• • •
THERE WAS ONE PASSAGE in which Ansary described Islam in a way that I found really moving: “Yes, Islam prescribes a way to be good, and yes, every devoted Muslim hopes to get into heaven by following that way, but instead of focusing on isolated individual salvation, Islam presents a plan for building a righteous community. Individuals earn their place in heaven by participating as members of that community and engaging in the Islamic social project, which is to build a world in which orphans won’t feel abandoned and in which widows won’t ever be homeless, hungry, or afraid.”
I wasn’t raised with any particular religion except my mother’s strong belief in crystals, astral projection, and the potential for meditation to help her win the lotto—and once you grow up without a religion I think it’s difficult to add one later in life. However, I can still be moved by religious expression. I found that there was something beautiful about the call to prayer, the melody itself, and the mindfulness of the ritual involved.
I didn’t think that learning Arabic would change how I felt about Islam, but I found myself having conversations about religion with Majed frequently after class. He’d explain a Muslim principle to me while chain-smoking cigarettes on the classroom balcony, and then he’d ask me how it was possible that the Holy Trinity was three people in one.
“No, seriously, how does God, who is the same as his son, send himself, as his son, to earth to die? I mean, how does that work?”
It was funny because as much as the Middle East represented the others to us, we were the others to them.
Sixteen
Gone were the little Mandarin words Cole had picked up. Niúni was no longer milk; it was just a distant memory. He moved on from watching Xi Yang Yang, although from time to time we did play it for him—the sound of Mandarin in the house was oddly comforting. Something else had happened. I noticed it when we were talking with the two women who ran the shop where I got my paper supplies. That day, a little boy about Cole’s age was playing behind the counter. I wanted to use my Arabic a little, so I tried to start a conversation. Toddlers are fantastic language partners because they almost never stump you with new vocabulary.
“Marhaba,” I said, leaning over. He looked up at me. “Shou issmak?” What’s your name?
“Henry,” he said, with the French pronunciation “Ahn-ree.”
“Cole, can you say hello?” I said to my son. He remained mute and wide-eyed.
In China, he was joyfully shouting “Míng tiān jiàn!” (See you tomorrow!) to our nanny, in addition to saying his regular English expressions. I wasn’t sure when things changed, but when we returned to the house, I started noticing that he wasn’t asking for things by name in any language anymore. He had regressed into grunting and pointing. It wasn’t “juz!” for juice, it was “ehh!” with pointing. He stopped saying compound sentences like “op dis” (open this) or “go ou-side” (go outside), and when I played Xi Yang Yang as a test, he was silent as I sang the intro song to him.
I had read about some language confusion in the many books on bilingualism I had devoured before starting this experiment. The authors were careful to underline that confusion is likely, especially when you move around a lot, but it was always temporary (unless your child had a language impairment). I was confident that our rapid transition was the cause—after all, we did just move from China to Lebanon, switching from English to Mandarin to Arabic in less than a year. According to the experts, a language freeze like this represents a desire to not say the wrong thing. Cole was still learning, still processing and still building language skills, but was choosing not to express anything verbally because he wasn’t sure yet which version was the right one. Sometimes this freeze was referred to as a “silent period.”
The research has shown that for bilingual children the milestones are all the same. Babbling starts at the same age as the first word—at about eleven months. However, vocabulary in toddlerhood might not be equal in both languages. Linguists Virginia Volterra and Traute Taeschner studied two Italian-German bilinguals and found that one girl had a vocabulary of eighty-seven words with just three words that matched in both languages (water, yes, and there). The other girl had six words with equivalents in both tongues and a total vocabulary of eighty-three words. If the child is hearing more than one language on a daily basis, then the opportunity cost is that the child is hearing less of each individual language than a monolingual would of their one language (for example, a 65 percent German/35 percent Italian-exposed child will hear 35 percent less German spoken in a day than a 100 percent German child will hear). So while their overall vocabulary across all languages would match that of a monolingual (or exceed it), it might be less than a monolingual in each individual language. In our case, Cole might have received 35 percent of his input in Mandarin for a few months. Certainly it was enough time for him to learn some words and to recognize Mandarin sounds, but since we left Beijing, his exposure had dropped to zero.
Did that Mandarin exposure help my son? Maybe. There are a number of studies on the residual languages of children who are adopted. It’s a perfect test environment because it happens so often and it’s a very clean break. One study examined Korean children who were adopted between ages one and three years and moved to the United States to join non-Korean-speaking families. Years later, the children were tested on their ability to “hear” sounds that were difficult for English speakers to distinguish but occurred naturally in Korean. The adopted children were able to hear the sounds, and the researchers suggested that they’d also be able to learn the language with a native accent if they later chose to pursue Korean. The hypothesis was that one never really loses a language, it just lies dormant, ready to be reactivated. So even if he didn’t remember any of the Chinese he’d learned at age two, if Cole later chose to study Mandarin, he might have a leg up.
