Mother Tongue

by Christine Gilbert

  “Right,” Drew said.

  “I just really underestimated how big an adjustment it would be, both in terms of language and in actual culture, and I took it all on. It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, hey, let’s take some Mandarin lessons.’ I literally tried to Marco Polo my way into China without any guides, just land and figure it out from scratch.” I laughed a little.

  “Yeah, and Marco Polo didn’t even learn the language.”

  “Right, Marco Polo didn’t learn the freaking language. Details like that seem sort of hilarious in hindsight.”

  There was a long pause, and I rested my head on him. Life was so relaxed here. I could just sit in Thailand forever, moving between the hammock and the market, the ruins and wats, the serene hidden gardens and tucked-away spirit houses.

  “So should we go back?” Drew asked, breaking the silence first. I took stock of my feelings for a second, waiting for my gut to tell me.

  “No. I need more time. We could go back somewhere in the south of the country sometime, or maybe go to Taiwan. But later; I can’t return yet. It’s too fresh.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Drew exhaled, and we both laughed. I stood up and pulled him up with me. It was going to get dark soon. One of us had to go pick up some food before Cole woke up demanding dragon fruit.

  “What about you? Are you done with me yet?”

  “Never.” He kissed me on the forehead. “Home is wherever you are.” I squeezed his hand, and he grabbed his motorbike helmet and headed out the door.

  • • •

  HOME IS WHEREVER YOU ARE. That phrase stuck with me as I thought about what would come next. I had put myself under so much pressure in China, isolating our family from any hint of expat culture, soldiering through cultural clashes without any community to fall back on, drilling vocabulary for hours and hours. What did I have to prove? And the situation with the nanny could have been handled so many other ways other than, you know, fleeing the country. I alternated between mortified and humbled and had frequent pangs of regret, both about starting the project and about giving up on Chinese. The part that haunted me most about our time in China was that Drew deserved better, too. This crazy bastard was on board with whatever I wanted to do, even after Beijing, even after I failed, even after I crumbled and called it quits. I owed him something great.

  The next day was the Sunday Walking Market, the best part of the week in Chiang Mai, if you liked food. Cole marveled at the twinkling lights strung around the wat and the live music played on the street, while Drew and I strode from stall to stall buying anything from five-baht sushi to samosas to chicken satay served with little plastic pouches of peanut sauce. We settled at our table, under the enormous knotted and twisted tree that acted as a makeshift umbrella over the wat’s central garden.

  “What about Beirut?” I asked Drew, as he cut up Cole’s pork shoulder, rice, and pickled vegetables.

  “Okay,” he said, pouring the broth that came with Cole’s meal over his meat.

  “It’ll be summer. Warm, beautiful. It’s on the Mediterranean. We can go to the beach. Rent a house. I’ll take Arabic lessons; you guys will just play.”

  “I have never really considered Beirut,” Drew said, pushing Cole’s plate toward him. Cole grabbed a handful of rice and shoved it eagerly into his mouth. “I mean, isn’t it dangerous?”

  “Well, the civil war ended years ago. There have been some issues, but as far as the Middle East goes, it’s probably one of the safest places to travel.” I swallowed my bite of chicken. “Plus it had the French rule for so long, it has that beautiful French look. They call it the ‘Paris of the Middle East.’ Plus it’s on the water.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It will be totally different this time. Everything. No nanny. No seclusion. No avoiding the expat scene. It’s warm weather, right on the sea, it’ll be great. I’m thinking French cafés and speaking Arabic. Lebanese food and beaches. You’ll love it.” And I meant every word—I wouldn’t isolate our family again like I had in Beijing.

  Drew looked at me. “I’m not learning Arabic, though; you know that, right?” he said, opening up his curry and shoving a big bite into his mouth. He gave an appreciative groan. “So good. How is yours?”

  “Spicy! My face is on fire. But it’s good.”

  We ate in silence for a while, huffing and puffing through bites toward the end, as if breathing over the food in our mouth would somehow cool the intense heat of the Thai chiles. I ate around the red and green sliced chiles; each one represented a world of pain, but the entire dish was still infused with a deep, sinus-clearing heat. It hurt, but it was oh-so-good.

  Finally Drew put down his fork and looked at me. “So Beirut, then.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re ready? You’re not going to try to Marco Polo your way in there and make yourself crazy, are you?”

  “I am going to work on that. This will be better.” I paused for a moment, then added reasonably, “Even if I do go insane again and think I am some kind of superwoman who can do everything at once, we’ll still be living on the ocean. It’s still warm. It’s still a hell of a lot easier than China,” I said just as the loudspeaker crackled to life. It was the Thai national anthem, which is played everywhere in Thailand at eight a.m. and six p.m. We stood respectfully, along with everyone else, and stopped Cole from fidgeting. After it was done, we sat back down.

  “Let’s go,” Drew said.

  “Back to the house?”

  “Yes, and to Beirut. Let’s do this.”

  “Okay!” I leaned over and kissed him. “I’m so happy. You will love this. I promise.”

