PowerPoint and Homework: Sept. 21st

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1. 

   Labiba Farzana

   September 21, 2022 at 11:10 pm

   Coffee is one of the things I like most. While my friends were nagging at me to keep my coffee obsession in control, I was sipping a french vanilla latte with one extra nitro shot, watching the beautiful sun setting in the lake water. Nature in Bangladesh can be very beautiful. While my delight in coffee and nature, a sudden phone call appeared. It was my mother. I excused myself and answered it. She was crying. Those were not sad tears though. They were tears of joy. She informed us we finally got the visa for U.S permanent citizenship. My mother was the type of woman who was obsessed with getting her children a better future. So when the news came, it was an overload of joy for her. After calming her down over phone, I went home to see still crying out of joy. Yes, I had to console her then too. That was the ultimate start of my journey of being a reader or writer.

   Now, I always thought, New York would be a peach for me because I was confident with my accent. In my younger years, in Bangladesh, my science teacher had a technique to make students pay attention to content more. She used to make a random student stand and read the textbook out loud. This way the reader and the other students would pay much attention. Many of my friends hated this technique. But I, on the other hand, loved it. Because I grew up in a family where English movies, songs and series were preferred more than our Bengali movies. So I grew accustomed to the American accent since the very beginning. Now, there’s one thing. Here, Bengali people would have very heavy accent while speaking English. Most of the words were even wrong. So speaking the correct way with an American accent seemed a little bit odd and made me stand out a little. Some of my classmates jokingly said I am a ‘wannabe posh’ girl for sounding too articulate. So if I may admit, I sometimes had to change my accent to a bengali one just to fit in. Now, back to my science teacher’s way of torturing her students. For her class, I would always be the first volunteer to read the textbook out loud. Because at that time of reading I had the freedom to read in the accent and patterns I loved to read in. Since in school, everyone was obligated to speak formal English, we were not allowed to say any English word incorrectly like you use in our daily life. That became a huge advantage for me. My accent, fluency, and confidence would make my teacher compliment me every time, asking me questions about how I speak English with such grace, also asking if I could teach her daughter to speak that way. She was usually very strict, so when she complimented me it meant the world to me and encouraged me to practice reading more and more.

   But I saw my confidence get shattered on my first day at work at Home Depot. Being a Plumbing associate, it was my duty to visually explain how the pipes and connectors worked, what kind of primers and sealers should be used, which flex tapes are the best, and which material is for which purpose. I found myself struggling as I forgot words and how to describe stuff. My anxiety took over and I started stumbling. Not finding the courage to engage more, I took a break from it and started realizing that all my childhood reading taught me how to change my accent. But I missed out on the part where I had to learn how to analyze stuff too.

   Another confidence-shattering experience was when I was hanging out with my co-workers. Their use of phrases and slang made me think I am not in New York at all. I still remember my first confusing phrase was “Labiba, you closing today?” In my head, I was thinking “Closing? Close what? The door? My locker?”. I was confused and had to ask my coworker Roy thrice, ‘Excuse me?”; “I’m sorry?”; “Close what?”. After trying they made me understand closing is a made-up term i.e if I was staying till the store closes. I was feeling both clueless and embarrassed at the same time which was not a pleasant thing for a girl who had always been confident with her English. This took a big toll on my mental health.

   Now came the stage where I wanted to go back. I didn’t want to stay here. I couldn’t understand people properly, couldn’t speak as fluently as them. There was one quote I related to Amy Tan, “I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of

   what she had to say.”(Amy Tan) I was feeling my quality declined. Inferiority Complex was kicking into me. I expressed my problems to my coworker Rasheen who happened to be a jolly 21-year-old young guy. He loved helping people and assured me that I am not the only Bengali immigrant friend of his who had problems like this. He had 7 other Bengali girls just like me. He was unbelievably helpful enough to give me a local slang cheat sheet for me to fit in. As happy and thankful I was to him, no matter how much I recited those slang they didn’t seem to fit me. Indeed I learned all of that slang but never forced myself to use them

   After local slang, came the challenge of academic English. For SAT, maths was my strongest suit. But not English. I lost track of the paragraph I was reading multiple times and failed to connect the dots for the main theme and narrative of the passage. This time, I did not give up easily. I drank coffee all night and watched Youtube videos, specifically KhanAcademy English reading passage videos. The reader Sal, would highlight each line, read it out loud, and would explain the meaning or the purpose of use of this specific phrase. Doing this repetitively, every night losing sleep helped me get so much improvement. I shifted my score from 480 to 720 on my English SAT.

   After a whole year of trying, and trying and trying I finally achieved something to mark my first checkpoint. I may not ever speak like a true American or blend with it, but I know that I don’t need to blend in. Because everybody has their own speaking struggles and that’s the only constant thing in this chaos

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