“Today, remember to be certain in your own Strength. To make peace with the transformation of body and mind that accompanies becoming a parent. To place disproportionate value on rain puddles, vanilla ice cream and comfortable shoes. And find solace in the unconditional trust that your child places in you as he grabs your hand before crossing the street.
Today, remember. You are good enough. Your voice matters. Believe it. It doesn’t take much more than that, I promise.”
IRÈNE, SEPTEMBER 2, 2009
I don’t actually remember when I discovered Irène’s writing, I just remember always being enamored with the way she would string words together and how lyrical her sentences were. Reading them almost felt like listening to a sonnet: she described her life as a young mother of twin boys in Paris with such simple beauty, such tenderness, it was difficult not to crave more. As I sought her writing, I developed an image of what she must be like: she’s Korean-American, I believed, a former English major who attended a small liberal arts college on the east coast of the United States before studying abroad in Paris for a year. There, she met the man who would become her husband, and she decided to stay …
I could not have been more wrong.
It turns out that Irène, while certainly the daughter of Korean parents, was actually born in France. The first few years of her life she spoke solely Korean with her family, and she didn’t speak French until she was older.
English, it happens, is her third language.
The thing is, Irène is beyond conversant in English — she has far surpassed fluency. Irène has become so masterful, she writes in English to a degree most native speakers rarely achieve. So when I learned that Irène was going to be in Chicago at the same time that I was visiting, I leapt at the chance to spend some time with her, to explore why it had been important to her to learn a third language so adeptly.
We managed to schedule some time together between meetings and shopping trips, and because Irène was feeling rather jetlagged from her flight from Paris the day before, we thought it best to get outside and grab some fresh air to help revive her. We walked to Millennium Park, in part because it was a landmark that neither of us had yet visited, but also because we both had our cameras with us and were looking for some photo opportunities. The day was gorgeous, so eventually we just collapsed under some trees to enjoy the weather (and for Irène to enjoy her first Chicago hot dog).
I decided not to beat around the bush. “Okay, Irène,” I said, stretching out on the grass, “you’re of Korean descent, born in Paris and speak both languages fluently. Why would you ever learn a third language? When did you decide you wanted to learn English?”
“Well, I was about nine years old, I guess,” she began, as she munched on her hot dog. Though we’d spoken on the phone before, I never stop being startled by how strong her French accent is, and as always, I remain very charmed. “My first language is Korean, but I started learning French at about age three. As a very young child, I used to spend summers in Korea so that I would remain fluent in both. Then, at about age nine I started really loving music — American pop songs in particular. I’m an only child, and when you’re an only child, you get to spend a lot of time alone in your bedroom.” She started to laugh. “Do you remember Glenn Medeiros?”
“Umm … I can’t say I do …”
“He sang that song ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You.’ Don’t you remember?”
She thought for a moment, and then began singing: “Nothin’s gonna change my love for you …”
“Oh, right!” I laughed, and then joined in: “You oughta know by now how much I LOVE YOU!”
She giggled. “Exactly! I loved that song. And I remember playing it over and over again, and wanting to know what Glenn was singing. So I’d get a notebook and write the words phonetically: nuh sing go nah change mah luv … And I would practice constantly. It wasn’t until much later, after a few years of studying English, that I finally figured out what the words were. I remember smacking my forehead and laughing out loud to myself. And I won’t even start on ‘A Song for You,’ by Beautiful South. I was eighteen before I realized he was singing girls’ names.” She laughed. “But you know what? The dedicated attention to lyrics really helped me develop a good ear, I think. I did it for years after, listening to English songs and writing down the words. Eventually, I did it properly, though,” she grinned.
“Wow. That’s some focus.”
“I loved it. I really loved music. It was my first entry into learning English.”
“So how old were you when you finally started learning English in earnest?”
She thought for a moment. “About twelve, I think. I was in junior high.”
“Did you like it? Learning it formally, I mean?”
“It was so easy for me. I think I was so used to switching back and forth between Korean and French. But I became really serious about it in high school.”
“Yeah? What happened that it became so important to you?”
“I fell in love with American movies. I’d always loved them: Rocky and Back to the Future were the first movies I saw in the theatre when I was a kid. Then when I was about 10, I went through a huge Star Wars phase. By high school, I really became enamored with movies and started dreaming about working in the film industry — I even wrote my Oscar acceptance speech, in English! I wrote screenplays, short stories … I was totally influenced by Quentin Tarantino, James Gray, Kenneth Branagh … I loved them all.”
I laughed. “Honestly, Irène, this makes no sense to me. I mean, yeah, those were cool movies and great filmmakers, but the French are sort of renowned for making cinematically ingenious movies, aren’t they? Why look beyond those? Why American movies?”
