If I were a Painter

You have no idea how often I dream of being able to paint something. Writing has always been my first love of course, but doodling and drawing is all part of the feel of pencil on paper so I do it often. I also add color whenever I have colored pencils, markers, or crayons around. But the problem is, whatever it is I manage to draw, with or without color, it's never what I really WANT to paint! Something like this:



If I were a painter, I would paint my world backwards and forwards, inside out and all around. I would paint the scene above and the one below and I would know how to reproduce exactly the right shades of color so they would be even more beautiful than the photographs - even more beautiful than when I stood there and took the pictures. As someone told me once, long ago, "Art is the lie that shows the truth".



Point of fact: I'm going to visit a "taller de dibujo" this Tuesday. Hope I can learn something to help myself become a painter. I know it's a drawing workshop - not a painting workshop - but maybe you have to start there.

Bilingualism and its Effect on Modern Family Life

The following is a follow-up to the group blogging topic of Bilingualism in expat couples. It is the first (unedited) draft of an article I wrote in 2005 for our school magazine. The names have been changed to protect the privacy of people, but their stories are true.

If you are like many people today, you probably think that speaking two languages well is a must for the future. But how does one go about bringing up children bilingually? What are the actual experiences of bilingual families?

Defining the term
Bilingual families, for the purposes of this article, are those in which the two parents have two different native languages – or have the same native language but also speak a common second language – and speak both languages to some degree with their children. The children in bilingual families grow up with knowledge of the two languages, and, in some cases, of the two cultures as well. Naturally, each family has its own way of dealing with bilingualism, and there are obviously many factors that come into play.

What the experts say
According to several articles I read when investigating the subject, it is very important for parents to decide beforehand just how bilingual they want their children to be. Will they be happy if their kids achieve a good level of listening comprehension in the second language, even if they don’t actually speak it? Will speaking and understanding the two languages – with one language being dominant over the other – be enough? Will they want their children to be literate in both languages? And finally, there’s the question of how far the parents are willing to go to help their children reach that level of bilingualism.

Bilingualism in families around us
With these tips in mind, I set out to discover how some families here in ***** cope with bilingualism. My first interviewee was Ted Banks. Born and raised in Utah, USA, Ted and his Mexican-born wife, Magda have three children. I asked Ted if they’d had a plan from the beginning to raise their children bilingually, and he said “yes, of course. Our plan has always been to speak English at home, unless we have visitors.” It isn’t always easy to stick to the plan however, because his wife’s native language is Spanish, and the children speak Spanish at school. When they are in public, he and his wife always speak Spanish, “except when we want to speak confidentially about something. Then we switch to English.”

Ted said that with his kids it’s not always easy. “Many times I speak to them in English and they answer me in Spanish.” I asked him how much of the two cultures his kids have absorbed, and he said that their knowledge of Mexican culture is very well-developed, but the American side perhaps needs reinforcement. “For example, they do all their reading in Spanish, which could be due to the fact that reading is something they see as forced, something required by school authorities.” On the other hand, Ted says his kids are perfectly comfortable surfing the internet and watching movies in English!

Finally, I asked Ted if the confusion between the languages had ever caused a funny incident and he told me that his youngest daughter once scolded him at the store for saying a bad word. It seems that when he asked her in English what she wanted, she answered him in Spanish, “Popohuates.” Ted said, “Popohuates? There’s no such thing! Don’t you mean, cacahuates?” Then she said very firmly, “SHHH, Daddy. You shouldn’t say ‘caca’!”

