“Enough, ” All the chatting and giggling at the dinner table instantly ceased, leaving my sister and I glancing fearfully into my father’s irritated face. “I want you girls to always know,” my father cleared his voice and glared at us, “we are Chinese, so in our family, we speak Chinese only.”

His voice trembled, “I know you have grown up and shared secrets you don’t want us to know, but your mother and I raised you. You should at least be grateful, instead of completely ignoring us by speaking a language we don’t understand at all!”

He then stormed out of the dining room and slammed the door behind him. Dumbfounded, my sister and I looked at each other and realized that we were in big trouble.

I didn’t know when or how I began speaking English with my sister, but I did know that one of the major reasons I spoke English with her in our family was that we would communicate something quite sensitive even right before my parents. English provides me a transparent barrier between me and my parents—I was able to write or talk about whatever I wanted without any concern of being discovered or scolded by my parents. 

In the middle of my puberty, I was in a fierce mood of defiance of my family traditional ideas. I wanted to get my ears pierced, wear makeup, or dye my hair—just anything that made me look unique and was firmly forbidden in my family.  My sister and I talked about those crazy actions almost every day, about how and when to bring those fantasies into action. For fear that our parents may know about our plans and “corruptive” thoughts, my sister and I often talked and even text each other in English. Whenever there was something we didn’t want to let our parents know, we automatically switched to English, in our posts on social media, our text, and even our dialogue. Gradually, using English in daily life became our habits. We talked less and less to our parents, who only knew Chinese. We were immersed in a beautiful new world created by two teenage girls, a world without conservative convention, and without my parents.

My parents never really expressed any dissatisfaction towards my use of language before, probably because they didn't think they had any reason to interfere. Nevertheless, this time, my father’s outrage evoked my fear that my parents would deprive me of my right to even communicate with my sister and step in my plan to be a more “special” person.

I decided to take action before my parents’ anger threatened my plan, so in one weekend, I told my parents that I was not going home and excused myself for preparing for the final. However, instead of really studying, I went out to an ear-piercing store.

No more than 10 minutes later, I exited the store with rings on my earlobes. I immediately texted my sister to brag about my “first step in real rebellion”
“Oh yes!” I texted her in English, “You know what? I pierced my ears! I can wear earrings now!”
“Mom and dad are going to kill you!” She replied back with shock, “but looking really cool.”
“No, they will not, sister.” I triumphantly wrote, “They don’t even know what we are talking about, need I to remind you?”

However, just a few days later, excitement of achieving my rebellious fantasy faded and was replaced by the pain of inflammation. Due to my hasty handling of my wound and the low-quality of my earrings, my ears were severely infected. My ears were so badly swollen and bleeding that I was unable to take a bath.  However, since I decided to hide this secret from my parents, I received no help from home and had to struggle to heal my wounds by buying random medicine from the pharmacy, but the situation only went worse.

I would do nothing but send some words of complaint onto my social media. One night, after I posted a long English passage complaining how painful it was to get my ears infected onto my Wechat, I got a phone call from my parents, who claimed that they would come to Guangzhou immediately and scolded me for my “horrible and unforgivable behavior”.

A few hours later, I was sitting in the emergency room in the nearby hospital with my parents. To my surprise, my parents didn’t show any extreme anger or condemnation. All they did was to carefully consult the doctor, apply medicine to my wounds, and even take me to a jewelry store to buy me an appropriate and high-quality pair of earrings. It appeared that they cared more about my safety than my reckless violation of family traditions. Although I was a bit reluctant to admit this, but I was actually touched that they would come to GuangZhou late in night from my hometown, a town far away from GuangZhou, just to help me to deal with the disastrous result of my impulsive behavior.

When they sent me back to my dormitory, in order to escape the awkward atmosphere in the car, I started to play with my parents’ phone. I still couldn't understand how on earth my parents figured out that I got my ears pierced, since I had not told this to any one of them, or imply it via any platform, well, at least not in Chinese. This is when I started to suspect my parents did something to my English post on Wechat.

There was a list of recently used apps on my father’s phone, and I found google translation in it. This was weird. My father seldom had any contact with English in his work, so there was no way he would download a translation machine, unless….With a bad feeling, I tapped into the app and instantly understand what had happened.
All the translation record in my father were exactly my every English post on social media, including the one in which I grumbled about ear inflammation, and most terribly even some posts in which I cursed my parents. Astonished, I also browsed over the communication record on Wechat between my dad and my mum, just to find out thousands of text discussing what did my every post mean and what should they did to help me.
It occurred to me that for all those long time, they were trying to, although quite clumsily and reluctantly, penetrated through the hard walls I established between them and me. They still managed to check on me no matter how often I frustrated them with a language they had no idea of.

“We have reached your dorm.” My dad said with a tired and gentle voice when he parked the car in front of the school gate. He reached out and embraced me, “Next time if you decide to do something, please communicate with us first.”
He saw that I was looking through the record of translation in the software when I returned his phone to him. “About your post, your mum and I are really sorry to do this to you. Those are supposed to be your privacy, but you leave us no choice.”

Tears welled up in my eyes when I heard them said so. My parents actually wanted nothing but making sure that me—their child was alright. However, what I did was just to hinder their path to fulfilling their responsibility as parents by using a foreign language as my weapon, something they had so little defense for that they had to resort to translation software to reach for me. Why was I doing this? I was completely excluding myself from them, building up cold walls with alien words, writing or speaking everything in English before them just in hope of securing my ridiculous scheme. It was unimaginable what my parents could feel when their own daughters were rejecting any communication with them so they could only get to know what was in their children’s mind by spying on them on social media.

“I am sorry, mum and dad. I was wrong.”
That night, when I opened my texting entry with my sister, I wrote in Chinese, “Let’s quit doing this.”
“Wait, what?” She still insisted on typing in English.
“Language should be a bridge that connects strangers, but not a barrier that separates families.” I typed every word one by one in perfect Chinese, and then I put down my phone and walked outside the dorm. Looking at the stream of cars passing through the road before my dorm, I wished I would go back home, where my family would talk and laugh together, in pure Chinese.