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I felt her staring at me on the playground while I screamed at my daughter.
She must be the grandmother of someone, I thought. She must be curious, as people often are.
Then she took a step toward me and opened her mouth, e-nun-ci-a-ting every word.
"Speak English," she commanded. "You confuse the poor girl."
My stomach has dropped. I got up from the grass and prepared to answer. And I did.
But not until an old familiar feeling overwhelms me, a mixture of fear and shame that I had used to wear as a backpack to primary school . I was 7 years old, only two years older than my daughter now.
You have wet. Beaner dirty. Return to Tijuana. You talk like Ricky Ricardo.
So many days at Lake Mary's primary school in California ended the same way for me: angry and broken, waited by the rose bushes for my mother's broken blue Datsun, wearing my sneakers and her dresses wrinkled swap meet. I thought I would never catch up.
Thirty years later, I have a career, a house, a husband, two cars, two children and a dog.
I became an American citizen, I watched "The Sound of Music", I read Truman Capote, danced the hokey pokey, shook hands with two presidents and lived alone for five years in the # 39; Oregon. I looked up and memorized and practiced aloud all the weird American idioms I've ever heard – cut the mustard, bite the bullet, burn the midnight oil.
I did all this, but, according to this stranger, I did not do enough – because I still speak Spanish.
I was in kindergarten when I left El Salvador.
My mother came first, after the civil war broke out and my grandfather was shot dead at home. My aunt was killed and my father was exiled and my uncle disappeared – and the bodies of so many others, one by one, turned on the paved paths at sunrise.
She sent me as soon as my visa was approved.
I arrived one summer night in a brown stucco house facing an alley in South Whittier, California. I was stunned to see so many faces that had left me in El Salvador – uncles, aunts, cousins that I thought I had left my life. My family has gathered on the porch to welcome me and hear me counting up to 10 in English.
I learned the language quickly and soon became their interpreter. They took me to job interviews, doctor's appointments, government offices and the DMV.
I was a superhero, rushing between two worlds. I knew that Spanish would still be part of me.
When I grew up and got married, my husband felt the same way about his first language – Armenian.
We would have long discussions about the transmission of our mother tongues to our children.
But how do you raise a trilingual child? A child who can weave and go out of three languages, writing systems and different cultures?
When I became pregnant in 2012, I made it my mission to find out.
I went online, consulted pediatricians and participated in roundtables with child psychologists. All the while, I kept thinking about how my hunt seemed laughable for so many multilingual people in the world.
The experts have all said the same thing: the spirit of your newborn will be wide open. She tunes herself to any language to which she is exposed by those who take care of her. She will know when to change according to the sounds she will hear from each voice.
The key, I was told, was that each parent stays in one language.
I pledged to speak only Spanish to our daughter. My husband is engaged to Armenian.
The night we brought our newborn home was one of the most uncomfortable nights of our wedding.
We settled in our king-size bed to pamper our baby and cuddle. David spoke to him softly. I did it too.
But we could not understand the words of each other. He felt lonely. And it would feel like that over and over again for years.
Still, we knew that if we were good, our efforts would be paying off for our child. His world would be infinitely bigger.
Those first two years, English was an ocean tide, getting closer and closer to the front door of our house.
Our parents came and spoke English to our daughter. They bought his books in English and turned the chains into English cartoons. His cousins on both sides were bred almost exclusively in English.
David and I became cops, constantly demanding that our parents return to Spanish and Armenian.
That made me think of a story I wrote during this period – how difficult it was for professional Latinos to keep their children speaking Spanish.
Some parents left the task to abuelita. Some did not think their Spanish was good enough or said that they did not speak enough Spanish.
Others worried that if they pushed too much Spanish, their children would fall behind in English.
Many of my close friends made choices that left them with a mixture of doubt, guilt and resignation.
Sometimes David hesitated and thought it might be rude to speak Armenian in places where people do not understand. Sometimes he passed in English with our daughter.
I would tell him not to do that. "Teach him to speak with pride, no matter where he is."
Before the age of 2, our little girl with big brown eyes and huge cheeks started to do it.
Mom, lechita! Dad, katik! Besito, pachik, perro, shunik.
Her words were gems that came from her mouth in sets of two – one for mom, one for dad.
Over time, she began to string them together in sentences, moving effortlessly between the two languages.
She composed poems on the ground in Spanish and sang her favorite Armenian song, "Im Poqrik Navak", in the lungs of the kitchen. It would translate for me in Armenian bakeries, and when her grandmothers would be together, she would translate between them.
One day, while our daughter was almost 4 years old, a neighbor noticed her shiny gold sneakers.
"Those are so cool," she said to our daughter, who answered in English, "Yes, my mother got them at the mall."
My jaw dropped. It was the first time I heard him speak English. Where the hell is it coming from?
Soon, she started kindergarten, and English was everything she talked about there and during recess with cousins.
The language became something she could not have enough of. She has dug out words as some children dig fake dinosaur bones.
"Mom, did you know that there are lots of ways to say" grass "in Spanish? Grama, zacate, caesar, pasto, monte."
Mom, have you ever heard the word gargantüésco? It means big. Like really big. "
" Mom, how do you say Caterpillar in Spanish? What about Armenian? What's in Russian? "
" I do not know, "I said," Let's look at it. "
About a year ago, we were at the table with our two-year-old daughter and brother when she made an announcement.
It was Dohmerrish, his imaginary friend, a French boy with red hair and freckles.
"He will live with us", she said said. "I need to learn French to be able to talk to him."
OK, we said so, and enrolled in French classes. [19659004] Back at La Mirada's playground, I watched the woman She knew nothing about me and my daughter
"You do not need to worry about my child, "I said, she speaks English, Armenian and Spanish and is learning a fourth language.
" How many languages do you speak? "I asked.
" I speak English, "says to me she, hand on hip. "That's what matters."
Then she asked how good could my daughter know one of her languages - to which I replied smiling, "You'd be surprised."
That night, with a mixture of emotions, described the meeting on Twitter.
What happened afterwards surprised me. A few days before communicating in my native language, a New York lawyer heard a group speak Spanish and threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement before a border police officer near the Montana border heard. two American citizens speaking Spanish and detained.
In a few hours, my first tweet became viral. It has been retweeted nearly 80,000 times, eventually reaching millions.
Thousands of people around the world have expressed their views on the language, on America, on identity and culture.
Nkululeko Sizwe from South Africa: "In Johannesburg … most young Africans speak 3 or more languages, I speak 6/7 (and I was raised in Namibia)." [19659004] Natasha Carlyon from Atlanta: "Unfortunately, people told my mom to stop talking to me in Korean, and she listened to it." She regrets the decision. to learn Korean. "
Annu Jalais of India:" Good for you. "My 4-year-old son also speaks 4 languages and this is only monolingual (French, American, British) who tell me "all" these languages will trouble him. "
Charlie Kelly of Pittsburgh: Best!
John Wallace of Texas: "Those who reprimand others about the language that they speak in a free country have a strange definition of" freedom ".
"Please, adopt me !! I promise that I will clean my room and even … help dusting. "
" Well done, mom. "
" Your daughter is my hero!
Comments continued to come for days, 20, 30 at a time.
"It's crazy," I say to David as my phone buzzed and buzzed.
In that sea of voices, just about all positive, a woman's voice went out.
I could barely remember what it looked like.
All I knew, that was Was that my children would be well.
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