  PART 2

  LEBANON

  Eleven

  The Mount Lebanon mountain range runs parallel with the sea, encircling Beirut in a natural barrier from the rest of the Mediterranean basin; its neighbors Syria, Jordan, and Israel; the Arabian Peninsula; and farther afield, Iraq and Iran. The snowcapped mountains found their way into the Old Testament with the name Lebanon mentioned seventy-one times, but the country, the lines we see on the map today, didn’t exist until after World War II, when it was carved away from greater Syria with the stroke of a pen as the League of Nations drew new maps for the region.

  They didn’t choose the country lines at random. The French had occupied Lebanon since 1923 and when the League of Nations ended the French mandate in 1943, they drew the country lines to create the only Christian-majority country in the Middle East. Historically, there has always been a large population of Maronite Christians in the Mount Lebanon range, so they simply chopped Syria into two countries, the fully Muslim Syria and the largely Christian Lebanon. Voilà! (As the French would say.) A nation was born.

  It was a fateful decision. The Muslim population continued to grow, quickly outpacing the Christians. Soon the majority-Muslim country was ruled by a minority, the Maronite Christians, with the inequity built into their constitution. It tore the country apart. After the establishment of Israel, thousands of Palestinian refugees flooded into the country, skewing the scales even further. In 1975, the tension reached a tipping point and the Lebanese civil war began, pitting Muslims against Christians and turning Lebanon into an unmitigated war zone for over fifteen years. More than 120,000 men, women, and children were killed, and more than one million Lebanese fled the country. There are now more Lebanese living outside Lebanon than within it. And these numbers can barely give a hint of the toll the war took on the country. An entire generation grew up with daily mortar blasts, sniping, and rockets fired into residential areas.

  However, since 2005, Syria, which stepped in after the civil war, has stopped being an occupying force. It has been largely peaceful, with a few notable exceptions: conflicts with Israel in 1996, during the Grapes of Wrath War, as Israel named it, when Israel fired over 1,100 rockets into Lebanon, and again in 2006, when further rockets were launched into Beirut. Granted, a few y
ears was not a long respite from such a tortured history, but around the time I was looking to learn Arabic, Beirut in particular was coming back. Oil-rich gulf tourists were already frequenting its posh resorts. The entire downtown area had been rebuilt and stuffed full of luxury-brand retailers. The New York Times named Beirut the number one place to visit on its 44 Places to Go in 2009.

  And to put it bluntly, the other options weren’t great either. We had been in Cairo earlier in the year, but now there were second waves of protests breaking out there. The effects of the Arab Spring were still being felt. We couldn’t return, at least not yet, not with so much uncertainty. Syria was in the middle of its own civil war. But in Beirut, unlike much of the Middle East, the war-weary Lebanese had forgone the Arab Spring. It seemed unlikely, but between Beirut’s location on the Mediterranean, its reputation for hospitality and great food, and its lack of current major conflicts, the city had shaped up to be the best place to learn Arabic.

  Beyond that, the major draw was the bonus languages. Lebanon is caught between three worlds: the long-lasting effects of French occupation, its Arabic roots, and the influence of international English-speaking tourists. Happenstance and history had created a city that was effectively trilingual. It brought out the anthropologist in me, curious to see what life with three languages would look like. How do they manage that with their children, with their friends, and in their marriages? I wondered. In a way, Beirut was a blueprint for how Drew and I could expect life with multiple tongues to unfold.

  Still, Arabic was the official language. Beirut would be a great place to learn to speak the language of 295 million native speakers, the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic has its own alphabet, with twenty-eight letters and a curvy script with dots and accent markers that looks like pure calligraphy. It is also the language of the Qur’an, in the form of classical Arabic, which has stayed consistent over the 1,400 years since Muhammad walked the earth. That’s a critical fact because in Islam, the faithful read the Qur’an in the original language, which is something that’s not possible with the Old or New Testament for the majority of Christians (unless they can read classical Hebrew, ancient Greek, or Aramaic).

  However, “Arabic” is really an umbrella term for many splintered dialects, which makes learning the language challenging, because speaking one dialect did not guarantee that you could speak Arabic with just anyone. Someone in Dubai might not be able to understand me at all. In Lebanon I’d be studying Levantine Arabic, which has about 21 million native speakers—roughly equivalent to the number of Dutch or Kurdish speakers. But, I reasoned, even if you learn the more popular Egyptian Arabic, that’s still got only 55 million native speakers (comparable with Thai or Italian speakers).

  So, learning Levantine Arabic wouldn’t be exactly the passport to the Middle East I had once assumed. At best it was perfect for a small region and ranged from merely helpful to outright useless in the rest, which was saying something, since the Middle East spans three times the length of the United States and there are dozens of Arabic variations. Yet I still wanted to learn.

  I had zero experience with Arabic. I didn’t even know the word for “hello”—I’d later learn that it’s marhaba. I spoke to my friend Dan, who is French-Armenian and grew up in Abu Dhabi. Dan had a thick dark beard and long hair pulled back in a ponytail. He was a photographer, which you’d know instantly because he always had his dSLR around his neck. He speaks English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and a smattering of Thai. His family had a home in Lebanon, up in the mountains overlooking the city. We ran into each other in Chiang Mai and he further confounded my Arabic concerns.

