Translating Lives : Living with Two Languages and Cultures 9780702244322, 9780702236037

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E D I T E D BY

Mary Besemeres & Anna Wierzbicka

Living with Two Languages and Cultures

‘…a book of revelations.’ – Arnold Zable

TRANSLATING LIVES

Mary Besemeres is a Research Fellow at Curtin University of Technology. She is the author of Translating One’s Self: Language and selfhood in cross-cultural autobiography (Peter Lang 2002) and articles on bilingual life writing. She co-edits the journal Life Writing.

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of numerous books including English: Meaning and culture (OUP 2006), Emotions Across Languages and Cultures (CUP 1999) and Understanding Cultures through their Key Words (OUP 1997).

The two editors are a mother–daughter team, and while they have different home disciplines (English literature in one case, linguistics in the other), they share both research interests and life experiences.

E D I T E D BY

Mary Besemeres & Anna Wierzbicka

TRANSLATING LIVES Living with Two Languages and Cultures

First published 2007 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia www.uqp.uq.edu.au © 2007 Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka (compilation and introduction). Essays © individual authors.

This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset in 11/16 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

Cataloguing in Publication data National Library of Australia Translating lives: Living with two languages and cultures. ISBN 978 0 70 223603 7 (pbk.) ISBN 978 0 7022 4432 2 (pdf) 1. Language and culture – Australia. 2. Intercultural communication. 3. Bilingualism – Psychological aspects. 4. Identity (Psychology). I. Besemeres, Mary. II. Wierzbicka, Anna. 306.440994

Contents

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List of contributors Introduction Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka Strangers at home Kim Scott From bilingual to linguist Michael Clyne Three worlds: Inheritance and experience Brij V Lal Playgrounds and battlegrounds: A child’s experience of migration Irene Ulman Returning to my mother tongue: Veronica’s journey continues Zhengdao (Veronica) Ye East meets West, or does it really? Jock Wong

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7. Growing up between two languages/two worlds: Learning to live without belonging to a terra Andrea Witcomb 8. Two languages, two cultures, one (?) self: Between Polish and English Anna Wierzbicka 9. My experience of living in a different culture: The life of a Korean migrant in Australia Kyung-Joo Yoon 10. Between z˙al and emotional blackmail: Ways of being in Polish and English Mary Besemeres 11. The journey of self-discovery in another language Anna Gladkova 12. Foster mother tongue Eva Sallis Endnotes References Index

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List of contributors

Mary Besemeres is a Research Fellow at Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia. She is the author of Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-cultural Autobiography (Peter Lang, 2002) and articles on bilingual life writing, most recently ‘Anglos abroad: Memoirs of immersion in a foreign language’, Biography (28:1, 2005). She has co-edited a special issue of the online journal Mots pluriels (23 March 2003) on autobiography between languages and cultures, and with Maureen Perkins co-edits the journal Life Writing. Michael Clyne, an honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at Melbourne University, is the doyen of studies on ‘community languages’ in Australia, and the author of key books on this and related subjects. These include: Transference and Triggering (Nijhoff, 1967), Language and Society in the German-speaking Countries (Cambridge University Press, 1984) and its sequel The German Language in a Changing Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Community Languages: The Australian Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Pluricentric

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Languages (ed) (Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), Inter-cultural Communication at Work (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning (ed) (Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), Dynamics of Language Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Australia’s Language Potential (UNSW Press, 2005). Anna Gladkova was born and educated in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. She received her BA in English Philology and Teaching English as a Foreign Language and an MA in Linguistics from the Nizhny Novgorod Linguistic University in 1996 and 2003, respectively. After completing her BA she taught English at the same university for five years before coming to Australia. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Australian National University during 2002, conducting research in cross-cultural semantics. She returned to Australia in 2004 to take up doctoral studies (also at the ANU). In Canberra, she lives a ‘cross-cultural life’ as a resident at a university college which hosts postgraduate students from all over the world. Her recent publications include studies of Russian social emotions and value terms reflecting ongoing cultural change in Russia. Brij Lal is Professor of Pacific History and Founding Director of the Centre for the Contemporary Pacific at the Australian National University. He is the author of Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (Journal of Pacific History Monograph, 1983), Power and Prejudice: The Making of the Fiji Crisis (New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, 1988), Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the 20th Century (University of Hawaii Press, 1992), Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations (ed) (Journal of Pacific History Monograph, 1992), A Vision for Change: AD Patel and the Politics of Fiji (Asia Pacific Press, 1997), Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey of Indenture through Fiji (Fiji Museum, 2000), Pacific Islands: An Encyclopedia (ed) (University of Hawaii Press, 2000), Mr Tulsi’s Store: A Fijian Journey (Pandanus Books, 2001), and Pacific Places, Pacific Histories (ed) (University of Hawaii Press, 2004), among other works. He is founding editor of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs (Honolulu) and of

