OP:
* In Post #14, sysprog quoted one of your responses, which appears to have been deleted. [ETA: The OP's response has suddenly reappeared as Post #14, and sysprog's post that I originally referred to now appears as Post #15.] I don’t know whether that was intentional or unintentional. But I’ll give a general discussion of instances in which bilingual fluency (fluency in English plus another language), as well as native experience in a non-US culture, can be a plus when applying for a job in the US.
* Some jobs are directly tied to bilingual fluency.
--The obvious one is translation. With your general coursework in a PhD physics program, you should be capable of translating a variety of technical documents. To get your foot in the door, you’ll probably need to work initially for an established translation service. They don’t pay well, but enough to tide you over. Once established, you can become an independent translator, either as a side gig or as your main gig.
--Another is tutoring (as mentioned above). Obvious subjects to tutor are math and physics. If you are fluent in a trendy language such as Mandarin, you could also tutor in that. Again, to get your foot in the door, you’ll probably need to work initially for an established tutoring service, then become an independent tutor. If you live in an area with a lot of dumb rich kids, you can make a very good living as an independent tutor.
* Many businesses these days serve a global clientele. If you work for a large US corporation, there will often be sales teams focussed on specific countries or regions (such as China, Japan, Europe, Latin America, Africa ...). Depending on the business, these teams will include both business and technical staff. Members who can speak the local language and, more importantly, are intimately familiar with the local culture, of the client are greatly valued.
--Example 1. At one time I worked as a telcom engineer for a US-based telcom Megacorp. I was involved with the international launch of a new network offering. An otherwise mediocre product manager was promoted to lead the sales team for an Italian client, because the product manager was an Italian-American who spoke fluent Italian and had family in Italy.
--Example 2. Latin America is a major market. In most of Latin America, Spanish is the primary language. It’s not too difficult to find staff in the US who speak Spanish to serve many Latin American clients. The biggest market in Latin America for many businesses, however, is Brazil, in which the primary language is Portuguese. Much more difficult to find staff in the US who speak Portuguese. Well, one of the students I mentored got her PhD in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics from a US university. She happened to be from Brazil. Upon graduation, she was hired straightaway by a major business consulting firm to serve the Brazil market.
A telcom project manager I knew was making slow progress in his career. Then we went after the Brazil market. He just happened to have been from Portugal originally. He was assigned to the Brazil team, made rapid progress, got several promotions, and became a department-head level product manager for the Brazil market.
--Example 3. Another student I mentored was from China and got her PhD in materials science and engineering from a US university. After serving a stint as a staff engineer, she eventually transitioned to project management and product management at a US contract manufacturing house, whose suppliers and manufacturing facilities are in China. She’s now an executive director there [ETA: By "there", I mean still at the US contract manufacturing house, not in China]. Now, she’s really technically competent, hard working, and aggressive. No doubt that she would have risen to a high position at some point in her career. But she effectively leveraged her bilingual fluency and cultural background to great advantage.
* So my general advice to you is to take inventory of all your skills, education, and experience and determine how best you can best leverage them. At this point, you don’t want to learn programming languages just to end up competing with legions of CS grads for coding jobs. Depending on the specific position (and of course on the pool of competing candidates), bilingual fluency and native cultural experience may help overcome some of your other deficiencies and help get your foot in the door. Remember: managers will rarely find their ideal candidate, and it's a question of how they weight the pluses and minuses of each candidate.
* One suggestion, if you’re willing to transition away from a mainstream physics job, is to apply for positions at major business consulting firms. Again, I don’t know what their recent hiring practices are (especially since the start of the pandemic), but it’s worth a shot. Check the APS website. I remember there was at least one article in APS News, and maybe an APS webinar, on careers for physicists in business consulting. Good luck!
* ETA: I wrote the above response when your Post #14 was deleted for some reason. Now that it has re-appeared and I've read it, I see that you are not willing to transition from mainstream physics to something else. Since you have no experimental background and no software background, I have no further suggestions for you. Even in the heyday of physics research at AT&T Bell Labs and IBM Watson, positions for people with your background were few and super-competitive (and those days are long gone). The positions in which Chinese is a plus would be those that involve interactions with Chinese customers or suppliers (as described above). If you want to stay squirreled away in an office doing physics theory, there's no advantage.
