Nonetheless, I didn’t have that head-swimming sensation of not knowing what was up and what was down, like I did when I was in China. In Beijing I would walk down the street squinting at stores, trying to guess what they sold, the nearly identical red block Chinese characters on the front of each one giving no clue. Once I walked into what I thought was a restaurant only to find out it sold car stereos. In Beirut, on the other hand, a chicken joint looked like a chicken joint, not a pharmacy or a shoe store. They’d put a big cartoon chicken on the front of the store, just like they would back home. Even if you didn’t speak a lick of the language, you could still find your way around. Culturally and visually, Beirut just made sense to me in a way that Beijing hadn’t.
In class, I learned the phrase inshallah, which means “God willing” (or more accurately, “Allah willing,” but I soon learned that Allah was just Arabic for “God”). It sums up a certain fatalism that exists in the city. Majed reviewed the syllabus with us and announced our first test would be in two weeks. Inshallah. Nothing was certain.
I soon learned that in Beirut, while there were Muslim and Christian parts of the city, there wasn’t a hard line. Even for the observant, everything seemed more lax than other places in the Middle East. There was a large Muslim population in the city, but you could still order alcohol at many establishments. Many people were Muslim, but women weren’t forced to cover up—it was summer and there were plenty of tank tops and sundresses being worn on the street. You can’t really say that about much of the Middle East, and had I been in nearby Jordan, I would have certainly worn a headscarf. As the historic crossroads between the East and the West, Beirut had developed into a cultural melting pot.
The French occupation had also indelibly left its mark on the culture. Beyond hearing French on the street, there were other artifacts. Beirut was a city full of cafés, with a twist—the Arab influence meant you could smoke a hookah (argileh as it’s called in Arabic) in any of those cafés, or almost anywhere else you went. For lunch and dinner, you’d have the mezze, a collection of dishes from tabbouleh to hummus to stuffed grape leaves. Pita bread was served with everything. Or you could get a fantastic salade niçoise with a glass of white wine. The city was bicultural.
Food I could recognize, people who reacted in ways I expected, taxi drivers who would always take my fare, students from the United States, and so on, made me realize how devastating a complete and utter disconnect from your home culture could be. This tiny foothold into life in Beirut made such a huge difference in our day-to-day experience of the city. When we were in Beijing, I didn’t know what was off—I kept blaming it on the winter weather—but as I practically skipped to class each day in Beirut, the difference was obvious. Living in a bicultural city meant I had a bridge, a path, and a way to connect. I wasn’t constantly trying to figure out what things meant—why did people stare at me in China, why did my tutor quit without even collecting his pay, why did my other tutor giggle when I asked certain questions? In Beirut, everything was different, yes, absolutely, but this I could handle. These were my people.
My enthusiasm impacted my studies as well. Before long, I slowly started passing the other students by, although that may have been thanks to Beirut’s endless nightlife, which left the partiers in our class wandering into class with epic hangovers that no doubt didn’t help their studies. Sometimes there are advantages to being a little older, wiser, and hopelessly over the entire club scene (having a two-year-old settled that once and for all).
• • •
LIVING IN BEIRUT, I started thinking about one myth that persists about bilinguals—that they are all bicultural. But that’s actually rarely the case. If you look at Beijing, my tutors were all bilingual but none were bicultural. They spoke English but had never lived outside China, and they had no understanding of the differences between Chinese and American culture except through TV and film.
In Beirut, my teacher Majed became my unofficial cultural liaison. After class each day, I’d pepper him with questions: What was polite, what was not, what did certain expressions mean, how did local people really feel about certain topics. Because he grew up in bicultural Beirut, he lived in two worlds. He was Arab, but he also spoke French. He was Muslim but also had a deep understanding of Christianity. He spoke English and got to know many of his foreign students from the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe. It wasn’t until I came to Beirut that I understood how rare this was.
Before embarking on this project, I had read everything I could find by François Grosjean, perhaps the most prominent bilingual researcher of the realities of living in multiple languages. Grosjean said that most bilinguals are not, in fact, bicultural, writing that “there is the misconception that all bilinguals are bicultural (they are not) and that they have double personalities (as a bilingual myself, and with a sigh of relief, I can tell you that this is not the case).” He used Europe as an example: So many Europeans speak English, but that doesn’t mean they automatically understand American or British or Australian culture (or any other culture in which English is spoken). By that same token, my native English doesn’t make me bicultural either. I can’t speak to, say, British culture with any kind of authority. A big part of what I was missing in China was that cultural piece. By going it alone, trying to work only with Chinese tutors, by not participating in the existing English-speaking community or learning about Chinese culture, I had completely hamstrung my efforts.
In fact, it was worse than that. Because I didn’t understand Chinese culture, I began to resent it on some level. I was deeply frustrated by what seemed like meaningless difficulties I continued to face, just because I didn’t understand the cultural context. Now, here I was in the Middle East, a challenging place to live by any standard, in a city that is bordered by Syria, which was in a civil war, and had Israel to the south, Lebanon’s sworn enemies, with nightly news reports of violence and kidnappings on the outskirts of town. Yet it all felt so much easier.
