BILINGUAL KID
Nidadavolu Malathi
—
I come from a country where anybody can speak two to three languages easily, even those who are considered illiterate for demographic purposes such as rickshaw drivers. They possess working knowledge of more than one language.
When I first came to this country I resisted all the attempts of my well-meaning friends to teach me the perfect American accent as much as I could. Assimilation was not in my agenda. I did not want to fit into the mainstream. But that had happened anyways and without any efforts on my part. It was a new wave of brainwashing. It slowly seeped into my brain like the sunlight at daybreak. You can not pinpoint the specific moment when it happens. I can’t remember the specific moment when I stopped thinking in Telugu and started thinking in English.
Sometimes I felt like this language issue was no worse than the British colonization I had heard so much about it in my childhood. It was as if somebody else was telling me what to say, how to say, and to think in what language. And they all said it was my choice!
In fact, there was something else that led me to think on those lines. Several years ago, I turned on the TV. The movie “Roots” was showing. I watched it only for a few minutes. It was too violent for me. The scene I watched however made a permanent impression on my mind—it was about the captors telling the young man to change his name to Tony. The young man took all the whipping and kept insisting that his name was Kinte Kunte. I understood for the first time what identity meant. The name, the face, the color, the language, the customs—they all come in one package. That is one’s culture.
You can see why the language issue was a sensitive subject for me. English, ubiquitous as it is, is only one of the millions of the languages of the world. Some people miss this point for some outlandish reason. I have come across people who look blank when they hear a sound that does not sound like English. Even a personal name never heard before can become a challenge for them.
—
The family next door
arrived to
It was early November. The temperatures were falling rapidly. I was sitting in my living room with a blanket in my lap and a book in my hand. I heard a knock on the door.
I opened the door. The woman next door was standing there shivering and pale as a ghost. She looked as if somebody knocked the daylight out of her. She gestured to the puff of smoke rising out of the chimney across the street and mumbled something. It took a few seconds but I managed to understand that she thought the house was on fire. I smiled and tried to calm her down the best I could. I tapped on her shoulders gently and said it was okay. I am sure the words were lost on her but my gestures conveyed the message. My English did not come to my rescue for sure.
The man was working in a gas station and his wife was a cleaning lady in our neighborhood. They bought some 1970s Dodge for $500. The car needed new tires, new battery and new carburetor. I could not help thinking about their dream, the great American dream.
Then came the time to admit their nine-year old son in school. Since the parents spoke no English, I went with them and walked them through the process. They signed wherever I told them to sign. The signatures were in their language. I witnessed their signatures. As God is my witness I knew they had no idea what they were agreeing to and I had no way of telling them so. The principal heaved a sigh of relief feeling good that we had managed to protect the system!
Jenina, the boy's class teacher, was very kind. She took his hand and walked him to his classroom.
“Here is a new boy in our class,” she announced to the class and turned to him, “What is your name?”
The boy did not reply. The teacher could not recall the name from the registration form, she had seen earlier. She remembered the first syllable of his name and came up with the idea. “We will call you Phil. Okay?”
The boy was either confused or protesting. He pursed his lips tight.
“Hi Phil,” the entire class shouted.
We left the boy, Phabwugin at the school for the day. The only blessing in all this was the school was within walking distance. He could walk back to home.
Next day Phabwugin or Phil refused to go to school. The parents argued with him, yelled at him and finally got him go to the school.
z
A week later I went to their apartment to see how they were doing. I returned after a couple of hours. My brother Gopu, a sophomore in a local college, was waiting for me.
“Where've you been?” he asked me. He was so accustomed to seeing me slouched on the couch watching TV, he was surprised I was not home at that hour.
“Next door. Chatting with the mother,” I said.
He laughed. “You two don’t even speak the same language. What were chatting about for two hours?”
Gopu, 15 years younger than I am, belonged to next generation in reality. He was a city-bred, a product of English medium school, and a borderline bilingual at best.
“Well, if you can talk to a dog or a plant, you can talk to a human too,” I said rasping.
I noticed that Phil was putting up a fierce fight each day to go to school. One day he came back with a bloody nose, and the next day with a black eye. The following week, Jenina showed up at their door. It was no brainer to see that she could not get far with the parents.
Jenina was a kind and caring teacher. She had read books, attended workshops, and presented papers at conferences on teaching English as Second Language. She had mastered the art and science of teaching ESL. She was trying very hard to teach the perfect American English to this kid. She wanted him to be her success story.
