“I speak Mandarin pretty well because I was part of an experimental method in elementary school,” my dad told me recently, with a hint of pride in his voice. Later, as I drove to work and had silence to think, I realised that he and his contemporaries were victims of forced assimilation.
My dad was born in Taiwan the year before the Chinese Communist Revolution, an event that sent ripples of one million political refugees across a strait of water. As Chinese democrats arrived on the shores of his homeland, my dad was learning how to walk and eating his first solids.
I know little of the Chinese takeover of Taiwan except that it was meant to be a short re-grouping before a counter-revolution. At some point, though, the Chinese settled in Taiwan. As the Japanese colonisers had lost Taiwan at the end of WWII, there was space for another foreign dominating power. One of the most effective ways to kill a culture is by attacking their language.
And so, when my dad entered school in 1954, he became part of the Chinese domination effort.
As much as they have colonised the Indigenous peoples, I’ve seen resistance in the Taiwanese people’s history. Attempts were also made by the Portuguese, Dutch, and various Chinese Imperial leaders, all ruling for a period and then getting kicked out. The Taiwanese are a proud, strong people. “This is our Taiwanese people’s television station,” one TV channel’s motto states. They know that the preservation of their people is through the language.
I didn’t know this history growing up. All I knew was that we spoke Taiwanese and that other Taiwanese people spoke Mandarin. I asked my dad about it once and he told me that it was because of his mum, who was actually Shiraya, an Indigenous people from the plains in the centre of Taiwan. My grandmother, I learned, worked in the back of a fruit shop when the Chinese had taken over. Without schooling or practice, she never felt comfortable speaking in Mandarin. Even Japanese – the language all my grandparents learned in school – was more familiar to her. With her whole world shifting around her, my grandmother chatted comfortably in the back room with her co-workers. The language of the home was always Taiwanese and I’m proud to be able to speak it.
As an adult, I migrated from my own homeland with it’s particular set of colonial histories to yet another colonised land. (Is any land outside of the reach of colonisation??) Here, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the language was once on the brink of extinction as it was attacked, legislated out and nearly disappeared from the deliberate work of a surge of immigrants from faraway lands.
But. Te Reo Māori didn’t die out. Like Indigenous people’s elsewhere, the very existence of Māori has remained a vital challenge to colonisation.
And so, though I do not belong to this land and the stories that form the words are not mine, I work to learn the language of this place. As an immigrant, it’s only right that I do so. And as I learn and speak, read and sing, I stand by the people of this land to say, yes, you will remain. No one outside of these lands speaks your language but that doesn’t matter. I stand with you, to resist.
“It’s not just the words that will be lost [with Indigenous languages dying out]. The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, from ‘Learning the Grammar of Animacy
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