The Mother Tongue in Foreign Lands
Heidi North-Bailey, New Zealand
23 June 2016

Written for the Shanghai Writer’s Association residency.

Picture me: dizzy with exhaustion, 23-years-old, staggering under my oversized backpack and verging on full-blown panic. I’m standing in Hong Kong airport after the 12-hour plane ride to get here, a still point in the jostling, streaming crowd. I’ve arrived on the first part of my whirlwind journey that started four weeks ago when, on a quest for adventure, I accepted a job offer to teach English at a language school in Huizhou. I’m waiting to be collected. I have no idea if anyone’s coming or how to reach them if they don’t. And then it hits me. Why my heart is walloping so hard. For the first time I have no internal sense of order – I can’t understand and I can’t communicate. The words I’ve used all my life are failing me – I can’t read or say a single thing. I’m groping, blind. I have no idea how tonavigate this unknown world.

This is twelve years ago. Before the Internet explosion and the world drew closer. I didn’t even know where exactly Huizhou was until my father, the night before driving me to Auckland International Airport, hauled down his world atlas and thumbed through the dusty pages before finally locating China, then southern China. Huizhou was a city of over 3.8 million people I’d been told,almost the same as the entire population of New Zealand (just over 4 million in 2004). It wasn’t even big enough to be featured on Dad’s map.

And that’s how much I knew about China:almost nothing. I knew people spoke Mandarin. I knew the world operated in lushly beautiful characters not letters. But until I arrived how it would feel for me to be rendered illiterate was too big a concept to grasp. While New Zealand is bilingual - English and Maori –we’re still a predominatelyEnglish speaking country. When I went to high school our language option wasn’t Maori, but French. Embarking onan expensive 24-hour plane ride to France to speak to them in their native language seemed such a wild and distant possibility 20 years ago that my interest in French was patchy at best. Besides I wasn’t very good at it.

What I was good at was English. I was one of those children who always read ahead for their age, I escaped into books when life became difficult, and I took my ability to navigate through the world of reading and writing and speaking with ease wholly for granted.?

To go back to my 23-year-old self’s arrival in China,my carefully weighted backpack was full of the of novels I’d failed to read during my recently completed English degree; fat volumes of Dickens, as well as a stash of well-thumbed favourites:Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame. Language was something I lived in.

But coming to China I hadn’t even bought a phrase book – which makes me think of my youthful self with some distain! So here I was, for the first time in my life, illiterate.

My first frantic phone call to Dad was,“Help! Please send a phrase book! They don’t speak ANY English here.” He did, but it took so many months to arrivethat I’d already found other ways to cope. Whichiswhat, I realised, we do.

I cluck-clucked – much to the amusement of fascinated onlookers – to demonstrate I’d like to eat chicken. Iheld up my vegetable cards at food stalls, drew terrible looking crabs and prawns on the back of exercise books, and was bustled into busy kitchens to choose what I wanted by ten staff eager to help me. In doing soI realised that when language fails us, we find other ways to communicate. And sometimes these ways lead to confusion, but sometimes they lead to something more wonderful than ever imagined.

The whole experience gave me a great respect for those who flit with ease between two or more languages and for those who are brave enough to be beginners into a foreign tongue.But most of all, it taught me that stripped of our languages, we are all just human beings, feeling our way towards connection.