Re-Learning to Read

                      

            Do you speak a foreign language? Go ahead, say Si, Oui, or Igen. Great! Now say everything else you know in that language, go ahead, speak for five minutes, fifteen minutes, for as long as you can. Say everything you know in that language, from asking for coffee or directions to pleading with a lover. How long does it take until your knowledge is exhausted?

            Now imagine that you have to work in that language. That you have to read, write, pass oral exams in a doctoral program, teach students (all your insecurities will multiply astronomically in front of an audience of bored twenty-year-old native speakers), apply for jobs, be promoted, talk to your boss and socialize with your colleagues in this foreign language.

            This is what it means to be an immigrant in the United States—among other things.

            (You are going to read this differently if you’re bilingual. That is, if your mother tongue isn’t English and you had to learn English in school and now speak it with an accent; or if you grew up with two or three languages spoken around you; or, like one amazing individual I once met, if your native tongue is English, but you’ve dedicated your life to learning and translating literatures and are able to speak something like eight or nine languages by now.)

            But I craved this experience of bilingualism. Growing up in an ethnically diverse region in Romania, where many families included members who were German, Hungarian, Jewish, Serbian, and Romanian, it was not unusual for some kids to speak three or four different languages, simply by growing up in that environment. I envied that plurality. In Romanian, the only language I spoke, they had accents, mispronounced words, sometimes used unusual syntactic constructions. But then other Hungarian kids would come around, or their German mothers would call them home, and there they were, suddenly metamorphosed into foreigners, voicing unexpected rhythms, vowels, feelings.

            There was one family my parents were friends with, who lived on the same floor (the sixth) in our apartment building: the mother was Hungarian and knew Romanian too. The father knew German and Romanian (he was an engineer at the train carriage factory) and he had learned Hungarian too, so that he could speak it with his wife. Their children (a girl older than me and a boy who was a little younger) spoke all three languages.

            I envied them: I only spoke Romanian. On various occasions when we visited, Cati, the mother, would ask them to perform some small duty, like bring sugar for coffee or answer the phone, reverting to familiar Hungarian, then switch back to Romanian to speak to my parents. If the kids misbehaved, the father would intervene in German, calling them to order in a language that seemed designed especially for that.

            Years later, as an immigrant, I am grateful for new syntax and intonation, for being able to switch back and forth. There is a quote by one of the great linguists of our time (either Chomsky or Piaget), something to the extent that “he who speaks two languages has two souls.” I am grateful for a new soul; but as of now, most of my feelings are untranslatable longings, or dor.

Food and Migration (2)

Mythologies, New and Old

            A few years passed, and it sort of gradually became clear that I might stay in the United States. Perhaps sensing that, my mother started telling me, during our long international phone calls, about the virtues of water drunk from the wells of my childhood.

            “It’s the only water that has the right energetic balance for you,” she said.

            She was talking about energy a lot, positive and healing versus negative and destructive. It seemed that energy, unlike most other things, was never neutral, unknowable, or an amalgam of good and bad stuff. As my mother described it, the positive and healing type was somehow connected with my homeland and its waters.

            I never knew what to answer. It felt like she was warning me of some unknown danger lurking in the future. Wasn’t it enough that I went home, back to Romania, once a year, then once every two years or so, to drink its energy-laden water? Or were the aquifers of another continent doing some irreparable damage to my energy? I had to admit that living in the States did feel exhausting at times.

            My mother’s watery mythologies made me think of other ones—Antaeus, for example, the giant from ancient Greek legends, son of Gaia, our mother earth. Antaeus was invincible while touching the earth, as Gaia protected him. While fighting him, Hercules discovered that Antaeus, whenever fallen to the ground, almost defeated, would rise back up, healed and more energized than before. In the end, Hercules defeated Antaeus because he held the giant up in the air, while Antaeus was losing his power, becoming like any mortal, so Hercules could kill him in the end. Had I, like Antaeus, lost contact with the source of my life and was now going to lose my power? Was I going to be defeated in everything, just because I wasn’t touching the land I was born on anymore?

            The truth was, I didn’t feel comfortable in the New World. I had thought that it would be nothing else than some sort of a Western Europe just a bit farther away—how one can be wrong! Everything was different, unexpected, and vaguely threatening. Ladybugs, I noticed, were orange, while in Europe they have a deeper reddish hue. In the fall, trees turned intense red, orange, and purple, while back home they stayed within tamer ranges of yellow and rust. Sweet potatoes, peanut butter, maple syrup, corn bread, tortillas—all these foods hinted at a different life system, here for thousands of years, different from everything I had encountered so far.

            From the outside—and I was a complete outsider at that point—the locals themselves, as far as I could tell, exhibited an ongoing discomfort at being here, one that they didn’t seem to notice. They never treaded the earth, but drove huge terrain vehicles, as if ready to conquer any land that had not been asphalted yet; they lived in houses whose windows never opened; chemical smells replaced the fresh air from outside; and plasticky foodstuffs in bright packages filled the aisles of supermarkets. It looked like they were spending a considerable amount of time to avoid the reality of the place piercing through some comfortable fantasy that they were other people doing something else in a different place that was nicer and cleaner. It felt as if nature was out to get them, and in order to prevent that hostile overtake they surrounded themselves with chemical lawns, landscaped bushes and trees never more than ten years old, miles and miles of asphalt, and ingeniously padded objects.