I'm so proud of my heritage... call me a dork, but a lot of the weekends, this is what keeps me up at night when I should be a normal teenager that's simply sleeping. You know what I do a lot of the weekends? If it's not sleeping (haha), no, it's not partying and getting drunk like a monkey (like some of my classmates have a penchant to do), but it's learning Chinese. Translating words and phrases.

I wish everyone had the opportunity to grow up billingual. Since I did grow up billingual, indeed, I have no idea what the other side feels like, to only have a (somewhat?) command of the English language and nothing else. Parlez-vous francais? and Hola do not count. I know a lot of kids in high school French, Spanish, etc. are only in there for credit/college applications, and I know most kids don't even come close to "profiency" in high school foreign language. I know unless I do outside reading and speaking, there's no way I can survive in Mexico, or Spain, or Venuzuela despite my (now) three years of Spanish class. However, I have been exposed to Mandarin since I was born, really, and if you threw me in China or Taiwan, I think I could manage :)

Being billingual (or trilingual, or whatever) is a powerful feeling, and a useful one at that! :) Being able to communicate with relatives, businesspeople, and simply people from that country(ies) is a huge barrier people can overcome with another language. There's a lot of appreciation to be gained with the knowledge of another language, too. For your own background and the other country's background and culture. Okay, in my case, there are still a lot of words/phrases that I'm not sure what they mean, but with every sentence I translate, hey, I'm getting there. It's like decoding some "secret" message, only like, two billion people know, but you don't.

Which gives great satisfaction to me. :) Maybe I should be one of those cryptologists my physics teacher was talking about - breaking all this code. It's kind of the same, right? :) I love figuring out and deciphering stuff. Definitely the hard part, but the end result is almost always so rewarding.