Mother Tongue

by Christine Gilbert

It had been a year and a half since we’d left Beijing, but for a long time I’d continued to spend a few hours each week dutifully plugging away at the textbooks Drew so thoughtfully rescued from the trash when we fled the country. I decided to take an online quiz to test my Mandarin skills and gauge how well my solo study, far from China, was working for Mandarin. The quiz was a placement test for an online course. If you had asked me cold to say something in Mandarin, the best I could have mustered was “Wo shi Christine” (I am Christine) and “Ni hao” (Hello). In context, though, I could make out simple spoken phrases, remembering as I went, the pronunciation and tones still buried deep in my brain. With the hanzi, the written characters, I was less successful. I had a vague memory of most of the ones on the test (like the character for “woman,” , which I had remembered because it reminded me of a person doing a curtsy), but I couldn’t recall the meaning for most. I tested as a midlevel beginner.

  I couldn’t find a test to take for the Lebanese Arabic dialect I’d studied, but I knew I couldn’t read the script anymore. If I sat for a long time with a word, going letter by letter, counting the dots from right to left and concentrating, I could slowly jog my memory enough to untangle it, but my fluency was gone. There had been a time when I could sight-read in Arabic, when I could write in the script as quickly as in English. But a transcontinental move, a pregnancy, a birth, a new baby, and life had all gotten in the way, and with it, my Arabic skill had deteriorated rapidly. There wasn’t a way to measure it, but it felt like I had lost Mandarin and Arabic more quickly and more completely than I’d learned them. It took a long time to push that boulder up the hill and when I let go, it rolled back down at a rapid clip.

  I thought about the polyglots I’d researched who spoke twenty-some languages but didn’t speak them all the time. Maybe I hadn’t gone deep enough with each language to prevent language loss, but it seemed, for me anyway, that I wasn’t the kind of person who could study Arabic for four months, move on to something else, and retain anything of use. Maybe if I had spent two to five years on each language, that would work. Or if I had attended college-level classes in each language. If I had achieved professional-level fluency. If I had worked or taught or lived in the language long enough. But I didn’t do any of those things.

  I spent two years learning three languages, two of which were the hardest for English speakers to learn. What I found was that while you could cram enough to pass a quiz, the thing that really mattered for language retention long-term was time. You could learn Spanish to conversational fluency in six months, I had no doubt, but most people need a deeper level of fluency to keep from losing it as soon as they stop speaking it every day. For Arabic and Mandarin, given that the writing system for each is different than the spoken language, it could hypothetically be possible to be fluent in one or the other in two years, but from what I saw, it was more like five years. Looking back at my original notes on the Foreign Service Institute rating of difficulty for each language, there was a direct correlation between the level of the language and how long you’d have to study:

  Level 1 (Spanish, French): one year

  Level 3 (German): three years

  Level 5 (Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese): five years

  I did a two-year experiment to attempt mastery of two level 5 languages and one level 1 language; I worked my ass off, but what I really needed was eleven years. If I had reached this understanding in a way that I would have accepted in the beginning (and, given my stubbornness and ambition, the way I would have accepted would have been the angel of language learning descending from the sky to hand me a scroll saying, “Don’t rush”), then my next question would have been: Do I want to spend the next eleven years studying just to say I can speak these languages?

  It’s hard to say.

  I could do anything in eleven years: I could learn to run a marathon in under four hours, get my PhD in political science, become a world-class salsa dancer, or start a dozen startups. Being realistic about the time it takes to really, truly learn the language was crystallizing. What did I want? Did I really need or want to learn all three languages? It was so simple: If you didn’t have a burning desire and a real-world application for the language, then you could only hold open the space for an exercise in futility for so long. Your arms get tired. You relax. The whole thing falls down.

  Drew and I started talking about what came next. What did we really want from our lives and how did we want to raise our kids? A few things had become obvious to us. We wanted our children to be bilingual. Definitely. And a more recent realization: We also wanted to raise them to be aware of other cultures. The bilingual part would be relatively easy to achieve in the United States if we found an area that had bilingual schools. The cultural part was trickier, although not impossible.

