My First Language is American

By Mandy

A previous op-ed article I had written for Asians in America, “The Language of Invisibility” and Tim’s 8asians’ piece “On Talking With or Without an Accent” made me think about how language can essentialize the identity of a person – particularly a person of color – within a nation-state or social community. Over the weekend, I pissed off someone in New York City by simply ignoring him and was immediately told to “go back to where [I] came from” – the assumption perhaps being that my silence signifies that I am foreign/non-American and, with my apparent lack of English skills and social refinement, do not belong in this country. This was definitely not the first time that something like this has happened.

The truth of the matter is that I was born and raised in America, and my language is American English. While throughout my youth people had occasionally asked me if I knew Korean, it was not until I became a singularly English-speaking Asian living in Asia that I began to contemplate my linguistic capabilities and ineptitudes and what this might mean.

Last year, I worked at an international private school in Bangkok where the majority of the students were the children of extremely affluent Asians. Despite growing up in non-English-speaking households and countries but still rapidly advancing towards bilingualism, many of the students could not get over how well I spoke English – the only language I speak fluently. When I told a 16-year-old Korean girl from Seoul that she should not be impressed by my English because I am a native speaker, she earnestly replied, “Yeah, but still… your accent is so good,” as if my being Asian should have belied my ability to learn American English.

More often than not, my Asianness implies that I not only could know an Asian language but should know one (the popular default being Chinese). Several Asian teachers at the international school would, seconds after meeting me and inquiring about my background, promptly ask why I don’t speak Korean. When I studied Korean in Seoul, I was disparaged by old generation adults and slightly older peers alike for “betraying” my roots by not knowing “my” language. When I was walking alone in India, where I studied abroad for a semester, I could effortlessly dismiss the street hawkers and creeps who called out random English phrases or “China! Japan! Nepal!” to me with a few words of my own jibberish language; no one ever questioned it, and they left me alone thereafter. (Interestingly, though, being an Asian person in a group of predominantly white college-age American females gave me somewhat of an amorphous identity in India. When I was with anyone from my program, I was an American girl and harassed as such; but the moment I separated myself, I was just some detached Asian tourist.)

For a long time, I felt compelled to rationalize why I did not speak this apparently “native” language of mine. I have two Korean parents and a purely Korean lineage, yet I barely understood anything other than baboh until I began independently studying Korean in college. My Korean tutor – along with the rest of the world, it sometimes seems – was curious to know why I did not speak Korean. My parents didn’t want me to have an accent, I mechanically tell everyone, they just wanted me to fit in. This was probably true. I grew up in a tiny, wealthy, blindingly White suburb that would not tolerate difference well – not that its populace is racist, per se, but that they, nor I, would not know what to do with each other had I established any distinct cultural identity. It was difficult enough getting through middle school as an angst-ridden ‘tween who listened to Garbage and burned candles on the weekends. The last thing I needed was a hang-up about being that kind of “different.” (This would come later on in college.) Still, this ostensibly logical logic is hard for even me to swallow as I continue to struggle with constructing coherent sentences in my unambiguously American-accented Korean, something that could have been avoided had my parents taught me their native tongue but could also be, in an ironic sort of way, a source of jealousy for that 16-year-old native Korean speaker.

This spring, I met the sexagenarian ex-Marine Mexican-American leader of an Arizonan chapter of the Minutemen, a volunteer vigilante group that independently “monitors” the U.S.-Mexico border. He ranted about many ridiculous things, but my favorite assertion of his was the blunt distinction he made between “real” Americans, who can speak English, and non-Americans, who do not know English or cannot speak it well. His complete disregard for the privileges that people from non-native-English-speaking countries/the majority of the world does not have access to and the subsequent disenfranchisement of specific social and racial groups is xenophobic nationalism at its worst, but what is scarier is that a lot of “real” Americans probably agree with this point of view. Moreover, for a person of non-native-English-speaking descent to be able to publicly articulate and emphatically believe such a sentiment is quite incredible. (It may also be worth noting that the Minuteman claimed he can speak eight languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, and “Brazilian” and that the racism he felt growing up was “all in [his] head” because he was “introverted.”)

These explicit and implicit conjectures have made me wonder how I, and others who share a similar position as me, am supposed to reconcile with these different national “identities” when I don’t subscribe to any one singularly, when my upbringing confutes the implied cultural norms of my heritage, and when, ultimately, I think one way but look like another.

Perhaps the only “language” I can ever comfortably master and be judged upon are my faceless written words. But, in the end, I think I’m OK with that.

Mandy graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in anthropology in May 2009. She has spent time living, studying, and traveling in South Korea, India, Thailand, and the US-Mexico border and is teaching English in Japan through the JET programme. Her hair is naturally curly.