Because Cole was exposed to Mandarin after almost two years of English, he wasn’t bilingual from birth; he would be a successive bilingual (or language learner). In François Grosjean’s book Bilingual: Life and Reality, he tells the story of two brothers who were acquiring French. The ten-year-old was very outgoing, and the five-year-old was reserved and quiet. As you might expect, the outgoing child tried French and made errors but kept charging forward. The younger boy hardly said a word until three months later, when he started using the language with fewer errors than his older brother, even though his brother had been speaking the language the whole time.
So while I was studying and practicing my Arabic, Cole was silently taking it all in. There was no way to know exactly how much impact any of this would have, but it couldn’t hurt.
• • •
AS FAR AS LEARNING LANGUAGES, while children absorb it naturally through exposure, as an adult, I do have a slight advantage—for the moment—over my son because I can learn and produce language much faster than he can. Part of that advantage comes from having a fully formed brain stocked with language centers that know how to produce at least one language: English. Cole, on the other hand, was still learning English, and now we were training him in Arabic and Mandarin—at this point building his understanding of how languages work across several tongues. This meant he was building his brain, too.
Whether I reached proficiency in these languages or not, I’d never reach native-like fluency—my brain had already formed. If an fMRI scan were done of me speaking Mandarin or Arabic compared to speaking my native English, it would show activity in different areas, not the same areas that it would show if I were natively bilingual. And I’d probably never have that “ear” for the language. I can hear something in English and know if it’s right or not, sometimes without knowing why—but I’d never get to that point with Arabic or Mandarin. I would also most likely always have an accent. On the other hand, if Cole learned his second languages to fluency before he was seven, he wouldn’t have an accent, he would have native understanding of what “sounds” right or
not in the language, and his brain would look just like a from-birth bilingual.
By the way, this brain development is so important that if you don’t learn any language by the time you’re about thirteen years old, it’s probably impossible for you to ever fully use any language correctly. Of course, who doesn’t speak before they are thirteen? It’s rare and usually occurs only in cases of severe neglect, so it’s challenging to draw a hard line between the effects of abuse versus the lack of language input. However, in the 1970s, a young woman named Genie was found locked up in her parents’ Los Angeles home, naked, strapped to a training toilet for most of the day, forbidden to speak and kept in severe isolation her entire life. She was thirteen.
Researchers followed her language development for a few years and found that she was able to learn, gaining about one year in mental age for each year that she was in treatment. Eventually, though, they concluded that her grammar and syntax were severely delayed because she had missed language input in her formative years. Her brain could not catch up. It had matured without a language and it was impossible to add one back in.
In another case, a six-and-a-half-year-old child named Isabelle was found having spent her life locked up in a darkened room with her deaf-mute mother. After they escaped, she was first tested at a mental age of nineteen months with no language skills at all. Within eighteen months she had rebounded, increasing her vocabulary to 1,500 words and speaking in more complex sentences than Genie had achieved. This led Stephen Pinker, a Harvard researcher, to propose that the difference between the two children was the age at which they first acquired language at all. Those early years of brain development are beyond critical.
However, if you’ve missed your childhood window for second-language learning, how do you overcome the challenges of learning it later in life? There was a study in 1989 of Koreans who moved to the United States between ages three and thirty-nine. In the long-term, they found that the three- to seven-year-old group grew up to be identical to native speakers. For the grown-ups, those who had moved to the United States after age eighteen, the results were mixed. Their age didn’t matter, but other factors did: getting an advanced degree, where they worked, how hard they attempted to learn the language.
For kids, it’s about biology; for adults, it’s about desire and determination.
• • •
CURIOUSLY, AS COLE ENTERED this silent phase, his physical activity skyrocketed. He climbed everything, from the wrought-iron bars in our windows, to the entertainment center, to the top of the furniture. He became fearless about jumping off things, too, scaring Drew and me half to death as he would scamper up on our bed, climb the bars on the window, and then jump from ceiling height to the bed, laughing the entire time. We quickly learned to keep the French-style window closed at all times, so he couldn’t get to the bars and perform his high-flying act. At the same time, Cole started taking off his diaper, insistent that he didn’t need it, until we suspected that he might be ready to potty train. We bought a training toilet (with characters from Cars the movie and a stick-shift “flusher” that made the sound of an engine revving when you pressed it down). Drew showed him how to use it, and from that moment on he stopped wearing diapers and used his little toilet. I couldn’t know, but I wondered if his development had put speech on hold for a moment while he focused on other skills.
Still, I couldn’t help but be a little nervous for my temporarily nonverbal son. I wrote down a list of his current words and promised myself that if he hadn’t improved in the next few months, I’d take him to the best speech therapist I could find in the States. Eventually my plan was to speak these languages with him, but for now, I would be happy when he started asking for “juz” again.
