A Foreign Language

At the end of this summer, as an antidote to the books I read on children and war, I read Living in a Foreign Language:  A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy (2007).  It was written by Michael Tucker, an actor who starred on “LA Law” with his wife Jill Eikenberry, who together bought a small, rustic villa in the mountains of Italy. Their love for the place grew as they became intimate with the local food and the people who make it.  Finally deciding to become fully resident, they began to learn the language and speak it with their neighbors.
It’s a wonderful story about finding and making Home by two people who know real love.  “To have the partner of a lifetime - for a lifetime - is rare stuff....What extraordinary freedom it is not to care about up or down, rich or poor, East Coast, West Coast, as long as we’re in the taxi together,” Tucker concludes at his happy ending.
But a sentence in his story about attending Italian Language School found its mark in me.  “I must admit our language skills improved remarkably - even though my head felt like the inside of a golf ball, with all those tight little rubber bands wound around each other under four thousand pounds of pressure,” he noted humorously.  Unfortunately, that is often what my head feels like working at RN Market.
You might think “Yes, being immersed in all that Spanish,” but what you might not notice on your brief shopping trips there is that a great deal of Chinese is also spoken, with just as much enthusiasm but even less vowel and consonant recognizability.
I am happy for both language groups that they have a place to speak and hear their native tongues, but the inside of a golf ball is what my head often feels like. I had thought that re-opening my slim bag of Spanish words and phrases would help, and generally it has.  Unfortunately, it has also raised the expectations of Spanish speakers that I comprehend what they say in response, and those are the moments when I feel like an airborne golf ball on its way to the first hole.  Also unfortunately, when I find myself needing to communicate with some Asian speaker, sometimes Spanish comes out of my mouth, confounding us both.
Sometimes I look at these non-English-speakers and wonder what the insides of their heads feel like.  What it feels like to be standing there handing over hundred dollar bills they’ve earned picking grapes and olives for food they used to grow and harvest or butcher themselves.  What it feels like to have their little ones learn the word “quarter” before they learn sentences, wanting coins for the vending machines by the door.  To have their teenagers blindly texting, oblivious to the packages that need carrying to the car.
Many of us English speakers feel like we’re living involuntarily in a foreign language, and resent the people who’ve brought it here.  But it seems to me that we are all surrounded by foreign tongues and foreign ways.  This land will feel like a foreign country until we get inside each others’ heads and start to unwind those little rubber bands.
- Trudy Wischemann is an English-speaking writer who never learned her grandmothers’ mother tongues. Write to her - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.