It's not about words - is it? - Дело не в словах, правда? |
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It's not about words - is it? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The woman is American; the children are Russian. It's a picnic; the woman, a mother, has asked her daughter and friends if they want to swim. "Dah!" the ‘tweens screamed. Yes. But a moment later came a collective gasp, a muted sigh. The mother was already raising her arm like a traffic cop. "Speak English please," she said. Her tone suggested this was a Top 10 phrase in her parenting repertoire. The girls, each one of them, covered their mouths as if to keep more Russian words-bigger and more complicated ones, perhaps-from escaping. "Sorry," one of the girls finally said, followed by another, then another. Not all the kids were hers. Clearly there were other parents, myself included, who borrowed from the same manual. Soon the girls were chiming a chorus of sorries before starting back along their path, platform flip-flops slapping the dirt, cups of Coke sloshing onto the hot pavement. One of the girls skipped back and grabbed the woman's hand. "Sorry mama," she said, braces glinting in the sun. "But when other Russian girls are around, I forget to speak English." "I was just teasing," the woman said, toying with a strand of the child's hair, trying, it seemed, to backtrack, to make it sound like the little girl had taken her way too seriously. "You just need to practice your English so you don't forget," she said, adding, posthaste, "but Russian's OK, too." "You say that now," the child whined, pulling on her free arm, twirling herself around in beginner ballerina fashion, landing back against the woman's hip. "But you don't understand." And here she spoke quite logically: "When they're not around I'm afraid I'll forget Russian." She emphasized the word, afraid. My kids said this sometimes, though they had each other to practice with. "You will not forget," the mother said, emphasizing the word not. But she didn't sound convinced, or, rather, convinced of her own desire for the child to remember. Personally, I thought it sounded like the mom hoped the child might forget. Or at least not be so intent on remembering. It didn't exactly feel like I was eavesdropping on my own life, though, granted, I'd had it with my kids' convenient use of Russian when they didn't want me to understand something, which seemed increasingly, as they got older, way too often. But I admit, I understood. She hugged the child. As the girl skipped off the mom called ahead, a little apologetically now: "Practice all you need to." I understood. The mom's worry, and ambivalence, and the shame she felt deep down at wishing her daughter could speak and dream in the same language she did. When our kids talked in their sleep, they did so only in Russian, like their unconscious minds were just letting it be known: hey, this is a part of me, too. Might forgetting Russian erase memories? Not likely. But it would make expressing those memories harder than it should be. It's such a metaphor, language, but one that can be too easily interpreted and therefore manipulated. As I saw it, the real problem was not that the girl would remember or forget Russian. It was this: in remembering Russian, would the child forget English, the language her American mother spoke? If there had to be a choice made would the child ultimately choose one culture over the other? Russian over English? Taken a step further: The past over the present? Them over us? This was the fear. |
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