You Speak Chinese?

UBC didn’t believe I, a Chinese citizen who lived in China for 17 years, speak Chinese—-but they also kind of did. What is all of this about?

Flashing back to my last year at UBC. As I was about to graduate, and there was a second lanaguage requriement for Arts students that we must knows a second language (other than English) to graduate. This is frankly a weird requirement, but let’s just put that aside and focus on my months-long battle to get the UBC to recognize and admit that I was capable of speaking Mandarin Chinese, so that I should automatically fullfil this requirement.

Firstly, there was no doubt that proficiency in Chinese did fulfill this second language requirement. I was sure it was listed somewhere in the university’s database that my citizenship was Chinese and my native language was Chinese, couldn’t they just use that as a proof? But it seemed that they were rather unflexible and strict, and they listed four ways to prove one’s Chinese proficiency: (1) finishing high school in China; (2) completing a grade-12 Mandarin Chinese course during high school in Canada; and (3) completing two Chinese courses at UBC; (4) demonstrating Chinese capability through an examination.

So, let’s see which section I will fall under. Well, after 10 emails back and forth with multiple advisors, it turned out that this was much more complicated than I expected. For (1), I transferred to Canada after grade 11, so I didn’t finish all of high school in China. I argued that, I did finish my junior high school (grade 7-9) in Taiwan, but the advisor dismissed it, claimed that this does not technically count as “finishing high school”.

Alright, then did I take a grade-12 Chinese class in Canada? Well I didn’t, because I despised it, because they were just super easy GPA booster courses for the subset of Chinese international students who don’t care to learn about new stuffs in Canada. They get a 95%, which help them get to a better university then they otherwise would. I picked only the challenging courses, those I had no prior experiences to: Economics, Social Sciences, Philosphy, etc. That decision brought me a miserable start of Canadian high school experience, academically speaking. But also because I refused to choose the easy path, I was now unable to fullfil this language requirement.

Then, what if I take a few Chinese classes in the last year of UBC? Well, again I see these as borderline cheating and shameful for my own standards. I could also took some other language courses, like Spanish, that could also fullfill the lanaguge requirement. But I didn’t want to, because I knew just two introductory languages courses would not take me to anywhere, I wouldn’t learn much and I would just forget everything a year later. I took German when I was in a Taiwanese high school, but the only term I still remember is Guten Tug. So it will be a waste of time, I would prefer spending the two course spaces for serious courses.

So now I had come to my last option: demonstrating my Chinese capacity through an examination. Well, the idea that, I, a Chinese citizen who grew up in China until 17, still needed to do an exam to prove that I speak Chinese, is already stupid. What is even stupider is that, the advisor suggested me to take a HSK Chinese exam for non-native Chinese speakers at the cost of about 110 Canadian dollars! Well, have you native English speakers in any moment of your life been required to take an IELTS exam to prove you speak English? How ridicious! There was no way I would spend all that money on that stupid exam!

At that moment, I decided to embark my, rather funny, odyssey of getting the UBC to admit that I speak Chinese. The first thought that came to my mind was that, UBC, as a top-notched university with a huge Chinese program/department/faculty, should easily have the capacity to test whether one of their students can speak Chinese right? It would be baffaling if they couldn’t. So I told the advisor, the written requirements on the UBC official website did not specify which exam counts at the “examination” through which one demonstrates their langauge capacity, so technically HSK wasn’t the only option. I demanded the school to provide me with a Chinese test within their Chinese program, whether it was an in-class exam or simply a chat with a professor of Chinese, as long as they in the end admit that passing that exam will mean that I fullfil the requirement.

The advisor did not say no. She simply said that, our campus, the smaller Okanagan campus, does not currently have on-duty professors on Chinese courses, so they could not help me with that. Well, that was alright, my girlfriend was at the UBC Vancouver campus and I went visiting her a lot, so I would now start bothering advisors and professors at the Vancouver campus.

After some emails, and after being through the cycles of advisors telling me to talk to professors and professors telling me to talk to advisors, the people at the Vancouver campus suggested me to take a UBC Chinese placement exam, which was the standard test they used to test whether a student can skip the prerequistes for high-level Chinese courses. Sounded great. So I took it and naturally got to the highest rank.

However, when I brought the test results back to my advisors at my campus, they told me the exam was insufficient because it did not have an oral component! Alright, I mean the Vancouver people did not guarantee this would work anyways, it was still up to the advisors at my own campus to determine whether any exams are authoritative enough. So, I updated with the Vancouver people regarding the issue, and eventually, one really nice professor at the Chinese program kindly accepted my demand and agreed to do an oral test through zoom.

The first sentence she said at the begining of our meeting was: “You are very persistent.” Yes I am! The second sentence was something like “we both know you speak Chinese so let’s just get this procedural thing over.” So she asked me a few questions, I answered with grace, even reciting an ancient Chinese poem to make my point. The test was smoothly done, and of course I passed it.

So, after almost 3 months of exploration, UBC finally believed I speak Chinese. Of course, it wasn’t a big deal. I did express my wish for UBC to establish a standard procedure or exemption for Chinese international students to prove their Chinese proficiency, making this more like a social activism or something, but had no responses. So in the end it was just about myself. But it is still very funny that I was required to prove that I speak my mother tongue.

Why did I say I also believe UBC kind of also actually knew I speak Chinese? Because I have heard from my Chinese peers with similar backgrounds, that when they tried to enroll in elementary Chinese courses on the website, their enrolllment was barred, meaning that UBC somehow knew that they spoke Chinese and that allowing them to be enrolled in elementary Chinese courses would be unfair for the non-native Chinese speakers. I haven’t tried, but I guess the same would happen for me. Which means, they should have had a way of identifying Chinese-speaking students. However, on top of that, when they were considering students’ language requirement for graduation, they suddenly lost this ability! How fun!

Anyways, here is an interesting episode of my years at UBC. Have you had similar situations? Leave a comment in the comment section!

—-2025.03.13