I grew up in Hawaii, and almost none of my Asian friends spoke the language of their grandparents well. Scattered words and phrases were part of our everyday casual speech, but even though I went to Japanese school every day for years, practically no one was able to use any of the Japanese they learned. Most of the reasonably proficient speakers I knew had either lived in Japan for awhile or had a parent who was from Japan. And I don’t think I knew a single fluent speaker of Chinese among my friends who attended Chinese school.
But the sense of loss and disconnect from the early generation’s mother tongue can be profound. Even while we remove our shoes at the door, consider a rice cooker to be a necessary kitchen appliance, and use words that are somehow more convenient in the original language than in English (like “obentō” instead of “lunch box” and “shibai” instead of “play-act”), we are occasionally reminded that even if we wanted to, we couldn’t have a heart-to-heart with our grandparents. And now, with so much available to us via the internet, a little bit of digging on YouTube can be discouraging, not enlightening. A year of dabbling with Duolingo isn’t going to assuage that sense of discomfort. You begin to wish you’d paid more attention when you were younger, maybe made more effort, but it’s only recently become so much easier to find foreign language materials. We really can’t equate today’s internationalized world with experiences of decades ago.
I was reassured to learn that immigrant families from Latin America also struggle with this, and that it’s an emotional experience for them, too. Spanish is often presented to us as the “easy” foreign language to learn. It has sensible grammar, familiar vocabulary, and is present in so many ways all around us in the U.S. But learning a foreign language is never “easy,” and Spanish-speaking families often place a priority on learning English rather than maintaining Spanish.
This piece from National Public Radio about Latinx “no sabo” kids who don’t speak Spanish came at a welcome time for me as I struggled through a new batch of vocabulary in my journey to master the 2000 or so “basic” Chinese characters used by Japanese high school graduates. And the more I study, the more I realize I don’t know, because I’m literally not Japanese. When you don’t use a language in its context, you just won’t know everything that people use to communicate, including slang and pop culture and contemporary references, even body language and jokes. And while I think it’s fine not to be fluent in a language that really isn’t “mine,” there’s that nagging feeling that I’ve failed some kind of expectation, that when I am talking to a native Japanese they are somehow waiting for me to make a mistake or mispronounce something, in order to firmly put me in the category of “other.” Or worse, that there’s a part of my own being that I can’t know because it’s buried in language that I haven’t mastered.
Jacqueline Delgadillo, a writer born in Mexico and raised in Southern California, says in the NPR report,
I think that there is just so much shame around being a no sabo kid that to redefine it just means accepting where you're at and accepting, you know, how fluent you are in Spanish and letting go of that shame and not letting someone else decide for you how Latina you are or how much you can claim your culture.
I wonder whether German and Italian families in the U.S. felt as conflicted about knowing the language of their immigrant predecessors? How do we separate language and culture—or can we? What about Yiddish speakers? Was it okay for those children to maintain Jewish cultural tradition to the fullest, if they weren’t entirely capable in the language? Or perhaps did that not matter so much, since Jewish children celebrating bar and bat mitzvahs do prepare for that with Hebrew language study?
Part of my effort to study and learn Japanese involves accepting that I am not actually Japanese. I’m not even really part of the 20th century Japanese diaspora, since my mother did not come over in those earlier waves of immigration, and I don’t have any connection to the internment camps, which puts me outside of a lot of the Japanese-American conversation. I think I have a lot in common with my non-Asian father, who was a studious homebody. He, too, studied Japanese in an academic way and became proficient enough to work as a translator (not something I’d like to do myself!). My mother forbade him from speaking Japanese around her because she hated his accent, but I recall that his written Japanese was quite beautiful (much more beautiful than mine!). He would never be “fluent,” but then again why should he? He did well with what he knew.
Studying Japanese has forced me to come to terms with the word “fluent.” I won’t ever be fluent in Japanese the way that I’m fluent in English. But I can’t afford to let the opinions of others control my self-perception. I am not Japanese, but I grew up surrounded by so much Japanese culture that it’s part of who I am. It takes some courage to keep asserting this, but I don’t know any other way to be.
I enjoyed this a lot! My mother never learned Italian from her mother--she always regretted that but never felt shame about it. So many Americans will say to me, "why don't you teach your son Japanese?" But it is a fruitless task to try and mold another human being. As my son's father says, "if he needs it, or wants to learn, he will do that." My ex always points out that we learned each others languages in adulthood. I think it is more of a spectrum than fluent (or not). The kind of binary approach to language is certainly something you find in monolingual societies like the US or Japan. But I think in more multilingual places, they see it on a spectrum. We have native languages and languages that we are fluent in... languages in which we can order food in a restaurant, reading languages, languages studied in school... And also there is also abilities that ebb and flow. My son lost his abilities as fast as he picked them up in childhood. And I am amazed and not at all sad to see my writing abilities in Japanese slowly fade. I think kids like my son have it tough since they can never win--in Japan, they are treated as foreign and in the US too there are questions. It is why he loves Hawaii so much. He totally fits in!! Last night he texted and asked if I can send him back to Japan for a week or so to visit and I told him to stop being so lazy and try and study a little nihongo!! hehe!
My mother is a first generation German-American and speaks and taught German. I never picked it up and I did often regret that. I am lingquistically disconnected from my ancestors.
I also have a son who is mixed Japanese and American. His mother, my wife, is a native speaker and we lived in Japan for three years to give him an experience with his mother tongue. But he's an American, for sure.
One perspective I have on this is that this tension and discomfort around the language of our ancestors and our place in their world vs. this world is a distinctly and quintessentially an American experience. Feeling a bit out of place with our lineage is what makes us Americans. Many, if not most of us share that feeling. That's why we have so many parades and festivals that attempt to connect us to our origin.
Puerto Rico doesn't have a Puerto Rican day parade, as far as I know, but it's a big deal in NYC. We're uneasy about who we were and are. I don't think the Irish in Ireland care about St. Patrick's Day the way they do in the U.S.
So, yes, as a descendant of German and Dutch immigrants, I do relate to your sense of alienation from your granparent's native language. And I believe that's something that you and I share as Americans. I'm glad you wrote about it, I wish more people would.