I’m a grammar vigilante now.

Verbal blunders—a CNN correspondent describing “a lot less” women on the streets of Kabul, or Justin Trudeau touting his approach “on” climate change—hit me the same way a piano tuner catches off-tune notes.

During pandemic lockdowns, I’ve turned to books and podcasts to compensate for lost companionship. Some books are read more than once, their ideas profound and their language elegant I linger when I read, sometimes to appreciate the beauty of the language. Often, I put my editor’s hat on, frowning over typos and wondering why certain words were picked over others. The pandemic is turning me into a wordsmith.

It wasn’t always like this. Ten years ago, I could barely string together a sentence in English. Now, I’m trying to build a writing career using a language that seemed at once foreign and perplexing.

I consider myself an aspiring writer, albeit an insecure and self-doubting one. After almost a decade in journalism, writing still doesn’t come easy, not least because I’m doing it in my second language. Having grown up speaking Chinese, a language without verb conjugations, I find it tricky navigating a dozen English tenses. Nouns are never pluralized in my native language, the reason why I’m never sure whether I should use sky—or skies—to describe the vast space above our head (or is it heads?). Preposition rules are convoluted. When I write, I feel compelled to find synonyms, leading to many wow-this-is-actually-a-word kind of eureka moments. Writing is the laborious work of crafting cogent sentences from which ideas flow.

My forays into English writing started with something mundane: translation. It was 2011, and I was a 24-year-old graduate student in Shanghai, idealistic and eager for a career with purpose. That fall, I landed a job as a news assistant at McClatchy, an American news outlet, in its Beijing bureau. China, still basking in the post-Beijing Olympic pride, was a superpower in waiting, its yearning for global recognition stronger than ever. A rising China—it eclipsed Japan in 2010 to become the world’s second-largest economy—was a global story attracting growing interest in capitals from Brussels to Washington. I wanted to tell that story in a language the world could understand.

Translation was the ticket in. Under China’s draconian media law, Chinese citizens hired by, say, the BBC or the Economist, are barred from independent reporting in that country. Our job was largely confined to translation and research, and many foreign correspondents rely on us to file their stories. For many Chinese employees, foreign news bureaus are little more than revolving doors. Dismayed by dim career prospects, many Chinese who worked for foreign press took up plum jobs in public relations or consulting, having learned to cope with tight deadlines and stress.

I stayed for seven years, a journey that proved instrumental in shaping my writer identity. In the newsroom, I learned through osmosis and clumsy imitation—and plenty of mistakes.

In the early days, the learning curve was steep. Not long after starting my job at McClatchy, I mistranslated a phrase that, if I were working at the United Nations, would have caused a diplomatic incident. On an autumn day, my boss came to see me in our small Beijing office. Grim-faced and with a notebook in hand, he had questions about a newly released Chinese Communist Party document. “What exactly did Wen Jiabao say? Does he want to change the political system?”

Wen was then the Chinese premier, who, once again, was trumpeting the need for political reform. The Chinese word for reform, gaige, appeared multiple times in an official readout carried by state media. My translation gave the impression that something big was afoot. In an earlier email to my boss, instead of indicating a modest tweak, I translated gaige as “revolution”. Oblivious to the word’s connotation, I received a quick lecture about semantics. My boss, still seething, explained to me the gulf between overhaul and overthrow as an English teacher would. I listened, red-faced. Then I apologized. Since then, I’ve never looked at translation—or words —in the same way.

With practice, my translation improved. But I wanted more. In 2015, I joined the Beijing bureau of The New York Times. Back then, the Times was the only international newspaper where the Chinese staff could write bylined stories. For some reason, the Chinese authorities went along with that practice. At long last, four years into my journalism career, I did more than translation and research. I pitched stories and wrote them. It was hard. Words came haltingly, the blinking text cursor a witness to my fitful writing. To get the opening paragraph right, I slogged through multiple drafts, like an app developer would when testing endless beta versions before official launch.

China was full of stories waiting to be told. During my time there, I shadowed a correspondent in a frigid Siberian town to interview a Chinese entrepreneur, investigated how western deodorant makers tried and failed to conquer billions of Chinese armpits, and documented China’s efforts to fight pollution. Time and again, editors came to my rescue. In the Times’s newsroom, copies change hands at various editing desks before publication. One editor, I learned years later, occasionally taped long drafts vertically, stretching for as long as eight feet. Then he’d cut some sections and rearrange them. The Times’s editors were true wordsmiths, whose deft hand showed me what good writing looked like. When a copy returned, the story often took on a new life, every word shining brighter. I’d place printouts of my draft and the published version side by side, ruminating on the edits and the trimmings of my clunky prose. There is no quick way of becoming a better writer; you learn to do so by knowing your bad habits. Then you chip away at them, one at a time.

Just like translation, my writing got better. Meanwhile, the media environment deteriorated. Amid rising geopolitical tensions between China and the West, international media outlets found themselves in the cross hairs of a government hostile to foreign influences. Many of my Chinese colleagues left the newsroom to attend graduate schools in North America.

