How Raising a Multilingual Tot Helped Me Write a Multicultural Novel

The author’s three-year-old son often described his sadness as a wounded heart in Mandarin. In Mandarin, the word for 'sad' is formed by combining the characters for 'wound' (伤) and 'heart' (心), creating 伤心. The child’s literal translation reflected his perspective on minor frustrations, such as losing a friendship, a drawing, or bananas, as deeply impactful events. This moment highlighted the poetic and literal differences between languages, as the author realized her son was not being melodramatic but accurately translating his emotions from Mandarin to English. The experience underscored how language shapes the way we perceive and express feelings.

The author decided to raise her son bilingually in Mandarin and English to maintain his connection to her Chinese heritage, despite not speaking Mandarin regularly since high school. She chose Mandarin partly for its perceived future advantages and partly to preserve a cultural link she felt was important, even though her extended family primarily speaks English. Raising a bilingual child required her to translate her thoughts, stories, and conversations between the two languages. She relied on pinyin, a Romanized transliteration system for Mandarin, to read children’s books to her son, as her own Chinese literacy was limited to a second-grade level. This process made her more aware of the complexities of translation between languages with distinct structures and cultural contexts.

The author observed that English and Mandarin represent emotions and concepts in fundamentally different ways. English uses an alphabet with endless combinations, offering many synonyms for emotions like 'sad,' 'unhappy,' or 'melancholy,' allowing for nuanced expression. Mandarin, however, combines existing Hanzi (Chinese characters) to create new words, often with poetic or conceptual meanings. For example, 'sad' is 伤心 (wound + heart), and 'difficult pass' is 难过. This difference in linguistic structure influenced how the author thought about translation while writing her novel and raising her child. It also highlighted how language reflects cultural perspectives on emotions and experiences.

While translating children’s books and raising her son bilingually, the author was also writing The Chinese Lady, a historical novel set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The novel features four characters who speak English, Cantonese, or both, though the author wrote their internal and spoken words in English. Initially, she included pinyin to add cultural authenticity, but her bilingual experiences led her to reconsider how and when to incorporate Chinese into the text. She aimed to avoid stereotypes or losing cultural nuances while ensuring the novel resonated with a primarily English-speaking, American audience. This process involved careful decisions about translation, transliteration, and the use of Hanzi (Chinese characters).

The author faced challenges in translating words and concepts between English and Chinese, particularly when literal translations lost cultural or contextual meaning. For example, the word 妹仔 literally means 'a young girl' but carries the meaning 'little slave girl' in Chinese, referring to girls sold into service. However, the term 'slave' has different historical and cultural connotations in the United States. To preserve accuracy, she used the Hanzi 妹仔 instead of translating it. Similarly, the term 堂, meaning 'hall' in literal translation, referred to Chinese immigrant associations in San Francisco’s Chinatown. These associations were often described by English-speaking Americans as tongs or 'gangs,' but the author chose to use the Hanzi 堂 for her Chinese characters and the transliterated tong or translation 'gang' for her white characters to reflect their differing perspectives.