On Learning the Mother Tongue (Not the National Language)

by Linda Petrucelli

The Taiwan I remember in the 1980’s was a linguistic buffet that a language-lover like me could feast on forever. I was working part-time as a campus minister at Indiana University when my dream of finding a job overseas came true. I had been looking for a repeat experience of my junior year abroad, spent in Nepal, and which included immersion language training. 

The organization that invited me to work for them, the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT), used to say that on any given Sunday, their congregants worshipped in at least thirteen different languages—on an island not much larger than New Jersey. Of the thirteen, a large number were languages spoken by the island’s indigenous peoples, as well as Taiwanese, Hakka, and Mandarin Chinese. 

After I arrived, the question quickly became—which language was I going to learn? In hindsight, I’m grateful that a church committee made that decision for me. I would learn Tai-oan-oe, Southern Min Dialect, the mother tongue of about 80% of Taiwan’s population.

Immediately, members of the expat community questioned my not learning Mandarin.

Taiwanese is a dying language, they told me. Everyone seemed to have a similar opinion—

The only people who speak Taiwanese are uneducated yokels. Mandarin is the language used in schools, media, the courts. There’ll be so much you won’t understand. You’ll never learn characters. Besides, Mandarin is much easier to learn.

The expats were right about what a kick in the head learning Taiwanese would turn out to be. Mandarin, with its four stable tones, was a cake walk compared to Taiwanese, with eight tones that changed according to a few rules and a million exceptions. Even the slowest Mandarin learners were able to buy train tickets and order noodles in their first month—while I was still stuck in the Taiwanese Pronunciation Guide, memorizing a written system called Lo-ma-ji—an alphabet-based notation used to represent eight musically mystifying, up-and-down sounds.

Challenges also came from my Taiwanese neighbors, Ong Sin-se* and his wife Ong tai-tai. The Ongs explained to me, communicating in their own version of English, that Taiwanese was considered Tai-ke, low class. All foreigners ought to speak the official language. Certainly an American should. They were a young and prosperous couple who spoke Taiwanese between themselves but only Mandarin to their children. Like so many parents I met, they were more interested in their children’s advancement than their ability to converse with oldsters like a-gong or a-ma.

Desperate to practice my Taiwanese, I would hang around the tea shops and vegetable markets in my urban Kaohsiung neighborhood. After taking one look at me, (a-tok-ga, big nosed foreigner) people I had heard speaking Taiwanese would immediately switch to Mandarin. I’d say, Please, speak Taiwanese. And they’d answer back in Mandarin. I’d say, I don’t understand! And they’d still answer in Mandarin. Once, while buying fruit, a woman shouted to her friend across from her stall, Get over here, there’s an a-tok-ga who wants to buy a jin of bananas and I can’t understand a word she’s saying! 

My language teacher, Mrs. Tan, explained it this way: What do you expect? People see a foreign face and in response, speak a foreign language.

I soon learned how to steel my ego against the inevitable laughter. I’d say the traditional greeting, Li chiah pa be? and people would break out in giggles. I was a linguistic oddity. A talking doll.

I studied Taiwanese full-time at the Kaohsiung Branch of the Taipei Language Institute (TLI) — the same institution where American journalist Nicolas Kristoff studied Mandarin. Often, there would be only a few of us studying Taiwanese while classmates learning the National Language crowded the student lounge.

With time, I slowly came to understand how a Taiwanese-speaking foreigner elicited such controversy. 

For one thing, Taiwanese has known a history of suppression and criminalization since the Kuomintang (KMT) took over the island from the Japanese after World War ll. The KMT enforced the use of Mandarin Chinese as the official language. Many of my Presbyterian colleagues were punished, called denigrating names, and rapped with rulers for speaking Taiwanese as students. This linguistic tension also reflected a simmering history of mistrust and some sporadic violence between the native Taiwanese speakers who were already living on the island and the later arrivals from Mainland China, followers of KMT President Chiang-Kai-Shek. 