  “Well, there’s the spoken language, but there’s also a totally different written language,” he explained over kao soi, a Burmese-influenced curry dish with crispy noodles. We were at the Free Bird Café, our local spot for Friday lunches.

  “Really?” I asked, trying to wrap my brain around that.

  “The written language is Modern Standard Arabic. Occasionally it’s spoken aloud, but usually only when politicians are giving a very formal speech or something like that. And then there’s the street Arabic, the local dialect of wherever you are.”

  “So what would happen if you learned only Modern Standard Arabic; could anyone understand you?” I asked between bites. We were sitting on cushions on the floor. The table was only a foot off the ground. The space converted into a community center for Burmese refugees, and some of our friends taught free English classes there at night.

  “It’s possible.” He pushed an errant strand of hair behind his ear and looked thoughtful. “It depends on how much education they have—the more educated, the more likely they’ll know Modern Standard Arabic. But generally, no one speaks it. They’d probably just laugh if you tried it with them. Everyone learns the dialect at home. You don’t learn MSA until school. But in Beirut a lot of schools are French. So in some parts, they speak French first, before they learn MSA. Like Ashrafieh. You should live there. It’s really nice.”

  “Ashrafieh? Cool. I’ll look into it.” I leaned back. “So what should I learn first? MSA or street Arabic?”

  “Oh, Lebanese. Learn Lebanese street Arabic first, then MSA. It’ll be better.”

  • • •

  BEFORE LEAVING THAILAND I tried to find Lebanese/Levantine Arabic study materials but came up short. There were plenty of materials there to learn MSA but not the Levantine dialect. I turned to the Internet and looked at the Rosetta Stone page for Arabic. Bad idea—they didn’t even mention that the course would teach MSA (and therefore be useless in daily life) before sending you off to the shopping cart. In fact, they wrote about their Level 1 course, “Ideal for beginners, you gain the confidence to master basic conversational skills, including greetings and introductions, basic questions and answers, shopping, and more.” Why would anyone want to start with basic conversational skills, greetings, and introductions for a version of the language that is only written and rarely if ever spoken?

  As a native English speaker, I found it strange that the written and spoken languages were essentially two separate beasts. I read that this split between written and spoken language is known as diglossia. Researchers at the University of Haifa found in 2009 that MSA was stored in the brain as a second language. If you take into account the local dialect and MSA, native Arabic speakers were actually diglossic. By default, Arabic created one-language bilinguals, at least neurologically, with the language centers organized more like a bilingual’s than a monolingual’s.

  So how does one go about learning a language that is actually two languages in one? Here again I took a page from Krashen. The acquisition-learning distinction, the idea of thinking about absorbing the language from the environment (acquisition) versus learning it in a classroom, is the underpinning of the entire foreign-language-by-immersion movement, and it’s the principle by which I organized our lives in Beijing: I lived in an environment where the language was used constantly, I created situations where I was forced to use the language, and magically (or so it seemed), I planned to become fluent. Except it didn’t quite work, did it? Beyond being overwhelmed, what I found was that I couldn’t use the language well enough to be understood on the fly in Mandarin. Sure, I got really proficient at saying “Ni hao” and “Xie xie” (hello and thank you), but it was only near the end that I could make myself understood well enough to communicate with a taxi driver—and then only in a very limited manner (“No not that building, that one,” aided with lots of gesturing). By the end I was dubious about my brain’s subconscious ability to absorb a language. However, I could never get over the “comprehensible input” hump to truly test his theory; listening to Mandarin I didn’t understand, even within context, even with physical cues, wasn’t enough to bridge the gap of understanding.

  Yet I knew this method worked, at least for some languages. I had experienced firsthand the miracle of immersion while living in Guatemala, when a sing
le month of Spanish deep diving produced better results than years of intermittent studying. I was the most fluent I had ever been in the language. But for a tonal language? Or a language that’s drastically more difficult for an English speaker to learn? It didn’t seem possible to me now, at least from my efforts in China, to pick up Mandarin or any tough language without months and months of formal grammar and vocabulary study, well in advance of stepping into the country. Krashen had always stated that learning is less important than acquisition, but I seriously doubt he ever tried to learn Mandarin.

  So for Arabic, I decided to modify my approach. Arabic is not a tonal language and it has a different alphabet, something I’d have to learn, but the alphabet is certainly a heck of a lot easier than picking up the Chinese character system with its word-specific symbols. If I could combine what I knew worked—the immersion and acquisition that Krashen wrote about and that I experienced in Guatemala—with the academic and learning aspect that I was sorely missing in Beijing, maybe this would work out.

  That meant taking my friend Dan’s advice and learning the spoken language first. I’d take an academic approach to get me past that “comprehensible input” phase as quickly as possible so that acquisition and absorption of the language can occur, by enrolling in a school and taking formal classes. Once I learned the rudimentary vocabulary well enough to follow a conversation and deduce new vocabulary through context, I’d slip into the immersion mode that Krashen wrote about, and I’d be able to speak the language in my daily life. Then from there I could start studying Modern Standard Arabic, which would let me read the newspaper and communicate in writing.

  First things first: I was going back to school.