If I had more time to write and more pages to fill, I would have liked to analyze the question of language in oral history in working with Chinese diasporas. Language was a notable point of contention and interest at various stages of my research project.
I should mention my capacities in Cantonese. I can understand Cantonese fluently. I can speak with advanced skills, but my Canadian accent makes me nervous and often causes words to slip my mind. I cannot read or write except for basic characters like me, you, numbers, and random trivia.
Bilingualism was a concern for me even as I was preparing to interview. I had to recruit and prepare information for my participants in both English and Chinese. In the interviews, my participants would switch between English, Cantonese, and very rarely, Mandarin. Their combination of languages — of “Chinglish” was familiar to me as the child of immigrant children.
For my interviews in Canada, my participants would prefer to use English, even if they were more fluent in Cantonese and they understood that I could understand them in Chinese. They would switch to use Cantonese when using TCM terms.
For my interviews in Hong Kong, my participants would prefer to use either English or Cantonese. They were mostly conducted in Cantonese, even though their English was fluent. They would switch to English to describe certain colloquial idioms or phrases to add colour to a feeling, emotion, or experience. Their preference for English was for my sake. My spoken fluency in both Cantonese and English was useful when conducting interviews with participants, especially when one idea could not be translated into the other, or in other characteristically Hong Konger ‘Chinglish’ moments. However, my inability to read and write in Chinese strained the subsequent transcription process.
Language was contentious during the transcription of my interviews. Because I was unable to read or write in Chinese, I first tried to transcribe my interviews using a third party referred to my by my father. The transcriptionist/translator was a university student in Toronto who was raised in Canada but was fluent in both languages. I paid them to do transcription, them translation of anonymous interviews. They were ultimately unreliable and eventually I begged my father to help me do the work with the assistance of Google Translate and Pleco.
During the translation process, which I worked with my father on, we had many discussions about what exactly a word or phrase would be translated into. This process really taught us both a lot about language and meaning.
During the writing and analysis portion of my project, I became interested in when and why participants would use English or Cantonese or both. Perhaps for a different paper I would focus more on the nuances of language and TCM.
For example, TCM is increasingly being learned, used, practised by people who have zero Chinese language skills. As I mention in my paper, there are many concepts in TCM that are not fully explained in English. The terms, while translatable, also come with particular etymologies. They are used in particular daily conversations and experiences, that add meaning to the TCM term. How does the untranslatable change the thousands-year-old practice? What is lost? What is gained?
This post is Part Two of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
Jenn Leah Ko 