Going All In to Fit In ft. Sean Hsieh | Real You Mandarin Podcast EP24

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Sean Hsieh and I actually met at a local Japanese language school in Japan, where the only language we ever spoke with each other was Japanese... right up until we sat down to record this episode together. It's a funny setup for a Mandarin podcast, but it also says something about how language identities get layered on top of each other over the years, and how rarely we go back and unpack them.

Most of the guests on this podcast tend to fall into one of two camps. They're either native speakers who grew up in Taiwan or mainland China and later immigrated to the West, or they're fully American-Born Chinese (ABC) or American-Born Taiwanese (ABT) like me. Sean lands somewhere in the middle of both: what people call "1.5 Generation." He was born and raised in Taiwan until age 13, then moved to Singapore for an American-style international school. To make that jump, he made a radical decision: cut Chinese off entirely and go full immersion in English, even though he could barely speak it when he arrived.

The All-In Bet on English

In the episode, Sean walks through what that 極端 / 极端 / jí duān / extreme approach actually looked like on a day-to-day basis, why he felt it was the only option at the time, and what he gained from going all in. There's a real argument for the strategy. His English is so natural now that most people who meet him assume he grew up in the US.

The Part He Didn't See Coming

What Sean didn't anticipate is how it would feel to come back to Mandarin years later and find that it had quietly stalled out somewhere around middle school. He still has all the characters, all the cultural fluency, and a vocabulary range that would put most of us ABCs and ABTs to shame. And yet when he assesses his own Mandarin, he describes it as "not very good."

Hearing him describe his Mandarin that way was one of the most striking moments of the conversation for me. So many of us ABCs and ABTs would kill for what Sean considers subpar. It's such a clear reminder that fluency is relative, and that the standard we hold ourselves to has way more to do with who we're comparing ourselves to than where we actually are.

The most honest part of the conversation is when Sean talks about what he'd do differently. He doesn't regret learning English the way he did. He regrets thinking he had to give something up to do it.

Key Vocab From This Episode

觀點 / 观点 | guān diǎn (point of view / opinion)

極端 / 极端 | jí duān (extreme)

打從心底 / 打从心底 | dǎ cóng xīn dǐ (from the bottom of one's heart / genuinely / sincerely)

Wherever You Are in Your Mandarin Journey

If Sean's story hit somewhere familiar... whether you cut Mandarin off, never had enough of it growing up, or feel like you're always behind some imagined standard... Real You Mandarin: Self-Expression was built for exactly that. The course is less about reaching native fluency and more about giving you the language to express the real you in Mandarin, starting from wherever you actually are right now.

Not sure if it's for you yet? Try a free lesson first and see what it feels like to learn Mandarin through content you actually want to talk about in real life.

Get the Full Transcript

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