Let’s face it: Stereotypes are usually based (at least somewhat) in truth.
No one knows this better than me, an Asian girl studying math at UC Berkeley whose friends are mostly of Chinese or Taiwanese descent — and no one takes advantage of it more for the purposes of snarky comical comments, either. It’s easy to connect with people through dry humor referencing the myriad idiosyncrasies of a culture we’re familiar with, chicken feet dinners and mandatory piano lessons and all. But there is one aspect of the Chinese stereotype with which I could never identify, despite its near ubiquity in the lives of my friends: having grammatically challenged parents.
I’ve heard innumerable stories from my friends of their relatives’ frequent linguistic faux pas but have rarely been able to contribute any of my own beyond my father’s impressive inability to pronounce the word “women” without sounding like he’s referring to height-challenged men (“wee-men”). The primary reason behind this is that, as strange as it may seem for a first-generation Chinese family, my mother is perhaps the biggest stickler for grammar and the most devout admirer of the English language whom I have ever met.
This is evidenced perhaps most clearly by the walls of my house, which, since I was in elementary school, have been lined with sheets of butcher paper covered in words like “lagniappe” and “inchoate” and esoteric expressions like “tempest in a teapot” and “deus ex machina” that no 7-year-old should have to know. I was one of those kids who could never confuse homonyms, who won the class spelling bees, who (before realizing how socially unacceptable this is) would correct others on their dangling prepositions.
These abilities and tendencies were inculcated in me through incessant corrections from my mother regarding my speech, which continue today and often provoke my irked justification that I’m simply speaking colloquially. This is an unacceptable excuse, according to my mother, who despite my mild protestations would, for example, insist that I, rather than “didn’t do it yet,” just haven’t done it yet.
This particular mistake is probably the one on which my mother corrects me most often and, consequently, the one at which I get the most annoyed, because I already know why it’s wrong. “I didn’t do it yet” uses the simple past tense, which deals only with what is already over and done with — so tacking on a “yet” to any sentence in the simple past attempts to extend the action into the future incorrectly. On the other hand, “I haven’t done it yet” uses the perfect tense, which describes a past action’s effect on the present. Therefore, in contexts such as these, extending an action using “yet” makes perfect sense.
Though I’ve had this knowledge (not to mention a plethora of refreshers over the years) for quite some time, I still find it difficult not to slip and say things like, “I didn’t buy my books yet.” Because of my parental guidance, however, every time the word “yet” escapes my lips in the simple past tense, a part of me instantly feels deeply ashamed — and every time I hear others misuse it, that pedantic part of me that used to correct dangling prepositions jumps at the chance of further social ostracism through criticizing my friends’ usage of tenses.
It’s difficult to reconcile my love of proper English with the colloquial inconsistencies that I’ve picked up over the years, and I’ll readily admit that it gets frustrating to have a constant reminder of this from my mother. But in the end, I’m grateful for this habit of hers to leave no exceptions to the proper grammar rules by which we live, because our adherence to them in all other aspects has fundamentally shaped who I am today — more than our Chinese heritage ever could. I’ve come to consider these corrections not as annoying reminders of my faults but as bittersweet reminders of whom I have to thank for my ability to articulate my thoughts clearly and properly in the English language, as well as one of the deeper lessons that my mother has taught me over the years — to never compromise my standards.
So I’ll keep mentally berating myself each time I stretch a tense the wrong way and keep wincing when others do the same. I know one day I’ll get the hang of it and make it second nature — I just didn’t do it yet.