{"id":368498,"date":"2026-06-20T17:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T17:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/368498\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T17:00:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T17:00:14","slug":"connecting-with-my-father-and-my-heritage-in-mandarin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/368498\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting With My Father, and My Heritage, in Mandarin"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve learned that word before, but it disappears the moment I need it. I can feel him waiting while I rack my brain.<\/p>\n

Eventually, I stumble through the sentence in a mixture of Chinese and English: Chinglish.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been wondering for a long time why I never learned to speak my heritage language fluently. I\u2019m trying my best, but I can\u2019t help but feel like I\u2019m a failure.<\/p>\n

Speaking complete sentences in Mandarin is new for me. Until a few months ago, I could barely do it.<\/p>\n

\"\"Anna Zou and her dad, Zou Yongan, in Beijing\u2019s Tiananmen Square during their first visit to China in 2003. (Courtesy of Anna Zou)<\/p>\n

My mom is a white American. My dad is from a small town in Hubei Province, China. After meeting my mom while they were both teaching English at Yangtze University, he moved to the U.S. in 1995.<\/p>\n

When they were expecting me, my dad imagined raising a bilingual child.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have the roots in Chinese culture,\u201d he would say. \u201cIdeally, I expect you to be in both cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the first few years of my life, my dad spoke to me exclusively in Mandarin. However, like many other American-born children of immigrants, my dad said we ran into one roadblock.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I would speak Chinese to you, even when you understood, you were always responding in English.\u201d<\/p>\n

He assumed I would become bilingual naturally. Instead, I resisted.<\/p>\n

As a kid, I obviously didn\u2019t understand what I was rejecting. I felt out of place at weekend Chinese school as the only biracial kid in class. The other students\u2019 parents were both native Mandarin speakers.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, I wanted to fit in with the kids from my elementary school, whose parents were both native English speakers. They spent their weekends playing instead of memorizing characters. To me, learning Chinese was an onerous obligation.<\/p>\n

One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad\u2019s lap in the back of a Chinese school classroom, crying over a textbook I couldn\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n

I remember feeling embarrassed, like I was already failing at something I was supposed to inherit.<\/p>\n

As I got older, my dad stopped speaking Mandarin to me altogether.<\/p>\n

We then communicated mostly in English, talking about practical things like rides or schedules. But now that I\u2019m in my twenties and my dad is getting older, I\u2019ve started wanting something more: a closer relationship with him.<\/p>\n

\"\"Anna Zou speaks in Mandarin with her father on a FaceTime call from her home in Berkeley on June 5, 2026. (Beth LaBerge\/KQED)<\/p>\n

Sometimes I wondered if my rejection of his language felt, to him, like a rejection.<\/p>\n

Last semester, while attending graduate school at UC Berkeley, I enrolled in a Chinese for Heritage Speakers course. The class was designed for students who grew up hearing Mandarin at home but never fully learned to read or write it. For some students, it\u2019s an easy A. For me, it was anything but.<\/p>\n

One assignment required us to record two-minute video blogs in Mandarin. For the first vlog, I did more than 30 takes \u2014 I kept mixing up sh\u016b, meaning \u201cbook,\u201d and sh\u00f9, meaning \u201ctree.\u201d Every mistake felt like proof that I was light-years behind everyone else in the class.<\/p>\n

But my professor, Cai Weisi, known to her students as Cai Laoshi \u2014 \u201cTeacher Cai\u201d \u2014 said many of her heritage speaker students share similar feelings.<\/p>\n

\"\"Anna Zou sits at her home in Berkeley on June 5, 2026. (Beth LaBerge\/KQED)<\/p>\n

After more than 15 years of teaching the course, she\u2019s heard countless stories from students who grew up resenting weekend language schools or feeling ashamed of not speaking fluently. They\u2019ve shaped how she\u2019s raising her own daughter to learn Mandarin.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the very beginning, I already decided to not send her to any Chinese school,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n

Pushing children too hard, she said, can sometimes drive them away from their heritage languages altogether.<\/p>\n

Hearing that felt validating.<\/p>\n

\"\"Anna Zou holds a photo of her grandparents at her home in Berkeley on June 5, 2026. (Beth LaBerge\/KQED)<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t the only one struggling. One of Cai Laoshi\u2019s past students, Sofia Guo, told me her first Mandarin vlogs mortified her. But as her language skills improved, she said her relationship with her parents did too.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can see my parents as people, adults who have their own personalities and they express themselves better in Chinese than in English. Of course, they could say all those same things in English \u2026 but you can see it on their faces. They light up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listening to her, I realized I wasn\u2019t just missing a connection with my dad. I was missing a connection with an entire side of my family.<\/p>\n

For years, whenever my dad called relatives in China, I was too ashamed of my Mandarin to chat. Three months into my class, I decided to try.<\/p>\n

\"\"Anna Zou (right) with her dad\u2019s older sister, or Gugu, at her house in their hometown of Songzi, China during the summer of 2007. (Courtesy of Anna Zou)<\/p>\n

My dad called his older sister, my g\u016bgu, who still lives in our family\u2019s hometown of Songzi. Her internet connection was spotty, and her accent is different from the Mandarin I learned in school. But for the first time in a while, I could understand enough to keep up.<\/p>\n

I told her I wanted to visit China.<\/p>\n

\u201cHu\u0101ny\u00edng n\u01d0 hu\u00ed ji\u0101,\u201d she said. We will welcome you back home.<\/p>\n

I always knew Songzi was where my family came from. What surprised me was realizing that my relatives there considered it my home, too.<\/p>\n

Before we hung up, my aunt told me my Chinese sounded good, and my dad agreed.<\/p>\n

\"\"Anna Zou on her dad\u2019s shoulders at a traditional Chinese courtyard hotel in Beijing, 2007. (Courtesy of Anna Zou)<\/p>\n

My dad and I are far from having deep philosophical conversations in Mandarin. I\u2019m still a beginner \u2014 I forget words and mispronounce tones.<\/p>\n

But my dad said something has changed.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a while, I felt like we were a little distant,\u201d he told me. \u201cNow I feel like you\u2019re getting closer to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

This Father\u2019s Day, I\u2019ll tell my dad something I\u2019ve never been able to tell him before in his native language.<\/p>\n

\u7238\u7238\uff0c\u7236\u4eb2\u8282\u5feb\u4e50\u3002b\u0101b\u0101, f\u00f9q\u012bn ji\u00e9 ku\u00e0il\u00e8<\/p>\n

Happy Father\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve learned that word before, but it disappears the moment I need it. I can feel him waiting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-368498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}