Hearing Grandma's Voice
Shin Min Daily News, 听见阿嫲的声音
(Translation)
“Peace is a blessing.”
Just five simple words, without any elaborate phrasing, yet they brought many people to tears.
In the film Dear You, another line left an especially deep impression on me: “What I have been waiting for is not money, nor for you to come home to repay me. I only wanted love, and to hear that voice that was once so familiar.”
Following the film’s release, a discussion emerged: should the Teochew dialogue be preserved in its original form, or should it be dubbed in Mandarin so that more viewers can understand the story? As a psychologist who studies bilingualism, however, another question came to mind: Why does the same sentence, spoken in a dialect, always seem warmer than its translated version? Can language itself truly influence our memories and emotions?
American psychologists Viorica Marian and Ulric Neisser, in a landmark 2000 study, found that people are more likely to recall past experiences in the language they originally used when those events occurred. In other words, memories and language are tightly intertwined. What truly shapes us is not the language itself, but the memories that the language carries.
Perhaps this explains why hearing Grandma ask, “Have you eaten?” in Teochew always feels far more affectionate than hearing the Mandarin equivalent. A familiar dialect immediately brings to mind Grandma herself, the old family home, and the aroma of meals drifting from the kitchen.
What remains in our hearts is never merely the language—it is the person speaking it, and the emotions carried in those words.
Some people worry that exposing young people to dialects such as Teochew might affect their Mandarin proficiency or even cause different languages to become “mixed up.” Many imagine the brain to be like a storage box: if one language is added, another must be removed. But that is not how the brain works.
Psychologist Judith Kroll and her colleagues have shown that when bilingual or multilingual people speak, different languages are activated simultaneously in the brain. The brain then rapidly selects the most appropriate language according to the context. Rather than competing with one another, languages cooperate and enrich one another.
Returning to Dear You, what truly deserves our reflection is not which version of the film should be shown. Instead, it reminds us that every language preserves the life story of a generation. We do not forget Mandarin because we learn Teochew. On the contrary, each additional language gives us another key to understanding others—and another precious set of memories to treasure.
Today, I no longer hear Grandma’s familiar greeting, “Have you eaten?” But whenever I think of her, the first thing that comes to mind is still her voice speaking Teochew—not its Mandarin translation. Perhaps this is exactly what psychology tells us: some memories are forever stored in the language in which they were first heard.
If your own grandmother is still with you, why not sit beside her one day and gently ask, “Grandma, how would you say this in Teochew?” She might smile in reply. She might repeat the phrase, then begin telling stories of her youth, of the old days in Nanyang, and of memories she has never before shared with her grandchildren.
Only later did I come to understand that what we wish to preserve is never simply a dialect—it is Grandma’s voice.