  I learned in Beirut that we all have an us and them mentality. The Middle East had previously always been “them” to me, but learning Arabic and living in Lebanon made me have empathy for a group of people I used to think of as on the other side of some invisible line that I couldn’t approach. In the 1970s and 1980s, Henri Tajfel wrote about this phenomenon and called it social identity theory. We think of people in our social circles more favorably; we inherently apply the most positive motivations to the actions of those people we see as “in our group.” We can see this play out in how some people in the West talk about the Middle East—assuming, wrongly, that those who live in the Middle East are fundamentally different, perhaps more violent or unable to get it together, or unwilling to change. Living there, what I saw was a group of people struggling with the same politics and cultural forces we struggle with in the West.

  So my social group got larger. I didn’t just identify with New Englanders anymore, or Americans, or the Western world. Beirut had shifted my perspective and I now thought of the Lebanese as my people, too. So when there was a car bombing in my Ashrafieh neighborhood, I was just as shaken as when the Boston Marathon bombing later happened back home.

  Language brought me to the Middle East, and language let me get close enough to erase those social lines. The gift of language is not just the ability to speak another language (which, let’s face it, is less important than ever for English speakers as the world adopts English). The real gift, the life-changing part, is opening up your worldview. If we want to prepare our children for the future—one that will no doubt be more globalized than ever—then that broadened sense of identity is the most useful tool a young person can have. It makes them adaptable, it helps them think about issues across cultures, and it will be a required skill for the next generation of workers. You can’t sit in a corporate office in Chicago and dream up ads for a campaign in Beijing without having cultural awareness. How can you sell something to someone if you don’t even know what they want? What motivates them? What do they think is cool?

  I started this experiment thinking that bilingualism was the goal, but ended more convinced that biculturalism—or at least multicultural awareness and appreciation—was more important. Knowing this, feeling this in our hearts, one thing became clear: We weren’t moving back to the States. We had traveled too far outside the bubble. How could we ever go back?

  • • •

  DREW HAD PICKED UP SPANISH without any lessons. It had been a year since we first arrived in Mexico, when he’d tentatively ordered a beer as “una cerveza, por favor” because it was the only phrase he had memorized (so he drank a lot of beers those first few months), rather than tangle with the menu, which seemed overwhelming. One year later, things were totally different.

  Pam was flying back to Bucerías to join me on a ten-day road trip and we were taking the breaking-down, busted-up old 1994 Dodge Caravan across Mexico for a girls-only road trip. In advance of our trip, Drew headed out to find a taller mecánico to replace two of the tires and the rear brake light. One year before, he wouldn’t even have considered such a task—since he’d need to speak Spanish to lots of people—let alone ju
st driven out the door with little to no plan. When he came back a few hours later, he was flushed and animated.

  “It was awesome!” he said as he got out of the van and slammed the door shut. I was sitting on the veranda with Stella while Cole rode his bike around the house in rapid circles.

  “What happened?” I asked, confused by his sudden ebullience.

  “Oh my God.” He grinned. “So I went to that place, the one on the highway? And I was all like, ‘Hola, pues, tengo que comprar nuevos neumáticos,’ right? And he’s like, ‘Okay, dude, well we don’t do that here, you need the tire place.’ In Spanish. All in Spanish. And I totally understood him.”

  “That’s awesome!” I said as he came over and sat down next to me.

  “Hello, Bella,” he said to Stella, kissing her on the top of the head, and then he said to me, “I know, right? So then he’s like, ‘Go down there, straight ahead, take a left, that’s the place,’ and so I did.”

  “Did you find a tire place?” I asked.

  “No, that place was closed. So I asked another guy, ‘¿Dónde puedo encontrar los neumáticos?’—you know, just some guy walking down the street—and he directed me to another place.”

  “And you got tires there?”

  “Yes, and it was so cheap. It was so awesome, though. I was just talking to everyone. They told me I probably need new front tires, too, but I think we’ll be fine for now.”

