Opinion | Guess how kids choose between the US and China in soft power?

My teenage nephew’s fingers race ahead of his speech machine as he valiantly tries to give me a step-by-step guide to Rubik’s Cube in Mandarin, but after the third or fourth ranhou (“and then”), his voice falls silent. His little brother can’t bear to listen anymore and blurts out, “Why can’t you tell her in English?”

He can’t do that, he explains gently, while I stifle my laughter, because the aunt “doesn’t really understand English.”

That would be poor old me, the self-appointed guardian of Chinese heritage, who made it a point to speak Mandarin and never English to my family’s children in the hopes that they wouldn’t lose Chinese as a native language, and thus easy access to one cultural universe. Still, sometimes it feels like a lost cause.

Even in a traditional Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking family like mine, the children stick to English among themselves and with their parents. Chinese fades into the background, less a mother tongue than a grandmother tongue; People talk about being polite to older people, myself included, when they can look away Captain Underpants, Ninjago, Young Sheldon or whatever it is they’re stuck with on Netflix via TV, tablet or phone.