“Stella really liked the calamari last time,” I said.
“Okay, and we’ll get Cole a crepe.”
“Sounds good. By the way, your poop log is making a break for it.”
“Oh, shit. But literally. Ha!” Drew chortled, pushing the log back into the backpack and attempting to force the zipper shut.
We both took a sip of our beers and gazed around in contentment. The plaza was just an open space between buildings. The alleyways leading off to the Gothic quarter or back to La Rambla were dark and twisting, all gray cobblestones with the flames of lanterns lighting each restaurant, the tables half full, waiters in crisp white shirts moving efficiently inside and out.
Dinner was later here, close to midnight in some cases. Kids were a part of public life and it wasn’t unusual to see children out with their parents late into the evening. Barcelona was a haven for parents of young children who still wanted to go out. Our children got to play on a slide and seesaws while we drank one-euro beers. When they got their fill, we’d scoop them up and bring them to our table to eat.
I set my beer down and gazed at my husband. “Drew, how the hell did we get here?”
He just grinned back at me.
• • •
CHRISTMAS EVE DAWNED with a touch of misting rain, and I couldn’t find anything in our apartment.
“Drew! ¿Dónde están los zapatitos de Cole? And what are you wearing?”
Even though we were alone, we made it a habit to use some Spanish with each other. It had started out as more serious attempts to teach Cole the language, but quickly we realized it wasn’t at all necessary, considering that we were living in a Spanish-speaking country. Few people here spoke decent English. In a report commissioned by the EU on English speaking, only 20 percent of Spain residents spoke English well enough to hold a conversation (compared to nearly 95 percent of Norway, where fluency in English is so common, it might as well be an official second language).
Instead, there are a number of second languages here, including Catalan, which is spoken across Catalonia, including in our home of Barcelona. Then there’s also Basque, Valencian, Galician, and Occitan. Occitan sounds similar to a mashup of French and Italian. The existence of these official second languages (plus a half-dozen unofficial ones) means that while most Spain residents don’t speak English, they are often still bilingual.
In fact, it was this multilingual atmosphere that attracted us here long-term: the lack of English and the commitment to bilingual education. In Barcelona we spent our days immersed in non-English languages, which made our own language study so much easier—not to mention the communal feel of being surrounded by like-minded people who thought that speaking multiple languages was a worthy life goal.
“What?” Drew shouted back.
“Zapatitos—the shoes!” I hollered again.
“Aquí, ya los tengo.”
Like most bilingual couples I knew, Drew and I had our dominant language, but we flipped between languages. The kids were still sorting out which language to use when. Water was always agua, but it paired with English for: “I want agua.” Sometimes, the whole thing felt chaotic. Especially when we were running late and the kids were successfully applying divide-and-conquer strategies to keep us one step behind as they avoided getting dressed, brushing their teeth and having their tiny feet shoved into those damn zapatitos.
“Drew!” I yelled.
“Ya vengo,” he said, scooping up a giggling Stella in one arm and prying a marker out of her hand before she could draw on her face any more. Just then Cole came sprinting out of his room, completely naked, with a plastic light saber over his head.
“Oh my God, we’re never going to make it,” I said, half-exasperated and half-amused.
“It’s okay, we’ll just be late. Is that a Spanish thing?” Drew said, setting Stella down to grab Cole. “Let’s pretend it is very Spanish.”
• • •
TWO HOURS LATER, we arrived at our friends’ house, an American and Argentine couple with two kids slightly older than our own. Their kids were attending school in Barcelona, so they were learning Catalan and already spoke Spanish from their dad. We got right down to business: That caga tió wasn’t going to poop out presents without a little help.
The key to getting your caga tió to poop is twofold: First you must sing a song, then you must beat it with a stick. The song is in Catalan, and it goes like this:
Poop log,
Poop turrón [a nougat Christmas candy]
Hazelnuts and cheese
If you don’t poop well,
I’ll hit you with a stick,
Poop log!
