Struggles of a bi-lingual child

One of the advantages of having a euro-asian child, as I see it, is the opportunity for the child to learn two languages from a  very young age, and possibly optimising the child’s intellectual capacity at a time when the child has capacity to spare.

Because of my mother-in-law, my child learned to speak Mandarin in parallel with his English from the start.

This may or may not explain why my son experienced speech delay problems when he reached about 12 months old, but I suspect not.

These delay problems eventually required about 4 years of speech pathology treatment. I suspect however that maybe my son had an inherent weakness with language to begin with, rather than any complications arising out of his bi-lingual environment.

Despite my son making remarkable progress with his English speech once he entered speech pathology, he still struggles with learning Mandarin.

At this stage my son has a genuine appreciation of the English language. He is an excellent speller and he has developed a very broad and impressive vocabulary.

But his Mandarin, despite being given every opportunity to learn, is quite woeful.

He attends Chinese lessons once a week, and I am wondering whether more lessons will help him gain some traction in this language.

It would be a terrible shame if my son does not master this language, given the importance of this language to my son’s heritage, and the ever growing role this language will play on the world scene.

Talking & hearing Chinese

I was always quite good at school.

I excelled in maths and physics, biology and chemistry, but always did exceptionally well in English.

When I went to University I also studied French as an aside, foolishly believing at the stage that French was still an important language to learn.

To my credit I picked it up rather quickly, and can still speak it well today.

So you may think that I have an aptitude for languages, given that history, and I would have agreed with you before I was confronted with a language that I can hardly “hear”, and one that simply does not follow any of the language structures that I am familiar with.

I realised that my ability to learn French, as well as some self-taught conversational German, was less to do with my exceptional prowess at absorbing language, and more to do with paralleling similar language structures.

German for instance is effectively the mother tongue of English, and is very similar to English in its structures. French, although less so, is still a related language with similar sounds and language rules.

Chinese Mandarin however is a completely different beast. Although I have become very familiar with so many words, given that I hear them every single day, I am still at a loss when I try and repeat these words.

Even my son laughs at me when he hears my Chinese.

“No daddy” he laughs. “It doesn’t sound like that at all.”

The problem is not simply in the pronunciation of course. It starts off in the hearing, and there are so many nuances in the Chinese language, that once you get to a particular age, you will forever struggle to hear.

So I struggle, although I wish it wasn’t so.

If only I could learn Chinese, I sometimes think, it would open up an incredible new world for me, one where I would directly engage with so many people that I am surrounded by, people that otherwise are off limits to me because of the language barrier.

Taking off my shoes in the house

Like most Australians I have always worn my footwear in the house.

As a young boy the only time there was an issue with footwear in the house was when there was mud on my shoes.

When I initially met my future wife, as a matter of courtesy and respect I would always take my shoes off before entering her unit.

I did this as a show of respect for her property, her unit, her home. It did not occur to me at the time that if I was to marry this woman at some point, that I would be forgoing my home life sensibilities for hers.

But so it was.

No compromise, no meeting in the middle, no delicate mix between of east and west.

Basically I live my home life as if I was raised in a Chinese family.

This expectation laso extends to the TV set. In fact watching TV for anything other than the new is  big no-no. The house is almost always quiet, with some activity going on that requires silence, or so I am told.

Anytime I watch sport on TV, I am quickly reminded that I am being lazy. No ifs or buts.

What is not appreciated by my wife is that many Australians keep the TV on at all times, simply as background noise that will take our attention from time to time, but we still get all our work done.

Completely different approach to home life, and one that I simply didn’t expect when I entered into a cross-cultural relationship.

Racism or just Parental Anxiety

We recently went away for a long weekend.

It was me, my wife and our son. My mother-in-law went to stay with her son for a week.

We travelled up north and had a really great time. We drove up the coast casually, taking our time and seeing the sights.

