User Story

By Xiaodong Gu

Chinese people usually begin learning English with “one, two, three”. When my daughter was about three or four years old she started learning English in kindergarten. She could only count from one to ten and only knew a few sentences like “Hi, How are you”, and “I am sorry”. One day, she bumped into a foreigner in the street. She said, “I am sorry!” at once. The foreigner was very happy to hear English from a beautiful little girl. So he replied, “I am sorry too.” My daughter wondered, “Should proper English use numbers to express how sorry you are?” So she wanted to try, “I am sorry three.” The foreigner was confused and he asked, “What are you sorry for?” Oh, my poor daughter, now she was sure she learned the real English, so she added one more time, “I am sorry five.” Then, the foreigner understood what she was saying, and he laughed out loudly.

I got a lot of problems with my poor English when I came to Canada. The first day my husband and I went to the LINC school, they asked me which grade I was supposed to be. My husband told them grade zero. They all laughed because they didn’t have grade zero in Toronto. After I took the test, we had to wait for their notice of the date to go to school. One day, when my husband was out, they called us. It was the first time I answered the phone in English. At first I just heard one word “school”, so I thought the call came from my daughter’s school. They spent a long time to let me know that it was from my LINC school. After that, they told me about the date and the time. Tomorrow, that was okay, at 9 AM. Nine, what time is nine? Holding the phone, I began to count my fingers, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. When I got to nine, the teacher shouted on the phone: “Right! That’s it. Nine.” I was so excited I got it. As soon as my husband came back, I told him about the date and the time of the school. He couldn’t believe it, “How did you get it?” When he knew the truth, he laughed at me and said: “You are lucky, if they asked you to come to school at 12 AM, would you take off you socks and count your toes to get the number?”

Although my son Ryan was born in Toronto, he learned Chinese first because we use Chinese all the time at home. When he came to our school’s daycare, he got a little problem with the language too, but he is a fast learner. Just several days later, he wanted to speak some English with us. Some experts say that two and half years old is the age of a rebel. It is true. If I said yes, he would say no and if I said no, he would say yes. One day, we were talking about something and I said, “I don’t know.” He answered at once, “I don’t yes!” We had to take some time to understand what he said, and then everyone laughed. The “I love you” game is our family’s favorite game. Every time we tell him “I love you.” He replies at once, “I love you too.” And we will say, “I love you three.” He laughs and keeps going: “I love you four.” We can play this all the way to I love you ten.

I started learning English from “one, two, three”, but I hope I will be able to express myself beyond just counting numbers in the future.

To see Xiaodong read excerpts from her story, watch the video story about the International Day of Sharing Stories hosted by the Mennonite Centre for Newcomers and the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights.