Low standards for white Chinese speakers

"Your Chinese is very good...for a white guy."

I strongly identify with this statement.

Chinese is a great language to learn for many reasons. One such reason is that native Chinese speakers are incredibly supportive of you, no matter how little effort you've put in or progress you've made. If you can even manage a totally flat, tone dead "NEE HOW," the average person you run into in China will start drowning you in compliments about how very good your Chinese is. Part of this is them just being polite, but a large part of this is their cultural expectation that no one who is not East Asian-looking will speak Chinese. This is because everyone around them is Chinese and almost none of the non-Chinese they have ever encountered spoke Chinese. And all the media and entertainment they consume strengthens their expectations.

This is very different from the linguistic expectations in English speaking countries where many of we white people grew up, surrounded by people of all races and cultural origins that all spoke English.

The thing about speaking Mandarin (or Canto or any other Chinese dialect for that matter) as white person is that there are very few of us...we are the exception not the norm. And being the exception by definition makes us exceptional. It has nothing to do with our ability or lack of ability. It's simply a numbers games.

When they compliment me, they are saying "your Chinese is very good compared to what I expected from a white person which was that you are unable to speak Chinese and illiterate." They are not saying "your Chinese is very good compared to a native Chinese speaker who studied at Tsinghua."

So while I properly "accept" the compliments about how amazing my Chinese is every day by modestly disagreeing and suggesting that, instead, my Chinese is at best "ok" or that it "gets the job done", as is culturally expected, I, myself, do not judge myself against their low standards.

And what exactly are my standards?

I've been complimented on my Chinese ability at least a half a dozen times a day, every day of my life for going on two and a half decades. On the one hand, I've very happy with my Chinese ability for the amount of time I spent studying it...which was part time for 3 semesters in university, ~6 months studying abroad in China and 2 months studying Chinese in Washington, DC. My Chinese was good enough to set up and run a company in Guangzhou for a few years with no English speaking staff, read (and negotiate) contracts and manage a software development team. I used to post in Chinese regularly on Weibo and at one point had a decent following. And back in my younger years, when I still had hair and was still an American, I even occasionally wrote blog posts in Chinese. (AI didn't exist!) I can also speak enough Cantonese for daily life in Guangdong and Hong Kong and, unlike many native Cantonese speakers, read and write it.

But all of that notwithstanding, my Chinese is still very far from where I'd like it to be. While I'm fine at reading news and legal documents, reading fiction is a struggle because my descriptive vocabulary is weak and I don't understand all of the cultural allusions. My chengyu is also not good. I also haven't read any of the classic books that all Chinese speakers should read. Overall, my Chinese language ability nowhere close to that of a college educated. I'd like to someday get to the level of a native speaker who is not only a native speaker, but a well-educated native speaker.

One might even say I think that my Chinese is very good...for a white guy.