English vs. Chinese

I came to US in 1993, 14 years ago. My spoken English was very bad at that time, not enough practice in China. Today, I still consider myself as a Chinese, and Chinese is still my native language. But when it comes to writing, I prefer English.

It is not because my English is so good (it is not as good as my Chinese), but typing English is so straight forward and I can probably do at 70 wpm speed. That is the reason I belived for a while. But recently, I realized that it is not the only reason.

The main issue I have when it comes to writing is that I have enough practice to writing in English at work, thus formed a habit of pour thoughts directly onto keyboard. Email, IM or documents are all in English at work, and mostly at home as well. On top of that, I have a higher standard for my Chinese writing. I can write casually in English for whatever the feelings and thoughts come up in mind at the moment (I have a tough time to write formal essays). But when I try to express my theory in Chinese writing, I think about structure, grammer, art of the sentences and variety of words, etc. a lot more than in English. It is also because of the American way of living here in California, I got a habit of not to take things "seriously". So my Chinese writing often stuck at the beginning without progressing within a reasonable time period, to a point that I lost my desire to continue.

Still, so many Chinese thoughts and feelings that cannot be told vividly in English. I missed the time when I could write fluently in Chinese.