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Conversations (Canberra); editor of The Journal of Pacific History; and was a co-architect of the 1995 Fiji constitution. Eva Sallis is the author of five novels: Hiam (1998), which won the Vogel Literary Award and the Dobbie Literary Award; The City of Sealions (2002); Mahjar (2003), Fire, Fire (2004) and The Marsh Birds (2005) − all published by Allen & Unwin; and a book of literary criticism, Sheherazade Through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphosis of the 1001 Nights (Curzon, 1999). She has co-edited several anthologies, including, with Sonja Dechian and Heather Millar, two anthologies of stories by young Australian writers: Dark Dreams (Wakefield Press, 2004) and No Place Like Home: Australian Stories (Wakefield Press, 2005). Eva is co-founder and president of Australians Against Racism, Inc. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Humanities (Discipline of English) at the University of Adelaide. Kim Scott is the author of two acclaimed novels, True Country (1993) and Benang (1999). The latter won the 1999 Western Australia Premier’s Book Award, the 2000 Miles Franklin Award and the 2001 Kate Challis RAKA Award, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Impac Award. He has also written Kayang and Me (2005), an oral-based history of his family, the south coast Noongar people of Western Australia, with Hazel Brown; and a children’s book, The Dredgersaurus (2001) − all published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press. His poetry, short stories and articles have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies. He has been a guest at many writers’ and Indigenous arts festivals in Australia, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Melbourne. He was one of the guest speakers in the 2001 Century of Federation Alfred Deakin Lecture Series in Melbourne. Irene Ulman is a translator, interpreter and journalist on SBS Television’s program Insight; and for many years, a translator and interpreter. In her own words: ‘I have been interpreting and translating ever since I came to Australia in 1974 and started living with two languages. Later this naturally-acquired skill turned into varied and rewarding employment. Now

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I am a journalist on SBS Television, but I still try to translate when I can and have done regular conference interpreting (it helps me remain bilingual!). For a number of years I subtitled Russian films for SBS Television. In 1996 the Australian literary magazine Heat published my translation of a chapter from a novel by Yuri Mikhailik, The Great Fountain.’ Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has lectured extensively at universities in Europe, America and Asia and is the author of numerous books, including: Cross-cultural Pragmatics (Mouton de Gruyter, 1991; 2nd edn 2003), Semantics: Primes and Universals (Oxford University Press, 1996), Understanding Cultures Through Their Keywords (Oxford University Press, 1997), Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge University Press, 1999), What Did Jesus Mean? Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2001), and English: Meaning and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2006). Her work spans a number of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and religious studies as well as linguistics, and has been published in many journals across all these disciplines. At the time of writing, Andrea Witcomb was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage in the Faculty of Built Environment and Design at Curtin University of Technology. She is now Associate Professor at Deakin University. Andrea has curated many exhibitions and is the author of Travellers and Immigrants: Portugêses em Perth (Research Institute for Cultural Heritage, Curtin University of Technology, 1997), a catalogue of belongings and artifacts of Portuguese migrants to Perth, with accompanying oral histories of several migrants. She is also the author of Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Routledge, 2003) and co-editor, with Chris Healy, of South Pacific Museums: An Experiment in Culture (Monash e-press, 2006).

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Jock Wong, a Chinese−Singaporean, was awarded a PhD in Linguistics at the Australian National University in 2005. He subsequently held the position of Temporary Lecturer at ANU and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on Singapore English and culture and their relation to ‘Anglo English’ and ‘Anglo culture’. These articles include: ‘Social hierarchy in the “speech culture” of Singapore’ in Cliff Goddard (ed), Ethnopragmatics: A Fresh Approach to Discourse in Culture (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006); ‘Why you so Singlish one? A semantic and cultural interpretation of the Singapore English particle one’, Language in Society (34:2, 2005); ‘Cultural scripts, ways of speaking and perceptions of personal autonomy: Anglo English vs. Singapore English’, Intercultural Pragmatics, Special issue on cultural scripts (1:2, 2004); and ‘The pragmatic particles of Singapore English: A semantic and cultural interpretation’, Journal of Pragmatics (36, 2004). Zhengdao (Veronica) Ye, a Temporary Lecturer in Linguistics at the Australian National University, is completing a PhD dissertation on Chinese emotions and values. She is the author of numerous articles on aspects of Chinese language and culture, including: ‘An inquiry into “sadness” in Chinese’ in Jean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka (eds), Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective (Mouton de Gruyter, 2001); ‘“La double vie de Veronica”: Reflections on my life as a Chinese migrant in Australia’, Life Writing (1:1, 2004); and ‘The Chinese folk model of facial expressions: A linguistic perspective’, Culture & Psychology (10:2, 2004). Kyung-Joo Yoon was until recently a Temporary Lecturer in Linguistics at the Australian National University, from which she obtained a doctorate in 2003. She taught Cross-cultural Communication (as well as other linguistic courses) at both the Australian National University and the University of New England at Armidale. Currently, she holds the position of Research Fellow at the Foreign Language Training and Testing Center in the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Korea. She is the author of many articles

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on Korean language and culture, including ‘Not just words: Korean social models and the use of honorifics’, Intercultural Pragmatics, Special issue on cultural scripts (1:2, 2004).

Introduction Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka

Most people in the world are bilingual. Yet in countries like Australia, where English is the dominant language, even now, in the era of ‘multiculturalism’, English is often taken for granted and seen as the ‘normal’ means of communication. Those who speak only English know of course that there are out there, in the world at large, people who speak languages other than English, and that in Australia too there are people who speak other languages in which they may feel more at home. As Leitner notes: ‘Today’s Australia is one of the most multilingual countries in the world, with well over 200 “Languages Other Than English” . . . used in a variety of contexts by over two million Australians’.1 In fact, as Leitner points out: ‘From early in Aboriginal history to the present time, Australia has been a host to many languages’.2 Nonetheless, there is still in this country little understanding of what it means to live with two (or more) languages rather than one; or what it means to be a native speaker of another language in a country where English alone is the shared medium of communication. How can people living their lives exclusively through English imagine what it means to live between different languages? Having no experience of