Poop log!
Log of Christmas,
Don’t poop herrings,
They are too salty,
Poop turrón,
They are much better!
Log of Christmas,
Poop turrón,
Pee white wine,
Don’t poop herrings,
They are too salty,
Poop turrón,
They are much better!
Poop log!
Of course, after a glass of wine, this is even more hilarious. We gave the traditional song our best effort, but mostly just sang “¡Cagaaaa tióóóó!” with gusto while helping the kids hit the log with sticks.
There’s a bit of Christmas magic here, where the parents have to slip the presents under the log’s blanket while the kids are distracted, which I failed to do discreetly. Drew took photos, our friends sang the song, I pulled out presents for the kids, and Cole and Stella had their first taste of Christmas in Barcelona.
• • •
I SLIPPED BACK IN TIME and considered that older version of me. I had loved Barcelona when we honeymooned here but couldn’t see any way to live overseas. I couldn’t have imagined raising my kids bilingual. But now, all I had to do was stay. Everything seemed so simple now. But we sure did take the long way to get here.
PART 1
CHINA
One
Drew lay on our hotel bed in Cairo, propped up on his elbow, holding up his face in the palm of his hand, our sleeping son next to him. I was pacing the length of the oversized room. The former grandeur of this building was apparent from the ample quarters, the hand-laid tile, the elaborate crown molding, but it had been long neglected. Everything was slowly grinding itself back into the ground, little cracks expanding across the plaster, the tiles, the joints between walls. Still, at fifteen bucks a night, it was an affordable hotel and well located, even if it was just a shell, an artifact of another time. I imagined those days: plush bedding, leather couches, artwork, and the twinkle of refined light fixtures. Instead we had lonely double beds with thin blankets, a folding chair, and a light spot on the wall where a mirror or painting once hung.
The dust was everywhere, a constant companion in Egypt, something we noticed when we arrived at the airport, and it had followed us ever since. There was a broom leaning next to our door when we arrived, as if the futility of the task had been realized, and the struggle abandoned.
There was a wide balcony attached to our room that trembled when you crossed it, but it gave a bird’s-eye view of the city from sixteen stories above. I stood in the door frame and looked out.
“Okay, so we’re doing it?” I said to Drew.
“Mm-hmm,” Drew said slowly.
I turned around and regarded my husband. He looked like he was about to join our son for a nap.
“Drew, it will be great. We’ll live in China, in Beijing, and learn Mandarin. Then we’ll go to the Middle East—maybe Jordan or somewhere, I’m not sure yet—and learn Arabic. I don’t know how much Cole will learn, but I am sure he’ll pick some up. Then we can go to Mexico or Costa Rica, live on the beach, eat tacos, and learn Spanish. I mean, just think about it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We would get fluent in three different languages, in just a couple of years. And beyond that, we’d also be learning about three massively different cultures, back to back. The implications are huge. I feel like we would understand the world better.” I took a deep breath. “Look, it’s Asia, the Middle East, and Latin culture. Boom. You know?”
“Right.”
“I mean who does this? Have you ever heard of someone else doing something like this?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “It will be amazing!”
“Okay.” Drew yawned.
“No, really. I need you to get excited about this,” I said.
He pushed himself off the bed and sat up. “I am!” He stretched his arms and gave me a grin.
“Okay, good. Because we are doing it.” I kept pacing. “Are you going to learn the languages with me?”
“Ah—no.” Drew smiled sheepishly.
I did my quick circuit around the room again, then resumed my position at the open balcony door and looked down toward the street below. A man was selling hot shawarma, carving meat off massive spits with a flick of his wrist and then piling it high into pitas. A gaggle of people stood around awaiting their orders. Egyptian families strolled past, the mothers in full abayas, the extended hijab that flowed over the entire body. Their little children bounced around them as they leisurely crossed the square.
I bit my nail and turned around again. “So when should we go to China?”
