I’m hopelessly monolingual. Sometimes I trundle through broken sentences in Mandarin, tripping over my pronunciations and tones. Other times I tiptoe into a conversation in German, not quite sure how to properly vocalise the words I thought I knew in my head. When people find out I’m mixed, they usually have something to say about it. Sometimes they ask if I can speak Cantonese (no) or Punjabi (no) or both (see above). “Mixed kids are lucky,” a friend once said to me. “You guys get the best of both cultures.” I’m usually too proud to admit that the truth is that I’ve gotten neither. In a mixed race household, English is accessible. Fumbling with three different languages that not everybody can speak would be difficult.
So I grew up speaking English, almost exclusively. By eight I knew what adjectives were. By ten I knew the word “exacerbate”. By fifteen I was writing profusely, unstoppably, convinced that this was my mother tongue. In between the blog posts and poems, I was confidently speaking up in classes and meetings. I never had to worry that I’d lose my verbal footing, or that I’d mispronounce a word and be completely misunderstood. There were many words you could use to describe me, but “soft-spoken” could never be one of them. I had a voice (that spoke in English) and I was not afraid to use it.
Language barrier. The term always frightened me because I knew how many I had. I couldn’t integrate with the Chinese community at home because I didn’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese. I couldn’t integrate with the Punjabi community at home because I didn’t speak Punjabi. I could barely slip into the Singaporean community because my Singlish was unpracticed and clumsy. But English was my safe haven. I could speak English. I thought I spoke it well.
When I was picking universities, I made a beeline for those in the United Kingdom. Mostly because I wanted to do law, and I knew England would be a good place to study it. Partly because I was still terrified of the prospect of not understanding and not being understood. I understand their language, I thought. I’ll be fine.
The initial trepidation of travelling 7,000 miles by plane faded into enthusiasm for living in a foreign country. Hesitance about braving gloomy winters transformed into curiosity about seasons.
But the language barrier? I thought that was something I’d left behind, along with high school drama and maths. As the weeks careened past, and autumn turned into winter, I was left with the dizzying realisation that perhaps I hadn’t left it behind me at all.
I find myself stretching words, altering tones, so that locals understand me better. My jokes come hurtling out of my mouth, only to land painfully in the silence that now fills the conversation. I’m in a seminar, and I think I’m making a good point. I think I’m making myself heard. But my professor doesn’t seem to understand me. He answers a question that I have not asked, a question I already knew the answer to. I try again, but he looks confused, and I wonder if maybe the grammar I learned in primary school is different from the grammar that is taught in England. In my head, I’m speaking fluently, stringing words together like lanterns on Chinese New Year, like long chains of jasmine, but maybe I’m mistaken, and the sentences I think cascade from my tongue are really broken, jumbled, and incomprehensible.
I second guess my command of the language. It’s no longer familiar. I lie awake at night, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. “Library,” I whisper to myself, trying to feel how the syllables curl around my tongue. “Library, library, library.” I repeat it over and over again until my mouth feels foreign and I can’t form the sounds to make this word. Not that I could in the first place. I add “library” to a growing list of words I’m convinced I can’t pronounce. Other words: Secretary. Deposit. Libido. Ally.
Once, I asked a friend how to pronounce something. He looked at me, confused. “Why are you asking me? You’re the native speaker.” I laughed, but I wasn’t sure he was right.
What English do I speak, that is so vastly different from the English spoken here?
I’m starting to learn the problems of language. Years of elementary grammar classes tricked me into thinking it was a science that was made up of grammar and vocabulary and stressed/unstressed syllables. I thought I’d turned my language into art. What else could my poetry be? But perhaps I never turned it into anything at all. Perhaps there’s no point drawing a fuzzy line between science and art. Perhaps it exists somewhere in the middle, and for every time Microsoft Word doesn’t underline one of my sentences in green, there’s a conversation where “should of” is the right way of saying “should have”, and for every time I decline to use an Oxford comma in the hopes of being academically grammatically correctically, there is a conversation where I should really just keep quiet and not talk, and just listen to the words flow over me because they’re in my language, but not quite, and interrupting would be strange and perhaps my Tier 4 visa gives me a right to live here but not to speak, to sleep in a bed here but not to be understood, to go to school but not to ask questions, not to be heard. Because I’m trying, and I’m so grateful every time somebody listens and we have a conversation with our asymmetrical words, but I’m also starting to see that English is made up of so many different wavelengths, and perhaps I knew that in theory before but I never never felt it in practice, and sometimes it makes me think (which I like) and other times it makes me confused (which I don’t mind) and sometimes I just feel stuck in a language that is no longer currency right here where I am.
