people sometimes tell me - usually when i’m being hard on myself - that my german is better than i think it is, but here’s the thing: being able to order things at restaurants and joke about the weather doesn’t seem good enough to me, at least not when it comes to settling into and really living in a place. my goal is to blend in, to be mistakable for a native speaker who grew up watching the standard cartoons and hearing classic jokes and experiencing the same paradigm-shifting news events. i want to take part in the collective reminiscing over germany’s triumphs and joys and learn how to navigate the minutiae of its pop culture. emerging unexpectedly in social settings, these little conversational details are the things which make one feel either as if they fit in perfectly or rather stick out like a sore thumb. this desire of mine is not new: i’d spent my first 32 years trying to blend in as an american with mixed results (it’s tough when you don’t have cable television as a kid, especially during the age of MTV!). i think some people, upon becoming strangers to a new place, have an instinct to form communities with other expats from their origin country. my instinct is rather to blend blend blend, like a conifer into a mountain range of a bob ross painting, to strategically camouflage my “otherness” and only let it emerge at will, when i’m in the mood to showcase it.
speaking of showcasing: my dad used to be the president of the local taiwanese association when we lived in upstate NY, when i was between the ages of 2 and 7. one of the activities of the taiwanese association was to host an annual taiwanese heritage festival which was open to everyone, both association members and their families as well as the general public, which meant that the displays usually turned out to be a bit over-the-top in their attempt to combine celebration with public education.
besides the street food stand which my mom oversaw - deep-fried egg rolls and crab rangoon were her top sellers, if i recall correctly - my favorite place to hang out was the fortune-telling station which my dad ran. my dad was an atheist and skeptic in the truest sense and enjoyed cracking jokes about my mother’s superstitions at home, but he’d spent enough time around taiwanese temples in his youth that he knew how to mimic the gestures of a shaman. his divination kit consisted of two parts: 1) two red wooden moon halves and 2) a vase filled with chopsticks which had handwritten chinese numbers on them. Each $2 divination session unfolded as follows: my father would instruct his customer, typically a middle-aged white American, to quietly ask themselves a yes-or-no question. my dad would then shake the vase with the chopsticks, making a big show of shuffling them, and ask the customer to draw the first one which grabbed their attention; the number on the chopstick would correspond to an oracle entry in a book which my father had brought over from taiwan at some point. each of the pages in his oracle book contained multiple lines of cryptically worded advice, which would then be confirmed or nullified by tossing the moon halves and checking to see how they landed.1 one particularly comical aspect of the divination was that the oracle’s advice as written may or may not have had anything to do with the question which was asked; say, for example, that i wanted to know if i should marry my fiance and i picked chopstick # 77 out of the vase. on the corresponding page there might be a rhyming quatrain about the virtue of persisting against your enemy at all odds, providing no encouragement or mention of what you should do about your love life. the next step would then be to toss the moon halves to confirm whether you have drawn the correct stick for the question which was asked. here the result depended on the combination of how the moon halves appeared on the ground: if both halves landed face down then the chopstick was definitely not the correct match and the customer would have to draw again. if both moon halves landed face up, that meant the question was poorly formulated and the customer should start over by asking a different one. the oracle’s answer would only be confirmed if the moon halves landed with one face up and the other face down, three times in a row. to be honest i am not sure how my father weaseled himself out of the quandary of a nonsensical answer combined with 3-in-a-row face-up-face-down moon halves because i imagine that must’ve occurred at least once, but i don’t remember ever seeing him get flustered.
besides the divination, the most common request which my father fielded at the taiwanese festival was to translate English names into mandarin. this was of course impossible; unlike English, where names can have symbolic meaning but are mainly phonetic, Taiwanese and Chinese names always have a specific meaning. my mom has told me, though I am not sure if it’s correct, that Chinese children tend to be named using words which connote wealth and success whereas Taiwanese children tend to be named after things which are found in nature. my pseudonym, for example, means “red moon” in mandarin (紅月亮), whereas my real life name is a flower which grew commonly in my parents’ backyard during the month in which i was born. although you might encounter two taiwanese people whose romanized names both read “yuelian”, the chances that their mandarin names actually mean the exact same thing are pretty slim because there is such a wide range of word combinations to choose from. of course my dad understood this even better than i but he decided to humor the requests anyway: instead of explaining to the americans that it simply wasn’t possible to translate “timothy” into mandarin, he would think of real mandarin words which approximated the syllable sounds in their names. then, not only would he teach his customers how to pronounce the sounds in mandarin, he would also write them down in calligraphy on a large white rectangle lined with red construction paper strung with a piece of yarn (prepared by my sister) so that they could hang it up at home. i remember one occasion where my mom teased my dad on our drive home for the translation he picked for someone named “benjamin”: 噴砂門 which translated to “sandblasting door” in English.
this, by the way, is something i’d noticed in americans which i haven’t seen as often among the germans i’ve met: the urge to translate, to convert 1-to-1 the things which they don’t understand from another language into something which they can grasp in familiar terms. germans, rather than translate english words or create new german equivalents, tend to simply fold the english words into their lexicon while sticking to german pronunciation and grammar rules (thus creating a new hybrid jargon known somewhat derisively as “denglisch”). the only 2 german words which i am aware of having been similarly adopted directly into english are kindergarten and schadenfreude, but kindergarten means something different here in germany (daycare rather than the first year of elementary school) and i have never heard a german talk openly about experiencing joy over someone else’s misfortune.
thanks to these links for refreshing my memory on how the divination steps work: the taiwan photographer and taiwanese poe divination
Your dad was amazing. And you do a great job of enfolding larger meaning in the story, but we don't get that nugget til the end - wonderful. And I promise to never again say you probably speak better German than you think you do hahah!