• • •
THIS MAD, IMPULSIVE IDEA for a language immersion project hadn’t occurred to me overnight. In my mind, it was all about Cole. I had first started thinking about multilingualism when I was pregnant with him and researching everything I could possibly read about, from home birth to vaccines to raising the baby bilingual. I ended up with a C-section scar, a fully vaccinated child, and a vague idea that we two all-American monolinguals should somehow raise him bilingual, if that was even possible.
But after Cole’s birth, we got distracted. Drew and I were filming a documentary project together that took us around the world, hitting Colombia, Thailand, India, Greece, Spain, and finally Egypt. Everyone back home kept asking us how all this travel was changing our son, and our honest answer was: probably not at all. During our travels, we had seen Cole pick up little words here and there, like “kap koon” for thank you in Thailand or “hola” in Spain, but he didn’t retain those words once he stopped hearing them every day. And while it was fascinating to watch him adapt to each culture so effortlessly, we knew as a one-year-old he wouldn’t remember any of it. Without encountering Spanish, Thai, Hindi, Greek, or Arabic again, for a sustained period, he would grow up to be an English-only speaker like us.
I had heard that there is a window when a child is very young during which exposure to a second language can lead to native mastery of that second language. For example, if we moved somewhere right now where Cole would hear, say, Hindi every day, he could grow up to speak Hindi just as well as he spoke English.
These were the thoughts percolating in my head around the time I ran into the research of Ellen Bialystok. Her research showed that there was a cognitive benefit to being bilingual, that speaking a second or third language could stave off the effects of dementia by four to five years. My grandfather had died from complications surrounding dementia a few years earlier, so when I read these results, I took notice.
My grandfather had been an English-Finnish bilingual. The last four to five years of his life were maybe the best he ever had. He played a lot of golf in those four years. He made the three-day trip in his red Cadillac from his lake house in Massachusetts to his condo in Florida and back multiple times in that period. We had long conversations over the phone, and I told him that I would take him to Finland with me. We hadn’t been close when I was young, but in his last years (though we didn’t know they were his last years), I really got to know him. If he hadn’t had those extra five years to live, thanks to his bilingualism, I might never have really known him.
My grandfather’s dementia was likely a hereditary condition, but unlike him, I don’t have bilingualism to delay the effects. It’s possible that acquiring a second language later in life could help, but Bialystok only studied lifelong bilinguals who spoke both languages fluently. If there was a window for mastering a second language to native-like fluency, it had probably closed for me. But it wasn’t too late for my son.
• • •
FOR OUR DOCUMENTARY, the filming was done. Drew would be doing the bulk of the editing, so, true to form, I was feeling my familiar tug toward the next big project. I started seriously thinking about languages and how to raise my child bilingual. Drew and I could do our jobs from anywhere with a wireless Internet connection. Cole was squarely in his second-language-mastery window, but growing fast. If we wanted him to learn another language fluently enough to pass for a native speaker—and then maybe to ward off the dementia that was likely coming for me and him from my grandfather’s genes—we’d have to act fast. Suddenly, the way forward seemed clear. What had before been just a few isolated details now connected in a way that could not be unseen. It felt like fate. I wasn’t prone to magical thinking, but somehow I was letting that feeling drive me.
We’d move abroad. Somewhere with a tough language, one that Cole would really only be able to master if he lived there from toddlerhood. And I’d learn it too, so I could speak to him in the language at home—and reap whatever brain-protecting benefits I could from later-in-life language study.
And if knowing two languages was better than knowing one language, surely knowing three or four would be better than knowing just two. So—once we mastered the first foreign language, we’d replicate the experiment twice more. We’d become fluent in three new languages in just a few years by devoting ourselves completely to them and immersing ourselves in those cultures and countries. It was a brilliant plan.
First, I had to convince my husband.
