From One Survivor to Another

“Worried that we might develop an accent, my father insisted that we speak English at home. This, he explained, would lessen the hardships we might encounter and make us more acceptable as Americans.

I’ll never know if my father’s language decision was right. On the one hand, I, like most Asian Americans, have been complimented countless times on my spoken English by people who assumed I was a foreigner. “My, you speak such good English,” they’d cluck. “No kidding, I ought to,” I would think to myself, then wonder: should I thank them for assuming that English isn’t my native language? Or should I correct them on the proper usage of “well” and “good”?

More often than feeling grateful for my American accent, I’ve wished that I could jump into a heated exchange of rapid-fire Chinese, volume high and spit fling. But with a vocabulary limited to “Ni hao?” (How are you?) and “Ting bu dong” (I hear but I don’t understand)), meaningful exchanges are woefully impossible. I find myself smiling and nodding like a dashboard ornament. I’m envious of the many people I know who grew up speaking an Asian language yet can converse in English beautifully.”