Seventeen
There was a civil war going on in Syria, an hour away from us by car. It wasn’t a lack of concern that kept us from thinking about this as we walked across Beirut for lunch one Saturday morning. It wasn’t that we didn’t care or were the type of people who ignored world events. It was just that it didn’t seem possible, as we sat in a restaurant overlooking the sea. The taste of salt in the air and a sweeping view of the Mediterranean and the coastline in the background conspired to keep our attention right here, right now. Syria was closer than Boston is to New York City, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world.
A group of Arab women sat at a table, all in black, having lunch together and talking in muted tones. The waiter brought our menus, the wind mussing up his hair. We ordered a spread of food and lounged on the cushions, enjoying the warmth of the sun. After lunch, I left Cole and Drew to use the bathroom. Inside, a flat-screen TV was playing the news. When I saw that there was a shooting, I stopped to watch for a moment, absorbing the footage of protesters and police barricades on loop.
I caught my breath. It was in Arabic, so I only caught every third word or so, but the video made it clear enough. The shooting had happened that morning in the area we had just crossed to get to the ocean. Apparently a Lebanese Shia clerk had been kidnapped in Syria (probably by the Free Syrian Army), and people had gathered in Beirut to protest, until a lone gunman started shooting AK-47s into nearby buildings. When we were there, we hadn’t noticed anything at all awry and had heard no gunfire. It seemed Beirut had a way of absorbing these kinds of things.
I often walked past protests, sometimes violent, in Beirut, while just one block away people enjoyed lunches and cocktails al fresco. It had been happening all summer and usually had to do with the Syrian war. The stated goal of the Free Syrian Army was to stop anyone who killed civilians, but there were reports of other activities, too: kidnappings and executing soldiers. In May, the Free Syrian Army had kidnapped eleven Lebanese pilgrims, mostly Sunni Syrians who had defected from the Syrian military. In Beirut, the response to these activities in Syria was swift, and Syrians were targeted for harassment. One family, the Meqdad clan, had gone on a kidnapping spree in southern Beirut, taking twenty Syrians who they claimed were members of the Free Syrian Army. Hezbollah, who had been covertly supplying military support to the Syrian government, threw up their hands.
It was an incredibly complex situation, and if you started to untangle it, it became even murkier. Syria’s government was Shia, governing a largely Sunni population (87 percent). A civil war broke out and Syria’s neighbor, Lebanon, governed by Hezbollah, also Shia, couldn’t come out and openly support the Syrian government because Lebanon was 54 percent Muslim and 40 percent Christian. Of the Lebanese Muslims, half were Sunni and half were Shia. So Hezbollah, despite being Shia, couldn’t take sides without risking unrest. So instead they allegedly sent three thousand fighters to assist the Syrian government (which they denied, of course). On top of this, you had the problem of Beiruti militaristic family clans, like the Meqdad clan, which boasted ten thousand members. The clans often took justice into their own hands. Hezbollah looked the other way. So effectively you had a paramilitary group working within the boundaries of Lebanon, outside the law. What did this mean for us on a daily basis? There were protests all the time, and we tried to walk by them as quickly as possible.
• • •
I FELT NUMB TO THE NEWS of the shooting. I even started to try to rationalize it in my head, to do the mental calculus that justified walking around a place where people are getting kidnapped. The list went like this: We live in Ashrafieh, not the dangerous parts of town; we’re tourists, we’re not Syrians; we never go to southern Beirut; as long as we stay away from protests we will be fine. Inshallah.
• • •
WHEN WE ASKED LOCALS about the protests and the violence, the general sentiment was “Welcome to Beirut.” Was this what Beirut did to you? The shoulder shrug, the going about your day anyway, pushing a stroller through the mortar-blasted neighborhoods while blocks away they are burning tires and waving flags?
Perhaps I really was becoming more Beiruti, because the problem that I constantly thought about i
n Beirut was not the violence—it was the infrastructure. Basic repairs were throttled by bureaucratic infighting. The power grid couldn’t handle the summertime power surges, so the city, unable to break the bureaucratic choke hold so they could repair and upgrade the system, had decided instead to impose three-hour rolling blackouts on a daily basis. On top of that, the Internet was slow, even by developing-nation standards, and while Drew was trying to upload a large video file for his work he ran through $100 worth of data charges to upload 5 GB worth of data. The water was always running out—we were constantly refilling our water cistern or forgetting to do so. And while it was a blessing that our stove was propane, the method of getting a replacement tank was to call “the guy” who called “the other guy” who showed up on his motorcycle with a tank strapped to it, to swap it out for you.
The electricity went out, the water was restricted, the Internet was slow and expensive, everything ran by propane, and it was still hugely expensive to live here. I had lived in countries with similar infrastructure problems but never paid so much for it. We were easily spending as much in Beirut as we would in Boston, but with less infrastructure than even rural Mexico.
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