Somehow I was always the one pitching an idea and cajoling Drew into coming along. Ten years prior, I had scooped Drew up from his man-cave attic apartment in Connecticut, where he was working as an animator, and convinced him to move cross-country together to Seattle after only three months of dating. The timing was right; we both wanted new jobs and a new start, so we decided to take the leap. But when I showed up at his apartment the morning of the move, it was a disaster. Years’ worth of his artwork, drawings, and illustrations covered the floor, like newspaper on the bottom of a hamster cage. His fish tank was green with a long-forgotten dead fish and one floating baby doll for effect. He had saved every empty beer bottle from the last six months of drinking and had haphazardly lined them up on the counters, on the windowsills, and against the baseboards. I would need a shovel to dig him out of this mess. It wasn’t until later, when we started our cross-country road trip, that I began to realize what was going on. He was nervous. He didn’t pack because he was procrastinating, avoiding the enormity of the life change we were embarking on.
He told me stories on that ten-day drive, stories about not taking his SATs or applying to any colleges until a full semester after he graduated high school when he realized, Oh right, everyone really has left. He was comfortable with routine and liked having things stay the same. As a third-generation Vermonter, he had it in his bones. I realized that this was part of why we worked well together. He was the anchor that kept me from floating away.
Now we were seven years into our marriage, parents to a young child, and had many cities under our belt. We had lived in Seattle for five years, Dallas for two, and been back to Boston for one. We’d briefly moved to Madrid, traveled to Central America, and had a baby in Oregon. After Cole was born, we continued traveling and filmed the documentary that eventually landed us in Egypt. Two years into our travels, he had joked that I just had to tell him what day to arrive at the airport and remember to pack his passport for him.
Still, this pro
ject would be different. It wasn’t the same as strong-arming him into spending three months in the tropical paradise of Thailand, where if Drew got homesick, hated the food, or what have you, change was only a plane ticket away. This would be a years-long commitment. I’d be busy with language classes all day—and I hoped he would join me in trying to learn the languages, too. I’d be taking him to places we’d never talked about living, and I’d need his full support along the way.
• • •
“SO WHY THREE LANGUAGES?” Drew asked.
I sat down on the bed next to him, careful to not wake Cole. I pushed my hair behind my ear.
“Well, if we’re going to do this, let’s just check off the big bucket-list item,” I said.
Drew laughed and lay back down on the bed. “I knew you were going to say that. You can never do anything just a little bit.”
“I know, but this might be our only shot to do something big like this.” I lay down next to him for a second and talked quietly over Cole’s dozing head. “We’ve talked about learning Spanish for years. I’ve always wanted to be someone who spoke a bunch of languages. How do those people get there? They just make the decision to do it. So if we’re going down this path, let’s go all the way. And think about how many doors it will open for Cole. He won’t even have to work to learn these languages, he’ll just grow up speaking them all from living there.”
Drew gave me a look. “Sure, he won’t have to work for them. But we will.”
I got up. The tile floor was cold under my bare feet. The hotel was so quiet it felt like we were the only guests. The sun had set at some point during our conversation, and now I felt a chill in the air. I walked to the balcony and closed the door.
“True,” I said. “But I’m tired of traveling to places and only learning traveler-Spanish or restaurant-Thai. Aren’t you?”
I had to get Drew on board with this, but I couldn’t force it. Otherwise the entire project would be a nonstarter. We were talking about how to raise our son and deciding to embark on a quest to learn these languages and travel to interesting places—yes—but also we’d be raising Cole in a way that would change him. He wouldn’t be a normal American kid. He’d be that kid who spoke four languages. I couldn’t even wrap my brain around what that would be like, to hear my son eventually getting so good at Arabic that I couldn’t keep up with his slang, or listen to him switching between English and Spanish effortlessly. It was a grand experiment, but it was also a little scary. Would I be introducing an emotional distance between us and Cole? Would I feel like an immigrant mother who loses touch with her child as the child assimilates and absorbs the new culture faster than she can? Would it be unnerving or exhilarating?
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