A conversation with my Welsh Chinese friend Diana

Hi guys. In part 2 of this series reflecting on my recent Welsh boot camp, I would like to talk about my unique experience being a non-white Welsh speaker but I didn't want this to be all about me; so I tracked down an old friend Diana who is Welsh-Chinese whom I got to know through gymnastics. I wanted to compare and contrast our experiences as I am a Londoner who had started learning Welsh 11 years ago whilst Diana was born in Cardiff and she had grown up in Wales.

Alex: So Diana, would you like to tell my readers a little bit about yourself? 

Diana: Hiya! I was born in Cardiff to Chinese parents - they were from the Zhejiang province just south of Shanghai and so I grew up in Cardiff, I still consider Cardiff my hometown even though I live in London now for work. I lived in Cardiff right till the age of 18 when I left for university at Oxford and eventually ended up working in London after my graduation. 

Alex: What was it like growing up in your family, like what language did you speak at home? 

Diana: We spoke in a mix of Mandarin and English, my parents can speak English reasonably well. But obviously, since they were born and raised in China, they were far more comfortable in Mandarin and so it was not like they were those Chinese parents who insisted that we had to learn Chinese to hold onto our cultural identity and roots, but given that they spoke to us in Mandarin at home, naturally my siblings and I picked it up that way through them. I never attended a Chinese class growing up, so whilst I can speak Mandarin well, I can't really read and write it - nothing beyond the basics that I have picked up over the years on my own. And of course, we had to do Welsh at school as well but we went to an English-medium school where Welsh was a second language. I did it for ten years because it was a compulsory subject. 

Alex: For my readers who aren't familiar with the system in Wales, could you explain that please? 

Diana: So in Wales, the parents have the choice to send their kids to either a Welsh school where everything from maths to science to geography to history is taught entirely in Welsh and English is also taught, but it is a system created to make sure that the student will speak Welsh as a first language after this kind of education where you're studying about 'trydan' instead of 'electricity' in science class. Then you have the English schools, where you do everything in English like in England, except you have like a just few hours of Welsh lessons a week - I also had to do Welsh for my GSCEs. 

Alex: And can you still speak Welsh today? 

Diana: Aah you're gonna hate me for this, but tipyn bach (a little bit) at best, like I can make some sentences to express myself but I struggle to understand people when they reply in Welsh - like they always speak too fast for me. Even the Welsh kids at my school struggled with Welsh at the best of times, hardly anyone in Cardiff spoke Welsh - it wasn't seen as a useful language for us in the future, we knew that we would be eventually going to university and getting a job; that's when we would need English, rather than Welsh. Welsh was viewed at best as this weird subject which was a break from all the other subjects we had to do and at worst, a total waste of time. Many of us hated it, it was a very bad experience. 

Alex: What was it like learning Welsh for you at school? 

Diana: I actually did pretty well in Welsh as a subject back when I was a student, but I suppose that was me defaulting to being a good Chinese student with straight As. My parents really put pressure on my sister and I to do well at school, we were expected to do well in every subject - typical Chinese parents y'know. But it was within that context that I was expected to study hard and do well in Welsh. But it was only right up till that last Welsh exam and then that was it, my relationship with Welsh just ended there the moment I finished that last exam, I literally walked out thinking, that's it, I never have to use Welsh again. There were subjects that I enjoyed and subjects that I simply had to do as I had no choice in the matter and I'm afraid Welsh was the latter. I had a dismal experience learning it back when I was in school.

Alex: What was so bad about your experience learning Welsh? 

Diana: I think it was just the general mood in the class - even the white Welsh kids who were born in Wales to Welsh parents didn't want to spend time learning Welsh, it was time they could have spent either studying other subjects, doing something fun like playing football or computer games, or even studying another more useful language like French, Spanish, German or Chinese. Furthermore, I didn't have good teachers at that school, there was a lot of rote learning. Welsh grammar is a nightmare - like it makes no sense at all even to me after so many years. I remember how I like to use dw i'n wedi mynd to say "I've gone" or "I went" but the teacher would insist that I use es i instead to mean the same thing, in English we don't make big distinction between "I went to the supermarket to buy milk" and "I have gone to the supermarket to buy milk" or even "I have been to the supermarket to buy milk"- they kinda just mean the same thing. I look at the way my parents speak English, it is not perfect as I know they're formulating the sentences in Mandarin and then translating into English but as long as I can understand what they are trying to say, I encourage them and tell them how well they are doing so they will keep on learning and improving. I didn't get that with my Welsh teachers - if you made a mistake in that class, they would scold you and made you feel stupid. Some of the teachers were better than others, but overall, it was a pretty miserable experience at school for me learning Welsh I'm afraid. I hate to play the 'it was not my fault I can't speak Welsh today' card but I believe that if the whole system was a lot better organized, if I had better Welsh teachers at school then things could have been different; so I blame the system and also the bad teachers. 

