Earlier this year, COVID granted me a lot of idle time so I decided to do a thorough cleaning in the home office. As I was going all Marie Kondo on the clutter, I came across this little button that said, "I Married an Immigrant". For the merest moment, I laughed at the idea of Andrea's home state of Alabama being considered a foreign country. Then the old situational awareness kicked in, "Oh, yeah, I'm the immigrant.
The traditional story of arriving immigrants usually involves sailing slowly past the Statue of Liberty, disembarking at Ellis Island, waiting in line to be processed into the country, and walking around, mouth agape at the hustle and bustle that is New York. Like most Asian-Americans, Mom and I came in through the back door at San Francisco. I was maybe two years old at the time. We didn't leave the airport to explore the sights of the city. In fact, once we got to our new departure gate, we never left the area. Mom was so worried about missing the east coast connecting flight, she wouldn't even take me to the bathroom despite my insistence that I really needed to go. She told me I wound up peeing into a potted plant nearby. Don't give me that look - I was 2.
After a transcontinental flight on the heels of a trans-Pacific flight, we eventually met up with Dad at his duty station in Annapolis. Those first few years were very idyllic, as I remember them. Dad continued his tour with the Navy, Mom settled in as a nurse at the local hospital, and I was acquainting myself with the best of American TV offerings: Ultraman, Speed Racer, and Bozo the Clown. As time passed, I was eventually old enough to start kindergarten.
As my first fall as a newly minted schoolboy unfolded, I thought I was doing fine. However, one of the first progress reports I brought home noted that I was having trouble communicating and was very non-verbal.
I think the word the teacher was looking for was "quiet". Ask anyone who knows me to give 5 adjectives describing me and "quiet" will be somewhere near the top of their list. This teacher's unfortunate evaluation had some far-reaching ramifications. It caused a lot of consternation for Mom and Dad, and from that moment, in order to promote rapid language and cultural assimilation, Mom and Dad only spoke to me in English.
The official languages of the Philippines are Tagalog (ta-GA-log) and English. Mom once told me both languages were subjects back when she was in school. In the highlands of Luzon, the largest and northernmost island where I'm from, there's another spoken language - Ilokano (ee-lo-KA-no), and to my ear, it's very dissimilar to Tagalog. Moreover, there are seemingly countless local dialects. My maternal grandmother would say as a young girl in the mountains, every time she crossed over a stream or through a forest, folks there were speaking a different dialect.
As a result, most 1st generation Filipinos are polyglots, being conversationally fluent in at least 3 languages. This is yet another cultural norm I've successfully broken. In high school during my Junior year, I attempted to fix this deficit and took Spanish.
I enjoyed the class and thankfully didn't find the material particularly taxing. One day that spring, the teacher's entire lesson plan was upended as the discussion was hijacked by the newly released Falco song, "Rock Me Amadeus". The class spewed a steady stream of questions: "Who was this guy?" "Where was he from?" "In what language was he singing?" "Hey, Miss Alexander, can you translate the lyrics for us?" Our beleaguered teacher, without the benefit of Google or even the Internet, succinctly replied, "Don't know. Don't know. Not Spanish. No."
Because of a kindergarten teacher's progress report, I became a lifelong English-only speaker who attempted to change this with a high school Spanish class, that, one day, broke down into a discussion over the Austrian singer, Falco, singing a song in German. For completeness, the English subtitled video can be found here, but honestly, it's nowhere near as fun as the flamboyantly 80's original.
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