  “I’m so impressed!” Drew took Stella off my lap and cradled her. I watched for a moment, then asked, “So what do you think did it? What helped your Spanish?”

  Drew thought about it. “Honestly, I think it was just having to use it all the time, plus watching cartoons in Spanish with the kids. Mostly, though, it’s just hearing it. I go into the market, I overhear someone else asking for something, I see what they are getting, and then next time I can use the same phrase. That’s how I figured out the carnicería offered adobada seasoning on the meat, or that you could ask for meat for stew as carne para guisar—or meat for grilling as carne para asar—and they’d just give you the right cut, you don’t have to say flank or skirt steak or whatever.”

  “Right,” I said. “And the nice thing is that since we have the kids with us, everyone always wants to talk to us.”

  “Yeah, any time I am out with Stella, I end up having a conversation. Is the baby a boy or a girl? Where are her earrings? Don’t you know they will do that free at the hospital? Go to the clínica! Or do it at home. With an ice cube. Ha!” Drew said.

  “So much vocabulary!”

  “I know, it’s great,” he said. “I mean, there’s no way to live here like we do and not learn the language, really. I feel bad for those people who stay here and just speak English all the time, no matter what. It’s almost like they are blocking out the Spanish, like ‘I don’t want to hear that.’”

  “I was afraid that would be us, como un par de gringos,” I said.

  “We are a couple of gringos, but our daughter is Mexican.”

  We both smiled. Then I said, “Okay, Señor Hispanohablante, ¿quieres asar un poco de carne para el almuerzo o no?” Do you want to grill a little steak for lunch or what?

  “Sí, mi amor, claro que sí.” Yes, my love, of course.

  “Genial, quiero usar la salsa de piña que hice ayer.” Great, I want to use the pineapple salsa I made yesterday.

  “¡Ag-wa!” Stella yelled out. She had worked her way off Drew’s lap on the couch and was holding herself up in a standing position.

  “¡Agua!” Cole also yelled out, reminded by his sister’s request that he too was thirsty.

  “Okay, I will get you some water! Hold on!”

  Drew and I headed to the kitchen. It never stopped thrilling us to hear the kids use any Spanish.

  • • •

  PAM ARRIVED FROM CANADA a few days later. We stayed up late catching up and listening to music.

  “I can’t believe how big Stella is,” she told me.

  “I know, she’s a little Viking, too, tough as nails. She’ll be walking any day now,” I said.

  “Unbelievable. When I left, she was so tiny, she would sleep on my chest. So have you guys decided where you’re going to go next? What’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know. I want to take this trip with you, then we’ll make a decision.”

  “It’s the end of an era.”

  “I know! I can’t believe how fast everything has happened.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to see where you end up next.”

  “Me too, Pam! Seriously. Me too.”

  Twenty-eight

  You know when the Mexican policía laughs when you tell them, “We’re going to Mexico City,” that you’re not on the tourist trail anymore. Pam and I had begun our road trip and the adventure was just beginning.

  So far, we had traveled from Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific coast to outside Guadalajara then to Guanajuato, and now we were making our way to Mexico City in our beat-up van that Drew had bought in Seattle and driven down to Bucerías when we first arrived. When I suggested this road trip with Pam, Drew had nearly pushed me out the door, saying, “Yes, you should definitely go. Please go!”

  I might have taken this as a not-too-subtle hint except I knew he had been exasperated by my reluctance to ever leave the kids. At ten days, this trip was by far the longest I would be away from the children. It would be good for me, I told myself as I kissed my babies and husband good-bye.

  It felt strange to be unfettered, but Pam and I were making the most of our adventure. Instead of taking the bland toll highway into the city, which would get us there in five or so hours, we decided to take the rural route winding through mountain roads into the city.

  On the side of the road people with carts sold strawberries and cream, waving us down as we drove by, but soon they became less frequent and the small towns faded away until we were driving through green fields with blue-tinted mountains in the distance. As the sun set, I turned to Pam and said, “I’m really glad we took this route.”