While I didn’t need to become bicultural to become bilingual, I did begin to wonder about my family’s cultural identity. Would we be changed by this experience? Would my child have a different cultural identity than me? And what is culture after all, except a set of values that you identify with—most likely because it was how you were raised or the environment you grew up in? Was I inadvertently also raising a bicultural kid? What would that mean?
Two-and-a-half-year-olds have a cunning way of putting these kinds of questions into perspective. When I returned home from class each day, Cole would run out to me with his arms outstretched. We’d have a snack and watch Garfield in French on TV. There was plenty of time to answer these questions later.
Fourteen
Drew loved Beirut. It was the little things, like going to a different shop for each item on our grocery list: picking up bread at the bakery; vegetables and fruit at the stand on the corner; milk and hummus at the corner store, where a young man named Gilbert worked with his father. Drew knew the guys at the phone store where he topped up his cell phone data, the lawyer who was renting us his house, the owner of the family-run kitchen supply shop (the father patted Drew hard on the back after we cleared them out of pots, pans, plates, cups, and silverware when we first arrived). There was a transgender hairdresser around the corner, a sign of the progressive times in Lebanon. Next door, the Armenian Orthodox church played music for four hours every Sunday. The sound of singing floated into our walled garden. And if you walked into town, you’d sometimes hear one man singing from his apartment, practicing for the next week’s mass.
Outside Gilbert’s corner store (a place known as “Smuggler’s”), a small card table was set up. Every day, four old men would shuffle up to sit around this table for a few hours and play cards. Whenever Drew passed by with Cole, who was often dressed up in his latest favorite outfit, a Superman Halloween costume we’d picked up impulsively in Thailand, the men would cluck at Cole and say, “Ayyy Suupppper
man!” in thick accents.
Each day when I returned from class, Drew would report the latest news from the neighborhood.
“I found a place that sells brooms,” he told me one day.
“Really?”
“Yes, they don’t sell anything else, just brooms. They have a son Cole’s age. I am going to go back later and get a broom. The owner doesn’t speak any English, so he just talks at me in French. I’m like, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ and he keeps talking. He asks me questions about Cole, and I try to guess what he’s asking, like, ‘Oh, how old is he?,’ so I say, ‘Two.’ He’ll just nod and keep talking.”
“That’s funny. Did you find the locksmith?”
“Yes! But he wasn’t in his shop. It was open, but there was no one in there. I went back an hour later and it was still empty. If I knew how to cut a key, I could have just done it myself.” Drew grinned in delight.
• • •
WHAT LANGUAGES BEIRUT residents spoke seemed to depend on their age. When we first arrived, we assumed everyone spoke Arabic, French, and English in that order. But we discovered that actually, the older generation mostly speaks Arabic and French and the younger generation mostly speaks French and English. Our neighborhood in particular was heavy on French and light on Arabic, probably because we were on the Christian side of the city. Still, many people in the city spoke all three, and it was not uncommon for us to walk into an office and hear the receptionist answer the phone in one language, switch to another for the conversation, and then hang up and address us in a third. It made us wonder if someday we’d be like them, jumping between languages with total ease, having an intuition about which language to use by looking at someone, and never getting mixed up between the three.
Researcher Arturo E. Hernandez shared his experience of learning multiple languages in his book The Bilingual Brain. At age twenty, as a native Spanish speaker with English as a second language, he went to Brazil to study in Portuguese (his third language). He became so fluent in the language that after two years, people mistook him for a native, but his Spanish and English suffered. He struggled when he returned to read English textbooks, and his grandmother thought his native Spanish sounded “strange.”
In the late twentieth century, people began thinking of the brain like a computer, and languages like individual software programs you can load up. It was clear from Hernandez’s experience that language didn’t exist in separate silos in the brain, but that there was overlap and individual languages could influence one another.
One interesting field of research is that of how language is processed in bilinguals who have a traumatic brain injury. In his book, Hernandez shares an interesting case he found in the journal Brain and Language. In this case, the patient, A.S., spoke Farsi as his mother tongue, and also spoke German and English. At age forty-nine, he was injured in an explosion that damaged his brain. As he recovered, he could only speak a few words of Farsi, his native language, but could speak fluidly in German, one of his acquired languages. After about three weeks, he was able to switch back to Farsi again, but he wasn’t able to use his English, his third language, until he had fully recovered his Farsi and German. The languages were stored in different parts of the brain, but it wasn’t pure silos; there must have been a bridge between his native language and English but not one between his native language and German. Perhaps it was because he spoke German longer that it had become a fully formed language in his brain, but his English was still being translated from his native Farsi. It wasn’t just the languages you spoke but the order you learned them, the depth of mastery and a million other factors that informed how your brain organized itself. No doubt it would look different for everyone.