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such a condition themselves, the only way they can learn about it is through the experience of others. Australia is a country rich in languages and rich in bilingual experience. To date, however, this experience has not been widely shared and a monolingual perspective on the world dominates the country’s public discourse as well as the private thinking of most Anglo Australians. Bilingual experience is a resource that until now has hardly been tapped in Australia. For the failure to tap this hidden wealth the country is paying a price in a variety of ways, most evidently in miscommunication and disharmony in the workplace,3 but also in many other walks of life. A monolingual perspective on the world is also a monocultural one. Although Australia prides itself on being multicultural, there is actually little awareness of what it means to live between cultures. There is also little awareness of how difficult intercultural communication really is and how much there is for everyone to learn about other cultural perspectives before effective intercultural communication can be established. It is not enough to be tolerant, to have good will, to be curious about other people’s folk dances, costumes and culinary traditions. The key to cross-cultural understanding is language. If the general level of such understanding in Australia is to rise, Australians need to develop more of an insight into what it means not to feel at home in English in a country where English is both the only official language and the only shared lingua franca. They also need to gain a sense of how social conflict is often due to miscommunication that has its source in people’s diverse language backgrounds. Shared access to English is not sufficient to overcome such problems in social interaction. Monolingualism limits people’s understanding of the world and of human life in more than one way. It brings about an unconscious absolutisation of the perspective on the world suggested by one’s native language. It is only exposure to other perspectives (those suggested by other languages) which shows us that what we, as native speakers of one language, instinctively take for reality is in fact a particular interpretation of reality.4 In a sense, living with languages is like living with other people. Just as

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our relationships with people shape us and make us who we are, so too do our relationships with languages. If a person lives his or her life through one language, this person, too, is shaped to some extent by that language – but lacking a comparative perspective they are unlikely to be aware of it. By contrast, a person moving between languages can be aware of having a relationship with each of them − a different one in each case − and of being shaped by these relationships. They can also be aware that they can make choices in relation to their languages; using them in different ways and in different contexts, identifying them to different degrees, responding to them emotionally in different ways, and so on.5 There is a world of human experience which is closed to speakers of only one language – unless and until they share something of it through bilinguals’ autobiographical testimonies. Until recently, it was widely assumed in both scholarly literature and popular wisdom that valid knowledge can come only from objective study of external reality. Because of this assumption, some subjects of profound human interest and of great social importance could not be explored in depth and discussed in wide-reaching societal conversation. As a result, some knowledge vital to society – especially to a ‘multicultural’ one – was passed over in silence. As linguist John Haiman has written in relation to an earlier book by one of the present authors, the testimonials gathered here ‘came not from social scientists but from bilingual people who have “been there”’. Referring to a well-known anecdote about the linguist Roman Jakobson, who refused to support the writer Vladimir Nabokov for a chair in comparative literature at Cornell University on the grounds that an elephant may not be the best professor of zoology, Haiman writes: From a scientific point of view, using native testimonials is perhaps like ‘making an elephant a professor of zoology’, but it may be that on this kind of subject ‘elephants’ who do not pretend to transcend their species are more reliable authorities than ‘human professors of zoology’ who delude themselves that they are able to transcend theirs. To put this another way, the inner self is a subject that can be approached only from within.6

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In fact, many scientists are beginning to recognise that a ‘science of experience’ has to be based on subjective rather than (putatively) objective data.7 Monolingual scholars analysing bilingual and cross-cultural experience by ‘objective’ methods are likely to be deluding themselves in the way Haiman suggests. Australia can be characterised, in writer Eva Sallis’s words, as a ‘language-locked’ country.8 From colonisation until the mid-twentieth century mainstream society was effectively monolingual, despite the presence of hundreds of Aboriginal languages, largely hidden from the view of the dominant English-speaking culture. In the last half century or so this changed as a result of the radical change in Australia’s immigration policies and through the resulting advent of ‘community languages’, some of them with very large numbers of speakers. But this change in Australia’s linguistic situation has not yet led to a concomitant change in public consciousness of what it means to live with different languages,9 and to some extent, the country remains locked in an Anglocentric view of the world.10 It could be suggested that an ideal antidote to this Anglocentrism would be for every Australian to learn a second language and to live for a period in a country where they could not rely on English alone. Needless to say, as a general solution such a suggestion would be unrealistic. A more practical alternative is a kind of intercultural and cross-linguistic empathy training which could be made available to anyone willing to learn. Such training could stretch people’s imaginations and allow them to make up for the onesidedness of their own linguistic and cultural experience by drawing on the experience of others − those who have lived in two languages and cultures. To quote a famous passage by the great American linguist-cumanthropologist Edward Sapir (who emigrated as a child with his parents from Germany to the United States): Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially

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without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.11

Monolingual speakers of English are usually not aware of living in a world shaped by their native language and of being shaped by it themselves – in their ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with each other. In fact, some monolingual theoreticians have adamantly rejected Sapir’s insight, arguably thereby demonstrating, once again, the power of language-based ethnocentrism in action.12 By contrast, the experience of people moving between languages (such as that presented in this book) confirms the truth of Sapir’s words. An Australian voice expressing an insight closely akin to Sapir’s is that of the writer David Malouf, whose family background is part English, part Lebanese, and who has spent long periods of his life navigating between the world of English and that of Italian: It is all very well to regard language as simply ‘a means of communication’. It may be that for poor handlers of a language and for those to whom it is new and unfamiliar, who use it only for the most basic exchanges. But for most of us it is also a machine for thinking, for feeling; and what can be felt and thought in one language – the sensibility it embodies, the range of phenomena it can take in, the activities of mind as well as the objects and sensations it can deal with – is different, both in quality and kind, from one language to the next. The world of Chinese or Arabic is different from the world of German or French or English, as the worlds that those European languages embody and refer to differ from one another. A language is the history and experience of the men and women who, in their complex dealings with the world, made it . . . 13