Alex: My Welsh teacher Stephen told me that his greatest challenge to convince students that they need to make an effort to learn Welsh is that firstly, he has got to make Welsh lessons fun because if it is not fun, then forget it, the class is gonna hate you. Secondly, you've got to make them understand that there is a good reason why they are learning Welsh. If the students ask you, "what is the point of learning the Welsh language?" You need to have a really good answer. How did your teachers perform on those two points: did they make Welsh fun and did they explain why it was useful for you?

Diana: Well they definitely failed on the fun factor, the lessons were not fun. And come to think of it, no they never really bothered to explain why we had to do Welsh. In my case, I am Chinese - I don't look like a white Welsh person even if I was born in Wales. So one teacher was almost like, look if you want to live here you have to learn Welsh to truly call yourself Welsh otherwise you're not really one of us. I was like, really? Cos a lot of my Welsh classmates don't speak Welsh either and they are the ones with the really Welsh surnames like Evans, Jones and Lloyd - I remember this classmate with the painfully Welsh name of Rhys Llewellyn and he was constantly failing all his Welsh exams. So if people like him couldn't be bothered to learn Welsh, then sorry, it's then kinda hard to convince someone like me to do it. 

Alex: Can we talk about your identity please Diana? Do you see yourself as Welsh at all? 

Diana: There are three boxes I can rightfully tick: Chinese, Welsh and British. Then you have these very clunky hyphenated labels like Chinese-Welsh or Chinese-British which attempts to cover more than one category. I definitely am British given that this is where I was born, I grew up in Cardiff and I am now married to a British man, I have a British son. I'm definitely Chinese, like that's what people see when they look at my face and ask that question, "where are you from?" If I told them that I'm from Cardiff, they probably wouldn't be satisfied with that answer so I have to qualify it like, "I was born in Cardiff and my parents are from China." That's when they usually just take away the part of the answer that they were originally looking for. As for how Welsh I am, I don't know, is there a test where you have to reach a certain level of Welshness before you can claim to be Welsh and does that test involve a test of the Welsh language? Cos I can tell you that people like that Rhys Llewellyn would fail that test and what would he be then? Just British and not Welsh? Would he be considered English even though he has never ever lived in England? How do you classify people like him - that's a troublesome topic. If being born in Wales is enough to make you Welsh, then I guess I'm as Welsh as that Rhys.

Alex: What about your parents then? 

Diana: When my parents moved to Cardiff for work many years ago, it was already a massive struggle for them to learn enough English to get by and credit to them, they can speak English pretty well as a second language today. They loved all things British, they loved the royal family and thus I was named Diana because they adored Princess Diana. My sister used to call me 'princess', that was my nickname as a child because of that story. So I don't think my parents really paid heed to the fact that there was another language called Welsh when they settled in Cardiff for work - you have to see it from their point of view, moving to another country and having to settle into an English work environment, where they had to operate in their second language was already a really big deal for them. They made no effort whatsoever to learn Welsh as adults, I don't think they know more than like five or six words of Welsh between the two of them - words like araf (slow) which you see on the roads everywhere! So could they have made more of an effort? Yes they could've but would it have made much of a difference to them assimilating as immigrants? I doubt it, it's not like we had been living in a particularly Welsh speaking part of the country anyway, we were in Cardiff, in South Wales where very few people speak Welsh, even if it is the capital of Wales. Could you imagine if they didn't speak Italian in Rome or French in Paris? 

Alex: I know you spoke Mandarin at home with your family but apart from Welsh, but were there other languages spoken in that area in Cardiff where you grew up? And what other languages did you encounter as you were growing up there?  

Diana: Oh I lived in a very diverse neighborhood but you would expect that in Cardiff. I remember that street where I grew up, there were Indian people living there who spoke Hindi - well, I presume it was Hindi they were speaking but it may have been another Indian language. I remember a Polish family and obviously they spoke Polish. Then there were others from places like Portugal and Greece, the fact is I didn't feel that different being Chinese there as there was plenty of diversity. It wasn't like the entire street was white and Welsh and I was the only immigrant there. I can see that happening in more rural parts of Wales though - there is far less diversity in the Welsh countryside, compared to Cardiff.

