Chinese English

I’m not gonna keep working at the bridal shop when it’s not fun anymore.  I pray that it remains fun until it’s time for the next thing – paid prison work? Full-time seminary?  Some other strange thing that I get it in my head to do?

Lately, the best part of working there is getting to know better the head of the alterations department, a woman from Hong Kong who knows A WHOLE LOT about design, construction, tailoring, and running a business.  She’s super bossy, which is lucky for me, since I love bossy women. 

Also lucky for me is that she's bilingual, so my monolingual ass gets to enjoy some of her jokes.  I really love (in what I hope is not just an exoticising way, but which I’m really having to check) the chance to get more familiar with the grammar of Chinese English – particularly the phonology and syntax.  I really wish I knew more about Cantonese so that I could recognize the ways that Cantonese grammatical structures are mapping onto her dialect of English.

A Google search brought me here, and Amy Tan writes about her mother’s English in “Mother Tongue,” and for a class on race and rhetoric I audited last year, we read this, but otherwise I couldn’t find much.  Curious.  I’d heard that Black Language was the most studied dialect of English, but I didn’t know it was like that.

Makes me think about this. "What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?" Yeah.  --- But it's really different when it comes to Asian cultural practices.  There were certainly kids of all races who were into anime, but none of those kids were “popular.” Whatever that means – but you know and I know that it means something.  That's all I can think of.  Or maybe my unknowing participation in an anti-Asian ideology blinded me to Asian cultural practices my students were taking up.

We have a tradition of making Asian people the butt of jokes in our movies.  Here’s the classic example, but it’s not like we’re done with that shit. And maaaaaan were there anti-Asian racist jokes rampant on the campus of UIUC where the number of Chinese students has dramatically increased over the past decade.

Why isn’t there more written about Chinese English(es)?  (Or are my Googling skills lacking? Maybe it's called something else?) I’m more curious now about how anti-Asian racism, including linguistic discrimination, works.  It’s not as if White America’s addiction to reappropriating Black culture in any way protects Black people from racist violence of the physical, emotional, and cognitive persuasions. (Probably has something to do with the simultaneous shaming of Black Language and cultural practices – e.g. “aks a question”)

So perceived demonstration of Black cultural practices earns somebody social power (but not enough social power to avoid being murdered by the police), while the perceived demonstration of Asian cultural practices is laughably uncool (but affords some privilege of safety)?  I’m thinking “out loud” here.  And I’m stuck.