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In most cases, the experience of moving, existentially, between languages and the revelation that one’s world, and even one’s self is shaped by one’s language(s) is linked with the immigrant condition – a condition which is often (and with good reason) seen as one of hardship and disadvantage, but which can also be seen as a potential source of valuable insights. Immigrants, and the children of immigrants, are the prototypical linguistic and cultural ‘hybrids’, to use the term favoured by another prominent Australian, the legal scholar Martin Krygier, himself a ‘hybrid’ and the son of ‘hybrid’ parents, who came to Australia as Polish Jewish refugees from Nazism. Hybrids have a specific resource available to them: a range of values, experiences, traditions, which are different from others that circulate in their heads and in the heads of those with whom they mix. That can be enriching both to them and those who meet with them. Moreover, where these components are psychologically salient – where they have meaning and significance for the hybrids themselves – they are not merely options from which to choose, like goods in a shop, or a background of exotic food, strong coffee or stronger spirits. They enter into people’s lives and souls.14

As Krygier points out, ‘hybridity’ brings with it not only a wider range of experiences and of ways of thinking, talking and interacting with others, but also a vantage point from which one can make comparisons: On the one hand, this can open windows for them into other, often very different and complex, cultures which complete outsiders find harder to penetrate. On the other hand, it offers to hybrids a vantage point, a perspective, and a quite peculiar place to stand. That metaphorical space is simultaneously inside and outside the cultures in which they are raised, in which they live, of which they are parts and which are parts of them.15

When speaking of the comparative outlook that hybridity can generate Krygier has in mind a broad spectrum of political, social and cultural

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comparisons rather than specifically linguistic ones, but what he says applies to linguistic differences as much as any other. All the contributors to this book are ‘hybrids’ in Krygier’s sense, and while their hybridity is in each case different all the autobiographical narratives included involve, and indeed focus on, linguistic hybridity. But if they are, in some sense, ‘hybrids’, they are certainly not passive inheritors of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds: above all, they are ‘selftranslators’. Diverse as these stories are, they all show ‘lives in translation’, to borrow bilingual author Eva Hoffman’s resonant phrase, and in each case the author shares with the reader aspects of his or her experience associated with that process of translating one’s life and oneself from one linguistic world into another. They show the pain of such self-translation, and also its rewards. *

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We invited people to contribute to this book who, we felt, would be able to explore insightfully their own experience of a life between languages, and who would together represent a wide range of languages, cultures and linguistic trajectories. While more and more cross-cultural autobiographies are being published in Australia, as elsewhere, few of these works explore in any depth the author’s experience of living between languages and cultures. It is this significant gap in contemporary Australian discussions of cross-cultural issues and experiences that Translating Lives seeks to fill. In the United States, in addition to the now iconic ‘language memoirs’ of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez among others, four important collections of personal narratives of bilingualism have appeared in recent years: Karen Ogulnick’s Language Crossings: Negotiating the Self in a Multicultural World, Isabelle de Courtivron’s Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Language and Creativity, Steven G Kellman’s Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft and Wendy Lesser’s The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues.16 In 2004, linguists Aneta Pavlenko and Jean-Marc Dewaele set up an international web questionnaire in which

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the question of whether bilinguals feel that they are different people when speaking different languages was posed to 1039 bi- and multilinguals around the world. Pavlenko’s study of the questionnaire’s results is presented in her book Emotions and Multilingualism. The publication of works like these reflects a growing awareness of the significance of bilingual experience in multiethnic societies such as the United States and Australia.17 Translating Lives is the first such book to appear in Australia. It offers an insight not only into aspects of the Australian migrant experience that have not been addressed before, but also into the cultural perspectives of peoples in the Asia−Pacific region, with contributors who migrated as adults from South and East Asia and the Pacific: China, Singapore, Korea and Fiji. It begins with a chapter by writer Kim Scott, author of the novels True Country and Benang, about the complexities of recovering his Noongar heritage through learning the Noongar language. The final chapter is by writer Eva Sallis, the daughter of a German-speaking migrant, who reflects on her lifelong engagement with Arabic, an engagement that underwrites her imaginative exploration of the world of Arabicspeaking migrants to Australia in novels such as Mahjar and The Marsh Birds. The book thus brings together Indigenous and immigrant perspectives on language and culture in a way that helps to highlight commonalities as well as differences among experiences of negotiating linguistic identities in Australia today. In preparing this book, we sent the contributors a set of questions to think about as they framed their chapters. We asked them to describe how they came to live with more than one language, and to highlight particular experiences that would give an idea of the place of these languages in their lives. We asked them to consider whether they could express the same sorts of thoughts and feelings in their different languages, and whether there were particular words or phrases in one language that conveyed important meanings that they couldn’t easily find words for in their other languages. We prompted them to reflect on whether they found themselves interacting with people in a different way depending on which language they were using, and to what extent this was due to facets of character of the people in

