ms_minerva

I’ve been sporadically reading through Anna Karenina on my Kindle this past year and finally finished it! Something that’s grabbed my attention throughout the book is how the Russian characters alternate between languages as a class signifier. Implicitly, French—in particular, good French—is an indicator of high rank, while the vernacular Russian is treated as vulgar. 

This reminds me of the language politics in the Philippines, or at least in Manila (I can’t speak for the rest of the country because I haven’t spent much time there). I have students who can’t speak any Filipino dialects because their parents raised them to speak English exclusively and sent them to American/British private schools. Of course, these are wealthy sorts who think they can “transcend” their ethnicity in this way and use English as a class signifier. I think this is the epitome of colonial mentality, but as a Filipino-American who continues to be terrible at spoken Tagalog even though my comprehension is pretty good, it’s probably not my place to say that? Minor tangent, but it really bothers me when people insist that Tagalog is an “easy” language, because it really isn’t if you’re learning it from scratch and I think viewing it as simple or lesser is just another facet of colonial mentality. Back on point, there’s the added complication that English is necessary in the global workforce, especially with many Filipinos scattering around the world. There has to be a way to balance native dialects with English and be practical while still maintaining our heritage.

Joy Luck Club: I don’t have the energy to write the full-length review this book deserves, but I will say that I loved the way Amy Tan treated the language divide between the daughters and their parents. The mothers’ narrations are incredibly eloquent, but when they speak in their daughters’ chapters their grasp on English is shaky and can’t capture the depths of their thoughts and emotions. For me, one of the most powerful moments in the novel is towards the end, when June’s father starts telling a story in English and she stops him and asks him to speak in Chinese instead. 

At my last job one of my co-teachers brought up the idea that there’s this sort of tragedy in the language barrier we have with our students. Even if they reach English proficiency, we’ll never know how they fully express themselves. There will always be an extra layer filtering their full realization of who they are as people so we don’t get the total experience. I feel it when I try speaking other languages and the humor and intelligence I like to think I have doesn’t express themselves in the same way.