The Translator's Eye: Language Acquisition as Epistemology

I’m from Henan, early 2000s.

I’ve written before about how memory works - how we author our childhoods, polish them into the versions we need. I won’t pretend to give you an accurate picture of what it was like. Just impressions: summer evenings, cycling, the particular quality of light in a place where everyone knows everyone. The version I have is load-bearing now. It holds up a self.

Henan sits at the geographic center of China. The Yellow River runs through it - the same river that gave birth to Chinese civilization, the same river that has killed more people than any other natural feature on earth. They call it “China’s Sorrow.”

This is where Chinese civilization began. The Shang dynasty ruled from Henan. The earliest Chinese writing was found here. For most of recorded history, Henan was the center of the world.

It isn’t anymore.

The twentieth century was not kind to Henan. The famine of 1942 killed three million - drought, locusts, war, and a government that requisitioned grain anyway. Time magazine ran photographs. The provincial government denied anything was wrong.

I learned most of this later, from the outside. When you leave a place as a child, you have to re-learn it as history. But some things you learn differently. My grandparents told me about the 1975 Banqiao Dam collapse - a year’s worth of rain in twenty-four hours, sixty-two dams failing in a chain reaction. They told me how they spent the night protecting the roof tiles. Somewhere between 26,000 and 240,000 dead depending on who you believe. The government kept it secret for decades. The largest dam failure in human history, and my grandparents’ version was about roof tiles.

By the time I was born, Henan had stabilized into a different kind of problem. Not catastrophe, just poverty. The coastal provinces were booming - Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu - plugged into global supply chains. Henan was landlocked, agricultural, left behind.

There’s a stereotype of Henanese people in China. The province is the butt of jokes the way certain American states are on the coasts. When Henanese migrant workers show up in coastal cities, they sometimes lie about where they’re from.

I didn’t know any of this growing up. Henan was just home.

I was young when we left for Canada. Young enough that the memories are impressions, not narratives.

I didn’t speak English. Not a word.

This is hard to explain to people who’ve never experienced it. It’s not like being in a foreign country on vacation. It’s total immersion in meaninglessness. People’s mouths move and nothing happens. You catch fragments - your name, “yes,” “no” - like recognizing shapes in clouds. The rest is noise.

I remember sitting in classrooms understanding nothing. Not the lessons, not the other kids, not the teachers. I watched. I learned to read faces, to track the emotional weather of a room, to understand what was happening without understanding what was being said.

I had no friends. How do you make friends when you can’t speak? I existed adjacent to the other kids, in the same rooms, on the same playgrounds, but not really with them. A presence without a voice.

Language comes if you’re immersed long enough. But there’s a period - months, maybe a year - where you’re not quite a person. You exist in the gaps.

Years later, through test scores and luck, I ended up at Upper Canada College on full financial aid.

The culture shock was granular. Small tells that marked you as different. The ski resorts everyone mentioned casually - I didn’t ski. The “cottages” that meant second houses by lakes. The travel sports leagues, the summer camps.

I remember a conversation about March break plans. Everyone was going somewhere - Whistler, the Caribbean, Europe. Someone asked me. I made something up. I don’t remember what. I remember the heat in my face, the quick calculation of what lie would sound plausible, the relief when the conversation moved on.

That became a skill: learning the references without having the experiences. Asking questions that sounded curious rather than confused. Holding two truths at once - gratitude and alienation - without letting either one show.

I came to code the same way I came to English.

Late. From the outside. Pattern-matching until the patterns started to make sense.

In high school I did debate - first in Ontario, fifth nationally. Debate teaches you to build arguments fast, to be comfortable not knowing things and figuring them out live. But that’s not really why programming clicked.

The first time I wrote something that worked, I recognized the feeling. The same dissociation from childhood, the same watching. Sitting in a room where everyone’s speaking a language you don’t understand, tracking the shapes of meaning, waiting for the moment when the noise resolves into signal.

I’d done this before. I was seven, sitting in a classroom in Canada, understanding nothing. And then one day I understood something. And then more. The feeling of a language opening up - I knew that feeling. I’d been training for it my whole life.

People talk about frameworks and technologies and I catch words here and there, finding familiar stones in the river. I learned to read the room. I learned that meaning lives in the gaps.

I’m good at this now. But I still feel like a translator. The outsider’s eye doesn’t close just because you’ve learned the language.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

The thing about never belonging anywhere is you’re not captured by any single orthodoxy. I didn’t learn the “right way” to think about code, or problems, or the world. My identity isn’t welded to my opinions, because my identity has been rebuilt too many times. I can change my mind. I can be wrong.

I’ve been wrong about everything before. I’ve been the stupidest person in the room - literally, the person who couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. I survived it.

The scholarship kid, the immigrant kid, the kid who came to tech late - these aren’t handicaps I overcame. They’re the reason I notice what I notice. The outsider sees what the insider can’t. The translator catches what the native speaker takes for granted.

I think about Henan sometimes. A place that was home before I knew what home meant, before I knew you could leave it, before I knew that leaving changes you in ways you can’t undo.