Megan Chen
What is your best memory about your family’s immigration story?
“Funny story - in Shanghai, they have a few fake markets, or markets that sell a bunch of knockoffs of brands. For example, they might have fake Louis Vuitton bags that are intentionally fake. The ‘V’ is oddly shaped because they can’t make it exactly the same. The quality differs between some of them - some stores make them well, some don’t. It’s just really interesting to see. When I was there, I tried to bargain for a lower price. That’s something you have to do, because they’ll want to sell it to you for some amount near the actual price of the bag, which you don’t want. If you want to bargain from $100, start bargaining at $20-25, and you can slowly raise the price, but you want to start low. I was doing that once in 8th grade, and I was speaking in Chinese, but they replied to me in English and they could tell I had an accent. They also charge foreigners more, and I was trying to stay in character. But my Mandarin wasn’t good enough at that point. So my Mandarin was improving, but it was still not there.”
Did you speak Mandarin at home in the United States?
“Actually, it’s interesting. My immediate family is me, my mom, and my dad - no siblings. But when it was just the three of us, I actually spoke Mandarin more than I do now. Because in their current jobs, they are working with lots of people from other places, like France, the UK, and Australia, they speak English a lot and their English also improved. So now it’s a mixture of Mandarin and English. Whereas before, when I was younger, their companies actually had a lot of Asian people. Lots of Asians wanted to work there because of the booming auto industry, so they were speaking Mandarin most of the time, and that carried over to home.”
