A Note from Passing Guest: Main Language
[Note to the reader: This is an excerpt from my book Passing Guest, where I explain my personal relationship between storytelling and language. Beyond my writing, speaking several languages is a big part of my life. I grew up bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) and at different stages of my life I learnt French, English and Chinese, as well as some Korean and Bahasa Indonesia. My relationship with all these languages shaped my experiences and my life away from my home country. In my novel The Mansion South of Maple Street, I wanted to give languages an important value to the story and they are part of the main character’s relationship with the environment in different ways].
Recently, I had to fill out some official forms and I was asked what my main language was. Apparently - and according to their definition of ‘main language’ - mine would be the one that came naturally to mind first. They never mentioned anything about that language being my mother tongue or something similar. Honestly, I did not know what to answer.
For me, that I speak more than one language fluently, it is hard to say if there is one that stands out. To start with, I grew up in a bilingual environment speaking Catalan and Spanish as my two mother tongues. On top of that, in my family and with a lot of friends, we usually mix and match the two languages in many casual conversations. Even at work, depending on who the stakeholders are, we constantly switch from Catalan to Spanish, holding interesting bilingual conversations.
Later, when I moved abroad, Chinese and English became the two other languages that are now a big part of my life and my identity. The four of them, altogether, come to my mind first in different situations and different contexts. Most of the time, it is a subconscious reflex. I find my lack of rigidity in the use of a particular language one of the most beautiful things of my life.
As a writer, language also affects the flavour of my creative process. Of my two mother tongues, Spanish is the one that my creativity associates with storytelling: I grew up listening to the fantasy tales that my grandad shared with me always in Spanish, his native language. This is surely when my mind associated Spanish as my main language for storytelling, instead of Catalan. This is also a beautiful legacy from my grandad; writing in Spanish always reminds me of him.
One of my old Chinese language workbook. This was the last Chinese Language official certificate exam I took before leaving Beijing in 2015.
Unfortunately, my written Chinese is not fluent enough to write stories at this level. Over the years living away from Spain, English is the language that has become my main language for a lot of things, including some of my storytelling.
There are stories that come to my mind in English first, others in Spanish. The language in which they come alive affect my point of view on them and the world that I create around those words.
‘Passing Guest' is a collection of stories that germinated in my imagination in English, and so this is the language in which they were written.