“They’re fantastic! Besides, French films, for a long time, had a reputation for being for elites — having lots of unnecessary words to make them seem loftier. And I never got French humor, isn’t that strange? But American movies — really, they’re fantastic. They’re highly entertaining and moving and universally funny. The endings are always so great: the ordinary girl always gets the cute boy, and everyone always lives happily ever after. Even today, I prefer American movies. They made me want to be a Hollywood movie-maker. It was my dream.”
I smiled, moved by her ability to articulate the way culture affected American and French film genres. “That’s awesome. Were there any other movies, in particular?”
“Oh, all of them. I remember that I would go to the movie theatre to watch them, and I’d try to get into the theatres where they were showing them with subtitles — which, actually, wasn’t all that easy because most of the movies were shown dubbed into French, which I hated. I didn’t want to be removed from the experience of listening to the English language.”
“That’s so interesting. I mean, I can see why dubbing can be annoying, but as a kid, surely hearing the movie in your own language would’ve been easier. I can’t imagine making watching a movie that much harder on myself, particularly when I was a child.”
“Do you think so?” She seemed genuinely confused by my reaction. “I don’t know, I just wanted to see the movie as the screenwriter intended. I wanted to see it in the original language. I was the same with television … well, with one television show in particular: ‘Saved by the Bell.’ Do you remember that show?”
I laughed. I did.
“I loved that show. In fact, I won a TV contest to meet the cast.”
“You are kidding me.”
“No! I had to answer three questions — I can’t remember what the questions were right now — and me and five other students won. We got to have dinner with Zach and Kelly — I mean the actors, of course, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Tiffani Thiessan. It was at the Hard Rock Café, in Paris.”
“That’s hysterical, Irène. Did you talk to them?”
“I was so shy! But the other kids who were there couldn’t really speak English, so I ended up translating for most of them. I think the only question I asked of my own was to Tiffani, and I asked her something silly like, ‘How many babies do you want?’”
She giggled at the memory. I laughed with her.
“So,” I asked, “have you ever been to Hollywood?”
“Yes!” she answered immediately. “When I was about seventeen years old, I visited America for the first time on a school tour. I went to New York City, Washington DC, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. While in LA, I visited Universal Studios. And it was great. But you know what impressed me the most?”
I shook my head.
“New York City. I remember when we landed, the first place we visited was Central Park. And I remember it was a beautiful day, and there was a baseball game going on in the park. It was so cliché, and yet I was so enthralled! It was exactly as I pictured America would be.”
I smiled in recognition. I remember when, at age eleven, my family moved to the United States. I was going to be in “junior high” — a level of education that sounded impossibly grown up to my adolescent ears — and I’d concocted an elaborate fantasy, based heavily on American after-school television specials, of what “junior high” would be like — lockers, cool girls adorned with handbags and high heels, and perhaps even spontaneous dancing on the cafeteria tables. I’m proud to say that my perceptions were 90% accurate.
“So, after having confirmed what American life was like, you returned to Paris. Then what?”
“Well, when I was eighteen, I enrolled in the Sorbonne, to attend film school, as I’d always planned. I studied the theoretical side of film, like film history and how to write and edit films. It’s there that I fell in love with the American film musical. Oh, and also Charlie Chaplin.”
“Really!” I said. “What was it about him that you loved?”
“It was how he could magically express himself using very few words. That’s how I like to be. I like to be … curate … with how I use my words.”
I smiled. “See, what you just said there … that’s exactly what I’m talking about with you —the way you use the English language is really creative.”
“Wait, did I say something wrong?”
“No … It’s just … the word ‘curate.’ in English, we use that word as a verb, and usually only with art. Like, you’d ‘curate’ an art exhibit. But the way you use it, as an adjective, it works, because with you, you clearly see and use language as art. Ant it’s apparent when you write, you are very careful with the words you use. You’re … ‘curate.’”
She smiled shyly. “Well, I suppose since my introduction to English was through music and film, I do see it as an art form.”
“Are you like this with all the languages you speak? Are you as floral and poetic?”
She thought for a minute.
“I think French is the language that is most me. French is very rough, very raw. When I’m angry, I always speak in French because it is the language that is the most elemental for me. With English, though, I can play with the words. I can’t make beautiful sentences in French, but I can in English — the words look and sound beautiful together.”
“That’s really interesting,” I said thoughtfully, “because I think many English speakers would say that French is the more beautiful-sounding language.”
“Oh, it’s pretty, I suppose, but you can’t play with it like you can English. At least, I can’t.”
“And what about Korean?”
“Well …” she said slowly “… Korean has so many more words than the French language has. I feel like Korean helps me complete my vocabulary.
“But English … English is so universal. I like that when I write in English, I can be read and understood by so many people. It puts me on the map in some way. It helps me say ‘here I am.’ I am heard. It allows me to leave a trace, make a mark on the world.”
