Read Online Bilingual Being by Kathleen Saint-Onge - Free Book Online Page A

the passage of time. Memories that were untouchable and undiminishable precisely because they were pre-experience, prelanguage, pre-self. And that muddle of mine between what was and was not – the boundaries of language and thought – would have huge repercussions for my way of looking at the world and my way of thinking about myself. Profoundly confused, I’d end up looking on the outside for what was lost on the inside.
    MOTHERS’ WORK
    That’s how, during the first week of May 2010, when I’d just finished two years of course work for my master’s degree and needed to come up with a research topic for my final paper, I took myself where I often go when I’m trying to hide or to think: a public library. I paused a few minutes to flip through the discards in the pile by the front door, three for a dollar. There’s always something useful.
    I was eminently comfortable in my home away from home that day, calm behind the countless shelves, my barricades, and anonymous among random readers, hoping for inspiration. Four hours in, I’d read the front pages of the dailies and given up on doodling. I meditated, staring at the walls, and let myself fall into emptiness. It was then that I heard it – the conversation that gave me standing whiplash.
    It was between a Chinese mother and a boy aged four or five. “What book you want?” she asked him in a sweet voice, in slightly hesitant English. No answer. “Ah, you like ah-the book like this one?” No answer. She continued in English, “How ’bout video? You want some ah-video? You want some this one? Look, it’s ‘Solly –’”
    But she couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t name the video, because the child spoke out suddenly, in almost perfect English, rude, loud, and impatient. “Mom, it’s not ‘Solly,’ it’s ‘Sally.’” There was clear disdain in his voice. “Oh, okay, ‘Sally,’” the mother agreed, hurt and pride weaving a sorry cloth. I shuddered. “Run!” I wanted to say, “Run! Take this child with you and never look back! Speak Mandarin to him today and every day until he’s yours to keep! You’re losing him, losing him. I know, because I’m him!”
    Yet I stayed silent. Don’t I always? I tried to go back to my own thoughts, mind my own business. But there was more and I couldn’t help but listen, here in the public soup that is the library. A few feet away, a Russian grandmother read a dual-language book to her grandson, around seven years old. She sounded out the words, beautifully, lovingly, the Russian rolling from her tongue like soft currents.
    The child was looking at the other page, the one in English, and blurted out “birthday party!” She replied in Russian, calling him back. “I don’t like this book,” he spat and hopped off her lap. She sighed.
    â€œRun!” I wanted to say to the grandmother, too. “Run, run, run!” And all of that. But she was too old to run fast. And I was too weak to speak. I was caught between what I justified as a gesture of privacy but what was actually a colossal failure of courage on my part. For I knew something that needed telling.
    Instead, I said nothing. Again. I felt furious, torn, but I kept my panic to myself. I’ve learned how to do that. There are stories no one wants to hear. And there are times when too much has been lost already – achild who’ll never be as close to his family as he could have been in his own tongue. I know: I’m living proof of how a mother’s work, of her place in a child’s life, will forever be compromised, lessened.
    In the social sciences this kind of listening in harmlessly to sample the field is sometimes called “botanizing.” It’s a term that sounds earthy and good, but I felt like I was touching thistles, then falling headlong into them. For here