Susie Lau dreads her daughter losing a language

With every FaceTime call to my parents, Nico becomes increasingly agitated by the pixelated image of por por and an inability to understand my mother’s Cantonese questions about school. And with no tangible presence, my mother tongue has become an irritant and an impediment for her. She skulks off from my phone and goes into an emo hole, with only the Encanto soundtrack to placate her.

I recently rewatched the beautiful 2014 film Lilting, directed by Hong Khaou. It’s a bittersweet tale about a Chinese-Cambodian mother stuck in an English retirement home who is rocked by the untimely passing of her son. She begins a lost-in-translation prickly exchange with Ben Whishaw’s character who, unbeknown to her, was her son’s lover. They somehow find common ground in the act of frying bacon with chopsticks, without understanding one another’s speech. That will be Nico and my mother some day, the quicker the nuggets of Cantonese slip away.

And so it’s time to confront the dreaded subject of enforced language schooling as I panic that one day the only line of communication between grandparents and granddaughter will be through a forced exchange of bowls of rice. For those with another tongue in their family, there’s a whole microcosm of Saturday/Sunday language schools that many second/third generation immigrant kids will know well. In a church hall, a community centre or a library there are kids loathing their parents for imposing *insert any language* on them when they would much rather be slothing around at home watching YouTube. In my case, I literally had to be taken by force every Saturday while Live & Kicking was on TV.

At 14, I may have declared dramatically that this was a blatant infringement on my human rights. Two decades later I’m considering subjecting Nico to the same ordeal. The stand-off between her and me won’t be pretty.