  “Me too,” she replied. Then, “What time is it?”

  “It’s six ten, why?”

  “We need to write this down for later—so we remember we both agreed this was a good plan.”

  We laughed. We had been approached twice already on this leg of the trip by police officers. The first pulled us over because of our foreign license plates, and the second was at a traffic checkpoint. Each time they asked, “Where are you going?” in a tone that seemed to imply we were quite far from anything at all.

  “Mexico City!” we cheered.

  Blank stare. A small laugh. Head shake.

  “Adelante.” (Okay, off you go.)

  For dinner, we ate pollo asado from a four-table roadside operation that had a massive rotisserie over charcoal. The sun set. We took pictures. Night fell and we continued to drive, catching glimpses of city lights between the trees but moving slowly.

  At the centro histórico, we pulled over at the first hotel, handed the valet our keys, booked a room with a view, and collapsed in our beds. We had spent the day laughing and talking through the long drive, enjoying a part of Mexico we would have missed if we rushed, a part of the trip that made it feel more like an adventure than just a self-led tour. But still, the cool, crisp white sheets after a shower were a revelation.

  For me, Mexico City’s biggest draw was the food. Our first full day we ate lunch at Pujol, a five-star restaurant that offers an eleven-course tasting menu with a focus on modern Mexican cuisine. It was voted one of the world’s fifty best restaurants, and at $79 USD per person, it was also one of the most affordable on that list. The dishes came out with meticulous care over two hours. Shaved ice with chili powder and lime, appetizers of sashimi tuna on a blue corn tostadita, aguachile with chia seeds covered in a smooth layer of avocado. The waiter brought out a massive hollowed-out gourd t
he size of a pumpkin that was filled with aromatic smoke, baby corn with chiles, coffee, and cream. It was all presented in Spanish. Dishes like “Botanas Elote con mayonesa de hormiga chicatana, café, chile costeño—Infusión de maíz rojo, pericón, raíz de cilantro—Chicharrón de col rizada” included words I couldn’t guess at, like “chicatana” or “pericón,” so my translations for Pam sounded like this: “Corn and some kind of ant mayonnaise, coffee, some kind of chile . . . uh . . . an infusion of red corn and cilantro? Um . . . plus chicharrón and cabbage, I think.” The ingredients on the plate were all recognizable to me after a year of living in Mexico, but I didn’t know the high-end foodie names for some of these things.

  Other dishes were easier. “Taco de barbacoa, adobo de chile guajillo, hoja de aguacate, guacamole” was barbecue tacos with a guajillo chile marinade (the same guajillo chiles I routinely bought at the grocery store for my own adobada recipes) with avocado leaves and guacamole. Most of these words weren’t taught to me in school when I studied Spanish in high school or college—in fact, for years I thought the Spanish word for sandwich was “bocadillo” (most people in Mexico use “torta” instead) or that drinks were “bebidas” (like the English equivalent, “Would you like a drink?” but in Spanish it’s usually asked, “¿Qué quieres tomar?” (literally, “What do you want to drink?”). It was only through living in Mexico, shopping for these ingredients, cooking with them, going to restaurants with locals, that I had begun to learn the vocabulary that Mexicans actually used. My lunch at Pujol was reminding me that it didn’t end there. Even in English new culinary terms and techniques are being invented; the sources of ingredients involve an expanding backstory that is increasingly told in restaurants.

  Of course, the meal was delicious; there wasn’t a course we didn’t love. One of my favorite dishes was a very simple cauliflower with almendrado, an almond sauce—I was completely caught off guard at how good it was. Next there was the suckling lamb taco with poblano chile, then fresh fish with an elote cream sauce. By this point we were swooning over our dishes—the mole madre, the fermented banana covered in macadamia nuts and chamomile petals, a dollop of guava and sweet potato purée, and brioche with Mexican cheeses and fruit. We sipped an infusion of corn hairs, lime, and star anise while finishing our final course: candied pumpkin with cream.