SOMETIME this year, if things go as planned, I will be in some province in China.
The reason? I intend to enroll in a language school there. And the language? Well, Mandarin.
Which brings me to the sentiment perfectly vocalised by my mother.
"You mean you went to SAP schools for 10 years so we would spend money for you to learn Chinese in China?"
It's not just my mother tongue that I'm craving to (re-)familiarise myself with.
I am anticipating the overwhelming sense of loneliness that hits me when I first touch down. I am expecting the unfamiliar streets of whatever provinces I wander through to show me new things, meet new people. I am eager to visit the same street cafes Anthony Bourdain has stepped into, sampling foods cooked in questionable ways that threaten to disagree with me.
But for all that awaits me in China, there is no larger reason for setting aside one whole month to be alone in a foreign country than the necessity to be there in the first place.
You see, I have been an anglophile all my life. I was always much better at English than Mandarin. My body gave out in spasms whenever I heard an S.H.E song play in malls, although I will admit that Jay Chou was a guilty pleasure.
Two taxi drivers have even asked me if I am Eurasian, simply because there must have been some good explanation for why I couldn’t give understandable road directions in Mandarin. That said, my Eurasian friends speak better Mandarin than I do.
And no, I wasn't employed by the Speak Mandarin Campaign to write this. I am just about desperate now, and not just because I realise I’m missing out on such an economically viable tool.
Be it when I'm conducting interviews, or ordering food at the hawker centre, or trying to talk to my grandmother, I have been handicapped by my half-baked Mandarin.
I am stranded, immobile, in a world that I thought would let go of its "cheena" roots but has stubbornly, and thankfully, held on to them. It's called culture, I guess.
Either way, my linguistic clock is ticking away. I have frittered away 10 years of almost-free education and drove 10 teachers (not including the tutors my mother employed) crazy with what I tried to pass off as grammar. And at the end of the day, I have nothing to show for it.
Some of my friends think it's a bit extreme, to move to a foreign place, away from loved ones, "just to learn Mandarin", which is just as easy to pick up here.
Well, if I had treasured those lessons, I'm sure my Mandarin would be, at least, of a decent standard. I didn't. And I regret it.
After a particularly memorable Chinese lesson in Secondary 3, my teacher smiled at me and said, "Kai Xin, please don’t ever tell anyone I was your Chinese tutor."
But now, I am sure. The month I spend in China will not be just a month of intensive Chinese lessons, memorising characters and pronouncing the hanyu pinyin.
It's a chance of a lifetime to pair up language and culture, to appreciate the intricacies of calligraphy, to learn a little wushu. To start a conversation with anyone in China, and hope that they will understand me too.
So that just in case people do ask, it won’t be so embarrassing to tell them you taught me, right, Liu Laoshi?