language

When I first began applying to colleges in my senior year of high school, I was determined to attend a school where I could fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming fluent in American Sign Language. About a month into the process, I had essentially given up on this aspiration completely. Universities with complete ASL programs—or even the ability to take ASL classes—were simply too hard to find.

My Contemporary Civilization professor writes a question on the board: Do property rights exist posthumously? My classmates insist they must (or, at the least, don pensive looks and meow out a “maaaaybe”). They share stories of how their families “earned” their property through generations of hard work, unanimously insisting that our possessions are secured via our merits. I sit, red in the face. I do not know how to say, in appropriate academic jargon, that my family has never owned a home. I do not know how to say, philosophically enough, that I have never even had my own room. I do not know how to say, or if it is appropriate to say, or if I am even right to feel that my classmates are implying my family is not hardworking, that my family is simply not of the same caliber or mettle as the high-flying parents of my peers.

I’m standing in my too-warm room with a yellow Ticonderoga pencil between my teeth. It’s the summer before college, but the woody taste reminds me of being in elementary school––maybe because I haven’t used pencils to do my homework since then, or felt particularly inclined to chew on them. But I’m doing this right now because an eHow article told me that speaking with a pencil in my mouth would help me learn how to roll my R’s.

Over winter break, I was up late one night playing board games with a few friends. We moved through Pictionary, Hearts, and even Monopoly (apparently, we’re very good friends) before turning our efforts to Scrabble.

It’s second semester, so hopefully (if you’re a first-year) you’ve figured out what the Core is.

A casual mention of the phrase “language requirement” usually makes people groan. “It’s just so many classes,” they say, “and far too many worksheets.” “It’s such a waste of time,” they quip, “I learned this all in high school. And I still can’t even roll my r’s. What gives?”

I love watching people’s faces when my mom speaks to them in Mandarin. Blonde-haired and blue-eyed, her vocabulary isn’t as wide as it once was, but her accent still retains inflections from the life and work she did in the Hunan province after graduating in the ’80s. The businessman she asks for directions or the tired-looking mother she chats with both acquire identical looks of quiet surprise. Maybe it’s not supremely odd, but it’s certainly out of the ordinary. It gives me a sense of pride.

In one of my first classes this semester, the professor opened his lecture by saying, “The human experience is multilingual.”

In the middle of June, an Israeli family moved into my neighborhood with three kids who spoke no English whatsoever. Through the magic of a suburban mom phonecall network, I found myself knocking on their door, wiping sweat from my forehead and armed with nothing but a notebook and pen. I spent every day of that summer teaching English to those children, building a language from games, books, and adventures. I had no curriculum. I let their interests, moods, and excitement lead the way—they wanted to learn. They loved learning English, making videos for “homework,” and writing letters to everyone they knew. It was crucial that they learned English, or they would not survive in school, or in America.