Another father’s experience
Tim Taylor says he came to Mexico from Canada some years ago because he wanted to leave the 1st world behind, and he embraced Mexico – the culture, the language – thankful “to get away from the materialism of life in a developed country”. He met and married a native of Veracruz, and began to make his living as an English teacher. However, at home they spoke Spanish, as his wife didn’t speak English. When I asked if he and his wife made a plan to raise their two sons bilingually, he said, no, there was never a conscious decision on his part to speak only English to them. At any rate, he believes that “fathers traditionally have less quality contact time with their kids than mothers. I was working long hours and when I got home, I wanted to feel really united with my family. When you’re a family, you’ve got to be all together. When both parents are not bilingual, it doesn’t work trying to maintain communication in the other language.” However, he says, his sons can speak good English now – though he doesn’t think they’ll ever be English teachers!
When I asked Tim if he ever felt at a disadvantage speaking with his kids in a language that wasn’t his native language, he said matter-of-factly, “Part of the package of parenting is knowing that it’s not easy. Communication problems happen even when a family is monolingual.” For Tim, patience is the key!

A completely bilingual family
My next candidate was Tom Hill, also from Canada, whose wife is from Mexico City. Tom says he met Maru when she went to take an intensive English course in his hometown, Toronto. “I was her teacher so right from the beginning, we established English as the language we would speak to each other.” When their daughters were born, they decided that Tom would always speak to them in English and Maru in Spanish. He and his family later moved to Mexico, where they have lived ever since. During the girls’ formative years, Tom says, “Maru and I were pretty strict about the bilingual rule, but once we felt that the job had been done, we slacked off.” When I asked Tom if his kids always responded to him in English, he said, “No, sometimes they answer in Spanish. But there’s never been any pressure on them to respond in one language or the other.”

I asked Tom about other ways he contributed to their bilingualism, and he said he always read them bedtime stories in English when they were little. Today both his teen-aged daughters are completely bilingual, even though they have never studied in bilingual schools. Finally, I asked Tom if there were ever any situations that made him feel at a disadvantage, being the “foreigner”. He said that sometimes in social situations he feels a bit at a disadvantage. He claims to be “quite witty” in English… whereas in Spanish, he misses many opportunities to make a witty response because he’s not as quick to think of one in Spanish.

From a subjective viewpoint
As further backup to this article, I decided to interview my own kids. I should warn you though, that as parents in a bilingual family situation, my husband, originally from Mexico City, and I – a native Texan – broke the cardinal rule that was stressed in the articles I read. We did not prepare our kids at all for a bilingual education. Nonetheless, all of our kids have eventually, and to different degrees, become bilingual.

In my own defense, I began with the good intention of speaking to the children in English, but I didn’t always have the opportunity, as I was living with my mother-in-law at first. When the older ones began public elementary school, they became very nationalistic and didn’t want to have anything to do with their American side. They wouldn’t speak English except when we were alone, and even then, only for a few minutes at a time. Eventually I took them to Texas for one school year so that they would be exposed to English for awhile. But after that year, we were back in Mexico for good. In the end, the children never fully embraced the language until they decided for themselves that speaking English was something to be desired, and this I feel is the key to becoming truly bilingual.

I asked my husband how his life has been affected by living with a woman from another culture and another language, and he answered that it’s not my culture or language that’s affected him, since we live in Mexico and speak Spanish with each other, but rather my personal lifestyle, which is sometimes drastically different from his. The interesting thing is that our children have developed cultural traits from both of us – being extremely independent as American kids are urged to be, yet being extremely family-conscious, as Mexican kids are brought up to be.

The following opinions are those of our kids’ in response to questions about being in a bilingual family:

Fran, 25, lives in France, where she is soon to be married to her Parisian boyfriend. After 3 years of life in Paris, she is by now pretty much trilingual. When I asked her (in one of our weekend internet chats) if she feels like she’s losing her roots somehow, she said, “No, I’m finally beginning to understand my roots.” The language she speaks with her fiancé: “Mostly French, especially around other people, but when we’re alone we tend to speak English.” Does she see herself living permanently in France? “No, not permanently. But then, we haven’t talked about where we want to live permanently. I mean, who’s to say what will happen in the future?”