I, too, was pessimistic about my career prospects. Once, a Chinese friend doing her PhD in New York implored me to improve my data skills. You’ll never be able to compete with native English speakers when it comes to writing, she said, convinced that honing hard skills would be wiser—and a necessary step toward a career makeover. Attempting a writing career in English as a Chinese person, in North America, she added, would be as futile as “an egg trying to smash a stone.”

I concurred. No more journalism. A decision was made: Writing was hard and too unattainable.

I followed in the footsteps of many Chinese colleagues. In 2018, I enrolled in University of Toronto for a two-year master’s degree in global affairs. Writing did not stop, of course. During the two-year graduate program, instead of newspaper articles, I wrote term papers on issues from international law to trade. Events of global and local significance were analyzed from a distance, through reading and reasoning. I wrote in a voice befitting a journalist, the voice of a neutral, impartial observer. Unbeknownst to myself, a quiet transition was underway—not the kind of career pivot I had envisioned. Quite the contrary, I found myself gravitating toward something I was intent on abandoning.

It all started with language, reminiscent of my early struggles in the newsroom. In the first week of my arrival, I drew a blank when a barista asked how I would like my coffee, the first of many encounters that laid bare an anxiety over my lack of colloquial dexterity. A simple task like ordering a coffee stumped me. Suddenly, daily errands demanded serious mental effort. I could write papers for my graduate course, but when it came to everyday tasks, I felt like possessing the vocabulary of a three-year old.

Two weeks later, although I had prepared an answer in advance, I stammered again at a cafe, while a dozen eyes drilled into my back. “Hmm, I want the cheapest coffee you have here please,” I said, flush with embarrassment.

Slowly but surely, I learned to take my naiveté in stride. My friends had to correct me more than once before I remembered how to pronounce Doritos. They explained what Benedict breakfast was. After calling spaghetti “western noodles” for months, I felt compelled to consult the internet to learn the various types of pasta and how to say them correctly. Then there is the Canadian corporate world’s use of “flip” in lieu of “send”—as in, let me flip you that document. That, to this day, remains a semantic enigma I, nor the internet, can crack. Observe, learn, and repeat. My vocabulary grew, and the city felt less foreign.

But perhaps Toronto is inherently foreign, with nearly half of its population born overseas. Immigrants flock here. So do Canadians from other regions. The city exemplifies Canadian values, be it multiculturalism or Canada’s embrace of diversity. Yet some people argue that Toronto is the least Canadian city, citing a slew of urban sins they say undermine the very core of Canadian-ness. As a newcomer, one particular Canadian trait piqued my interest: niceness. To many Canadians, niceness is a badge of honour. A national pride of sorts. The beaming faces and never-ending apologies point to the mild decorum that dictates everyday interactions.

But there is more to niceness than meets the eye. Look no further than the exuberant, sometimes perfunctory, “sure” in conversations that sometimes mask tepidness and half-heartedness. In many other cultures, affirmative language around nicety can be an invitation to deepen relationships and connections. The brand of niceness I have experienced in Canada seems to build walls of insularity and clique-ness. I once thought niceness would help me find plenty of friends easily. Not only did it not help, it became an obstacle. 

I took to the Toronto Star to say so. In a 2019 op-ed, I argued that Canadian niceness is often steeped in aloofness and indifference, almost like an on-demand gimmick meant to keep confrontations at bay. It doesn’t help forge strong bonds in the society. 

Within a week, messages began pouring in, via email and social media platforms. To my surprise, my interpretation of Canadian niceness resonated with many readers; some implored me to dig deeper. Thousands of comments trickled in on Facebook, a chorus of voices trying to dissect niceness and how it shapes social ties. The comments felt like a collective therapeutic heart-to-heart, with people sharing their own struggles in forging lasting bonds in a big city.

And the pandemic is not helping. Recently, a friend snapped a picture of a cardboard she saw, taped to an abandoned storefront in downtown Toronto. Signed by “R 2022,” it read, “In a passive society, smiles are not the faces of happy people.”

If my writer identity was in hibernation, that op-ed and my experience as a newcomer had awakened it. For the first time, I felt the power of storytelling inspired by personal experience, a departure from journalistic writing where writers must keep their sentiments at arms’ length to ensure objectivity.

In my journalistic role in China, I sought to document a changing society. But those stories I told had low personal stakes, observed from a distance, narrated through interviews and research. In Canada, my desire to write is still driven by curiosity, but some things have changed. I’ve become a narrator of my own story, in a country full of immigrants who have moved here in search of a better future, nursing different dreams. 

Meanwhile, my obsessiveness with language precision will persist. I’ll keep critiquing what I read. My struggles as a writer will also continue. That insecurity, perhaps, is a good thing. It keeps me grounded and humble. And it keeps me going.

As I was wrapping up this piece, a Canadian-born friend commented on a short story I recently finished. “You’re creative in your expressions and articulate in your language, but it’s the ESL quality that gives everything a kind of alien tone,” he said, “I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It’s charming.”

I started my writing career in China, but it was in Canada where my writer identity was finally born.