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question or to aspects of the languages being spoken. Finally, we wondered what it was like living with more than one language in an environment where many people know only English. While these questions were not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive, the contributors all responded to one or more of them in illuminating ways. In his compelling meditation on the place of Noongar in his own life, Kim Scott shows how precarious its position is, how marked by the history of its speakers’ dispossession, and suggests the scale of the challenges that face those who are working to revive and maintain it. Yet he also brings out ways in which the language is being creatively adapted by people like himself: ‘(re)learning’ Noongar means shaping it to accommodate contemporary urban realities, like washing the dishes or using an ATM machine, however incongruous talking about these things in Noongar might feel. Michael Clyne traces the role of languages in his own life − from his childhood in a German-speaking Jewish family in assimilationist 1950s Melbourne, through his years as a scholar of bilingualism working in German, and later Linguistics, departments. At the same time he provides a fascinating picture of how Australian attitudes to language have evolved since World War II. His chapter includes a vivid account of his experiences raising his daughter Joanna as a bilingual, and ends on the high note of the satisfaction he has gained from working with migrant families who want to maintain bilingual households in a predominantly Anglophone environment. Brij Lal, historian of the Pacific and grandson of a girmitiya or Fijian Indian indentured labourer, writes eloquently of the painful irony according to which Fiji-Hindi − the language of home and family life among Indo-Fijians − is looked down on by its own speakers and denied a voice in the public sphere; for example, in political speeches or on radio programs, whether in Fiji or in the diaspora. He shows how formal Hindi, the language of choice for Indo-Fijians in official situations, is by no means a mother tongue. Interacting with members of his family who live in Australia, Lal finds that the many different kinship terms in Fiji-Hindi – the respectful

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Kaka for father’s elder brother versus the playful Dada for his younger brother, for instance − create something of a parallel universe when spoken against the background of English with its uniform ‘uncle’. Irene Ulman, who emigrated from Russia to Israel at age ten, and then to Australia at age twelve, considers her relationship with Russian and English inseparable from her experience as a migrant child. In her lively and personal chapter she relates how that experience influenced her language choices later in life. In contrast to Michael Clyne, who followed a ‘one parent, one language’ strategy in raising his daughter (speaking to her in German while his wife spoke to her in English), Ulman spoke Russian to her daughters until they were four years old, and then spoke mostly English with them, while her parents and partner continued speaking with them in Russian. As she puts it, when her daughter Rivka came home from school speaking English, she ‘reacted with a very strong urge to support her in this new enterprise’. In her evocative essay ‘La Double Vie de Veronica’, Zhengdao (Veronica) Ye explored the cultural dilemmas of her life as a Chinese-speaking migrant in Australia. Here she returns to the theme of her bilingual existence through an account of a recent visit to Shanghai, the city of her birth. Ye writes of the huge social and technological changes that have occurred since she left China in 1997 and which she finds reflected in Shanghainese as it is now spoken. She emphasises the organic quality of speech in her mother tongue, likening her renewed use of it to a fish being thrown back into water. Yet she also shows how English has left its mark on her ways of thinking, so that calling a shop assistant in Shanghai ‘aunty’ − the normal term of address in such circumstances − now feels, at least momentarily, awkward. Jock Wong challenges an overly comfortable understanding of multiculturalism by arguing that cultural perspectives are not merely different but can be actively at odds with each other. Raised in Singapore, in a threebedroom unit shared by ten others, where people used imperatives with one another freely, on arrival in Australia Wong was bemused by the ubiquitousness of ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’, used even among friends. He has found the value placed on personal autonomy in Anglo-Australian culture

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inhibiting when forming friendships – in Cantonese, in contrast to English, male friends are referred to as ‘an arm and a leg’; that is, they are seen as an extension of each other – but also, over time, increasingly liberating. Andrea Witcomb’s chapter affirms how complex linguistic identity can be: her migration to Australia as a child was in part a return to her mother’s country and the native language of both parents. Born to a British father and Australian mother in Portugal, Witcomb spoke Portuguese almost exclusively until moving to Australia at the age of thirteen. After arriving in Australia, her father, who had re-created himself as a Portuguese academic after World War II, never spoke Portuguese with his children again. Poignantly, Witcomb suggests the effect that losing their joint language − the language in which he could express emotions − had on her father’s way of relating to her and her brothers, and hence on her own sense of self. Anna Wierzbicka offers a sequence of nine vignettes from her life as a bilingual. Among them are reflections on the untranslatability of the key Polish word pamia˛tka, something like ‘keepsake’ – a word saturated with the country’s history of upheaval and loss – and on the incompatibility of English words like ‘cute’ or ‘adorable’ with the way she perceives and relates to her young granddaughter. Using non-diminutive forms in English such as ‘hand’ or ‘head’ when speaking to or about a small child, rather than the diminutives which are all but mandatory in Polish, sounds ‘strangely cold and loveless’ to a Polish ear. Mary Besemeres likewise reflects on how language intervenes in personal relationships, with the Polish emotional concept of z˙al (here meaning something like ‘forceful reproach full of hurt’) helping to define her relations with Polish family members and Polish-speaking friends in Australia, sometimes in painful ways. Seen as a natural way of behaving in Polish, to many of her Anglo-Australian friends and acquaintances an expression of z˙al would look like emotional blackmail. The chapter by Kyung-Joo Yoon brings out particularly clearly the extent to which interacting with others is dependent on shared assumptions about how others may be spoken to or about − assumptions encoded in language. Humorously, she describes being taken aback by a conversation she

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observed between her young son, seven at the time, and some Australian women, who to her surprise smiled, listened and nodded at him in a way that Koreans would reserve exclusively for other adults. Her sons, who are effectively bicultural, shift between languages according to the relationship they want at a given moment: the younger addresses the elder by name in English when he wants to be equal and reverts to Korean when he wants to appeal to his brother’s good will. As Yoon comments, their relationship ‘doesn’t stand still’. Anna Gladkova, a Russian teacher of English completing her PhD at an Australian university, writes that she can’t help but find inadequate the matter-of-fact way in which Anglo Australians say goodbye to each other, without any expression of regret. She contrasts it with the Russian saying posidet’ na dorozhku (‘to sit together for a bit before parting’), which evokes how people farewelling friends ‘have to sit down near packed suitcases and mix occasional words of care with meaningful moments of self-explanatory silence’. In a phrase like posidet’ na dorozhku, which reflects such a different attitude towards leave-taking, we seem to touch the very pulse of culture. When speaking Arabic, author Eva Sallis feels that she is ‘trapped in a mode of charming formality’ which colours not only how others see her but who she feels herself to be. She argues that this goes beyond mere role-playing: her senses of humour in English and Arabic are perceptibly different and her opinions tend to change depending on which language she is inhabiting at the time. Strikingly, she affirms that even when her fiction ‘has nothing overtly Arabic, it is about ideas that are born from the perceptions bilinguality has given [her]’. The chapters gathered here bring together a wide range of personal, linguistic and cultural perspectives. Translating Lives presents a unique array of voices speaking on a vital aspect of Australian life. We hope that it may spark a wider conversation, in Australia and beyond, about the relationship between language, society, culture and that elusive and complex entity, the self.

