What is "Field Trip" in Chinese?

Some wit once observed that a woman, no matter how extensive her wardrobe, always is in need of just one more outfit. As a writer, I am ready to testify that, to write anything I can always use more—more skills, more hard work, better ideas... The same is true about being a parent. Whatever qualities it takes, you need more.

I may as well admit it. I have found parenthood to be the single most difficult job, far more demanding than being a writer or a woman, which are no picnics, either.

For such a demanding job one would think nature would have devised a stringent system to screen out the unqualified. Reality is obviously otherwise. I attained parenthood, long on ignorance of its ramifications, short on "the right stuff" for handling the work.

I can still remember the two occasions when my husband and I brought our precious bundles home from the hospital. We were awestruck by the responsibility of rearing these fragile and vulnerable beings. In each case our awe soon gave way to shock.

Despite their physical helplessness, they had minds and wills of their own. When their desires did not coincide with ours, they did not hesitate to let us know about it. As tiny and tender as their skulls were, they were not timid about locking horns with us.

In those early confrontations between generations, one would assume we as parents would enjoy every unfair advantage. We were bigger, stronger, wiser, far more powerful than they were, and in many cases we were two against one. But we had one weakness: we wanted to do our conscientious best because they were our flesh and blood and we loved them. We had to tread carefully for fear that, with one false move, they might be affected adversely for the rest of their lives.

If parenthood is not a piece of cake, the conflict of dual cultures certainly makes it doubly difficult. Many of our major confrontations seemed to center on that theme. The first one involved language.

Like the vast majority of first-generation Chinese American parents, we very much wanted our children to be bilingual. We took care to speak to our first born only in Mandarin and were pleased that she was fluent at age three. Smug in our naivete, we thought our good work was done and the nursery school would simply serve to round off the English portion.

A few weeks into nursery school, her conversation began to resemble the Christmas tree in our family room: Its trunk was still genuine, but its branches were dangling with more and more foreign objects. One day when she was describing the happenings at school, I observed with alarm that the "tree" was covered entirely with "decorations." While the "ornaments" sparkled, I could see the "tree" itself was withering, soon to suffer the fate of all Christmas trees after the holiday season. I felt compelled to interrupt:

"Um . . . wait a minute. Would you mind telling Mommy this in Chinese?"

"Okay. But Mommy, what is field trip in Chinese?"

Well this was a bit difficult. Here, if a teacher takes the students out of school to go any place, it’s a field trip. In Chinese, if you take a hike, it is yuan zhu; but if you go to a museum, it becomes can guan.

"Where did you go?"

She looked at me in dismay.

"The pet shop. What’s pet shop in Chinese?"

She got me again. During all the years I spent in China and Taiwan, I had never seen or heard of a pet shop. It was an idea as foreign as family room for which there was, at that time, no ready translation. I had to improvise. After having to stop frequently for reinforcements for her newly-inadequate Chinese vocabulary, she announced in frustration, "I don’t feel like telling it any more."

That was potent ammunition indeed. Speaking Mandarin and mother-daughter communication were mutually exclusive? I was quick to capitulate, not realizing that with one step backward it was all the way down. Our dream of bilingual children was lost forever.