University Applications

Uncle LiengSeng's daughter Nicole is applying to university. I spent the day looking through her applications and sharing my comments. I can just remember how stressful it was (more for my dad than me) 13 years ago, so I can really emphathize. Here are some of my own personal experiences which I shared with Nicole.

When I was 12, I passed up an opportunity to learn a third language. I wanted to learn French but my parents wanted me to learn Japanese. In the end, we decided that I would not take a third language so that I could concentrate on learning Chinese.

That was a mistake I came to regret throughout high school. I was green with envy when my peers got selected to go to these language immersion programmes in France, Germany and Japan and I didn't get to do so. When I was 18, I told myself that I would make up for it. The irony of it was that after one year of French, I would take three years of Japanese in Princeton.

After my first year in college, I did a 2 month immersion programme in France. It was only then that I realise the point of learning languages. I don't know why nobody told this to me while I was growing up and I wish that they did, because I was learning languages for all the wrong reasons, because I was Chinese and I had to be proud of being Chinese, because I needed to do well in examinations, because it was glamorous. It was only there that I realise that the point of learning languages is to communicate.

Learning a language was and is still tough for me. I don't have flair for languages... I know this, because I have lots of friends in high school who were so much better than me. I also had the fear of people laughing at me, because my accent was off, I didn't get it right. In France, I realised that all of that didn't matter, I saw how accomodating the French were when they saw me struggling so hard to speak in a language that was dear to them.

After that summer I went back home and I started speaking to my grandparents. I have always had the fear of speaking dialects stop me from communicating with them... and then I realised how fear had stopped me with communicating and bonding with the people that are dear to me. So that has been my story about learning languages and travelling around the world. I remembered in 1997 when I attended the World Youth Day in Paris, an occasion with 1 million Catholic youth all gathered to see the Pope. There was an event with Abbe Pierre, a Catholic priest who started the social action movement. Abbe Pierre was someone I had read about and always wanted to meet. Of course, he spoke in French and someone did the translation in English. The person doing the translation didn't quite do justice to his translation, and I thought what a pity if all the english listening people didn't get to hear what he had to say. After a few minutes, I just couldn't take it any more. I don't know what possessed me, but I went up past the security barricades, to a French priest and said " Je voulais faire la traduction en anglais." I don't know what this French priest must be thinking, some Asian coming up to suggest he does the translation in English, in front of nearly a thousand over people. I also didn't know what I was thinking or doing, but I did it anyway.

My passion for learning languages and communicating hasn't stopped even though I am out of school. I am learning Malay now, because I am guilty that my grandmother who doesn't have any education knows more Malay than me even though I have had 18 years of education.... but the motivation doesn't change.