New Language New Lifestyle

New Language New Lifestyle

I sat in room 207, more uncomfortable than ever. It was the first day of second grade and I was surrounded by people who spoke a different language from me. I said hi and smiled, they did the same but it never went further than that. All of my friends were in my class. Thalia, Jennifer, Aminda, Zoe and I were the only fluent english speakers in the class. Ms. Zondek had told us to try our hardest to communicate with the other kids who only spoke Mandarin. In the middle of classes ESOL kids would ask us for help on pronouncing words or what the homework was. It was harder than I ever would have thought to keep your patience when speaking to a person who can’t understand a word of what you’re saying.  Luckily, Ms. Zondek had us covered most of the time. I had a hard time keeping my cool when one of the ESOL kids would say something completely wrong and it was just straight up hilarious.

Laughing at their mistakes made me feel terrible. I knew exactly what it was like to not fit into a group, a community even. Like the quote from I Just Wanna Be Average “you’re placed into a system that isn’t designed to liberate you but occupy you, or, if you’re lucky, train you”(166). In that quote I realized how hard it must have been for all of those non-english speaking kids who had no idea what me and my friends would be laughing at or what in the world our teacher was talking about. Instead they had to sit in their seats at lunch, doing extra work to improve their english skills. I only knew they stayed up at lunch because one time I had to stay up and help one of them. All lunch period all I could think about was how I wished I could be outside playing with my friends. While I was helping Pu Chen with his writing assignment on frogs I discovered the fact that these kids stayed up here on purpose. I had so many other thoughts in my tiny second grade mind. Like how upsetting it must be for these kids to stay up and watch us go out every single day while they stay in so they can get better at what I’ve known almost my whole life.

Lucky for me, that day was a day we got to go to the cybrary to pick out books for the weekend. I made a bee-line to the culture section and picked out a book about Mandarin while the rest of my friends were in the fiction section picking which Junie B. Jones book they’d each get. I checked out my book with Ms. Phillips and sat down at an empty table. My head filled up with new words and characters so fast that I finally got the full effect of how hard it is to learn a whole new language from scratch. Like in How To Tame A Wild Tongue the narrator says “for a people who are neither spanish nor live in a country in which spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which english is the reigning tongue but who are not anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard spanish nor standard english, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?”(55). Now, if you switch Spanish with Mandarin, it’s a perfect example of how secluded you can feel when everyone else knows what’s going on but you. Speaking a different language can put your mind in a whole different place, a place where you’re your own anchor. However, at some point that anchor needs to be brought up so you can continue to explore the world you never thought you’d know.