Jenina spent extra hours with Phil. Developed tools exclusively for him. Eventually Phil came to like her. He did not mind spending time with her after school, but speaking English was a different story.
Things were getting tougher. Everyday I saw Phil with a black eye or bruised arm. Then came the big blow. The principal was ready to expel Phil or suspend him for a semester. The reason was Phil brought a kitchen knife to school. Jenina calmed down the principal for the moment; she told him that she would talk to his parents.
For a second time she came to pay a visit to the parents. This time I was invited to join them in the discussion. Jenina explained to me in great detail all the steps she had been taking not only to teach Phil English but also to instil the importance of learning English. Her efforts included making flash cards to suit his specific needs—which meant making cards carrying the name of his country, fruits and vegetables grown in his country, his gods, his festivals... I could see she was sincerely trying to help him.
Phil was not interested in those cards for the obvious reason. The other children in his class were not interested in those things. For them, the words were simply weird, and Phil was a weird kid.
Then she switched to the local culture. She prepared cards
exemplifying life in
Jenina gave him children’s books. He did not find them interesting. She gave him audio cassettes of sing along tapes meant for children. He was too old for those songs. He did not say so exactly. The way he looked at those pieces said so.
She kept talking about the virtues of being a bilingual. Once he had mastered the English language, he could be the proud speaker of two languages, a perfect bilingual kid.
“You should start to speak English at home also, by way of reinforcing what you have learned at school,” Jenina suggested.
“.....” Phil blurted out an expletive.
We the adults were stunned and stared at each other. The two parents said something to the boy to the effect that he should watch his language. At least, that was my understanding of the words they spoke to him.
My weird sense of humor kicked in. “There! You want English, and you got it,” I said. I knew it was not very nice of me. But my point was—children do pick up the language much faster than we think they can and at places we don’t think of.
Jenina kept insisting that they, the parents, should speak English at home. I started to lose my patience.
“But you do know that the parents don’t speak English,” I said.
“Tell them to learn English. You know language is one of the important survival skills. They need to learn English if they want to live in this country.” Jenina was trying to be very polite but her tone was sounded harsh. They sounded harsh to me at least. She had a point though and that annoyed me even more.
“Explain to them,” she said again.
I copped out. I had to.
“I don’t have the language skills at that level to explain your opinion to them,” I said, mustering all my strength to be polite.
“But you do communicate with them,” she insisted.
That ticked me off.
“Remember what you’d said earlier about being a bilingual kid?”
“Yes. Why?”
“The way I see it, language is culture. Home is the only place where they can speak their language and cherish culture. If you insist that they should speak English at home, you are asking them to ignore their own language and then their own culture. Then you are not making him a bilingual kid. You are making him English-speaking monolingual,” I said fiercely struggling with my own emotions.
And then left in a hurry, giving some flimsy excuse for my departure.
I was beside myself. I was fretting and fuming all evening. The rice was burned. The curry was too salty. The soup was more like industrial strength paint.
“What is wrong?” my brother asked me, pulling out TV dinner from the freezer.
“The teacher is so keen on making him ubhayabhasha praveena[i] (specialization of scholarship in two languages).”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“She is not making him bilingual, she is destroying his culture. God knows he will master English soon enough.”
“You don’t mean that,” he said. He was referring to the phrase ‘destroying the culture.’
“Well,” I growled and disappeared into my bedroom. He did not follow me. He knew better than that.
——
I looked out the window. The young boy, Phabwugin, was hanging around in front of our apartment but not too close. I wondered what was he doing there? What did he want?
After a few minutes, Gopu went out with a basketball. He was throwing hoops. Then he gestured the boy to join him. Phabwugin jumped in quickly. They two were throwing the ball into the hoop. I was watching them. Phabwugin was good. There was not much of a conversation between the two but for an occasional ‘wow’ or ‘good’ from Gopu. The only words I could hear were the sounds of the heart to heart talk—that universal language!
Gopu did not have to go through this three-ring circus. He came from home, well-prepared, all set, and ready to go. He arrived here fully equipped. His Telugu was just one notch above the level of Phil’s English.
Language is culture. Home is the only place where they can cherish their culture-the last resort of human yearning for identity.
I know that kid will start speaking English soon enough--watch TV, the movies, hip-hop, football, Miller light, Apple pie ... the all-American dream.
Gopu was sent to English medium school from the start and
was groomed well to fit in to the culture of the
My heart sank tumbling down into the bottomless pit. I have no words to explain for this sadness. I was overwhelmed at the thought that these two kids would draw from the two languages only when they are upset.
——
