Who am I and what can I offer?

Yancinban Chameleon 洋泾浜变色龙

aka luminyuan

Being multilingual makes you feel like a chameleon. Sometimes you think of the perfect joke, only to realize half a second later that the friend you are currently hanging out with wouldn’t understand the joke because it’s in a language they don’t speak. And then woooosh! You come up with another joke expressing a similar sentiment, only this time in a language they do understand!

The “Yancinban” part in my blog name comes from 洋泾浜, which is what I was called growing up, since I did not speak my heritage language Suzhounese with a “perfect” accent. This will be explained in a later blog in detail!

– What was it like growing up in an environment that never fully accepted you for who you are? – What is it like to have 5 sets of personal pronouns in your family, even though everyone only lived 1 hour apart and technically spoke the same “dialect” of a “language”? – What is it like to be perceived as a woman in one country but a man in another? – Why are some Chinese people racist, and how is it different from American racism?
Discover a new perspective on language, culture, and life through my blog.