CH A P T E R 1

Strangers at home Kim Scott

Unlike most contributors to this book, I didn’t grow up speaking two languages. I didn’t grow up speaking my own ancestral Indigenous language – Noongar – in addition to English and, in fact, only began learning Noongar language as an adult. So, rather than considering bilingualism as such, I’ll instead attempt to explain my writing as a struggle to match the English language with a non-verbal sense of self and of heritage. I will also refer to how that ‘nonverbal’ sense of self has developed as a result of learning the language of my Noongar ancestors, the people indigenous to south-western Australia who were literally more than decimated within decades of the arrival of Englishspeaking colonists. I have ancestors among the Noongar, and I have ancestors among those colonists. There’s not time here to go through all the reasons why I didn’t grow up speaking Noongar language − that long story of dispossession, disconnection, assimilation and ‘shame’ − but suffice it to say I grew up thinking of myself as ‘of Aboriginal descent’, and was told that my Aboriginality was the

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‘best part of me’. Trouble was, when I looked around me through the filter provided by my formal education and the popular media, there seemed little empirical proof to confirm the truth of those sentiments. That was still the case when, as a young adult, I was made aware of the imperative to declare myself Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, rather than ‘of Aboriginal descent’ or ‘part-Aboriginal’. It was an imperative demanding commitment, that one take a position as regards ‘us and them’, and its language was that of politics, of justice and power. It’s a context conducive to a certain prickliness, a certain defensiveness. And yes, I sometimes recognise such qualities in myself. My first novel arose from a quest to find my family roots, to identify the region of my Indigenous ancestors, and re-graft myself to a genealogy merging with a bountifully populated pre-colonial past. I called that book True Country, taking the title from the lyrics of a song by the band Midnight Oil: We carry in our hearts the true country, And that cannot be stolen. We follow in the steps of our ancestry, And that cannot be broken.

These are, you’d agree, lyrics of affirmation. Yet the title of the song is ‘The Dead Heart’. I’d kept these lyrics taped to the wall beside my desk as I wrote, and it was some time after the novel was published before I realised I’d been writing in the gap between those lyrics of affirmation and the title’s statement of loss and finality. I remember reading the earliest draft, a draft which had flowed quite easily, relying on the first person, autobiographical events and the distance of a dubiously fictional persona. It was a horrible shock returning to it as an editor, and recognising that my fluency was the result of a rather innocent, perhaps mindless, utilisation of the conventions of a social realist literary tradition, and the sort of perspectives offered by my formal education and

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the media. At times I recognised the attitudes of my local newspaper’s travel sections, a sense of visiting remote Aboriginal communities, and presenting Aboriginal people only as some sort of exotic ‘other’, and as subjects to be observed from a distance. I felt repelled by my own writing, my own fluency, by a slick surface of language which created a barrier to prevent me exploring and giving expression to neglected aspects of my own sensibility. It’s an unpleasant and alienating experience, and one I would previously not have thought possible. Fortunately, some of my characters spoke in a version of what is termed ‘Aboriginal English’. This had not come fluently, and I’d struggled to get something that I’d only heard, but never seen on a page. I wrote it as one would poetry, attending to rhythm and syntax. And in fact it was this voice, this style, that helped me escape the prison I was enclosed in, a prison made by the conventions of colonial social realism, and even of empiricism. I re-drafted, and something of that Aboriginal voice, and those Aboriginal characters, took over the story. The novel correspondingly moves from first person to a collective third person and thus, in the form of its telling, suggests something of being claimed by a heritage. Or so I like to think. My second novel, Benang, arose from research in our state archives, where one finds the language in which our shared history is written, and where phrases like ‘the first white man born’ and the ‘last full-blood Aborigine’ occur again and again. My notes became spattered with the initials FWMB and LFBA I had used to identify each of these phrases. Try to pronounce these sets of initials. FWMB. LFBA. The sort of staccato sputter and bluster one produces seems apt to the quality of the sentiments behind the words. I came across a book written by a one-time Chief Protector of Aborigines after his retirement, and incorrectly noted the second part of its title, Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community as ‘their place in our community’. My error reveals the way I read the book, in which there is a photograph of three generations side by side with the caption:

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T R A N S L AT I N G L I V E S Three generations (reading from right to left). 1. Half-blood (Irish−Australian father; full-blood Aboriginal mother). 2. Quadroon daughter (Father Australian-born of Scottish parents; Mother No. 1). 3. Octaroon grandson (Father Australian of Irish descent; Mother No. 2).

