What initially struck me when reading From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle by Min-Zhan Lu was the dynamic and ever evolving relationship she had with her own bilingual abilities and how it reflects the complicated way that everyone, especially women, view themselves from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood.
At the beginning of the essay, the writer reflects on having a “family language” that was separate from the language she spoke at school. When reflecting on her experiences in second grade, she writes:
“I noticed the puzzled faces of my class- mates. I had the same sensation I had often experienced when some stranger in a crowd would turn on hearing me speak English. I was more intensely pleased on this occasion, however, because suddenly I felt that my family language had been singled out from the family languages of my classmates. Since we were not allowed to speak any dialect other than Standard Chinese in the classroom, having my teacher speak English to me in class made English an official language of the classroom. I began to take pride in my ability to speak it.”
This reminded me of many social experiments that have been done where girls in this age group tend to be self-confident in their differences and aspire to have ambitious careers as scientists/doctors/etc. These studies then find that as one goes through the transition from child to adolescent, one becomes more self-conscious about their differences. Everyone wants to fit in and hide the aspects of themselves that make them different. I think Min-Zhan Lu’s experience speaks to this in a really powerful way as it brings culture and feelings of nationalism into the equation. However, in a broader sense, it speaks to how society as a whole likes to condemn people for what sets them apart as opposed to welcoming the differences of others. Min-Zhan Lu even writes about adults who would condemn her parents for teaching her English, when they believe that Russian had replaced English and the acceptable second language to learn. It is because of behaviors like this when children, especially females, grow up in society they are bombarded with issues of self-confidence and are made to feel like suppressing their abilities or talents will make them more palatable to the general public. This is counter-productive and results in less enriched members of society.
This piece of writing also made me personally evaluate the way that I think of people who speak more than just one language, as I do. At my job at Starbucks in Uniondale, Long Island, I frequently find myself getting frustrated attempting to communicate with people who don’t speak English very well. Min-Zhan Lu writing made me remember how much harder these people have had to work in order to work in order to be able to adequately express their thoughts in two languages. While I may find it frustrating that someone cannot seem to order a cup of coffee in English, the person I am getting frustrated with is actually more advanced than me in language as a whole, because they are adept at two languages and I am confined to only the one that I speak. Many people in our American society look down on people with thick/accents or broken English, but it is truly those bilingual individuals that are the more advanced.
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