So, Spain, then. But where in Spain? Well, Barcelona seemed like the perfect choice. It was a big city, but not too big. We had visited there before and loved it. Also, Barcelonians spoke Catalan, and educated their kids in both Spanish and Catalan. So our kids would grow up as trilinguals. I talked to another friend who was Spanish but lived in Madrid. He said, “Why Catalan? What’s the point? No one speaks it.” But I reasoned: The people in Barcelona speak it, so my kids’ friends will speak it. That was incentive enough.
After studying the most common languages in the world, I knew firsthand that there was no point in speaking any language—even if billions of other people speak it—if you don’t actually know any of those people. Over nine million people speak Catalan (which, granted, is nothing compared to a language like Mandarin, which has over a billion speakers). But even if only 100,000 people spoke it, but that number included everyone we knew, then it would make sense to learn it. Besides, Catalan was a Romance language with roots in French and Italian, so knowing Catalan would give our kids a leg up if they ever wanted to learn French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, or any other Latin-based language.
Plus, everyone is bilingual in Barcelona. It was like Beirut in that way. In Barcelona (and Catalunya), the unique cultural identity is very important, and speakers work hard to keep their language and culture alive. In a way, I had a lot in common with them; I was working hard to give my children languages and cultural awareness. It was a priority not held everywhere in the world.
I still had a deep interest in the Middle East and Arabic, so I would be glad to be just a short flight away from Morocco, Egypt, Beirut, or Jordan. There was a large Muslim population in Barcelona, and plenty of Arabic learning centers. I would have a lot of resources if and when I returned to consistently studying Arabic. For Mandarin, on the other hand, I came to a realization that should have been obvious long before I started this project. I didn’t love China like I thought I would, and I think that’s okay. I love lots of places, but China and I don’t click—but I do love Thailand. Every time we go to Asia or anywhere near it, we find some excuse to stop there. We love the country and the people. We have friends there. Thai was a tonal language—why hadn’t I picked Thai from the start? Why? Because I wanted to pick the most useful languages—and I blindly used the total number of speakers to measure that. But if we weren’t committing to living in or visiting China regularly, then knowing Chinese wasn’t useful to us. Not at all. It would be much more practical to learn Thai because we actually visited the country at least once a year.
So I altered my plan. I’d stop studying Chinese, and start with Thai. My goals for Thai were small; I just wanted some basic conversation skills. There was no need for my children to be educated formally in the language because they were unlikely to go to college in Thailand or to need to read Thai books or write essays in Thai. When we visited the country, we’d speak the language. The kids would pick it up and forget it, over and over again. Some words would stick and when we returned the next year, the exposure would reactivate the language, and they’d slowly build their base. For us, that was plenty.
Drew would keep practicing Spanish and maybe learn a little Catalan, but he’d probably always be a reluctant language learner. The kids would speak Spanish, Catalan, English, and a little Thai. I would, too, and I’d also be able to read a little Arabic. This plan finally made sense, and I knew it would work because it mirrored our lives and how we’d use the languages. We were structuring our lives in such a way that for the children the languages would not be something they were forced to learn, or a chore they had to complete, but instead, just “the way we talk.”
• • •
WE TOOK A SHORT TRIP to Mexico City to get Stella’s U.S. birth certificate (which is actually called a consulate report of birth abroad, since she was not born in the United States) so we could apply for her passport. It came two weeks later, and we could officially leave the country just after Stella’s first birthday. We did end up having to get the car door fixed after all, since the “repairs” the mallet-happy mechanic did in Mexico City didn’t really fix the problem. Luckily, in Puerto Vallarta, where we have friends, we didn’t have to negotiate on the price. Everyone knew we were just normal Americans, not super-rich, important, traveling journalists as the mechanics in Tapachula believed. Drew and I took turns behind the wheel of the Dodge Caravan on the drive north, across the border and into Texas. Our Mexican baby Stella entered the United States for the first time.
We stayed with my friend Kayt in Houston as we tried to sell the car (we ended up having to drive to New Orleans to finally get rid of it because no one in Houston wanted our beat-up minivan). I was completely culture-shocked after so much time away from home; I walked around the grocery store in a daze. Meat was so cheap. You could get anything; there were so many options. I looked at the Mexican food section. There were the same spices I would find in my local market in Puerto Vallarta, except there were actually even more of them. You could get anything from dried chiles to bags of Jamaica tea. There was an entire aisle dedicated just to cereal. Another for shampoo and conditioner. I was frozen with all the choices thrown at me by the American grocery store. How could you ever decide?