When I lived in Taiwan, the island had the longest history of martial law in the world. It occurred to me that some Taiwanese people were fearful that speaking to me might make them subject to investigation or get them into trouble. Others, I would learn after becoming friends, were suspicious that I might be a foreign spy. 

A subversive air surrounded me when I spoke Taiwan’s mother tongue. My speaking Taiwanese affirmed the cultural struggle of a people. Witnessed a language’s value. Speaking Taiwanese also created unusually intimate bonds with native speakers, as I learned once I began my work assignment after eighteen months of language study. A rising social consciousness had spurred the PCT into opening service centers designed to advocate for sex workers, injured laborers and fishermen. My job, which I held for the next seven years, was to help raise international awareness and funds. 

One night, my landlady, a church elder, invited me to dinner at her home. At the end of the meal, as we were sipping some marvelous tea, she closed all the windows and locked the front door. She lowered her voice, leaned towards me and asked, “Do you know Ji Ji Pat?” She then went on to describe an incident that occurred on 2-2-8, February 28, 1947, that marked a period of civil terror on the island. Thousands of students, civic leaders and Taiwanese intelligentsia disappeared. It was a forbidden topic when my landlady spoke of it and not acknowledged in history books. Just to say the words Ji Ji Pat, could earn you a visit from the KMT secret police. I can’t imagine her telling me about this forbidden history in Mandarin.

My inability to speak Mandarin, though, did exclude me from certain academic and civic sectors, and reading characters remained out of my reach. Taiwanese grammar is hugely different from written Chinese. I was essentially illiterate. But Taiwanese opened different doors. Once my language improved, I was able to convince people to listen to what I was saying and not react to what I looked like or represented. 

Learning Taiwanese requires a number of vocal acrobatics. There’s a nasal tone, the phi*-im, that makes you produce sound through your nose. There are aspirated consonants that make your jaw ache. And of course, it’s a tonal language, where the meaning of a word is communicated through its pitch—and for all intents and purposes, you have to learn how to sing.

Just about every student of a tonal language has at least one embarrassing tale about mixing up their tones. You go high when you should go low and suddenly you are inadvertently referring to a sexual organ or making some other crazy mistake. My big blooper occurred the first time I preached in Taiwanese. I got so nervous in the pulpit that my agitated emotional state began to affect my tones. I intended to say, Jesus went about teaching all the people. But instead, I changed a seventh tone into a fourth and proudly proclaimed Jesus went about biting all the people to death. I knew I must have really flubbed it when all the church elders praised my piau-chun accurate Taiwanese tones.

Just before my Taiwanese studies were coming to an end, I was invited to compete in the TLI annual language contest. Foreigners from all over the island presented speeches, poetry recitations, musical acts, and short dramas before a national televised audience. Mrs. Tan worked her connections and recruited three Taiwanese-speaking students to perform a beloved local folk tale called Ho-ko-bo, the Tiger Aunt. Mrs. Tan also wrote the script and cast me in the title role, a villainous Tiger who masquerades as a long-lost relative, and attempts to eat two little girls left home alone.

The cast traveled to Taipei and performed the play along with about twenty other entries, most of them in Mandarin. What I didn’t know till later, was that Ho-ko-bo carried a hidden political subtext. Allegorically, the KMT was the threat dressed up like family.

At the end of the play, Jade, the surviving little girl, climbs a palm tree and pours hot peanut oil down my character’s throat. This bit of stagecraft we achieved with a wok filled with Christmas tinsel and a death scene pratfall by me that won a standing ovation.

After all the contestants had performed, the judges began announcing the winners. Suddenly I heard my name and Mrs. Tan pushed me toward the steps that led up to the stage. I squinted in the blazing klieg lights, still in full costume, my face painted with tiger stripes and my ratted hair frosted white. On my hands and feet I wore gloves and footies with felt attachments that looked like scary claws. 

I smiled and stood there, not understanding a word anybody was saying. 

I later learned that I had won best performer of the night and had been awarded the Golden Seagull, TLI’s equivalent of an Oscar. When a judge pushed the metal statue into my hands—he whispered in my ear, Goa ia kong Tai-oan-oe, I speak Taiwanese, too.