I will not use this for my essay.
HW 7
A struggle of mine with facing two worlds was when I was a kid. I grow up speaking spanish and english, being bilingual was very hard for me because at school i had to speak english and at home I would speak both. You may think this was easy but the reality was it was not. I remember well growing up the closes person to me was my mom and I all I ever had was my mom besides my older siblings, but I was very close to her. Not being able to speak proper spanish was very hard for me. It made conversations with my mom very short and although I wanted them to be longer they couldn’t have been because I didn’t know spanish well, or my mom didn’t know english at all. I remember sometimes when I would conversate with her she I would get frustrated because I wouldn’t know how to express myself, I would try to pronounce the word but still she would look at my confused. My mom would try not to laugh or giggle, which would make me even angrier. Looking back at it, it’s pretty funny. I would often tell myself to regret it or just not mention it, in our conversations. This was also hard because when I was younger we would go to doctors appointments and I would have to translate to my mother what the doctor would say, sometimes I wouldn’t even know where to start. I would just tell her the only parts I knew how to translate and leave the big spanish words at home for my siblings to translate for her. I can also relate to Amy where she would make phone calls for her mom. Except instead of me acting like I was my mom I would have to put on a intimidating voice and call, ask her boss to give my mom a raise on her salary. I was stick in between these two worlds because at school my language was english but at home was both so this cause a negative impact in my educational journey because I had to learn both languages at the same time.
I solved this by not asking my siblings so much on what my mother would say or what she meant. I started breaking down the words so for example I wouldn’t know how to say shark in spanish so I would slowly describe it to her by saying ” Pez con dientes grandes y puntiagudos” and she would add on and say ” Si se de lo que estas hablando de los que ves en el oceano y pueden oler la sangre desde lejos, esos se llaman tiburones”. This would translate to her saying “yes I know what your talking about the ones that live in the ocean and can smell blood from far away they are called sharks”. I started this through out until I was small and even Today I still use it. I wouldn’t say I overcame it but I would definitely say I found a solution for it.
Anthony<
I sense your difficulty of not being a perfectly fluent Spanish speaker and not being able to communicate perfectly with your mother. This is also sad. I believe many of us who are children of immigrants have felt this sadness at not being able to speak from our deepest hearts to our parents in their home language. We just are not fluent in these languages. That is the downside of American assimilation. In some way, we become Americans and leave our parents behind. I too have felt this sadness.
If you were to choose this piece I would ask you to choose a few scenes to develop with CSD Concrete Specific Details. The part where you give me a bit of the conversation about sharks with your mom is good, but you need to do more.
· Could you describe in detail a conversation with your mom that shows “not being able to speak proper Spanish” and the resulting frustrations?
· Could you choose one of the situations where you had to translate for your mother. SO maybe you choose to describe that conversation with her boss when you had to speak in an “intimidating voice”? What did you say? What did the boss say? LOOK back at that scene in “Mother Tongue” with Amy Tan pretending to be her mother. This is a similar situation with your own situation, as you point out. Can you do what Tan did with the description and the dialogue and make it funny? Was it funny? Or scary? How did you feel doing that translation?
GOOD that you were able to make a connection to one of our readings, “Mother Tongue.” You will defnitely have to do that in whatever you write for the Ed Narrative. So good practice here in this HW!