Lu, a 22-yr-old philosophy major, said in answer to a question about being bilingual, “it’s not so much a question of speaking 2 languages, but rather living in English and living in Spanish. The grammar and syntax of each language affect the way life is experienced. Spanish can be more abstract than English, but English is more practical and empirical. It gets confusing if I’m speaking one language in a certain situation where I realize that I could express myself better in the other language… On the other hand, when you’re bilingual, you have the option of seeing things 2 ways – backwards and forwards.”

At my incredulous “¿¿WHAT??”, he gave this example: “In English you could start describing something without naming it until the end, i.e. ‘the gigantic red ball’, whereas in Spanish, you name the thing first and then describe it: ‘la pelota gigantesca y roja’. So you conceptualize things differently, depending on the language you’re using.” (Did I mention that he’s majoring in Philosophy???)

With Anto, who is 19 and out of High School, I got quite a different view on the subject. When I asked him if I could interview him, his answer was: “Okay, but show me the green paper. I don’t do interviews for free.”
Anto considers Spanish his native language, explaining, “I only speak English because my mom hassles me so much.”

He said that he never spoke English until he was around 8. “Before, of course I could understand English but I didn’t speak it ‘cause I knew I didn’t sound good in it. It’s like being autistic… you know something’s there in your mind, but you don’t know how to use it.”

Did he ever rebel against speaking English? “Yeah, like when my mom made me tell her the plots of movies in English. It was frustrating because I think faster in Spanish.”

What about advantages? “Well, yeah, like getting out of English classes and exams. But sometimes it’s not so great. Like when you have to recite a poem in English in front of everyone. They all think you can do it because you’re supposedly bilingual, but you don’t feel so sure about that…”

As for advantages and disadvantages of the two languages: “With Spanish, you can express yourself more sentimentally. Spanish is a romantic language.”
And English? “I hate the way you don’t spell the words the way they’re pronounced. I much prefer reading in Spanish, but maybe if my mom had made me read and write in English every night when I was little, things would be different…”

Chloe, 14 and presently in Jr. High, said that she couldn’t remember when she started speaking English, but that the reason was “to speak to my mom’s family.” According to Chloe, “English is harder than Spanish. I can’t remember how to conjugate the verbs correctly every time.”

Does she read in both languages? “Yeah, my mom is always giving me books to read in English. Once we had this poem by Lord Byron in Spanish class. So I had to read the original poem out loud in English and another girl read it in Spanish. It was a poem comparing the night with a woman, really nice in both versions. I also read Harry Potter in Spanish and English, but I liked it better in English. Maybe because it was the original language… I don’t know… it was just ‘funner’ in English. So after that, I read Harry Potter 2, 3 and 4 in English.

Does anything bother her about being bilingual? “Yeah! It’s horrible – weird – when I have to speak in English with my mother around my friends. They think it’s cool, but I always feel really uncomfortable.”

How about the good side? “Well it’s nice to be good in English class, and in the future, it’ll be easier. I mean English is the most spoken language in the world – after Chinese – and Spanish is the third language. So if you speak English and Spanish, you’ve got a good start!

Until recently, our youngest son, Sam, 11, was still hiding in the bilingual closet! I was so tired of hearing him say things like: “This is Mexico. In Mexico, you speak Spanish!”, that I took him with me for a few months to English classes so he would have to express himself in English at least for a few hours a week!

As a final observation, I’d like to say that I agree with Tim, who pointed out at the end of our interview: “Throughout most of the world, being bilingual or trilingual is nothing exceptional. When you come to think of it, it’s actually odder to see a country today that is basically monolingual.”

How bilingualism works in this relationship

When I came to Mexico thirty years ago, I didn't speak a word of Spanish. Well, I could say "gracias", and "baño", and maybe a few other words, but that was about it. I thought I was going to "pick up the language" while I was there, but I was three months into my traveling around before I met people who didn't speak English and weren't really intent on trying to practice what little they knew. (My future husband was one of those people, though he didn't figure into my life in a personal way until two years later).

