When I was get­ting my master’s degree in Teach­ing Eng­lish to Speak­ers of Other Lan­guages (TESOL), we learned about a study – I wish I could remem­ber the details, but it’s been more than 20 years, and I have for­got­ten – which mea­sured the responses of peo­ple on a sub­way who spoke only Eng­lish to a con­ver­sa­tion tak­ing place between a man and a woman speak­ing a lan­guage other than Eng­lish. If I recall, one of the most com­mon reac­tions the English-only speak­ing pas­sen­gers had was to sus­pect that the cou­ple was talk­ing about them, or per­haps about Amer­i­cans in gen­eral, and the assump­tion was almost always that what­ever the cou­ple had been say­ing, it couldn’t have been nice.

That kind of xeno­pho­bia, often mixed with racism, emerges quite com­monly when dis­cus­sions of lin­guis­tic plu­ral­ism or tol­er­ance turn to the ques­tion of the degree to which United States soci­ety and cul­ture can accom­mo­date the pub­lic use, offi­cial and unof­fi­cial, of lan­guages other than Eng­lish. When my wife and I decided to raise our son to be bilin­gual, for exam­ple, and we chose to speak only, or at least pre­dom­i­nantly, Per­sian to him for the first cou­ple of years of his life, mem­bers of my fam­ily were very con­cerned that we were set­ting him up for ridicule, and even fail­ure, because they were sure not only that he would learn to speak Eng­lish with an Iran­ian accent, but that there was a good chance he would speak Eng­lish ungram­mat­i­cally. What both­ered me, how­ever, was not this prac­ti­cal con­cern my rel­a­tives had about whether or not my son would acquire Eng­lish as a native speaker. Mis­placed as that con­cern is – chil­dren are, after all, lan­guage sponges and can, if they start young enough, learn to speak mul­ti­ple lan­guages flu­ently, with the appro­pri­ate accent in each, with­out any trou­ble at all – I think it’s not an unrea­son­able one for peo­ple to have who have not yet thought closely about how chil­dren are social­ized into their native lan­guage. No mat­ter how exclu­sively my wife and I might have tried to speak only Per­sian with him, for exam­ple, he was immersed in the cul­ture that is Amer­i­can Eng­lish in almost every other aspect of his life. It would have been dif­fi­cult, espe­cially since Eng­lish is my native lan­guage, for him not to have acquired Eng­lish as a native speaker.

Rather, what trou­bled me about my rel­a­tives’ response was the anger, the tone of one who has been betrayed, that entered their voices, when they would tell me things like, “He’s never going to sound Amer­i­can, you know, and he’s going to hate you for that when he’s older.” Over time, despite the fact that we tried as much as pos­si­ble to speak Eng­lish to our son when peo­ple who didn’t speak Per­sian were around, it became clear that much of what some of my fam­ily mem­bers resented was that they couldn’t under­stand what my wife was say­ing to our son when she spoke to him in her lan­guage. Not that I don’t under­stand the dis­com­fort that being unable to com­pre­hend the lan­guage spo­ken by the peo­ple stand­ing next to you can make you feel. In the late 1980s, I lived for about a year and a half in South Korea, and I nei­ther spoke nor read a word of Korean when I got there. It was fright­en­ing. More­over, unlike the peo­ple in the study I described above – who had no way of know­ing what the con­ver­sa­tions they were over­hear­ing were about – I knew for a fact that a lot of the peo­ple I rode the train with every day, whose con­ver­sa­tions I could not pen­e­trate even the slight­est frac­tion of an inch, or whom I passed in the street, or stood on line with at the bank, were often talk­ing about me, and I knew this because they were not shy about point­ing at me while they were say­ing what­ever it was they had to say.

It was very hard at first not to assume that at least some of what they were say­ing was less than flat­ter­ing, though I learned over time that most were prob­a­bly just say­ing an adult ver­sion of what the kids in my Chamshil apart­ment com­plex would say every time I walked past, point­ing and laugh­ing with a delighted curios­ity at the strange­ness of my pres­ence: Migook saram! Migook saram imnida! (An Amer­i­can! It’s an Amer­i­can!). Still, I have never under­stood the atti­tude, which I have only ever heard expressed by Amer­i­cans, dis­played so promi­nently by two guys from Chicago who were in Seoul for a med­ical con­fer­ence of some sort. I know where they were from and why they were in Korea because my friends and I, all of us Eng­lish teach­ers at the same school in Yoksam-Dong, over­heard their con­ver­sa­tion in the Pizza Inn (or maybe it was Pizza Hut, I am not sure) in the Sam­sung Build­ing, which was one of the places we’d go for lunch when we had a crav­ing for west­ern food. These two men wanted what­ever kind of over­loaded pizza they were try­ing to order with­out one of the top­pings on the menu, black olives, which they were try­ing with­out much suc­cess to explain to their wait­ress, whose Eng­lish was not very good and who was very flus­tered at hav­ing to use it, espe­cially as she could sense the ris­ing frus­tra­tion in her customer’s voices when it became clear to them that she wasn’t really under­stand­ing what they wanted. Finally, the wait­ress said, “Okay, okay!” as if she under­stood and went back into the kitchen. When she brought out their order a lit­tle while later, though, there were black olives on the pizza, and the guys from Chicago were furi­ous. They didn’t exactly yell at the wait­ress, but their voices were raised as they demon­strated what they wanted by pick­ing the olives off their food and set­ting them aside. This time the look on the wait­ress’ face con­firmed that she had indeed under­stood what the men from Chicago wanted, and she took the incor­rect order and went back into the kitchen.

I don’t remem­ber why none of us tried to inter­vene, since there were those among us whose Korean was good enough to defuse the whole sit­u­a­tion, but after the wait­ress had gone back into the kitchen, one of the guys leaned over the table and in a voice choked with anger and frus­tra­tion said, “Why don’t these peo­ple learn to speak the fuck­ing lan­guage!” His friend nod­ded, said, “Do you want to leave?” and they walked out.

Con­tinue read­ing →