Mom: “Has you red lah?”
Though she can’t speak English well, my mother laid the foundation for mine.
An immigrant from Malaysia, my mother has lived in the United States for more than 25 years.
Yet, despite the length of time she’s been here, the predominantly English environments she’s immersed in, and even the constant corrections of her children (me), my mother still speaks broken English. And like most immigrants who speak ‘imperfectly’, she’s no stranger to the ridicule and humiliation that come from both strangers and familiars.
My mother grew up in a multiethnic society during a time when the Malaysian education system was being restructured. Prior to the end of the British rule and the declaration of Malaysia’s independence, there was no unified schooling system nor curriculum: each of the three main ethnic populations — Malay, Indian, and Chinese — had their own way of handling matters of education. However, with the new Malaysian government came reform policies that attempted to standardize the system by establishing a national language for official purposes — Bahasa Melayu (i.e. the Malay tongue) while still allowing other languages (e.g. Chinese dialects of Cantonese and Hokkien) to be spoken at the ethnic-specific schools.
It would take many years for Malaysia‘s educational framework to strengthen, years that came at a cost to my mother and other children her age who were learning to speak.
English sat on the back burner and became a language that my mother didn’t really see the importance of until she arrived in America. The only one in her family to cross the Pacific, my mother was alone in a foreign country that spoke a relatively unfamiliar language, a language that was the means to her future or her end. Not one to make it this far and fail, my mother found herself a job that didn’t require too much English knowledge and in her spare time, took free English classes whenever offered.
It wasn’t much, but it was a start, and it was enough for her to get by and be understood.
By the time she started a family, her priorities changed and her children, rather than studying, came first. As a young child, I remember the odd ways my mother spoke. Most of her thick Malaysian accent had faded away but there still remained the distinctive ‘lah’ that would punctuate the end of all her phrases. The question “How are you doing?” would turn into ‘How are you doing lah?’. A command would go from “Don’t do this!” to “Don’t do this lah!”.
Though lah never quite caught on with me (though it’s occasionally used in jest), her mispronunciation of words did.
Common words like “coupon” and “onion” became ‘cue-pon’ and ‘awn-ne-uhn’ and harder words like “rotisserie” morphed into new entities altogether: “raw-ti-sworry”.
I’ve since learned the correct pronunciation of all three words, particularly, “rotisserie”…after being subjected to five full minutes of my friends’ laughter.
As for my mother, those OG pronunciations have not changed.
Although my mother still struggles with speaking English, her speaking capabilities far surpass her written skills. Sometimes (read: many times), it takes me a minute to decipher what her texts actually mean. Otherwise, if taken at face value, I’d currently be hospitalized for the number of heart attacks induced.
Some examples of such text messages that even AutoCorrect couldn’t save were:
“Buy sister fungus chips she likes”
and
“I got staff”.
In regards to “fungus”, my mother was actually referring to “Funyuns,” the artificially onion flavored chips rather than the dehydrated mushroom chips that my sister would never touch. And for “staff”, she really meant “stuff” — as in objects and things — rather than “staph”, the contagious infection that was making everyone at school sick.
For the longest time, I resented my mother.
Much of that resentment was rooted in shame and bitterness, wrapped in the memories of when my mother’s English failed me.
The red on my papers because my mother couldn’t help with proofreading and editing my homework, unlike many of my classmates who had parents who could and often did.
The sneers from eavesdropping strangers when I had to translate medical or legal jargon — Google Translate for Chinese was crap back then, as was the flip phone’s capabilities — for my mother.
The echoes of mockery from my peers when I mispronounced ‘easy’ words during a class discussion and was publicly corrected by the teacher.
The painful long nights under the fluorescent bulb, staring at 50 pages of assigned reading on an Ibsen play, attempting to crank out an analysis paper after exhausting SparkNotes and CliffsNotes.
I was angry, spiteful, and the living personification of nasty towards my mother. After all, it was me who got myself through school — those English classes. It was me who wrote those essays that got me accepted into colleges and won me scholarships. It was my blood, sweat, and tears that built my writing into what it is today.
And so, off to college, away from home, away from my mother, I went.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but there’s something about distance that prompts reflection.
There were other memories. Memories of when my mother’s English failed me but her love didn’t.
The scavenger hunts at dollar stores for spelling books and other English enrichment activities so I wouldn’t be glued to PBS the entire summer.
The bi-weekly trips to the library so I could explore the new little chapter books (really, the DVD’s) on the shelves and so she could check out some audio book tapes for our mother-daughter story time later.
The ticking of the clock hands as my mother quizzed me on vocabulary for the upcoming spelling test — from ten simple words like ‘island’ to ninety (yes, really, ninety. My 11th grade English teacher has since retired) obscure, polysyllabic SAT words like ‘inchoate’.
The pride in her eyes and wide smiles and “Very good!” when I’d read the pieces I wrote, whether a polished personal narrative assignment for school or an atrociously written silly poem.
She was, and had always been, active, selfless, and the living personification of nurturing.
After all, it was she who spent hours with me cultivating that fondness of words and reading. It was her sacrifice, determination, and creativity that laid the foundation upon which my writing would eventually stand. It was she who encouraged me to chase after my love of English, to hone this craft of mine — no matter what the path would look like nor where it’d take me.
As I look ahead to this next chapter of life, in hand a diploma pieced together from many other pages and papers, wisened by both experience and introspection, I remember.
I remember those memories through a different lens.
Thank you, Mom.