When I began learning Spanish it was like this: I accepted an invitation to live for three months (the rest of the time allotted to me on my visa) with a family in Mexico City. The young people in the family consisted of three sisters and 4 brothers. We would talk one-on-one with a dictionary between us and we'd get the main gist of our conversation by using keywords which would be looked up in either Spanish or English depending on who was thinking of the word. Once the meaning was clear, the conversation would continue in Spanish. English was a reference for me, but not the language of expression in any conversation. And I wanted it that way.

I jumped into my life in Mexico and there were no ifs ands or buts about accepting everything - including the language. I didn't want to speak English. I wanted to speak Spanish. I wanted to feel that I was really Mexican. Now I realize that it's a natural human longing to feel accepted by the society in which you live and that's probably why I was so determined to speak Spanish and adopt many new ways of acting and reacting, new perspectives on old issues; in short, I was able and willing to become a new minshap; I'm not kidding - many people have actually told me something to that effect, like: "you're sweeter in Spanish". Or, "you seem so different when you speak English".

In addition to the above, once I began really hanging out with my partner, he probably wouldn't have seen the relationship as something to be pursued if I had insisted on English being part of the deal. And in fact, I should mention from the start that one of the things that originally impressed me about my partner, was his vocabulary. I was eager to learn the language, but being an expressive person myself, and having a large vocabulary which I love to make use of in English, I yearned for a good model for increasing my Spanish vocabulary. The first time I listened to my partner expound upon an idea that came up (by then I was speaking Spanish "más o menos" as they say), I fell in love with his eloquent use of words.

So that was my side of how we began. On his side, I've always known that one of the things he loves most about me is the way I could become part of his world and not drag mine into it. This is not to say that I don't bring my views and opinions and ways of doing things into our lives on a constant basis - of course I do this. But I do it without expecting him to swallow all of it in English. I do it in his language. And I know that many of those US-isms spark up, enliven, give food for thought, and generally refresh our relationship all the time.

Thus, a pattern emerged from the beginning. Spanish was the language we spoke to each other. And we were pretty puritan about it. I couldn't stand not being able to find the word I wanted to say in Spanish and would badger him until I got the precise word, or I would interrupt the conversation to get the dictionary and look it up. We didn't do things like say a whole sentence in Spanish with one word in English interjected because there was no Spanish equivalent. There was always a Spanish equivalent!

But that was then. That was before our kids came along. Then there were new dilemas to contend with. I wanted to speak English with them, and did so to a certain extent - especially with fned, who was a toddler when we went to live in the US for one year. But when we came back to Mexico and Lu was born, I was living with my MIL and she didn't speak English. So I spoke more and more Spanish with my kids and it kind of became the language at home for them. Whenever I wanted to speak English, they would insist that I switch to Spanish and for many years I did.

Fifteen years ago, I began teaching English where I now live and work. Although I'd been teaching English all along for the previous 15 years, this was the first time that I spoke the language so extensively throughout the day. In my present working environment, I speak English with most of my colleagues and always only English with my students, in or out of class. Somehow, this started to spill over at home, and culminated in my writing an article in the school magazine about bilingual families. By then, my kids were growing up and actually WANTED to speak English. They were starting to have bilingual friends and realized that English could actually come in handy. So, I started speaking English with them more and more and lo and behold, my partner started to get in on the act!

Of course, he's always been able to speak some English, but his accent is pretty exaggerated and he tries to get away with breaking as many grammar rules of English as he can. But nowadays, we often throw in English expressions as we speak. Sometimes I feel that my Spanish has suffered from not being used so constantly and because I've relaxed about trying to find a way to say EVERYTHING in Spanish. Nowadays, if I don't find the word I'm looking for, I have no compunction about saying it in English and expecting everyone else to just "get it" in English.

LINKS TO THIS POST: GROUP BLOGGING on bilingualism in expat couples

We won - but what does that imply?