Our host, Kayt, was a science writer. She started telling me about the research on learning music at a young age. “It doesn’t even matter if you like it or not; taking music lessons has huge cognitive benefits.” Her young son was learning the piano from their home in suburban Houston. I thought to myself, “Well, jeez, that would have been easier.”
• • •
WE FLEW TO BARCELONA. I visited the market right away. There was organic local produce, and tons of cherries, which were in season. We made the Catalan dish conejo al aioli, a garlicky rabbit dish grilled on the barbecue. The Spanish here was harder for me to understand, the vocabulary slightly different. When I ordered a beer, it was a caña, for a small glass, rather than just ordering a cerveza or chela in Mexico. But it was immediately clear to me that we’d made the right call moving here. Life was lived outdoors in this city. People went for walks, hung out in the plazas, had a drink in a café with a friend. It was so social and friendly, and kids could be seen everywhere you went. There were playgrounds everywhere. So many young families, and it was easy to make friends. In our first week, we were introduced to several moms who wanted their kids to learn English and were eager to have play dates with us. It seemed like everyone we encountered was our age and had kids. We were in parenting heaven.
We arranged to take some bikes up the coast to Girona and tour around the beach towns north of Barcelona. This area was the best of all worlds. A beautiful city, full of amazing culture and food and architecture, and just one hour north was the Costa Brava, full of spacious beaches and world-class cycling routes. If we wanted to go to Paris, we could take the high-speed train and get there in a few hours.
“We are never, ever leaving,” Drew told me.
Okay, deal.
Thirty
Drew and I walk with Stella and Cole through the Gothic quarter, the same place we stayed during our honeymoon ten years earlier. I have Stella in a wrap, Drew is holding Cole’s hand, and I am holding Cole’s other hand.
I’d set out on this quest to better understand the world, to improve myself, to give my children a brighter future. I don’t know if I accomplished any of those things, but surely it can’t hurt to be bilingual. But I have some peace now about the world and my place in it. I have my priorities set. When we started, we had completed a year of fast travel with a toddler and I was sitting in a hotel room in Egypt trying to figure out what was next. I was chasing, seeking, running, stretching myself because I had to know.
I wanted a deeper connection with my grandfather before he died because I longed for family. Maybe it was the absence of a healthy home and family in my childhood that meant I had to search the globe to find my place in the world. In the end, I decided the mo
st exciting and meaningful thing I could do with my life was to settle down in a thriving city by the sea, become part of the community, and raise my kids. Almost all of my adult friends with kids had already figured this out, but I like to take the long route. I needed to explore a bit first. I had had no framework for what a happy family even looked like. Somehow through luck, providence, and the limitless patience of my husband, I seem to have gotten all those things.
Here we are strolling through the same winding streets that we had held hands and walked through as newlyweds. Back then, it was the most romantic time of my life. I was intoxicated with travel, thrilled with every public fountain and outdoor café, exhilarated by the sound of foreign words rolling off foreign tongues on the street. Now I am full of a different feeling. It’s this quiet happiness that infects your life when your children are cheerful, your spouse is relaxed, your family is together. These two moments in time reach across the expanse of ten years and touch each other. It was the happiest moment of my life then, and having my children with us in this same spot is even more than happy. It is peace.
I lean over and kiss Drew on the cheek.
“Welcome home.”
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
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). Directorate-General for Education and Culture, Directorate-General for Translation and Directorate-General for Interpretation, “Europeans and their languages—Special Eurobarometer 386,” European Commission, June 2012. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf.
CHAPTER 1
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. E. Bialystok et al., “Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia,” Neuropsychologia (2007): 459–464.
F. Craik et al., “Delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease: bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve,” Neurology 75 (2010): 1726–1729.
E. Bialystok, “Reshaping the mind: the benefits of bilingualism,” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 65 (2011): 229–235.
R. K. Olsen et al., “The effect of lifelong bilingualism on regional grey and white matter volume,” Brain Research (2015): 128–139.
Bialystok’s interview from the New York Times . . . C. Dreifus, “The bilingual advantage,” New York Times, May 30, 2011.
The Foreign Service Institute, the branch of the U.S. government that trains diplomats in many things, including foreign languages, rates Arabic as a level 5 language on a scale of 1 to 5—in other words, one of the hardest for a native English speaker to learn. Interagency Language Roundtable, “An overview of the history of the ILR Language proficiency skill level descriptions and scale by Dr. Martha Herzog.” http://www.govtilr.org/Skills/IRL%20Scale%20History.htm.