That photograph made it obvious: there was no place. Aboriginality was to be ‘bred out’. The book also advocated separating children from their Indigenous families and educating them to be either ignorant of their Indigenous heritage, or ashamed. The recurring phrases in the local histories, as well as the photograph’s triumphant demonstration of biological assimilation indicate – to me, at least − a desire to finish off an old story of the human inhabitation of this land, and to begin a new one. To make a clean break. To ensure there would be no continuity. The one-time Chief Protector was seemingly well-intentioned. He pointed to the need to ‘uplift and elevate’ a ‘despised race’. And I, confronted with my own ignorance of my family and community history, couldn’t help but wonder about my own place. Had I, to use the persuasive voice of the archives, indeed been ‘elevated’ and ‘uplifted’? Merely mouthing the words left a bitter taste. I placed the narrator of my second novel in such a predicament – literally uplifted and elevated. It was my way of dealing with the language of the archives, or resisting the confines and perspectives offered there. I gave my narrator a propensity to rise from the ground, to drift in the air. ‘Uplifted’, ‘elevated’, disconnected from his Indigenous heritage and people, he sometimes becomes trapped in the corner of the ceiling, has to tie a fishing line to his ankle lest he float away into the stratosphere, weighs his pockets with small change and building rubble. The phrase ‘first white man born’ gave a perversely powerful energy to my writing. My narrator wondered if he was in fact the ‘first-successfullywhite-man-born’ in the family line. Who among his ancestors would be proud of him, and who ashamed? I have to admit it amused me to have a narrator supposedly giving away

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all claims to an Indigenous heritage, especially because I was writing at a time when authors were having their Indigenous identities challenged – Colin ‘Mudrooroo’ Johnson, Archie Weller, ‘Wanda Koolmatrie’. Piecing together a family history, struggling to rewrite a manuscript bequeathed by his colonial, non-Indigenous and now ailing grandfather, my narrator is visited by some of his extended Indigenous family. The perspectives they offer are difficult to incorporate within his grandfather’s manuscript, and it is only when he finds himself making the very sounds of the place he inhabits – of the wind, of waves, of its rustling vegetation, its welling springs, its birds and animals − that he is able to convince and communicate to an audience a ‘true’ history, and his undeniably Indigenous identity. These utterances of his – these sounds of place, not directly communicated in the novel − I understood as a metaphor for Indigenous language. The novel’s title – Benang – is a Noongar word meaning ‘tomorrrow’. It was also one of the spellings given to the name of an ancestor of mine. With one lonely word I hoped to join a past to a possible future. At the time I was writing this novel I’d also begun learning – or attempting to learn – Noongar language. I was one among various small groups of Noongars doing so. Most of these gatherings, for one reason or another, stuttered, faltered, dissipated. Some were neighbourhood meetings at a local community centre. At one university where I worked for a time, Noongar staff gathered at lunchtimes to share and try to regenerate what we knew of language. I went to some workshops held under the jurisdiction of the education department to train Noongar language teachers. I studied the fitful publications of the Noongar Language and Cultural Centre, now defunct. I went through the word-lists compiled from the archives. An elder or two helped me. Listing my experiences like that it’s almost as if there were lots of resources, but there weren’t really. I never found it easy. Why?

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Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t think so. There’s problems for those of us learning or − as I like to think – ‘relearning’ Noongar language. For one thing there’s a problem with relying on the English alphabet, which cannot accurately suggest at least some of the sounds of Noongar. There’s a problem, too, with many of the transcripts in the archives, and the dubious sensitivity of the recording ears and pens. Compounding those problems, there’s the dearth of contemporary, fluent speakers. And it would be wrong to deny the insecurities niggling away at some of us. Awkward questions like how and why the language has not been retained. And there is the shame which, unbidden, wrongly insinuates itself into our answers. Some of us want to just know it, not have to consciously learn it. For some, it’s a constant reminder of how tenuous is an Indigenous identity, without a language – other than the discourse of politics – with which to affirm it. There’s an element of psychological alienation too, I think, in using Noongar language to render the sounds of traffic, or of describing the act of washing dishes, or of operating an ATM. So many referents of Noongar language are in the natural world – an older natural world – so how can it be used to explain this one? You find yourself relying on metaphor, and as if standing in quite another place looking at what previously seemed the commonplace, ‘normal’, everyday world. And there are jealousies and rivalries. I wouldn’t like to make too much of this, but of course when – so very recent and sudden – Noongar language becomes valued as cultural capital it also becomes part of the exchange between societies, and then we sometimes compete among ourselves to gain recognition as a ‘culture and language expert’ because of the perceived financial reward and status on offer. Finally, there is the question of the status of different dialects, and who has appropriate rights to deal with language associated with extended families and long oppressed communities. Perhaps only those selected by elders who’ve carried particular dialects – through oppressive

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circumstances − should be entrusted with the continuation and regeneration of it. My own efforts at learning Noongar language gathered momentum with the help of cultural elders of the Roberts family and, in particular, Lomas Roberts (Sr) and Hazel Brown. Aunty Hazel asked me to begin documenting her sense of family and community history, and part of the taping and transcribing inevitably involved Noongar language. I began grouping language material, and making up word-lists and such from the work we’d done. Often, when I presented these to her they jogged her memory, and more material was retrieved. I cross-referenced her words with other published and archival sources, analysing her sounds and superimposing them on the old printed materials as a guide – rather than guessing at the spelling and intended result − for my pronunciation. Early in our meetings she responded to the Noongar name of an ancestor of mine, a name I only knew from written sources. She remembered, as a child, hearing her own elders discuss this person, and she even put the name – Winnery – to a specific place. ‘Winnery,’ she said. ‘That’s a Hunter River name. That’s from the head of the Hunter River. Wilomin people.’ And she told me something of the Wilomin people: Old great-great-grandmother’s old father used to shout like a curlew, and disguise himself to look like a curlew. And that’s why that family called themselves Wilomin. Wilo, that means curlew, see? And actually they’re a very shy bird. You’ll hear them, but you’ll very seldom see ’em. Unless you’re very quiet. Very, very quiet. Wilo, they got long legs, and there’s only a bit of a bird on top, and they have this long neck, and they can flatten themselves down just like a piece of dry stick and they’ll never move. Even if you’re watching them, they’ll shut their eyes and you’ll think they’re a piece of rock. Mrs Hassell − My Dusky Friends, you read that, unna? − called our people ‘Wheelman’. ‘Wilamen,’ some say.

