“What do we send you to school for, if you can’t even pronounce the name of that company?”
my paternal grandmother asked me in Hakka as we drove by the warehouses within proximity of
the family business, observing the channel letters affixed on concrete walls.
I was no older than eight. I wanted to tell her that names of businesses, save for the ones that
are surnames of the founders, were typically made up. I wanted to say that they were rarely
words in the English dictionary and therefore weren’t always intuitive to pronounce.
Instead, I remained quiet.
Quiet was the term my elementary school teachers and classmates used to describe me. My
teachers told my parents I was polite, well-behaved, and delightful to have in class. They
contrasted me with the kids who were loud, outspoken, and unruly.
During my first three years in the school system, I was enrolled in an ESOL—English for
Speakers of Other Languages—program. Having just begun learning English, I was struggling
amongst my classmates, most of whom already had a basic understanding of the language.
However, even between my peers in ESOL, I was the odd one out. My native language wasn’t
Spanish. It wasn’t even Mandarin. Instead, it was Hakka: an obscure dialect of Chinese.
I grew up in Doral, a suburb within the greater Miami metropolitan area in South Florida.
Everyone around me spoke Spanish, even my parents, who were both born in China, but
immigrated to Panama in their childhood years before they came to the United States. They
attended bilingual schools and could converse in Spanish fluently by the time they became
adults.
My grandparents were adamant about my parents only speaking to me in Hakka from the day I
was born up until the day I stepped into my pre-K class. They wanted to preserve their culture
through their grandchildren, and as the firstborn child, I was the first recipient of this rule. My
family could have taught me multiple languages at once, but they chose not to. They stuck with
Hakka, and Hakka only.
I hardly think back to that detail of my early childhood now, because it has faded out of
relevance. Currently, my primary language is English, and it’s what I use in my everyday life. It is
only when I am faced with the “languages spoken” section of job applications that I think back to
the ideals my grandparents imposed on me and wonder how much of a disadvantage this fact
truly was. Could I have been better off, had I been taught to be trilingual, the same way my
parents were?
Probably. But that’s not how things went, and that’s okay.
Any language I want to learn in the present time, I have the resources at my disposal to do so. I
am a college student, and I spend every weekday on the campus of a well-known academic
institution. I can no longer blame my circumstances for my shortcomings.
I didn’t have much of an interest in learning a third language while I was growing up, but I’m
starting to consider it with increasing frequency as I progress through my academic curriculum,
taking on new classes each semester. I am studying audiology: the healthcare field in which
professionals diagnose and treat hearing disorders.
My work will inevitably involve individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Although it is not a
mandatory component of my studies, American Sign Language would be a convenient skill to
pick up, considering my career path. It would be practical and courteous to my clientele.
I think that might be my next major goal in life.
It’ll be one more thing to add to my ever-expanding bucket list, but it’s something that excites me
to think about. Life is an unending journey of learning and growing, and this could be another
small step within that spiral staircase.
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