On Language
There was a time when I was a student, walking across campus and a lady asked me to take a picture for her at the main gate. She was on vacation and visiting campus while she was here, presumably. She asked me if I was a student, what subject I was studying, and what I planned to do after I graduated. We chatted for a little bit, and she told me that her son also attended the school and was pursuing a degree in Economics.
And then she asked me where I was from. I told her that I was born in the Midwest. This whole conversation took place in Chinese. Yes, the woman I was speaking with was Chinese, too. She was wearing a puffy, purple coat and a visor, and she looked about the same age as my own mother. She gasped in surprise, “Oh, I thought you were an international student, not an American born student! Your Mandarin is so good!”
I thought it was such a blessing that something like that would happen. I was feeling down on myself because sometimes, when I talk to my family members, I can’t find the right word in Chinese to use. Mandarin Chinese and English are very different languages - I’m pretty sure it’s not just me who holds that opinion. One has plurals and tenses that modify the actual verbs in question, and the other doesn’t. One has a pictorial writing system (it's the reason people are drawn to our cool tattoos), and the other has a phonetic, alphabetical writing system. The list goes on. There’s a reason Chinese speakers have a hard time learning English, and vice versa. I feel fortunate that I was raised in a household where both are used out of necessity.
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America is the land of the free, and the home of the brave. Or should I say, the land of the monolingual.
In countless countries all across the globe, people are able to speak several languages and/or dialects seamlessly and fluently. For example, many Chinese residents can speak a local dialect, a regional dialect, the official* national language, Mandarin Chinese, and sometimes English, if they've gotten that education. Plenty of indigenous folks in the Americas speak one or several native languages in addition to Spanish, out of necessity. A family friend who lives in Frankfurt, Germany, speaks 4 languages fluently. One of my friends can even speak 11 languages. Whoa!
In the linguistic sense, America is the exception, not the norm. There are plenty of people who only learn American English, and never go a day having to speak, read or think in a different language. One of my classmates once told me a funny story of how an American couple at the next table over in France tried to pronounce "jambon" and "fromage" exactly with English pronunciation (rhymes with "dampen" and "brokerage"). The waiter was probably frustrated.
That leads to a lot of warped perceptions as to what "speaking another language" entails. And no, counting to 10 in Spanish, knowing how to pronounce "Konichiwa," or belting the intro of Circle of Life in Swahili absolutely do not count. Most people I've met are polite and don't try to toot their own horn, but there are some people out there who insist they are fluent in a language, but can't even hold a conversation with a stranger in said language. And of course, linguistic competence is not the same without cultural competence - the knowledge of slang, dank memes for edgy teens, abbreviations, common courteous practices, idioms, and more.
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I want to find it hilarious when an old woman approaches a mom and her daughter in Wal-Mart, insisting that they need to speak English instead of Hmong. I want to laugh at how narrow-minded that stranger is, and how the mom and daughter are blessed to be bilingual, how they are strong and hardworking people for being immigrants. I want to simply roll my eyes at how brash this lady is, eavesdropping at conversations in public places. Feeling the need to butt into something that doesn't concern her. I really do.
I wish that the old lady who told young students at Starbucks that they needed to speak English instead of Korean, would understand that the world is unfathomably bigger than she could ever choose to know. That she is wrong. That she is foolish, that she has been lucky enough to never feel the pressure or obligation to learn a second language that is foreign to her tongue. Why can't she realize that this is a cosmopolitan world? Why does she feel the need to interrupt people in a coffee shop who aren't speaking to her?
It's supposed to be laughable, but it's not. It's just another facet of reality in America, I suppose, that runs deep, and has been around far longer than I've been alive.
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