Do you realize how painful such a task is?

(The following banter is adapted from an email I wrote to a friend, a very white friend with white Ivy league educated parents.)

My mother, my very intelligent mother whom I believe I have inherited all of my cognitive abilities from, is verbally sabotaging herself on electronic paper and asking, no wait, demanding that I correct it for her. If this were a friend, I would explain to her that she needed to try harder, that the present attempt was so lacking that I could not edit it because I was unsure about what she means to say. But, this is my mother and I somehow cannot say this to my mother.

The concept of adjective and adverbs and past and present tense, all of that is so foreign to Chinese people. In Chinese, there is really only one verb tense. It is not present nor past nor past perfect nor future. It just is. "I eat now. I eat yesterday. I eat tomorrow." The added time marker indicates the tense. It is in times like these that I wish my parents grew up in a country that had been colonized by the British. Their English skills would be so much better.

Really, my dad's English is pretty good. The guy has been translating church talks from English to Chinese since I was in grade school. My mom, my mom is just a whole different story. Her English is probably not that bad. She can verbally communicate just fine. But, when it comes to writing, she turns into this helpless teenager who has resigned herself to defeat, the state of helplessness that is so much more perceived than real.

And the result? Well I, the least busy of all of her kids, and strangely enough also the least patient, am assigned the task of making it all better--of trying to understand what exactly she wants to say, and then saying it correctly.

Oh wretched Earth, why me? Like my uncle always used to say "Woe is me; woe is me; I am woe, and woe is me." He grew up in Hawaii. His English is good.