[Espy]

What... what's a zabuton.

My mom and I speak this really mixed mess of english and mandarin when it's just us and my dad talking (my dad and I lean towards a larger proportion of english), and my last roomie looked at me after one particular phone call and was like "I could understand maybe every other word; do you usually just talk like that with your mom?"

"...Yeah?"

But then grammar gets wonky, and my mom has apparently spoken Mandarin w her old friends but w english grammar and they get super confused and weirded out, haha.

And she sometimes turns to me and goes "what's the word for x in mandarin?"

"...you are asking the WRONG person."

or, I say what the word is, and then pause, and then she pauses, and then we both realized she asked the wrong person who still somehow knew what the word was.

It's funny, I don't know what's considered my first language, bc technically the first word I apparently ever said was "doggy" in mandarin, but growing up, it was always a mix of mandarin and english. I suppose it might be english, since I think in english.