The Heart of a TCK -- Part Four

With the alienation from the Chinese community came a sense of shame. I remember my parents' friends making comments about me losing my Chinese identity because I was losing my ability to communicate in Chinese and Taiwanese (a dialect that originated in Fu Jian Province, China). Was I actually "losing" my ability to communicate in Chinese (which I only studied up until first or second grade) or was it that I simply did not develop the communicative and grammatical competence of the language necessary to express the thoughts of a grown child/teenager? I believe it's the latter. As a child, I knew enough Chinese to express myself as a child, but as I grew up, I needed more sophisticated ways to express myself. And the knowledge of Chinese that I had, which was at the first/second grade level, was simply not enough nor adequate. So Spanish became the language by which I expressed myself as an older boy, and then English became the language by which I expressed myself as a teenager. In essence, the Spanish and English that I learned gave me the vocabulary, grammar, functions, etc. by which I could express myself at the different developmental stages of my life.