A Chinaman's Chance by Eric Liu

proper coaching he’s forced to spell out his tacit knowledge, pay explicit attention to movements, and unlearn bad habits.
    After an initial phase of self-consciousness, though, I found it enormously satisfying to learn precisely why certain rhythms and sentence constructions had always felt “right” and certain others just hadn’t. There was a hidden logic behind it all. My textbooks spelled it out at a level of detail that might have been mind-numbing to some—there were whole chapters on when to use le and for which of many purposes—but for me was thrilling. For the first time, I heard clearly what my relatives had been saying—that is, I understood the rules that governed their speech, rules I’d noticed but hadn’t systematized and couldn’t replicate in my own speech. Now I could. I could converse with my grandmothers, no sheepish apology required. In certain moments, I could muster or at least mimic some of the mock-stagy confidence of the joshing between my father and his friends. Even though my vocabulary remained limited, I started speaking Chinese as if I were fluent—as if I’d gone back in time and given myself years of fluency.
    Then, after doing four semesters and completing Level 2, I stopped. I felt I had enough to get by. I could do everyday conversation now. I wasn’t interested in being able to read the Chinese newspaper or talk politics or history in Chinese. I had become interested in talking politics and history in English . Diplomacy, strategy, European great power rivalries, military history, American political history: this is what I wanted to fill my credit hours and my brain with. So I did. That brief moment, when I could glimpse being more than passable at Chinese, passed.
    10.
    From Spoken Standard Chinese , volume 1, by Parker Po-Fei Huang and Hugh M. Stimson:
    12.9 The experiential verbal suffix -guo . This suffix indicates that the actions of the verb to which it is suffixed happened at least once in the past. It differs from the past tense verbal suffix guo (–guo ) in always carrying the neutral tone and in never occurring with the sentence particle le that means “action completed in the past.” . . .
    ni dao Ouzhou ‘quguo meiyou? Have you ever been to Europe?
    wo mei quguo. No, I haven’t.
    ni chiguo Zhongguo fan ma? Have you ever eaten Chinese food?
    wo chiguo. Women chang chi Yes, I have.We often eat 
Zhongguo fan. Chinese food.
    In short: the same suffix guo (literally, “pass by”) can be used in two subtly different contexts, one to signify something that happened, the other to signify an experience that’s been had. How wide is this gap between “It happened” and “I have had this experience”?
    â€”————
    One of my great regrets is that my father never knew I was a speechwriter for an American president. I think he would have felt a specific kind of pride. He wouldn’t have been boastful; that wasn’t his way. He would have been gratified as a fellow wordsmith. Though Chao-hua Liu was never officially in the word business, he was nonetheless a master. His ear—his instinct for killer ways to make a point, both logically and musically—was nearly as good in English as it was in Chinese. He would have been proud that my command of my native language had given me this opportunity. He would also have discerned, I like to think, how a lifetime of being steeped in my second language—a tongue of poetic conventions, implied meanings, freighted terseness—had shaped my instrument.
    By far the most consequential speeches I wrote for President Clinton were for the 1994 commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day and the Allied invasion of Normandy. Here was a Gen X son of Chinese immigrants crafting words for the first baby boomer president and a son of the South, as he thanked the GI generation and the father he never knew.