Adding a Helping of Heritage on a Full Plate (Part 1 – Language) | Family

Adding a Helping of Heritage on a Full Plate (Part 1 – Language)

By Jeff | Sunday, September 21, 2008 | 14 Comments

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“Dad, what are they saying?” said Number One Son.

“Yeah, what are they talking about?” said Number Two Son.

My sons were referring to the animated conversation that was going on in Tagalog between, their Aunts, their Uncles, and the Wife at the dinner table. I tried to translate as fast as I could, but I didn’t catch everything.

I was reminded of this time when John forwarded a link to this article to the 8asians blogger mailing list. The Asian American couple (he of Korean descent and she of Chinese) sent their busy, highly scheduled three year old son to Chinese school even though neither of them spoke Chinese. The family lives in a mostly white area, and one of the goals of sending him there was to expose him to other Asian American kids. To their surprise, the vast majority of students were white. The son didn’t seem to take to the classes, and so the parents let him quit.

The article generated a lot of discussion on the 8asians list. Some bloggers objected to the claim in the article that Asian-American families concentrate 100% on assimilating their children. Others pointed out the folly overloading kids so young, while others pointed out that many Asian Americans parents seem to be intent on “earning points” by having their kids do many activities while ignoring the real purpose of those activities. Shouldn’t be sports be about learning sportsmanship, discipline, and appreciating and learning exercise? Shouldn’t music be about learning culture and appreciating the splendid works of the past? Shouldn’t learning languages be about learnin g different perspectives and cultures?

All great questions and comments. My own particular thoughts came in three areas: teaching the kids languages, exposing your kids to other Asian Americans, and loading and on how much to push on kids. I had a lot of thoughts on this, so I am dividing them into three parts. This first part is about teaching kids the languages of the ancestral homeland. I wish I had learned as Tagalog as a kid, but most Filipino immigrant parents at the time when I was a kid didn’t bother and generally didn’t seem to care. Most spoke English fairly well. I have heard that some Filipino parents during that time were told that if they didn’t talk speak only English to their kids that the kids would fall behind in school.

The colonial mentality of Filipinos and Philippine geography (lots of islands and different languages) does not help either. The Wife tells me that some richer families in the Philippines would speak only English to their kids, and that the kids would only learn Tagalog from their maids and nannies. Also, in some regions of the Philippines, I am told that the people would prefer to speak English rather than Tagalog. My mother only learned Tagalog in the US. In some places, like Hawaii and Guam, the common language of Filipinos is Ilocano. My brother’s Chinese wife was really shocked to learn that Filipinos generally don’t make an effort to pass on language skills of Filipinos languages. Where I live, there are Japanese language schools, Chinese language schools, and Vietnamese language schools, but no Filipino language schools. Ironically, my brother never learned Tagalog, but he learned Japanese and Mandarin, although that didn’t do him much good communicating with his father-in-law who only speaks Cantonese.

I ended up learning Tagalog on my own from some books. Having The Wife yell in Tagalog when she gets mad also helped! I generally can understand conversations and the action on TFC (The Filipino Channel), but I take a while to compose sentences when I have to talk. Filipinos, I find, are generally not particularly amused by my accented slow Tagalog, although they think that it is SO cute when a white guy like Travis Kraft speaks it. My kids ended up not learning Tagalog, something I regret. It would have helped the Daughter greatly in her Spanish language classes. For one, it would have helped her think mo re flexibly. The Daughter’s friend, who is fluent in Mandarin, also takes Spanish, and I remember her helping the Daughter with Spanish, saying “don’t try to make sentences the same way as in English.” My daughter, knowing only one language, had trouble thinking flexibly in different grammatical patterns. Also, Tagalog has many words from Spanish. If she had known Tagalog, she already would have had a substantial vocabulary.

In the article, there are non-Chinese parents who send their young kids to Chinese school. I have a friend who did this. My guess is that his motivation is give his child an advantage knowing what he, who worked as an expat in Asia for a long time, perceives as a dominant language of the future. So I think that the benefits of teaching the ancestral language are three potentially threefold: the ability to think in more flexible ways, picking up an economically useful skill, and the ability to better connect with other generations of family. Some stories, like the one that Number One Son and Number Two Son asked about, are just better told in Tagalog, and my hurried translations just don’t do them justice.

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http://asianmommy.com/ Asianmommy

I agree that there are many benefits in teaching kids a foreign language early. As the kids get older, they lose the ability to pick up certain sounds that are easy for them to learn when they are young. If they can learn to roll their Spanish Rs or learn the 4 tones in Mandarin now, then it’ll be much easier for them in the future if they want to pursue these languages later.
sc

If you want to your kid to learn a tonal language like mandarin and speak with no accent and hear the tones you need to start them young because there are very few people that can learn a tonal language from a non tonal background at an older age and not be able to tell them around from a native speaker.
http://amateureditrix.blogspot.com amateur editrix

