My seven-month-old daughter lay on her play mat, each chubby fist clutching one puny foot. It was a perfect demonstration of the “happy baby” yoga pose. I wanted to tell her so in Mandarin.
“Zhè shì kuàilè yīng’ér–,” I said.
I stopped mid-sentence. Crap. What’s the Mandarin word for “yoga”?
My daughter, all ruddy, dumpling cheeks and sprouting teeth, beamed up at me expectantly. I sighed and finished in English.
This is the Frankenstein-esque Chinglish I am passing on to her: an unholy mash of kitchen-table Mandarin, English nouns and a cringe-inducing ocker accent. When I read her Chinese baby books, half the words are new to me. We are the blind leading the blind here.
It’s ironic that I’m teaching my daughter Mandarin (which I only learned properly in my 20s as a language student in Beijing) given how vigorously I used to deny my Chinese heritage. As a child of 1980s and 90s Australia, I recall speaking as loudly and in as broad an Australian accent as possible in public places just so no one mistook me for “one of those Chinese people”.
Back then, it felt safer to distance myself from my heritage. After all, it was only in 1973 – when my dad first boarded a plane from Malaysia to Sydney – that Australia officially renounced the last remnants of the White Australia policy and shifted towards multiculturalism.
My dad understood that adopting Anglo-Australian norms was part of the deal. This was before cheap air travel allowed for quick trips back to the mother country, so he assumed he had taken a one-way ticket.
He worked hard alongside my mum to give my siblings and me the best opportunities, sending us to elite private schools. There, I encountered girls who seemed to embody the Australian ideal: tall, strapping, jocular country boarders who ruled the school.
I failed to see that my own story – of immigrant parents sacrificing for their children – was quietly becoming part of Australia’s evolving identity.
It’s unfair to say no effort was made to raise me bilingual; around age 10, I was sent to Saturday Chinese school. If I felt embarrassed to be Chinese in broader Australia, in these classrooms the opposite became true. I was consistently outperformed by pint-sized kindergarteners who spoke Chinese at home with their parents. I felt doomed never to catch up and the classes quickly fell by the wayside.
Fast forward to 2025. Multiculturalism has gone from government policy to a source of national pride: the most recent Scalon Institute survey shows 85% agree multiculturalism has been good for the country. Multilingualism is now seen as both a personal and professional strength, creating opportunities to work overseas and in globalised markets. Studies demonstrate its cognitive benefits: boosting memory, problem-solving and mental flexibility, while also delaying dementia.
I belong to a new generation of Australian parents who see immense value in passing on language skills to our children. But what, exactly, are we passing on?
I’m struck by the similarity of experiences from second-gen friends across different cultures. Recalling my Chinese school “struggle sessions” with a friend, she laughed – she’d had the same, but in Punjabi school. Like me, she intends to raise her newborn bilingually.
“And what?” I retorted. “We’re going to put our kids through the same humiliating experience?”
I envisioned my daughter amid peers fluent in perfect standard Mandarin, children of graduates from China’s top universities. In contrast, my hapless child would speak our unique blend of “mongrel Mandarin”, my little walking Steve Irwin-possessed Duolingo machine.
“Of course,” my friend said.
Of course! Because that’s what we do as parents: we try our best with what we have. Unlike my parents, I don’t have fluency on my side, but I do have resources they lacked: bilingual childcare centres and playgroups, language apps and Zoom classes. Programs like Western Sydney University’s Little Multilingual Minds are attempting to better support multilingual education – though much of the infrastructure, such as Saturday schools, remains community-driven, patchily funded and concentrated in cities. In 2023, the federal government announced a $15m investment over two years to support children learning languages other than English.
There are times I feel like I’m cosplaying my Chinese heritage. My Mandarin is slow, stilted and unsure – more zombie than living language. What does it mean for my daughter to study from such an imperfect textbook?
Or does it matter? A colleague once told me how, in her home, Portuguese faded after her father’s migration to Australia. One of the few words that survived was “chucha”, a soft term for a dummy or pacifier. When her newborn daughter began to use a dummy, she instinctively used “chucha”. For her, the word became more than just practical – it was a link to a language she barely spoke and a cultural identity she never fully claimed.
“It was a way of honouring the cyclic nature of things,” she said. “Babies are born, babies use chuchas.” Because some things never change, right? And perhaps, she added, it was also a way of telling her father: “Look, see? She’s speaking Portuguese.”
Language is more than grammar and vocabulary; it’s a bridge through time. Even when fractured and messy, it connects us to those who came before and to those yet to come.
One day, I imagine my daughter teaching her own child some fragment of our mongrel Mandarin – an awkward word or phrase I clumsily passed on to her – and I’ll see how it’s endured, nonetheless. In that moment, I’ll know she’s holding on to more than just a language; she’s holding on to those stories – of hopeful journeys and sacrifices made – of our family.
