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A social issue especially important to me is immigration; specifically, learning conversational English. In the past and especially today, language barrier issues tend to get overlooked when discussing foreign nationals. This simplified notion unconsciously leads to an anti-immigration sentiment when viewed from a foreign perspective. Immigrants have ongoing hardships to adapt from an educational view of English in their native country to being immersed within an English-speaking country. Having immigrant parents myself and experiencing similar emotions during my Hindi study abroad, I decided to write the following article Ing-Lish in hopes to shed light on these struggles.
Ing-Lishh
PEACH CITY ~Translated from Hindi~
A yellow taxi gives a faint rumble next to me as a large truck with a Pepsi advertisement roars to a halt in front of me. The red hand flashes into a white walker as I cross the black and white striped street with my daughter. The air is relatively clouded with factory soot, but the business women and babies in strollers do not seem to mind the debris. We are traveling toward music where the people are dancing and laughing and singing with their cash boxes stretched out when a man trying to catch my attention for his knick-knack stall “Peachtree Atlanta” hollers “Namaste!” As much as it is calming to hear a familiar word, I am only reminded of the delayed reaction time of my eyes to read simple signs. The towering glass buildings surround me and keep rising and rising forever until I am blinded by the sun reflecting across every panel. Atlanta’s skyline pops up out of the frames of countless movies I’ve watched, just as I imagined it. But I am not here to tour or sight-see or take pictures to text my large extended family. I am here to help my daughter.
Google has given her a stable living within their outreach headquarters. As much as she has progressed through college and work here in the States, the time has come for me to help her find a home—let her fit into the puzzle piece of society. Before we head to an open house, she wants to show me one of her favorite places to work and relax.
A triangular vent props out above the doorway with an orange and green backdrop. “Pan-Era” the sign reads, as the smell of freshly ground coffee beans makes its way into our noses. The air conditioning fans me as my feet click across the cold orange titles.
“Mom, my friend is over there. I need to ask him about the next programming meeting. Why don’t you order some food for us?”
LOST IN TRANSLATION
When I first met Chaiyya, we were at an Indian potluck party in downtown Atlanta. She wore a flowing, light-blue saree with her black hair tied in a bun while teaching my yorkie pup to sit. Her name does not translate to “tea” but rather shade which fits her perfectly given she tries to shield her loved ones and animals from the harsh sun amid her recent move to America. I respect her greatly, a genuine person who takes her job as a veterinarian very seriously. As I pursue my dream of becoming a world-class architect, I can only imagine how much more courage and persistence she needed than me in order to fulfill her degree and live in a new place with her daughter. Fully born and raised in the states, I can do no justice in capturing the fearful yet astonishing emotions of immigrants, both young and old, rich and poor, European and Asian, African and Hispanic. I can do no justice in capturing the harsh realities of living amid one of the world’s largest spoken languages. I can do no justice in capturing Chaiyya’s accounts in Hindi and losing bits of translation in English. But I can create a new chapter and fill-in it in with some forgotten situations.
A-B-C-D, PLEASE WELCOME ME ~Translated from Hindi~
Behind the crystal clear glass boxes, Pan-Era’s sweet aroma of summer muffins, pastries, and desserts encompasses my nose as I read the menu above. Sandwich and soup are simple words to understand. Underneath each section, I read descriptions consisting of tomato, cheese, and spinach. The sparse pictures of these foods help me understand the menu, but it does not capture every item on the menu. No one is standing at the front table but I hear silverware clanking behind the green curtain. Perhaps I will try the IPads around the sides of the front table. Every word is in English, and the only word I pick up on is “cred-it card.” I make a mental note to obtain a card as soon as possible, as it seems hard money is barely used here.
A college student is standing next to me, tapping away at her phone, headphones in. I try to reach into the back of my brain, pushing away the squiggly symbols of the Devanagari script and remembering the greetings unit from secondary school. The brick-like memory is too heavy to lift and I am trying to find the block-like English alphabet through the small holes in the pile of clay rectangles.
“Excuse me—”
The college girl moves her pupils up and scrunches her eyebrows together before briefly mumbling, “Do I look like I work here?” She turned her back toward me.
I tried not to judge America from one person.
Just then, a crimson-haired lady wearing an olive-colored apron with a white clip-on tag with “Hi, I’m Connie” in bold, capital letters, walked to the front of the counter. Her face was grey with drooping eyelids and she must have been here since dawn.
“Welcome to Panera, how can I help you?”
Panera. Panairuh. Now I can pronounce it. The American language runs quickly, slurring its words together with a strange accent. The tip of her tongue rolls off so easily while I strive to string every word together. Welcome...Panera...Help. I attempt to smile at her before saying my first words. I reach back inside my brain trying to fixate a phrase together, but the words are flying around in swiveled paths I cannot grab. I look at the menu again and I see the word “Ba-con.” It rhymes with econ, but the food is foreign to me.
“What is Ba-con?”
“Bacon? Is this a joke?” Connie contemptuously responds with a snappy tone. “You know, pig meat. You want a BLT?”
Bae-cun. The syllables morph into other letters, and fog surrounds my heart, a cloud of dread in front of me. My hands are wavering and I get confused. Meat. I could never imagine eating the animals I take care of day in and day out.