In his 1881 book Les maladies de la mémoire, the father of French psychology, Théodule-Armand Ribot, wrote of a forester living on the border of Poland who grew up speaking Polish and later in life moved to a German-speaking area. While in this town, he didn’t hear or speak Polish for more than thirty years. During an operation, he was given anesthesia and spent the next two hours unconscious but speaking in Polish. His conscious mind was put to sleep, but his childhood memories of Polish came bubbling to the surface.
Over the last century there have been theories about how language is stored. Some people think that everyone has one dominant primary language that is stored first in certain parts of the brain. If you later learn second or third languages, depending on how old you are when you learn them and how often you use them, it can alter how your brain uses and retrieves all languages. But, as with studies on the musical brain, the recent development of fMRI has revolutionized the world of bilingualism research and called this theory into question.
Using fMRI, now we can actually see what happens in the brain, instead of trying to intuit what is going on by observing bilinguals or learning languages ourselves. In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers put bilingual subjects into fMRI scanners and asked them to think about something that had happened during their day, in either their first or second language. They found that for early bilinguals, those who learned two languages simultaneously when young, the areas of the brain that activated as they thought about their day greatly overlapped. In other words, the brain scans looked pretty similar no matter which language the subject was thinking in. However, in late bilinguals, those who learned their second language in adulthood, the scan showed comparable but separate areas of brain activity. The age of acquisition had more of an impact on the brain scan than the number of languages they spoke. So when I thought about multilinguals “switching” between languages, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The dominant theory of language acquisition for the last hundred-plus years—that everyone has one dominant language and that other languages are stored separately—is true only if you learn your second language late in life, but even then, the complexity of the human brain allows for languages to live together, to influence each other, and to act independently. We have shifted from the brain-as-a-computer hypothesis and languages as individual pieces of software to a more nuanced view. There’s not a single model; it’s all interconnected, and for the multilingual individual, it doesn’t feel like “switching” at all—it’s all part of the same fabric.
When I spoke to Vivian Cook, the U.K. professor who studies second-language acquisition, this was one of his biggest points. As technology has improved we’ve gone from thinking of language ability as a few separate silos, stored and accessed individually in the brain, to an overlapping and organic instrument that is shaped by the number of languages, the frequency of use, the age at which each language was acquired, and other factors. Your bilingual brain might not look like my bilingual brain, but we could both speak the same languages.
One of the allures of learning a language, and perhaps the biggest myth about bilingualism, was that having more than one language somehow makes you smarter, that it’s a special skill, the exception and not the norm. Linguists like Vivian Cook now argue the opposite: that bilingualism is not some superhuman feat but, instead, an ordinary part of human existence. The human brain is more than capable of handling more than one language, and it’s only the exception, the scarcity of multiple languages in the environment during our formative years, that leads to monolingualism. Other researchers support this. Patricia Kuhl studied Catalan and Spanish bilingual infants and found that they could detect subtle differences between the two languages as early as age four months, even though they are both Romance languages and have shared word sounds and vocabulary and a similar cadence (linguists call this prosody). Being bilingual isn’t a special skill; it’s the way we are wired to develop.
So what is the bilingual advantage? Research shows two interesting things. For young bilinguals, there is an increased ability in the area of executive control. In a 2004 study, researcher M. Rosario Rueda tested bilingual children using a task-switching game that tested their ability to select correct answ
ers based on mapped criteria while using executive control to dampen down “noise” or distractions (they played a game the researchers called “the hungry fish game,” during which the kids were asked to feed the hungry fish by pointing to its mouth). They found that the bilingual kids performed better and more accurately at around two and a half years old than their monolingual peers. The difference between the bilingual group and the monolingual group became smaller at three and four years old. So while there was a “bilingual advantage,” it was short lived.
For bilingual adults, there’s no increase in IQ or other cognitive ability when measured against single-language adults. If you think of the brain as a muscle that only has to work in order to do something difficult, this makes sense. The children were better able to switch between tasks because being bilingual requires them to do this more than their monolingual counterparts. But when adult bilinguals were tested cognitively against other adults, measuring their ability to complete a puzzle, for example, there was no significant advantage. The brain was able to handle the two languages efficiently, so it didn’t need to compensate by boosting brain power.
However, the difference in cognitive ability shows up again later in life. As gray matter begins to recede, bilingual seniors retain more of their cognitive abilities, such as memory and problem solving, for longer than their monolingual peers. More specifically: If you’re like the rest of us, after your twenties you’ll slowly start losing brain mass. That loss accelerates when you get into your fifties. By the time you hit your seventies, you will have lost 5 to 6 percent of your total brain mass compared to what you had at age thirty. By age eighty, you can lose as much as 25 percent. But the situation may be different for bilinguals. Bialystok’s research showed that even in bilinguals with significant impairment from dementia, the rest of their brain seemed to compensate for the loss, allowing them to stave off the effects of dementia for much longer than their monolingual peers (four to five years before symptoms begin to show), even when their fMRI scans showed similar loss. This fact is what started me on this entire project. After my grandfather’s struggle with dementia, I wanted to do anything I could to decrease the effects of the disease, if I was unlucky enough to get it, and set up Cole to have the best chance possible as well.
Mother Tongue Page 12