I was watching it from the sidelines, so to speak. Listening to each new piece of news on the candidates, tuning in to the countless videos about this one or that one saying this or that against their opponent.

I saw the debates and began to feel passionately sure that Obama was what the country needed!

And I wasn't the only one. We were all feeling like that! We saw the outcome of the election going to the Democrats as the possible turning point in history - we saw Obama as our Leader.

So now - he's won! We've won! And what does that imply for the future? Will we begin to see an end to war in the Middle East? Will the damages to our environment be reckoned with and overcome? Will Obama reach leaders of other countries around the world so that we can all unite and fix our planet?

Much remains to be seen. But at any rate - it's a start! And for now, that implies a new beginning that we can all take part in!

Déjà vu

A couple of weeks ago, two things happened at work that I thought about a lot, but didn't get a chance to talk over with anyone else to see if they found a similar significance in the events or if I was just blowing them out of proportion. Tonight, however, while reading fned's blog, I felt a definite sense of déjà vu and simply had to blog about the parallels in her experiences and my own.

Fned states:
"I recall a few months ago reading a monthly report sent by a British manager to his French boss. The mail was detailed but not overwhelming in description, contained praise and recrimination where called for; mentioned areas for improvement and pinpointed subjects that needed to be addressed before they became problems. I remember thinking « Wow! What a great report! It provides all the necessary information and yet remains simple and clear for someone who’s not on hand locally ».

In my case, it happened like this:
One of my students needed to write up a presentation his boss would make at an international board of directors in English. So we used the class to do it and we came up with what I thought were three very powerful slides. They were "detailed but not overwhelming in description, mentioned areas for improvement and pinpointed subjects that needed to be addressed before they became problems."
That was on a Friday.

Fned continues:
The French boss later forwarded that same report to his own Boss after having deleted 75% of the text, keeping only the strictly essential of the message (past events, new developments, next steps) all in a series of concise and brief bullet points.

In my case:
The next Monday, my student greeted me by showing me the final version of his presentation, which his boss had gone over and "forwarded to his own Boss after having deleted 75% of the text, keeping only the strictly essential of the message (past events, new developments, next steps) all in a series of concise and brief bullet points" in a single slide.

PRETTY CLOSE!

Fned contends that she can't help "feeling that somewhere in that example was a very subtle indication of the differences in how corporate information is conveyed from one country to the other."

In my case (a situation of Americans, Mexicans and Germans working together), I thought, hmmm, it must be an international phenomenon... the higher up you go, the more concise the information must be...

But no matter how you see it, it does seem that the highest level of an international corporation will never really be abreast of the realities they are facing. By the time they get the information, it is so edited that they never really see what the people who are actually working on those projects are facing. Makes me wonder!

The other event was what fned described as "how the first person is used (or not used) in communicating." She gives the example of English speakers using the first person "I" or "we", thus implicating the person in the message. She says that the French use "on" which could be interpreted as "we" but not necessarily including the person actually communicating the message!

I would like to add that Spanish speakers have an even more ambiguous way of getting around pointing the finger. In Spanish you can use "se" to say that something "was done", without shedding light on who actually did it. This of course is the passive voice and is used in English too, but sparingly! Key information needs to be more precise. You might say: IT WAS DECIDED that... but only if you begin with something like: WE had a meeting, during the course of which it was decided that...

In Spanish you can start by saying: A meeting was had, and it was decided that... and we are left with a question in our minds as to WHO HAD THE MEETING????

As a translator, I have battled with this issue time and again. Sometimes I have to call a client to ask for clarification on the who, what and where of things because of what I perceive as rampant (ab)use of "se".

In conclusion, I have to agree with fned that it gets really tricky when you want to translate meaning from one language to another!

Pictures by request

The trip was lovely so here are some pictures!

First Jeanne picked me up at the airport and we went to Lulu's Jailhouse Cafe. She'd heard they have the best homemade southern cooking, and they sure did!



Note those huge chicken fried steaks, the mashed potatoes and fried okra - not to mention the homemade rolls!!! WHOA!



