He sat up, angry. "Well, this is what's inside," he blazed at her. An Indian translated into English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these days, people look polite. This is me." Caught in the aspic of his adopted language, he had begun to hear, in India's Babel, an ominous warning: don't come back again."
I feel a similar struggle between my Vietnamese heritage and American culture. When I was little, my parents and I agreed that English would be more appropriate as my dominant tongue, seeing as I needed to grow up, learn, and get a job here in my adulthood. The brat that I was, I felt that this meant I didn't need Vietnamese. Vietnamese grew more difficult as there were few other people to practice it with, and it was so much easier to speak English since my parents have a greater fluency than most Vietnamese immigrants I encounter.
I, of course, grew to have a greater appreciation for my culture as I got older and less stupid. Unfortunately, the same obstacles remain, in that I have few others to practice my parents' language with, and my aptitude with languages stands as ... leaving something to be desired. My aunts and uncles coo when they hear me speak Vietnamese, because many of my cousins have even less of a desire to learn the language. Me speaking the language is less of a natural thing and more something precious and quaint.
My parents advise me not to visit Vietnam, where American born Vietnamese are especially naive and susceptible to abuse, which makes sense. It still makes me feel like a terrible person to think that I would be an alien in my parents' country. Thinking about it makes me feel a certain fear and futility in trying to continue my personal education of Vietnamese heritage, like I'm setting myself up for rejection by my family on a national scale. Then again, no amount of Americanization can change the Vietnamese blood in me or deny me the right to appreciate it.
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