Alex: Allow me to share with you an experience I had over the weekend at my boot camp Diana. My teacher and course organizer took the students out to a Bryn Fon concert which was in a field that was in the middle of nowhere - but when we got there, it was packed with Welsh speakers who were super enthusiastic about his music. Like he's this 67 year old singer who has been doing music in Welsh for many years and he has quite a following. He's a big fish in a small pond, quite unlike say Tom Jones or Shirley Bassey who are also Welsh but sing in English. But my point is that this Bryn Fon concert, I was the only non-white Welsh person there - I really looked hard, there wasn't a single other Asian, like Indian or Chinese looking person, there weren't any black people, there were only white people. I can't be the only non-white person who has studied Welsh because there are people like you Diana but then you would not go out to a Bryn Fon concert like that. Could you give me some perspective as to why it is like that? Do you have to be white to be considered properly 100% Welsh? Why don't the Asian and black people of Wales become more Welsh instead of choosing to be English speaking minorities there?So are Chinese people not assimilated enough and going to Bryn Fon concerts because white Welsh people are racist towards Chinese people or does the blame lie with the Chinese immigrants who have simply not made enough of a real effort to 100% assimilate properly by learning Welsh to embrace Welsh culture?

Diana: Yeah I think I've heard of Bryn Fon before but I can't say I know anything about his music. Did you know what you were paying for when you agreed to go to that concert in the middle of nowhere? Did you enjoy that Bryn Fon concert? 

Alex: Admittedly, I didn't know his music, never heard of him before that night. The people at the concert were all singing along to all his songs, they knew every single word to the lyrics and I felt awkward not being able to join in. But I wanted to have that experience, I wanted to do what my Welsh teacher and course organizer enjoyed, I wanted to do what they did as they're like properly Welsh and do all things Welsh so of course they were big fans of Bryn Fon's music. Like Bryn didn't speak a word of English on stage at all, it was a 100% Welsh-only affair that night. I told my Welsh friend Owain that I'm at a Bryn Fon concert and he texted me, "it's been nice knowing you, you've been kidnapped by the hardcore Welsh mafia cult." He meant it in jest of course - it's just that even Owain didn't expect me to turn up at a Bryn Fon gig like that which is really for the most hardcore Welsh speakers. Yeah, it was a very interesting experience, I had fun there.

Diana: I am going to use the information that your Welsh teacher gave you right back at you to describe how I would deal with this situation. Would it be fun for me to go to the Bryn Fon concert? I don't think so, like how am I going to enjoy it if I don't know his songs? And what would be the point of me going then, would I have anything to gain by being the only non-white person standing out there in a field in the middle of nowhere listening to Bryn Fon - like who's going to give me a special accolade for that? Your Welsh teacher made it very clear: his students weren't going to be motivated to do something if it wasn't fun and if they felt that there was no point to doing it - what's the point in me trying to be more Welsh than the Welsh people around me? What would I achieve and would I have fun doing that? Let me put it this way: if the cool, popular kids at school were into Bryn Fon, then I may have thought that I would lose out by not partaking as well; that if I didn't listen to his music as well, I would be considered as socially inept, uncool and not accepted as one of the popular kids. But that was never the case as the cool kids in school were never into Bryn Fon anyway, no - it would've only been the super hardcore Welsh speaking communities who were into Bryn Fon's music and I wasn't mixing with such people in the English school where I was educated and such was the nature of the schools in the Cardiff area. 

Alex: So do you think things would have been different if you were brought up in somewhere a lot more Welsh speaking like Gwynedd or Camarthenshire, where the cool kids in school were Welsh speaking rather than in central Cardiff then?

Diana: Oh, definitely. A lot of people underestimate how different the big English speaking cities like Cardiff are compare to the more rural countryside communities because of the language. You see you have a wide range, from places like Blaenau Gwent where about 90% of the people don't speak any Welsh at all to Gwenydd where about 75% of the people do speak Welsh. There is massive regional disparities and that's why a lot of it depends on which part of Wales you've come from. Now I'm from Cardiff, where about 85% of the people don't speak any Welsh, we're not the worst but yeah, if 85% of the people don't speak Welsh in Cardiff then you're unlikely to grow up with the language playing a part of your life. I also did French at school, I'm far more likely to encounter a French speaker than a Welsh speaker in a city like Cardiff. I actually remember far more French than Welsh today as I have had far more opportunities to use my French than Welsh in my working life and also for the occasional holiday to French-speaking Europe or just socially when I meet French speaking people here in London. I would've been more keen to learn Welsh if it was a language I could use daily. 

Alex: Have you ever ventured into the more Welsh speaking parts of Wales, what was your experience there?

Diana: Yes I have of course and you're not going to like my answer. I think I get away with it being Chinese, it's like they will see that I'm not white, they assume I'm not from Wales and so there would be no expectation for me to speak Welsh. I don't want it to be all awkward, like even if I do speak some Welsh when I am say buying an item in a shop and I say bore da (good morning) and diolch yn fawr (thank you very much) would they think that I'm a tourist who has picked up a few words? But if I then tell them that I am from Cardiff, I fear they will go alright then, let's switch entirely to Welsh and I can't keep up, then I'll have to be like sorry dw i ddim yn wedi eich ddeall chi (I didn't understand you) - then they would be like, but you can't really speak Welsh, can you? Bloody immigrant, coming to live in Wales but refusing to learn Welsh!