After stuffing ourselves and still having to ask for doggie bags - how could we ever have finished all that food? - I told Jeanne I was going to need a nap so we found a place along the highway where a river runs through, spread out a blanket and got some shut-eye under a shady tree...




It was very nice, but in the end, we had to check out that water and it was cold!! DELICIOUSLY COLD and crystal clear. The picture doesn't do it justice, but I couldn't take any pictures when I was actually in the water. This was right before we decided to change into shorts and jump in!



After the swim, we continued the way until we arrived at the rendezvous point with my sibs and went to see Drew play in his band! They were really rockin'!



And we rocked with them in our own fashion!!





Finally we got to the home of our wonderful padres and naturally, one of the first things we had to do was sit down and play some Mah-Jhong! (spell it anyway you like... this is the way I spell it!)



The next morning we were up early and decided to get in some exercise before going to our cousins' house for lunch.



It was a good thing we did take that trek... Lunch was out of this world!!



And we even got in a good cousins picture!!!



The next day was the big birthday bash! It started with some earings...



From there it went on to all sorts of gifts until the birthday girl was just surrounded by gifts!



But then it was time to get ready for the surprise lunch, and was it ever FABULOUS!We had arranged a lunch at the hotel where Mimi first worked 60 years ago. The hotel was so impressive. Mimi says it's changed a bit over the last 60 years! Here you can see the entrance to the dining room (I had the buffet and it was all so mouthwateringly delicious...)



Guess there are no pictures of our meal, because we were too busy eating it! However, we did get this gem of the birthday girl blowing out her 80th candle on a couple of yummy eclaires!

For my Mother on her Birthday

Time moves. Whether you understand that to mean that time itself moves, or that time moves us, the fact of the matter is that from one moment to another, things change. I like to think that Life is a circle. You can look at Life however you want, but I see it as being circular. So that as time moves, it takes us around and back to ourselves. (the wheel of time?) We may go around more than once. The circle may become concentric or expanding, but we are always going round and round.

So, let's look at the number 80. That's a pretty circular set of digits. There's the zero, the big one, and there's an eight, which is made up of two circles. Is there any divine meaning in the number 80 with reference to Life then? Perhaps not. Maybe the meaning is more symbolic, the number for today. Because today, this very day - the meaning is clear: Happy 80th MOM! This one's for you.

The circles in the number of your years make a lot of sense when I think of you Mom. The two circles in the 8 symbolize your movement as wife and mother. You can draw it as two separate circles, or you can draw it in zigzag fashion, like two "s"s back to back. In your case, I'd say definitely zigzag, because you've always managed to keep us all intertwined. Back and forth, to and fro, we all move around and with each other. As we've grown with time, the zigzagging lengthens out and slows down, but it always unites and seamlessly comes together, and that's how I see you Mom; a woman who has always united the parts of her life into a perfect unit of completeness.

But wait - do you think I'm assuming that a woman only exists as wife and mother? No, no! Don't forget the big 0. The circle of Life! That one goes around and around, as we travel around inside it. In my Mother's case, it goes smoothly and with grace and balance. That's the Libra in you Mom! And the circle itself is HUGE! It has always tended to expand rather than contract. Your zest for life has kept you from limiting your circle. It's made you open to learning, becoming, enjoying new experiences, and to encouraging others to learn, become, enjoy new experiences, and applauding us when we do!

It's hard to put into words all the love and wonder I feel, how blessed I know I am, whenever I think about my mother; how I relish the fact that she is my mother. From the time I was little, I always knew she was a special mother. And today, I must say, after listening to my kids' reflections on the topic, that there's definitely a ripple effect: "Mom-ness" effortlessly expanding into "Mimi-ness"!

So here's to you Mom. I am so thrilled and honored to be here with you and my Dad and my sibs on your 80th to celebrate all our love for you and our best wishes for a wonderful, happy happy birthday!