Mother Tongue

Mother Tongue

Nguyễn Trung Hiếu

I write this essay in English, not because I want to, but because I have to. I can speak Vietnamese fine, read it with some effort, and can?Tt write it at all.

That?Ts no good, says my grandmother who grew up in Vietnam and moved to America in 1976. She uses Vietnamese in so many forms, the way a very experienced dancer breathes life into many different steps. She uses it to tell jokes to her friends, to write letters, to read the newspaper. She jots down which groceries to buy, composes speeches for a weddings, reads from the Bible. She argues, watches videos with Chinese subtitles, listens to music - all in Vietnamese.

Me, I use Vietnamese in one and one way only: I speak it. And usually only to my family.

My grandmother says that knowing only how to speak, not to read or write Vietnamese, is bad - how can a chair stand on only one leg-and that the weak mastery of my mother tongue will ultimately weaken my ties with other Vietnamese, my culture, my identity. But actually, the opposite is true.

There is a reason, laziness aside, why my Vietnamese is so bad, and that is because I never had the chance to use it very much: I was born the first - ever Vietnamese boy in a little town in Germany, a town would have otherwise been unremarkable if it had not been Albert Einstein?Ts birthplace as well. Almost everyone else in the town was German ("Wie geht es ihnen? Gut?") and ate German food (my parents learned very quickly to hate potatoes). We were strangers in a strange land, one that would be covered in snow in the winter, dandelions in the summer and apples in the fall.

My parents taught me to speak Vietnamese, and the first word I learned was "ba" - father (which in retrospect reveals that Vietnamese consider the father more important than the mother, even at such an early age). I like to think that my parents taught me to speak Vietnamese because they wanted me to remember our culture in the same way Jewish people remember theirs in the hope of one day returning to the Promised Land. But it was probably just convenience, because who wants to return home from a difficult day dealing with Germans unwilling or unable to understand, only to have to speak even more German to your own child?

But because almost nobody else understood Vietnamese where I grew up, I came to associate my mother tongue with family and, by extension, intimacy. During the day, in school or at work, or while going shopping or talking to neighbors, we talked another language. But when we were together, it was just Vietnamese. It was like a secret language that nobody else was able to understand. When visiting others, we did not have to whisper to each other if we wanted to make private comments, we could just switch to Vietnamese! Now that was real power! (But not good manners, as I found out quickly - and painfully - from my mother, after commenting rudely on somebody?Ts breath). So we all came to associate German with public life, and Vietnamese with privacy. We used the mother tongue to carve out a sphere in which we could let our guard down, to laugh and joke with each other. It became something that only your family could understand, like a secret language that we spoke to one another. I never learned to read or write the language - why would I need to? We were always around one another.

The same was especially true when we moved to America, because now, none of us spoke English very well at first. And so we clung to each other even more tightly. At least initially, we were the only ones who really understood one another. Where in Germany, all of us could converse with the natives there (we children better than our parents), here Americans did not understand even my sister and me. And as a result, we came to rely on one another even more than before.

The intimacy - built on the Vietnamese language - that we had in our family was clearest when we were out together in public. In conversations with friends, we of course spoke English. We argued on the merit of American culture (McDonalds and Hollywood), or about the celebrities (Michael Jordan and Martin Luther King). My parents told stories of Vietnam (the grocery stand they had in Saigon), we children related stories from school (everything?Ts fine). It was good as long as our comments were directed our American friends. But whenever we wanted to address each other in front of them, we ran into a problem. Which language should we use? Vietnamese? But that would be rude. English? But that would in a way betray the closeness we felt for each other. So we did not speak directly to each other very much.

You would think that my limited mastery of Vietnamese would make me uneasy with other Vietnamese people, but the opposite is true. Because for so long I associated my mother tongue with intimacy, a Vietnamese word or phrase, casually sprinkled into a conversation would make me feel infinitely closer to another person - it was sort of an open - Sesame shortcut to friendship and kinship with fellow Vietnamese students.

I now use English in every way - I speak and write and read it all the time, but that does not mean I feel close to everyone who speaks English. When I read an English book, I do not feel like friends with the author. When I write stories in English, I do not feel as tight a bond with the reader. But when I speak Vietnamese, I feel close with other Vietnamese, because the only time I can speak Vietnamese is if someone else is there, in front of me, to listen and to respond. And that is why, today still, when I walk through downtown - turbulent, noisy, chaotic - and hear a Vietnamese conversation, no matter how soft-spoken, I automatically turn around, feeling for the familiarity that comes from eating a favorite food you haven?Tt eaten in years or smelling the scent of a room you grew up in.