, the boy took a block and smacked me in the lip.  I cried.  I told my mother what happened. She was livid.  She went to talk to the teacher who explained that I needed to learn how to speak to defend myself, --that I needed to practice speaking English.  My mother was so mad at that teacher that had she not been brought up to revere teachers, she would have smacked the teacher in the mouth.  But instead, she came home and told me that we needed to speak in English at home for more practice. And from that point on, I have only spoken English to my parents. 

So I lost my facility with Taiwanese. When we visited Taiwan a few years later when I was 8 years old, I could not communicate with my relatives in Taiwan.  I understood what they were saying, but I just couldn't respond. I was out of practice. My grandfather lamented that his grandchildren couldn't talk to each other. 

One day when we had lunch in the kitchen, I could not bring myself to eat the chicken soup.  I stared at the chicken feet sticking out of the soup tureen and just shook my head. My grandfather said in Taiwanese, that if I wasn't going to eat the soup than how could he?  I did not know how to respond, even if I could have. Was it a joke? I couldn't figure it out. But another time when I walked into the kitchen, I was holding my stomach. I wasn't feeling so well and my grandfather said in his loud voice,

            "Ahtomachee Ahchee."

I couldn't figure it out at first, but then realized that he was mispronouncing the words, "Stomach ache."  He was trying to speak in English to me!  I was so touched. They weren't particularly poetic or even correct English words, but he tried.

The language of Taiwanese is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese. The written characters are the same. In Taiwanese schools, the powers that be made a decision in recent years to teach Mandarin Chinese in the schools.  That means that the older generation who can only speak and write in Taiwanese cannot communicate with their grandchildren.  To me this is a tragedy of epic proportions, because it makes communication within families as difficult as it was for me to communicate with my grandparents. Language is extremely important for passing along memories.