We finally got to the Gold Coast in Queensland, and this part of the trip was our son's favourite.

He got to go to Movie World, Sea World and Wet and Wild Water World.

All was going remarkably well. My wife and I were in a great mood, and really attentive to each other. Our focus however was on our child, and we both marveled at the joy of simply being parents, and spending quality time with our one and only child.

Well, all was great but for one incident, that for some reason made a huge impact on me emotionally, but did not register at all with my wife.

Whilst we were at Wet and Wild Water World, there was a section where most of the young kids and parents would congregate, which involved a huge water feature with a large pirate bucket that would fill up with water, and periodically dump the water on all the young kids below.

It was quite contagious hearing the laughter and enjoyment of all the young kids running around and screaming everytime they would get wet.

It was especially wonderful watching my young boy, who is typically quite shy, run around with free abandon, completely enjoying himself and engaging with other children of his age.

Well at this point a large blow-up ball entered the scene, and along with the water features, the children started kicking this ball around.

At one point the ball landed near my son, and he prepared to kick it, jokingly going back and forth as if he were about to kick the ball, but pulling back at the last minute.

Everyone present found this quite amusing, especially my wife and I. We were also really proud of our son for showing the confidence to play-act as he was, in front of what was effectively a group of strangers.

Well, everyone was laughing at our boy's antics but for one other child, another boy roughly the same age as our boy, about 8 years old.

He impatiently began calling out to my son to kick the ball.

What stunned me was the language he used.

The boy, as if to taunt my son, began calling out:

"Hey China, kick the ball! Kick the ball Chopsticks!"

He repeated this taunt one more time, before my son finally kicked the ball.

My son completely ignored the comment. It simply didn't register with my son. I am not sure if this was because my son didn't hear what was said or how it was said, or if my boy simply selected to ignore it.

My wife on the other hand heard what was said, but did not even look at me to signal concern.

It left me wondering whether my reaction was an over-reaction.

But what I felt was remarkably strong and overwhelming. I even felt completely, as embarrassed as I am to say this now, to approach the boy, a young 8 year old boy, and abuse him for talking that way to my son.

Luckily I held my composure, but expressed my feelings to my wife soon after.

She said she did not consider it racism, it was just a silly comment from a young child.

maybe she was right. Maybe the fact that I am a fair-skinned European has somehow mis-calibrated my sense of what constitutes racism, and what may simply be a simple reckless comment.

I guess as parent I am programmed to be over-protective of my son, but incidents like this leave me feeling anxious about the next time that this happens, and if it is a more serious incident.

I want to be there to always protect my son, but of course that is unrealistic.

It is one of the burdens of having a racially mixed child I guess.

Re-writing history

I have been very confused lately.

I don't know if somehow things have settled down and life goes on as normal, or whether I am simply fooling myself.

My state of mind is earily similar to a friend of mine who a few years ago separated from his wife.

His wife was Russian, and they did not go through the typical courtship process.

My friend had previously got an Australian woman pregnant, and only because of his persistance and use of very expensive lawyers did he finally manage to get a shared parenting arrangement, whereby his daughter lived with him for 5 days a fortnight.

So after a very distressing ordeal, which involved the full complement of anti-father agencies in this country, he managed against the odds to get a very positive arrangement for him and his young daughter.

So perhaps you could imagine the absolute shock of all his friends when we found out that without much thought as to the eventual consequences, he popped over the Russia and somehow managed to commit himself to a woman that he hardly knew.

Given what he had already gone through with an Australian woman, we all wondered what in heavens he was thinking doing it all over again, but this time with a foreigner from an ex-communist state.

Well, true to form, within three years of arriving to Australia, she kicked him out of his own house, she wouldn't let him see his two kids, and she launched legal proceedings against him.

He was shattered, but more than that he was very very angry.

For about 6 months I heard a man completely committed to getting full custody of his kids, kicking his wife (and her new boyfriend) out of his house, and then moving on with his life.