CHAPTER 2
I read a number of books in preparation for this project. Here is a list of some of the more useful ones:
N. Chomsky and J. McGilvray, The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
V. Cook and B. Bassetti, Language and Bilingual Cognition (New York: Psychology Press, 2010).
G. Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (New York: Picador, 2011).
R. Ellis, Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
M. Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners (New York: Free Press, 2012).
D. L. Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (New York: Vintage, 2009).
D. L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool (New York: Vintage, 2012).
A.M.B. de Groot, Language and Cognition in Bilinguals and Multilinguals: An Introduction (New York: Psychology Press, 2010).
F. Grosjean, Bilingual: Life and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
F. Grosjean, The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
E. Harding-Esch, The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
A. E. Hernandez, The Bilingual Brain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013).
K. King, The Bilingual Edge: The Ultimate Guide to Why, When, and How (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
B. Z. Pearson, Raising a Bilingual Child (Living Language Series) (New York: Living Language, 2008).
S. Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).
V. Raguenaud, Bilingual by Choice: Raising Kids in Two (or More!) Languages (Boston: Nicholas Brealey America, 2009).
N. Steiner, 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child (New York: AMACOM, 2008).
X. L. Wang, Growing Up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven (Parents’ and Teachers’ Guides) (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2008).
CHAPTER 3
Krashen, a linguist and second-language acquisition expert who wrote several papers on the topic in the 1980s, most notably his 1982 paper, “Second Language Acquisition . . . ” S. D. Krashen, “Second language acquisition,” Second Language Learning (1981): 19–39.
He also wrote two books about the subject:
S. D. Krashen, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1982).
S. D. Krashen, Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1981).
CHAPTER 4
Who was the first foreigner to become fluent in Mandarin? It was most likely Matteo Ricci, and while I didn’t get to write about him in the book, his biography is worth a read: R. P. C. Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).
CHAPTER 7
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a report stating that on some days as much as 25 percent of the pollution in Los Angeles comes from China.
The EPA’s report was issued in 2006. Here is the Chinese response:
“US Report on Pollution ‘unfair,’ ‘unreliable,’” August 4, 2006. http://www.gov.cn/english////2006-08/04/content_354164.htm.
In 2010, researchers did a follow-up study in the Bay Area and found that 29 percent of the pollution came from China in their sample:
E. J. Gertz, “Lead isotopes tag the origins of particulate air pollutants,” November 10, 2010. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/88/i46/8846news3.htm.
Additionally, the World Health Organization reported that around the world, seven million people in 2012 died from the effects of pollution:
D. Pennise and K. Smith, “Biomass pollution basics,” WHO. http://www.who.int/indoorair/interventions/antiguamod21.pdf
The New York Times also published an in-depth piece about the pollution in China:
J. Kahn and J. Yardley, “As China roars, pollution reaches deadly extremes,” New York Times, August 26, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html.
CHAPTER 8
I read quite a bit of Diana Deutsch’s work, and although not all of it made it into the book, this piece in particular shaped my thinking:
D. Deutsch, “Speaking in tones,” Scientific American, July/August 2010, 36.
In 2009, she performed an experiment that tested two groups of music students—one group from the United States and another from East Asia—to determine how many of them had perfect pitch (the ability to accurately identify a musical note from a sound). D. Deutsch et al., “Absolute pitch among students in an American music conservatory: association with tone language fluency,” Journal o
f the Acoustical Society of America 125 (2009): 2398–2403.
D. Deutsch et al., “Absolute pitch among students at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music: a large-scale direct-test study,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134 (2013): 3853–3859.
Perfect pitch is still rare, but in 2004, Deutsch did a study of speakers of Mandarin and Vietnamese (both tone languages) and recorded them saying the same word over several days. D. Deutsch et al., “Absolute pitch, speech, and tone language: some experiments and a proposed framework,” Music Perception 21 (2004): 339–356.
Researchers from Northwestern University published a study in Nature Neuroscience in 2012 that showed that hearing a piece of music while you sleep can improve your performance of that same piece of music when you’re awake. J. W. Antony et al., “Cued memory reactivation during sleep influences skill learning,” Nature Neuroscience 15, no. 8 (2012): 1114–1116.
CHAPTER 11
University of Haifa. “Literary Arabic Is Expressed in Brain of Arabic Speakers as a Second Language.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 November 2009. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091104091724.htm.
The acquisition-learning distinction . . . 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. K. Morgan-Short et al., “Second language processing shows increased native-like neural responses after months of no exposure,” PLoS ONE, March 28, 2012.
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