“No! I love animals!”
“So you want meat?”
“No, only vegetables.”
“Ma’am we don’t offer plain vegetables,” Connie remarked as she handed me a menu and walked away.
I want to reach after her, but an invisible hand has taken my voice. My tongue is being twisted backward by a fifty-pound dumbbell. I am pushing against my throat but no sound hums out. I could tell her about all the English lessons I took. I could tell her about all the newspapers I read during my free time. I could tell her about the train moving through my brain, shoveling my Hindi into the fire in hopes English would glide along the tracks. But the only word I manage to whisper is “ok.”
I hear airy sounds from behind the curtain. Black hair...joke...rude...waste time...third world. An eruption of laughter comes forward, their fire getting gradually thicker and obscure. They were the skyscrapers towering over the tiny fire hydrant, distinctly separate from the community. They viewed me as a baby stumbling on his toes step after step. They viewed me as a toddler wobbling on training wheels in her three-wheeled Fisher Price bike. They viewed me as ten-year-old too short to reach the cereal at the top of the fridge.
Connie comes back from behind the green curtain, holding an ice-cold glass of water. “You know what this is right? Why don’t you take a seat.”
Everything sped up. Suddenly, a brown brick wall surrounds all of us creating a room. Another cylindrical brick wall breaks right through the center, except this time encompassing and darkening my path, creating a barrier between the rest of cafe and myself. The crystal clear water slowly begins to drop, drip by drip, turning into a jelly-like waterfall spilling infinitely.
TWENTY YEARS LATER
The day after the potluck party, I returned to work after a weeklong vacation. As an architect, I have a sufficient amount of quiet time to relieve myself of deep thoughts when I sketch blueprints. Break time arrived, and I decided to visit my good friend Ivan. When I stepped into his office, I noticed the photos on his bulletin board. One, in particular, was a mother and father standing behind a little brown haired boy with blue eyes in front of the ice-capped Kievan Mountains. I wonder when he last visited Ukraine.
His eyes turned blank and he stared at the wall for a good six minutes, tapping his toe and twiddling his Pilot G-2 pen.
“Everything slowed down,” he exclaimed abruptly. “I tapped away at my keyboard, only pausing to take a long sip of my coffee. She stood there, almost frozen, with no words to say. She held her face slightly bowed with her mouth slightly open. A glass of water almost levitating towards her, she took it without protest. The room cleared away for her as she began to make her way to the closest seat. Gradually, the water began to pirouette, falling softly like braids onto the cold, tiled floor. The water skidded across the ice, droplets flying up and down. I left my belongings with a thud and went to go help her. I could see the unease in her eyes, not because I am an architect, but because I knew exactly how she felt. I too was her. Just twenty years before.”
“Before you came to this office,” Ivan said, “I worked with the architects on the ground when we decided to stop for a lunch break. It had been sixteen years since I arrived in the U.S. and at the time (maybe even now), my L’s stretched back into my mouth and I could not differentiate W’s and V’s. Still, I’d consider my English fluent.”
I almost forgot Ivan immigrated here so long ago. He seemed comfortable like a native speaker all the time at the office, yet now these memories resurfaced.
“I microwaved my favorite dish I proudly whipped up last night, and the umami smell of the liver and the sweetness of the cranberry rang wind chimes in my head. I took the container out, the steam coming out of the tiny seams of the rice dough. I sat down, but the room around me remained peculiarly quiet. Not tranquil, but filled with pauseful waiting and anxious breathing. One man, Tim, had his lip slightly curled, intently watching the speckled rice dough. Another, Henry, had one eyebrow arched, intently studying the buckwheat below the dough.
Henry pointed slowly, ‘What did you bring?’
I explained the buckwheat cereal mixed with the mushroom cream was called ка́ша (Kasha) while the liver and potato-cranberry rice dough was called варе́ники (Varenyky). Another minute passed by, feeling empty. I felt on edge but began to eat my food. They watched me, their heads cocked slightly. Henry’s eyes moved from side to side as he glanced at Tim before returning his gaze back to me and my lunch.
‘Oh, so it's a tattered down version of mashed potatoes and dumplings’ Henry commented.
‘No, ка́ша and варе́ники,’ I replied firmly.
‘Why don’t you just call it mashed potatoes and dumplings?’ Tim remarked, ‘You live in America now right! I can’t understand your stressed V’s and whatever letters you used.’”
Ivan took a long pause, deeply breathing before continuing onward. His distraught face told me the memory was painful to recall, yet needed to relieve him from his miseries.
“I discussed how the two are distinctly separate, discrete types of food in their own ways,” he explained. “Like cereal and milk. Two different foods. Some phrases and cuisines simply cannot be translated into English at one’s wish. My one happiness and safe haven, taking me away from the chaos of a new country and language, welded together under the greater umbrella of English.
Twenty years later, and the wall called language barrier still hasn’t broken down. I tried adapting my tongue to their methods. Will they accept mine?”
Ivan broke the conversation with me and went back to staring at the wall, waiting for the clock to tick six o’clock, the time he could return home.