In his eyes she had betrayed him in the most malicious manner, and nothing could undo the damage that was done to this relationship. Absolutely nothing!

She had kicked him out of his own home.

She had made false allegations of domestic violence against him.

She had removed $240,000 from his bank account (not sure how she managed that one).

She had refused to let him see his kids;

and "a new man" moved into the house.

Pretty serious stuff, and quite unequivocal.

Well, 6 months later he called me up one day to tell me that he and his wife had reconciled.

There was a very long and strained pause on the phone at that moment, as this was the last thing I expected from him.

He then proceeded to rationalise, and in a way to re-write history.

He told me that his wife really didn't have a boyfriend, he was just a Russian friend that moved in for companionship.

He told me that his wife really didn't want to make allegations of domestic violence against him, but she was strong-armed into it by the women's legal service she was using.

He went on and on, revising everything that had occured, somehow making it all out to be a simple misunderstanding.

"And what happenned to the $240,000?" I asked.

He said that in anger his wife sent it to her family in Russia, and they spend it.

"It's only money" he then added, in a defeated tone.

At the end of the conversation, he realised that I simply wasn't buying it, and I guess at one level neither was he.

So he ended by saying:

"You know, I just don't have the balls for this. Separation is a lot harder than I thought. If it means that I simply will have to give her what she wants to avoid more problems, then I am preparaed to do this."

I was shocked and disappointed. I had previously looked up to this guy. He was a ball-beaking business man, he was ultra-competitive at everything he did, and he drew a line in the sand with his child custody matter, and stuck to it no matter how difficult it may have been.

Here he was now however, a broken man, essentially trying to deceive me, but more importantly himself, on the most crucial matter of his married life.

So here I am reflecting back on this friend of mine, who is incidently still married, but never calls me anymore.

I am wondering whether I too am somehow revising circumstances.

Paranoid delusions and fear of Abduction

In the past I have tolerated my wife's quirk's, and I viewed them as managable little issues that would resolve themselves with a dose of common sense.

Maybe I have been too tolerant however, and just maybe, these little quirk's were something more than that, maybe even something pathalogic like a paranoid disorder.

One example for instance hapenned not that long ago, but this is just one of many.

My wife had formed the belief that our electrician was trying to assasinate her. This was the word she used "assasinate".

She came to this conclusion when he hapenned to leave a cutting tool behind on our kitchen table after he was called to fix a faulty fuse.

My wife saw this as a symbolic gensture that he was jealous of her, and wanted her life to suffer.

The electrician was a small, timid Chinese man, who spoke in broken English, but who was called by my wife because he was cheap.

This little benign incident took a life of its on, when my wife started "seeing" the electrician following us when we were out.

My wife kept on demanding that I confront him about his assasination attemps (apparently my wife heard the sound of gunshots close to our home).

She kept on fretting that he will drive past our house and shoot her.

Anyway, that bizarre period died a slow death, and only so when I demanded that she not speak of it again lest I take her to a psychiatrist.

Now there are many more incidents like this, and I have always taken the approach that she is my wife, and I have an obligation to stick with her and manage whatever she has going on in her head together.

I also believed that my son would be infinitely better off with my constant watchful eye on his mother, rather than a likely outcome of my son being in his mother's sole custody.

I mention my son because a number of times my wife's delusion revolved completely around my son, and had it not been for my resistance she would have involved the child, I believe, in a harmful way.

Well I raise all this because I have been recently following story in the press about a father who had similar experiences with his wife, to the point where she finally accused him of sexually abusing their child.

The story (The father who never gave up)involved a mother who imagined one bizarre incident after another, and finally abducted the child internationally to protect the child from the father.

The psychiatric analysis of the mother showed a history of paranoid delusions that climaxed into her fixation on the father.

Now this story has really worried me. My wife has not yet made such comments to lead me to believe that she has developed such beliefs, but she does want to send the child to China for 4 years, and so I am left wondering.

