This article was submitted by Samantha Wu, the 2022 Roy & Gim Oi Lim Memorial Scholarship presented to the top high school senior. Samantha was a senior at Bonita High. She has gone on to attend Mt. San Antonio Community College, where she is a business administration major. She is the granddaughter of Pei Huang.
In third grade, I lost the spelling bee with the word “cupboard.” When I heard the answer read out loud to me, I was perplexed. Cupboard was spelled “cup” and “board,” but why wasn’t it pronounced as a combination of the two separate words? My third grade lessons never made clear the use of silent letters. Why would you spell a word with an extra letter that isn’t included in the pronunciation? I pointed this out to my teacher, and she responded with a simple “English is an odd language.”
That explanation seemed too easy, but it held much truth. English can be an odd language — one that contains so many different rules that seemingly contradict each other. How is it that “Sean” is pronounced “Shawn” yet “Dean” is not pronounced “Dawn”?
“(With Cantonese) it’s the colorful, witty expressions that are not word for word. For example, 仆街 (pronounced “poke guy”) in Cantonese literally translates to “fall street” in English, which makes no sense.”
Growing up in a multilingual household, speaking Cantonese and Toisanese were second nature to me. Summers spent with my grandma, Pei Huang, and her friends made me grow accustomed to the odd Cantonese idioms and phrases. When I visited my grandma’s village in China during 6th grade, the frenzy of quickly spoken Cantonese over large dinners was comfortable to me. During my freshman year, I wound up as a translator for the Gom Benn Village Society during their annual banquet. When the president spoke to the crowd in Cantonese, I would recite the same words back in English. While translating, it soon became clear that my translation in English did not follow the exact word-by-word structure of what the president said in Cantonese.
It’s what makes Cantonese so special for me. It’s the colorful, witty expressions that are not word for word. For example, 仆街 (pronounced “poke guy”) in Cantonese literally translates to “fall street” in English, which makes no sense. However, translated correctly, it means “drop dead” – an expression of extreme contempt. If I followed the words literally or the “right way,” Cantonese speakers would stare at me in confusion. Correct translations are not always the literal ones.
When reducing English to simple rules like “i before e, except after c,” it is easy to find contradictions. But grammar is much more complex than a sheet of guidelines on how to speak correctly. English follows a linguistic structure with logic engrained in every seemingly anomalous sentence. If I had my way, “cupboard” would be pronounced as “cup” and “board” but it isn’t. English does not always work the way I believe it should. As a Chinese American, I’m no stranger to different languages. Yet, instead of criticizing the differences, I’ve come to learn to embrace them. There is beauty in linguistic chaos. I’ve learned to use these contradictions to craft my English translations. Entropy and structure are seen as two separate elements, but the truth is: they often go hand in hand. My desire for structure contradicts heavily my affinity for chaos, yet both construct the person I am today— an avid user of spell check.