I thought about irène’s concept of her three languages, how they complement each other. Generally, I don’t believe people think of languages as being able to fill in the gaps of each other — when we learn a language, we learn it, I think, from the perspective that we are simply re-learning our normal way of communication in a different tongue. But now, I see it can be more than that. As I thought more about it, even the way I’ve learned to speak English, in both my countries — Trinidad & Tobago and the United States of America — there are certain idiomatic expressions in each that capture feelings and emotions not easily expressed in the other country’s “language.” Only in America could I ever “hit it out of the park” — in Trinidad, I merely “succeed.” And in Trinidad, I might suddenly “catch a vaps” to the shock of everyone around me — but in America, “doing something unexpected,” might merely raise an eyebrow. Each dialect, each version of English has its own uses, its own way of communicating my feelings and experiences. So it should obviously follow, I suddenly realized, that it would be the same with three distinct languages. How freeing it must be for people who learn even more, or even take the leap to emigrate to another country to immerse themselves in a new, foreign tongue.
I wondered if this freedom also translated into the assimilation into various cultures as well.
“Since you’re fluent in these languages, do you think you’re able to move among cultures pretty easily, as well?”
“Well, I’m very French,” she said thoughtfully. “When I was eighteen, I made the unconscious decision to be Korean —to live a Korean life, to have Korean friends, marry a Korean man — but since my children were born, I’ve come to realize that even though I’ve done all of these things, in actuality, I’m very French. So I don’t know if I’m able to move among cultures easily, but I certainly understand them in a way that I may not have if I didn’t speak the three languages as well as I do.”
“Do your sons speak all three languages?”
“They speak French and Korean. We speak Korean at home. Unless I’m angry,” she smiled. “When I start speaking in French at home, my sons know that I am serious.”
I smiled.
“How do you think their ability to view or understand cultures has been affected by their bilingual ability, or watching their mother be trilingual?”
“Well, I think culture is in everything … it’s even in the way you brush your teeth, if you think about it,” she responded. “Language is a way to help bridge the gaps between the cultures. It has given my sons the ability to adapt to any situation, I think. We can go to New York or Korea, and they just adjust themselves. Also, and what I’m happy about most, I guess, is that they aren’t upset when someone speaks a different language, even if it’s one they don’t understand, like some kids their age might be. They just get the fact that people speak different languages, have different skin colors. Sometimes we speak Korean in the streets of Paris, and kids look at us like we’re aliens. I’m happy my own children don’t behave that way. I believe that speaking different languages is a door to tolerance and respect for others. Hopefully my children will see this. Hopefully they take the best from all the cultures that I’ve come to love.”
“What, specifically, do you hope they learn?”
“Well, I hope, from the Korean culture, they learn how to respect their elders and how to take care of older people. I hope they learn that the elderly can enrich our lives. From the French culture, I hope they grow up to be decent men and helpful husbands. I hope they learn independence.”
“And the American culture?”
She laughed. “From the American culture, I hope they learn to dream big. I want them to know that anything is possible. That when you follow your heart, it can take you anywhere.”
“Live the ‘American Dream’?”
“Exactly.”
I love the concept of language being the gateway to tolerance and respect, and I believe this. As someone whose speaking accent is somewhat shaped by various countries where I’ve lived, I know that I have sometimes been received with some skepticism by each country’s local population as a result. Similarly, I’ve often been appalled by how quickly I have seen tourists in various countries dismiss its native countrymen as being unintelligent, simply because they do not speak the tourists’ foreign tongue. In speaking with irène, it becomes so clear that an effort on everyone’s part to value language — to hold it up as the art form it can be — could be a true path to understanding each other’s cultures. Similarly, by valuing our own language — the way we speak, the way our voices are shaped by the different regions we call home or the way we’ve been educated or the travel we’ve made or our native lands — we can realize that this skill, our way of communicating, is really a beautiful Different we can claim for ourselves.
“I believe that speaking different languages is a door to tolerance and respect for others.”
I asked irène one final question: “Do you think you’ll make your boys learn a third language? Or even a fourth?”
She thought carefully — curately — before responding. “Well, I don’t know that I’m going to make them learn another language,” she began slowly, “but just by virtue of attending school in France, they will learn English and at least one other language, probably Spanish — French kids have to learn two languages at school. But I’ll definitely encourage them to learn additional languages. If you think about it, if I had never learned English, you and I may have never met, or I might never have traveled to the United States. But I did because I made the effort to learn a third language. I think in the end, what remains are the people in your life — and maybe my sons’ future best friends or their soul mates are Spanish, you know? Maybe they’re English. I would hate for them to miss the opportunity to have that connection with someone simply because I discouraged them from not learning another language.”
I nodded in emphatic agreement. Without question, language has taught me that the ability to communicate was the doorway to experiencing the differences in other cultures, in other worlds.
And without exception, those experiences were very, very beautiful.
