A chameleon was born

I've always struggled with the idea that one can only be of one nationality and never the other. If you're born in Japan, naturally you are seen as a Japanese. But I grew up in a complicated family, with several moms and a half sister, who are both Taiwanese. Weirdly, having different mothers didn't stop me from growing closer to my big sister, and I would often visit her during the summer and winter breaks. Learning Chinese almost felt native to me, I didn't study grammar or  remember 100 vocabularies, I just hanged out with my Taiwanese side of the family a lot. But as close as I was to this side of the family, I never really felt accepted into it. I was always "That Japanese kid" to them, and even till today, some uncles still bring up the story of my "Chinese learning phase", which really just mean "when you were talking all funny" with great fondness. 

On the other side, because my mother was an English teacher, she was determined that me and my sister shall be the next English prodigy in the small town of Nagatsugawa, and bombarded us with every teaching method she could think of. Books, quizzes, songs, dancing, even taking us to a lot of her  foreigner friends parties...you name it, we've done it. And it worked. Although I wasn't to found of some of the methods (mainly the quizzes and tests), through her trails and errors, I discovered my love for reading, and learning English was no more than me enjoying a quite afternoon at the library after that. If you asked a 12 year old me to name a scene from Harry Potter, I would've gladly recited the whole book for you.

But as I was juggling all Japanese, English and Chinese at the same time, I wasn't a very fast learner. I spoke all three languages very clumsily and with a bit of an accent, making me sort of an outsider in every group. Although I was Japanese, I was considered half Taiwanese to my friends because of all the time I spent in Taiwan. But for my relatives in Taiwan, I was the Japanese cousin who comes to visit now and then. I didn't belong anywhere, and I was confused as to why until I gradually became more fluent in the languages. I learned that speaking someone else's language is the quickest way to blend in a group. The way that people's face lit up when they hear their language spoken in unexpected places will never be tiring to watch.  I learned to talk to people with their respected languages, and they in turn accepted me into the group as one of their own. And thus, a chameleon was born.

There are no better words that I can think of to describe this phenomenon but this quote from one of my favorite comedian:

"Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people."-Trevor Noah, Born a Crime