If you’re one of my regular readers, you’d notice that I’ve almost stopped blogging for some years. Beneath the mundane excuses – that I’ve become busier being a mum and a researcher, there is a more fundamental reason. That is my struggle with languages.

In theory, I’m supposed to be more expressive as I speak multiple languages. In practice, I’m not able to fully express myself in either. For years, I lived on a “English for work, Chinese for life” model. This is a typical model for many immigrants who leave their home country as an adult.

I simply lack the English vocabulary to describe iridescent colours, intricate smells, delicate touches, or name names. Many idioms/slangs remain totally foreign to me. I also cannot hum along with melodies that could move peers to tears. I probably also don’t get 50%+ of the jokes when the British evoke cultural lexicons that I didn’t grow up with.

Yet I’m perfectly fine with talking about philosophies, writing eloquent propositions, and I probably know the Bible better than most people who used to attend Sunday schools. Those are precisely what would make me stutter in Chinese.

So if I want to talk about work and life at the same time with a sufficiently good fidelity and sensitivity, it’s more difficult than I’d like to admit.

My workaround, in previous years, was to reserve English for work and social, and to blog predominantly in Chinese, on my observations in life. Yet after spending more than a decade aboard, my Chinese has become duller and rustier –I can feel I’m losing grip of the mastery. I felt this particularly strongly When I reread what I wrote years ago – I definitely can’t write like that any more. In other words, my Chinese linguistic muscles have shrunk, my productive vocabulary has decayed into receptive one. I can’t write my life with ease and grace in Chinese now.

My second workaround, which I started last year, was to write on LinkedIn. Because it’s a platform for professional networking, so presumably I could write about professional topics using my working language. During this grand writing experiment, I did find myself more comfortable and fluent writing not only about work, but also occasionally about life. But there’s a catch.

I don’t think the audience there is someone I genuinely want to write for. It’s no longer people you’re weakly connected with, but more likely to be a dynamic cohort generated by the algorithm, depending on the topics and hashtags. And writing for a random cohort means you have to earn the trust and attention every time, from scratch.

Posts without a catchy title, strong opening, or a selfie are rarely pushed, noticed, let alone read. Even when it’s read, the experience is seldom accumulative. Except for very few people, I couldn’t expect any pre-requisite, so each post has to be very self-contained, almost memory-less. This form of writing is hardly satisfying – most of the times, I prefer to talk to old friends who remember something about me than to a new acquittance where I have to start with the weather.

So I’ve exhausted my workarounds. I realise that if I still care to express my worldview, observations, and feelings, I need to overcome my struggle with languages, the sooner the better.

So I decided to try to write about my life in English. It may or may not work, but I guess it’s better than inaction. Perhaps one day Daniel will be glad about the decision I made today, to take a glimpse of my life at a time when he had no memory of.

P.S. I’ve left this post completely unedited by AI, as I want to preserve a writing sample for comparison, to see if I will eventually become more expressive in my working language.