Alex: Hang on Diana. Has anyone actually said that to you? 

Diana: No, no. Never. But it's just like this worst case scenario in my head I would rather avoid and if they think that I'm an English speaking foreigner from Asia then that's fine by me. They're gonna be like "welcome to Wales, thanks for visiting!" I don't know if I would get that same warm reception if I admitted I was actually born here? I don't know, like if I am having a different kind of interaction like the one we're having now, then I'm happy to feel vulnerable and speak to you in Welsh; my terrible, limited Welsh and I can trust that you won't judge me too harshly as we're very good friends of course. But if I just wanna get a drink at a cafe or buy an item in a shop in somewhere like Anglesey where they do speak Welsh, then sorry, I won't speak Welsh a stranger as it opens up a whole tin of worms, no, let's not even go there.

Alex: I'd like to finish on this question, do you agree with the way Welsh has been made compulsory in all schools in Wales, given the way you had to do Welsh as a subject in school? Do you think it should be abolished? Do you think students should have the right to choose their second language rather than be forced to learn Welsh whether they like it?

Diana: As someone who is at least effectively bilingual in Mandarin and English, I can't claim to be trilingual as my Welsh is so limited and perhaps I can call myself trilingual if you include my French but again I'm not totally fluent in French so it'll depend on how generous you wanna be and where you draw the line. I think there needs to be a fundamental rethink about the way we approach the learning of languages in this country, not just Wales but all of the UK. For people like you and I who are quite comfortable expressing ourselves in more than one language, learning a foreign languages.  For many of the people in Wales, having to learn Welsh on top of English is seen as such a massive burden, like you're asking them to do twice the amount of work compared to the people in England where they only need English whereas if you go to more multilingual countries around the world like Switzerland, Belgium. Finland, Luxembourg Singapore and Malaysia, speaking two or three languages is just normal y'know, it's no big deal. If Welsh people had the same attitude towards learning more languages then I believe that we wouldn't even be debating this in the first place. It is this fundamental reluctance, this refusal to learn a second language that is the root of the problem here. I do believe it is beneficial to be bilingual and become fluent in another language - I think it is a problem that the UK has totally failed when it comes to achieving this and it has a lot to do with the way the default global lingua franca today is English and thus English people tend to get away with being monolingual but that's not right. This is a problem for the whole country. 

Alex: Then what about allowing Welsh students to pick a another second language that is not Welsh in school, Diana?

Diana: To be honest, I don't think it matters - I think back upon the many people I went to school with. They sucked at Welsh, I don't think they're gonna become fluent in Dutch, Thai or Arabic. But most of them would just end up in English speaking work environments, they would never have to socialize or do work meetings in another language. So as long as they've had the experience of learning another language, it would train that part of their brains so whether we make them study French, Welsh,  German, Portuguese or Hebrew, it still achieves that same purpose as part of their education. So I am on the fence on that issue. I don't think it matters which language they learn but it is how you approach it and how it is taught - there's nothing wrong with learning Welsh of course but there was something very wrong with the way it was taught to me when I was a student. I don't blame the language, but I do blame the terrible teachers I got - that was unfortunate, it was my bad luck and I sincerely hope that other Welsh students had better experiences than me. It would be nice if people in Wales were more open to the idea of being bilingual or multilingual, like in other countries where that's simply the norm there, so those kids there grow up speaking more than one language because everyone else around them does that and they don't feel that learning a second language is anything extraordinary - it is totally normal.

Alex: I remember a few weeks ago when on the German-Luxembourg border in Echternacherbruck, I was literally standing a few meters from the border just on the German side when I asked a friendly local for directions in German - I was looking for the nearest bus stop and he was kind enough to walk me to the bus stop since he was headed that way. The conversation started in German, then we switched to French and then he even offered to speak to me in English as well. But that wasn't some guy at the tourist information office whose job was to deal with tourists from all over Europe, it was just some random young dude walking by when I was lost and needed to ask for directions. I think most British tourists would simply take out their phones and ask Google for directions but I like encounters like that and it just reminds me how hopeless British people are compared to our counterparts on continental Europe when it comes to being to effectively communicate in more than just one language. It would take a fundamental shift in attitudes to fix this problem. 

Diana: Yes exactly. we must get rid of the attitude problem first, then start teaching other languages. The Welsh government can enact the strictest law to ban English but must address the root of this huge problem in the first place. 

Alex: Thank you so much for talking to me Diana today. I really appreciate your help. Diolch yn fawr iawn, merci bien! 

Diana: Croeso, de rien!