Thank you thank you thank you for this article. I’m also the daughter of Filipino immigrant and I can only understand Tagalog. And ever since I moved out of a predominantly Filipino area, I’ve truly understood what a gap I have, not only in my history and ethnic identity, but the difficulty I have even communicating with my family. Though everyone is fluent in English, no matter how much I want talk about deep philosophical issues I have with my own identity I can’t.
I’m glad to know that my experience with my native language isn’t isolated and hearing the greater reasonings for it (the history of colonization).
I agree that it’s a really hard line to toe with the workload of your children, I also agree that there are many parents who do many beautiful things simply for pride’s sake and not for the enjoyment. I do however, hope you’ll be able to send your kids to a tagalog class (or a hooked on phonics type of program ^_^. it’s how my parents taught me english), not only will it help them, but maybe you can pick stuff up too. Also, since most of your family, including your wife, speaks tagalog they’d be able to reinforce the learning process.
http://flanflanflan.blogspot.com Efren

I remember my parents not wanting me to learn Ilokano when I was growing up for the reason that you mentioned–that learning it would somehow put me at a disadvantage (and there was also the whole accent issue that they were ashamed of). Although, now that I think about, I think one of the reasons why they didn’t want me to learn was so that they could have a secret language that they could talk to without my sister or I knowing what they were doing. I picked up some Tagalog when I was the executive director for Filipino Task Force on AIDS some years back, and I remember that my being a monolingual 2nd generation Fil Am made me suspect since nearly everyone who worked or was a client were immigrant at first, but luckily my management skills made up for it.

It sucks that the only school where one can actually learn Ilokano on a regular basis is at University of Hawai’i-Manoa. Tagalog, while it’s great to learn on some level, isn’t as relevant for me as Ilokano is.
http://www.8asians.com/author/ancientone95131/ Jeff

@amateur editrix: Walang anuman. Walang anuman. Walang anuman.

@Efren: My in-laws also use Ilokano as an encryption technique when they don’t want me to understand something (since they know that I can understand Tagalog). Regarding Ilokano vs Tagalog, movies coming out of the Philippines are in Tagalog, TFC is in Tagalog, and in most parts of the world, Filipinos default to Tagalog, so for me, without relatives in Hawaii, Guam, or Saipan, it is more relevant. Some of my in-laws snobbily treat Ilokano as a language of provincianos/provincianas (i.e. country bumpkins) that “sophisticated” people don’t use unless they have to (like talking to the help).
Chuck

This is an interesting topic for me right now… My nephew (two Chinese parents) are trying to figure out how to teach him language, such that he will grow up speaking English natively but also not lose the Chinese completely. I hope they can do it, but also they live in Boston and I can’t wait to hear the accent develop
http://www.alexfelipe.com alex

yo, I just found this site. Nice job 8asians.

I’m a Tagalog with a Canadian citizenship and I’ve been lucky to have never completely lost the language (I came to Can when I was two). I always felt it was odd that everyone else I grew up with stopped speaking it.

But it’s just our sad colonial mind as Filipinos: parents arrive in N. America and suddenly they want their kids to speak only English, and think only in American… Until they get older and the kids start feeling the alienation…

But I am happy to see that so many of those youth are now searching for identity, and doing their best to pass some Pinoy pride on to their kids.

–> Check out my site all if you have some time: http://www.alexfelipe.com (I’m a photographer)
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KC

Just stumbled upon this site–I’ll be coming back to read more.

I’m a Fil-Am that grew up among several other Fil-Ams in So Cal and looking back, I consider myself very fortunate to have grown up in an environment like that. I could bring weird, even smelly, food in my lunch box to school and no one thought it was too weird (though I would never bring something as smelly as tuyo to school).

I also have a huge family like many other Filipinos, and my mom’s side of the family in particular all live close to each other. When they first immigrated here, they all lived with us, including my grandparents, and that made for some fun times. That also meant that a lot of Tagalog was spoken in my house growing up, and I, intrepid child I was, was determined to find out what they were talking about. Sure, my relatives laughed at me a lot, but they could tell I really wanted to learn Tagalog and were patient enough with me to correct my mistakes. Twenty-something years later, and I understand and speak Tagalog fairly well. I took some classes at university and the two times I went to the Philippines, everyone I encountered was amazed that I spoke so well. I do consider myself an oddball though, because all those Fil-Ams I grew up with? Some can understand a great deal, but hardly any of them can hold a conversation beyond “Salamat” and “Kumusta ka?” I’m well aware of all the reasons many Fil-Ams don’t speak their parents’ languages, but it still disappoints me that both parents and children are complicit in this. Language is a vital part of what connects us to our culture and ancestry and yet many Fil-Ams I know never bother to learn Tagalog, Ilocano, Kapampangan, or whatever their parents speak.

Who knows, maybe the third-generation of Fil-Ams will have a renewed interest in learning their grandparents’ language. My partner is Chinese and if we get married and have kids, I’m pushing for our kids to be trilingual!
http://zenforyou.dalefg.net/ Maricris

This is one great way of putting it and ironically, what your wife said were all true. It is despicable that the mentality of the Filipino culture is that if you speak English and is fluent with it, makes you a cut above the rest. A dysfunctional status quo that everyone wants to attain which in a sense makes us lose our integrity and being as one culture. I would love to see the rest of your article. I’m delighted that you are actually tackling this subject. This has always boggled me for years. I just don’t get it.
Thanks for visiting my blog by the way. Glad to finally find another voice that speaks the same thing as me.
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