Wednesday, April 8, 2020 // The Statement
2B
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Magdalena Mihaylova
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Erin White
I
t was a Saturday afternoon. My family had been
playing mahjong — a complex game in which players
form sets of matching tiles — for an hour or two and
we’d just finished a round. We shuffled the tiles for the next
round, shifting the pink and white pieces around the length
of the table for a few minutes. I wasn’t really good at the
game: My brother and I had just recently been introduced to
all the rules. My hands were still getting used to the feel of
the tiles’ plastic, smooth against my fingers. As I stacked my
row of tiles, the blank pink sides facing up, my mom spoke.
“You can pass this on to your children,” she said.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve thought and worried more about
the idea of passing on something — like clothes, old dolls,
recipes — to my own kids in the future. The actual question
of having kids isn’t necessarily a subject of concern for me
right now. But, if I were to have kids, I’ve always been afraid
that I wouldn’t be able to pass an incredibly important aspect
of culture: language.
My parents immigrated from the Philippines in the ‘90s. I
was born in Chicago, which makes me a second-generation
immigrant. I was raised speaking Cebuano (colloquially
known as Bisaya), an official language of the Philippines
that is closely related to Tagalog and mainly spoken in the
country’s southern regions. We ate traditional Filipino food
like adobo and lechón, practiced various holiday traditions
like receiving ang pao — red envelopes — and occasionally
attended Filipino parties where karaoke was the main event.
But the presence of Filipino culture overall was lacking.
Growing up in various states across the American Midwest,
it wasn’t often that I found Filipino culture in places outside
our home, save for the occasional trips to Asian grocery
stores and the few times that I heard snippets of Cebuano
when we’d go on vacation to New York City or visit our old
friends in Chicago. Most of my extended family lived in the
Philippines and those who lived in the United States were
living in California, Washington or Texas, so any exposure
to Filipino culture was limited to the confines of my house.
When I was still very young, my parents spoke to me in
both English and Cebuano, aiming to raise me to be bilingual.
As young children usually do, I learned quickly, but there
was a problem: Cebuano and English mixed together in my
brain and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between
the two. In preschool, I tried to explain to my teachers that
my favorite food was pancit — noodles — but 3-year-old
me didn’t know how to convey that. In another instance, I
babbled to my babysitter about being sick and throwing up.
She didn’t understand me, because I kept using the word suka
— to vomit. I didn’t realize there was an English equivalent.
After my teachers sat down with me and my parents to
talk about my tendency to slip from language to language,
my parents eventually started to use more English around
me instead of Cebuano. I stopped mixing Cebuano words
in my sentences. With no other Filipino children like myself
at school, I hardly spoke the language at all. This isn’t a
particularly unique situation. Many second-generation
immigrants lose their ancestral language at some point.
In fact, according to a study conducted by the Pew
Research Center, while nine out of 10 second-
generation immigrants are proficient in English, only
four out of 10 second-generation Asian Americans
say that they can speak their parents’ native language
decently.
I didn’t lose my grasp of the language entirely, I just
kept listening but stopped speaking. I still know the
words, and can fully understand spoken Cebuano, but
I can’t speak it. While I can comprehend my mother’s
instructions for help around the house or my dad’s
sarcastic commentary on movies, the glottal stops of
words like tuo feel strange in my mouth and my tongue
stumbles over the language’s ng sounds.
I’m stuck, in a way, between being monolingual
and bilingual. Any conversation with Cebuano that I
hold now is stilted by the fact that I know what’s being
said, but I can only respond in English. As I’ve grown
older, I’ve found myself becoming more aware of how
this holds me back, especially when I interact with my
grandmother, whose knowledge of English is present
but minimal. When I’m with her, there are often so
many things I want to say, like how my day’s been, or
that I’ve been working on a cool project at school. But
there’s no easy way for me to get any of it across to her.
Due to my lack of fluency in Cebuano, I know I wouldn’t
be able to pass on my knowledge of the language in the way
that my parents could, especially with the likelihood of me
continuing to live in the U.S. or some other English-speaking
country. I’ve felt guilty about this for some time. Language
has such an intimate connection to culture and Cebuano
was one of the few things keeping me close to my Filipino
roots. While my family still had Filipino-style meals and
occasionally attended festivals hosted by Filipino-American
organizations, I felt that language was something indicative
of true connection to a culture. In some ways, I saw it as a
tether.
At the same time, I’ve always questioned how strong of a
tether I actually have if I can’t even fully speak my parents’
language. When I visit my cousins in the Philippines, I can’t
help but feel a disconnect between us. At times, when we sit
together for dinner, someone will say something that I don’t
particularly understand and the others will laugh while I just
listen, smiling as if I know what they’re talking about. They
know both Cebuano and English and often slip between the
two when they speak to me, but there are certain things —
like jokes, references — that I can’t fully comprehend because
I’m not a native speaker.
This inherent difference, of course, has never been
something that anyone could change; it’s simply a result
of the way things are — my parents decided to move to
the U.S. while my aunts and uncles chose to remain in the
Philippines. Regardless, it still makes me feel inadequate at
times, like I’m not as “Filipino” as my cousins are. In a way, I
suppose I’m not. I was raised an ocean away. Even still, I feel
pride in being Filipino as much as I am American.
At times, though, I find myself struggling to fit myself
into either category. Would the generation after me feel even
more separated from Filipino culture? Would my parents feel
disappointed in their daughter for not sharing their culture
enough? It’s not necessarily out of the question for them to
teach my future kids, but I’ve always seen that scenario as
me admitting defeat.
That Saturday afternoon, when my mom told me that I
could pass on mahjong to my children, it almost felt like a
form of reassurance. It was as if she knew that I’ve felt guilty
about my lack of skills in Cebuano.
As I sat there, I realized she was right — there was an
entirely different facet of culture that I hadn’t considered.
I’d been placing too much emphasis on language, when
elements like Filipino delicacies, ang pao and even karaoke
are just as important, if not more so. Even though language is
definitely a large part of culture, it doesn’t encompass all of it.
Certainly mahjong, a game that I’ve seen Filipino adults play
at family gatherings and parties, could be considered a part
of our culture. Perhaps culture doesn’t really have a hard
definition, and there is no “checklist” of things that you have
to be or have. Ultimately, feeling connected and legitimized
in a culture is up to you.
I know that it’s impossible for me to give the next generation
in my family the same experience that my parents gave me.
I won’t be able to give them the language, and I might not
know or even understand all of the Filipino customs. But I
can share with them my own experiences and what I have
learned. While I might not be able to teach them Cebuano
jokes or show them how to make pancit, I can always pull out
the old mahjong board with its pink tiles.
statement
THE MICHIGAN DAILY | APRIL 8, 2020
BY CHELSEA PADILLA, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Passing down culture
PHOTO COURTESY OF CHELSEA PADILLA