Outsourcing children to be raised in China

Well, even though we have technically reconciled, it seems that every second day I have to put out a new spot fire.

I do not seem to be able to get any respite within this relationship.

My wife has now come to the conclusion that our son needs to be taken to China and left there for four years, so that he can learn Mandarin proper.

When my son was just born, we went through a similar episode where my wife insisted that we send the newborn to China with her mother, to be raised in China for the first eight years of his life. She argued that this would free us to make more money and not be tied down by having to raise a child.

I said "No" back then, despite it causing a lot of arguments, and I am saying "No" again.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

My wife and I have come to an uncomfortable truce, one borne out of necessity rather than preference.

I guess it kind of operates like the Bill Clinton Military policy on gays, where it was a case of "Don't ask, don't tell".

For my part I have come to this point purely as a case of exhaustion, and my strong belief that if I push this issue any further I will simply be labelled a jealous and paranoid husband.

I have also reached the conclusion that I know as much as I will ever know about what has happened.

What I do know however with complete certainty is that there has definitely been no sex or physical contact involved, if that really make a difference.

There are a number of reasons why I know this.

(1) Firstly, my wife simply would not have had the opportunity to make the time for the required rendezvous'. Like many Chinese mothers, she is completely immersed in her career, in her out-of-work-hours book-keeping work, and taking our son to his almost daily extra-curricular activities.

An 'affair' would consume too much time, and would take her away from what she loves doing most.

(2) Secondly, as one of the readers suggested, I did in fact lodge a helpdesk request to recover the emails that were sent from my wifes email address.

What I got back was 6 emails only, and they only provided me the date, sender, subject title and receiver deatils. Apparently there are some kind of privacy provisions to prevent snooping and the like, and thus the body of the email is not stored in the firewall, or something like that anyway.

I got the feeling that Helpdesk were a little suspicious of my request, and I was told that if I cared to get the complete emails, I could simply ask the recipient (being of course James, the lawyer).

Well, at least I got something I thought, but unfortunately 4 of the emails had one non-descript subject title of "re: Hi"

However, two of the email subject titles were more descriptive.

They had the title of "Do you remember what I look like?", and "re: Do you remember what I look like?".

This subject title is in keeping with what my wife told me about James, that they met once, and more importantly she said to me that she doesn't "remember what he even looks like!"

It adds up that is she asked him if he remembered what she looked like, she would likely have also had problems remembering what he looked like.

(3) The third point is the most convincing for me personally.

You see, prior to my wife I had one other Chinese girlfriend, but she was from Hong Kong.

This girl, lets call her Elizabeth, was sexually liberal in bed, and contributed to the love making on an equal footing. She was also affectionate and physically intimate when circumstances called for it.

My wife however has been anything but, from when we first met.

When we first started dating, my wife would not hold hands. I can honestly not recall her ever holding my hand willingly.

What further surprised me was her complete distate for kissing. She in fact regularly rejected my efforts to kiss on the mouth by calling it an "unhigenic practice."

We actually had sex before we had ever kissed or even hugged, which I find remarkable to this day.

And our sex flows along these same lines. My wife lies back and her arms are strethed down along her legs. She doesn't move her arms, and she never touches during love making.

When I face her face, or when another part of my body is in the vicinity of her face, she turns her head to one side, and there it remains.

I remember on one ocassion without any prompting from me, my wife told me that she was to perform a sexual act on me, in order to show me how much she loved me.

Given her frigidity, this was a remarkable offer from my wife, one I still cherish with great fondness to this day. However it lasted barely 2 seconds, with her making strange throat noises and running to the bathroom to spit.

So, my point is, even though I have been content to accept these quirkes because I care for my wife, I simply can't see her having sex with another man as anything but a serious inconvenience for her, and as such, very unliklely.

...but of course, all those emails and all those phone point to something don't they?