| Kali Prasad |
Posted
on 07-Mar-02 05:08 PM
The Proper Daughter
By Annie Wang
Chapter Two
To: Sis
From: Cici
Subject: Want To Be Like You
Dear Sister,
Thank you so much for sending me the CD of the Phantom of the Opera. My roommates all wanted to borrow it from me. I only lent it to Nina since I believe only she has the suitable taste. Others can't appreciate the Phantom of the Opera because they only listen to Backstreet Boys and some stupid Taiwanese singers every day. I guess they wanted to borrow the CD from me only because they knew it was from the U.S. Anything from America is desired here. None of them plays the piano or is familiar with the melody of The Nutcracker. I have nothing in common with them.
Nina is the only one in my dorm room that could talk about Italian operas, Broadway musicals, Bach, Schubert, Strauss with me. I am quite disappointed that my college classmates are so shallow. American students must be less shallow, am I right? I feel fortunate that I was born into the Chen family. Our parents didn't leave us to flirt with boys when we were young; they sent us to learn music and dance.
Today, Nina and I were imagining your life in New York while listening to the Phantom of the Opera together: seeing Broadway shows every night, skating in the Rockefeller Center, listening to Jazz in a Soho bar or hymns in a Harlem church, drinking cappuccino in East Village, visiting used bookstores Walt Whitman had visited. What a life! The free American life, the dream of me and all my classmates.
Can you imagine my life? Political sessions, revolutionary history studies, endless exams ... Our dorm has a new policy to cut off electricity at 10:00 p.m. every day. We were told it is for the sake of saving the planet and the environment. But everybody wants to get ahead, so we use flashlights to study after 10:00 p.m.
There is a girl named Yu whose only dream is to speak beautiful English. She is a freak. At first she tried to memorize words from her Oxford English-Chinese dictionary and tore each page she had remembered. Her dictionary had almost nothing left except the cover, but she still got an F in each English exanimation. So she started to eat the pages she had torn out. You know the Chinese logic, men believe they can be more vigorous by eating the penises of bulls and tigers. Yu thought that she could remember all the English words by eating a dictionary.
After everything failed, Yu got desperate. She went to hotel lobbies to meet native English speakers in order to improve her oral English. Guess what? Last week, she was punished by our school because she was caught by the police with a Canadian man in his hotel room alone around midnight. The man was not wearing a shirt when the two were busted.
Some say Yu prostitutes herself in order to speak good English. I don't know if it's true or not. I don't want to learn English in such a humiliating way, but I am anxious to pick up my spoken English. Sister, how did you manage to speak such good English? Perhaps you are naturally smarter. Our parents often say that I was not supposed to be born because of the one child policy. I guess I was lucky enough to be given the chance to have this life in the first place. I should try my best to live up to the expectation of our folks.
Your Little Sister Who Badly Wants To Be Like You,
Cici
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She, the older sister, is named Rene. She has gone by that name for five years now. Giving up her Chinese name was the first thing she did after arriving in America.
She is sitting in the Starbucks in Beijing, drinking cappuccino, rereading the printouts of the old e-mails her little sister Cici sent to her a year ago. Rene likes to keep records of everything, including letters and e-mails, because otherwise she is afraid that she would forget things too easily.
The two middle-aged men who sit next to her keep smoking even though the non-smoking sign is painted as red as the Chinese flag. The Starbucks represents a new cosmopolitan Beijing; the smokiness in the air betrays that things are not that different from five years ago when she left the country.
She has just returned home and doesn't want to go native right away. She is always aware of the perils of going native. That's why she has chosen to sit in a Starbucks and wear her Harvard T-shirt.
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To: Sis
From: Cici
Subject:
Dear Sister,
Thank you for encouraging me. You are right, it is sad that speaking good English becomes more important than speaking good Chinese in China nowadays. But what can we do? Even the government leaders love to show off their English. With good English skills, one can easily find a good job that pays much more. I studied the women who held high government positions in Hong Kong and found that many of them were English majors. China would be like that too.
I am good at grammar, but I get nervous to speak out. Americans open their mouths too wide. The British only move their lips. I can't do either.
I am happy that you are having a good time in New York. Your internship will officially start in two weeks, right? I guess you won't be this carefree after it begins.
I am a bit disappointed at you when you say that you don't care much about family honor now. Family honor has always been the motivation behind us. I remember when we were young, you told me that we Chinese use our family names first, then our own names, but in most other cultures, family names come after first names. You proudly told me that we Chinese value family more than anything else.
I understand that you have become more Americanized. But Americans are not much into family issues? I don't think so. Their president, G. W. Bush, is proud of his family name and holds his family honor dear. We were born into the Chen family, we should be proud of our blood. Each of us should be responsible for the honor of other family members. That's what our parents have taught us and what I have believed in.
Cici
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