Dougherty 1 Jack Dougherty English 101: Living Multilingualism Dr.

Mandy Suhr-Sytsma 16 September 2013 Lost on a Hong Kong Subway Growing up, my mom always tried to teach me a few Mandarin terms here and there, but of course it never caught on because I never spoke the language on a daily basis. One summer between elementary school and middle school, I took an impromptu trip to Hong Kong with my mom to deal with a family emergency, which in a string of coincidences, ended up lasting almost 3 months. On the sixteen-hour plane ride over there we practiced as many basic terms as we could. These were phrases were along the lines of, Jack. (Hello, my name is Jack) and (I would like to order a bowl of rice). Over the first weeks there, we spent a lot of time meeting up with relatives and family friends of my mom that I had never met before. I did my best to assimilate with these people that my mom held in high esteem but could do little more than utter awkward responses with my limited knowledge of the language. Needless to say, I had a lot of time to spend sitting in the back listening to conversations that I didnt understand. However, as the days turned into weeks, I started to pick up on words, and then full sentences that turned into small dialogues. I ended up coming out of that trip with much more than a functional knowledge of Chinese language. In fact, I came home with a new mentality when it came to learning as well as an experience that I will never forget. One afternoon I accompanied my mother, Yuki and grandmother Oi Poh to the shore, but to do so in Hong Kong one must navigate a concrete jungle of busses, subways, and taxis to get there. Since its such a densely populated city, owning a personal car is almost unheard of unless

Dougherty 2 one is extremely wealthy. Therefore nearly every person relies on public transportation for daily commutes. Being an eight year-old boy growing up in the 2000s, I was of course distracted by one of the Pokmon games on the Gameboy personal gaming system. On the subway system, they pack everybody into the car like sardines so tightly and rapidly that it is very easy to become disoriented. I called (Mom, will you look at this!?) to tell her about one of my exploits in the game and received no response. All I heard above the murmur of random conversations was what sounded like someone elses mother scolding a child in Chinese and what sounded like a businessman frantically working out the intricacies of some deal. And in that moment, in one of the most densely populated places on the face of the earth, I experienced true panic for the first time in my life. To this day we dont know how we got separated. I started to run through ever crevice I could find in that subway car from around/through peoples legs to hurdling peoples baggage. Mom was nowhere to be found. I started to cry, and nobody could console my 8-year-old self because I could not speak Chinese well enough to order food let alone explain myself in my state of panic. The most frustrating part was that I could understand Chinese basics from doing so much listening but couldnt speak well for the same reason mentioned before which was that I was usually just sitting in the back listening. In retrospect, I looked a mess frantically running around a subway car with my eyes bright red and wiping snot into my sleeve, and yelling in English taking a shot in the dark that someone- anybody at all would be able to communicate with me. I probably carried on like this for the next 3 or 4 stops on the subway. But then over the loudspeaker I heard the most satisfying two-syllable phrase I have ever heard in my entire life. In the midst of a string of gibberish I heard what seemed like, sdfjkghairugldkjslrousbr, and aoisrgulsdjkbweiorbug, in a computerized voice over the

Dougherty 3 loudspeaker but somewhere in the middle I heard the phrase, Sha Tin. Never has such a weight been lifted off of a persons shoulders than that of my 8 year old self (broke, without a cell phone, and crippled by the language barrier). Sha Tin is an old string of apartment complexes on the outskirts of the city, closer to the Chinese mainland on the northeast side of the Hong Kong Peninsula. But the name sounded as good as heaven to me, because thats where my beloved Oi Poh (grandmother) lived. The only way I knew to actually get there and not become more hopelessly lost was to piece together some sort of directions by stringing together a few phrases I had learned along the way. Mainly colors, , which mean red, yellow and black respectively to identify different routes on the subway system. After maybe 3 hours of what I believed was clever navigation and subway hopping which was probably more of just blind luck than anything, I triumphantly ran up out of the subway and into the smoggy air. From there, I found my way to a park where I knew my grandma would be playing chess in the afternoon as she did every other afternoon of the summer. Upon arriving in her arms and later on her couch, to this day I have never slept so soundly again in my life. Although seemingly a traumatic experience at the time, I now realize of course that I was never in any real danger. All the same I took many things from that experience. For one, I came to realize that if a third of the worlds population spoke this language, it would be irresponsible for me in many ways to not learn it while I had so many opportunities. I decided then that I would become proficient in Mandarin through family, as well as high school and college. And for the first time in my life, I was more than willing to accept learning a new language and further exploring my heritage. The subway experience at age 8 in many ways shaped who I am today- a college student that is instead of resistive to learning like some students out there, but fascinated by learning and becoming the best I could be in all academic areas as well as athletics.

Dougherty 4 From that moment in my life on, I never wanted to be underprepared for anything. I had felt the sting of ignorance in a very real and frightening way and this became a part of my persona and Ive grown to love to be over prepared in the classroom and in all other aspects of life, to avoid the painful pit in my stomach that comes from being ignorant, or underprepared for a situation.