Growing Up A Mok: Chinese School

Ever since we adopted Levi, one of the most common questions we get is: "Are y'all gonna teach him Chinese?"

The short answer?  We don't know.  His grandparents will definitely try their best, but it's tough for me to consider Chinese school when I went through more than a decade of classes with essentially nothing to show for it.

No offense to any of my teachers -- they are wonderful people -- but teaching kids Cantonese when they rarely, if ever, speak it at home is such a waste of time.  I memorized a lot of vocabulary words during those years, but the dialect is like 90% slang, so the majority of those words were useless in the real world.

I'll always remember Chinese school for what it truly was: a hindrance to my love of basketball.

When I first started Chinese school back in the 90s, it was the heyday of the best Sunday afternoon TV lineup ever: NBA on NBC.  Like 98% of Asian kids back then, I did not have access to cable television, so those Sabbath tripleheaders were my only real glimpse into the rest of the NBA world outside of my beloved Houston Rockets.  I still dream about that intro music sometimes.

We'd be plugging away in class waiting for our next break, and when the teacher finally relented, we would all crowd around the beat-up television set in the corner and try to catch a scratchy, pixelated glimpse of a Michael Jordan highlight.  Someone would have antenna duty, which consisted of twisting and curving that precious piece of metal until a semi-clear image would appear on the screen.

Kids today got it so easy with their smartphones and tablets and Wi-Fi.  Back in our day, we had to work that antenna like a Stretch Armstrong to get a decent picture.

I couldn't get enough of basketball back then.  It was always on my mind, and the obsession manifested itself with basketball cards.  Every week after worship service, it would be a trading frenzy that even the folks at the World Trade Center would be proud of.  And since Chinese school was also at church a couple hours later, much of class turned into a prolonged negotiation.  I did everything I could to collect cards of my two favorite basketball players: Sam Cassell and Penny Hardaway.  This is especially fitting now because my entire collection is currently worth pennies as well.

The strangest thing about Chinese school was that my parents still somehow got me to keep going.  We're not merely talking about a couple of my formative years, we're talking tail end of middle school territory, and I'm sitting in a small church classroom on a Sunday afternoon... still waiting for that cherished mandatory break.

There was a bell involved, but not the fancy kind at normal schools that dings over the intercom system.  No, the Chinese school bell was literally a bell that some volunteer lady would have to parade around the church ringing that signified when everyone could escape from their classrooms for a few minutes.  You just hoped you would be at the beginning of her bell route instead of near the end because everyone was headed for the same place: the basketball court.

Ball is life.  It didn't matter that the break was only supposed to be maybe ten minutes long.  We'd always try to get a game in.  Then the bell lady would inevitably start her march again, and we'd all groan, hang our heads, and head back to class wondering what we were doing with our lives.

By the time we reached high school, my class was the oldest grade for Chinese school.  Nobody really wanted to be our teacher anymore, as I think we had developed a bit of a bad reputation.  Frankly, most people were wondering why we were still there.  Myself included.

Chinese school hit rock bottom when our class consisted of maybe five people, and we had straight up lost all motivation to take it seriously.  We wouldn't stop talking and/or playing paper football, so the teacher punished us the only way he could think of.  He started by putting my friend Evan in a corner for timeout.  Evan was confused at first, but he got to his feet, stepped to a corner of the room, and goofily stood there, looking back at the table where the other four of us remained sitting while the teacher tried to continue the lesson.

But we kept chitchatting, so the teacher sent me to another corner.  And on and on until I swear four of us high schoolers were standing in a different corner of the room, with only one student left at the table with any chance of learning Chinese.  The room wasn't even that big, maybe 10 x 15, so we were all within arm's length of the table.  We were clueless about what to do, so at one point we started doing the wave.  It was bizarre and hilarious -- to this day, I can't think of that story and not chuckle.

So back to the original question: are we going to teach our son Chinese?  Yes, but probably not through Chinese school.  And for sure only the most important words like "bathroom," "are you kidding me," "too expensive," and "beef flat noodle."