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T R A N S L AT I N G L I V E S But we Wilomin. Wilomin people used to communicate between Bremer and bottom side of Quaalup down that side, and they used to go to Bremer and they used to go to Doubtful Island, ’cause they travel around everywhere, see. And some of these people, they go down there and mix with other mob, see? They were friendly tribe, and that’s where the wilo was, up the river, see? But it’s a funny thing Kim, years ago, 1947, there was Dad, myself, and his brother Malcolm, my husband Harry Brown, one of my cousins − Rita Dempster’s brother Adrian Allen − and we had another boy with us, Dad’s sister’s grandson, Tommy Woods. We had a green ute, and it belonged to my old man. Well, Daddy said, ‘Let’s go up the Hunter River,’ ’cause Harry had shotguns. See, go and shoot some ducks, ’cause plenty of ducks up there, the Hunter River. We went so far, and then because the motor was low Harry was frightened to go any further because the bushes might pull the wires out. ‘All right, leave the motor here.’ Harry had the shotgun and Uncle Malcolm had the .22, and we were gunna go for ducks, see. Anyways, we got right in the swamp, freshwater, got right up there close, and just before we get towards where the old camps were, Daddy said, ‘You gotta stop here now, and make a fire. You gotta make smoke and let ’em know that you’re coming.’ So he cleared the ground and then he got a little bit of dry grass and he dug a hole and he lit a fire. He had to be very careful, ’cause it was summertime and we didn’t have any water. The fire burned up and he chucked some green bushes on; and then the smoke, see. Soon as the smoke went up . . . well, you shoulda heard the curlews, boy. Hear them singing out. They’re singing out over there, and then on this side. All around us. Weeee . . . Weeeee . . . Wilo wilo wilo. And you know when they make a noise, and you’re not used to it, that wilo cry can be very frightening. I was amazed you know. We just stood there and looked at one another. How they made a noise, all around us.

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Well, we looked at one another. Me and Tommy, we were scared. Shivers went up and down my back. Daddy said, ‘That’s it, you’re right. That’s the Wilomin people; they’re letting us know. We’re right now.’ And he just hit the two sticks together like that, and no more. We heard ’em, but we didn’t see one. That’s something I’ll always remember, you know. When we heard them all around us. About eleven o’clock. It was just like a chorus, and it was most frightening. They’re letting us know that they know you’re here. Like that old song, ‘Wilo wang mia wang wo da badin kabin ngayn …’ You heard that one? The curlew sound, you know, ‘I wonder is it for me?’ Like, lotta Noongars they think, oh, death bird, you know. But not us. Not we Wilomin. They speak to us.

Her story of spirits calling transfixed me. A single Noongar name had enabled Aunty Hazel to connect me to a specific place, and to another way of thinking about self and family history. In defiance of the persistent messages of the archives, it suggested a story of continuity of what had been prior to colonisation. It wasn’t reactive, or immediately political, and was authentically of place. I thought of how in learning to make the sounds of a regional Indigenous language – even in learning to do so – there is the possibility of reshaping oneself from the inside out, of making oneself an instrument of place, particularly when the language is so onomatopoeic. It might even lift one above the trap of polemics, almost as if on the wings of a bird. Kwent kwent, kwent kwent – the Noongar way to express bird wings flapping. And, of course, there is also the promise and pleasure of sharing something of the perspectives of ancestors. Jay Arthur has written about Australians being trapped in the language of the ‘Default Country’; living in one country, they use the language originating in another. It’s not that the land Australian English refers to is England, but rather that ‘our language is set to the Default Country’. Arthur continues:

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T R A N S L AT I N G L I V E S The Default Country . . . is narrow, green, hilly and wet, which makes Australia wide, brown, flat and dry. In the Default Country, the rivers run all the year round . . . They know how to find the sea.

The word ‘drought’ in a country where rainfall is naturally irregular, says Arthur, encourages disappointment, the sense of being cheated by a hostile land. The word ‘river’ only approximates what Australians know by that word. Think of the Todd River in Alice Springs for example, or the south coast of Western Australia, where the word ‘river’ often describes a tenuously linked sequence of ponds barred by sandy dunes from reaching the sea. Perhaps the English language – yes, even ‘Australian English’ – carries ways of thinking which correspond awkwardly with the country we inhabit. Aunty Hazel told me the Noongar word for river is bily. It’s also the word for navel. I’d like to think of those south coast rivers as connections to a nurturing life source; as patience, as stillness and welling. Water seeps from springs, from soaks and natural wells, and accumulates, waiting for rain to add the volume and momentum to break through and toss the sand aside in a rhythmic, seasonal rush to join with the ocean. In this chapter I’ve referred to the limits of English in expressing connection with the continent and its deeper history. I’ve suggested something of what Indigenous languages might offer. But Noongar language, like many Indigenous languages, is endangered and almost lost. How best to restore it? I believe it needs to first be consolidated and regenerated in the communities of people descended from its original speakers, and not only in academies or via publication. I can’t help but think of Indigenous individuals who speak of tourists paying to go on ‘Indigenous tours’ and visiting sites they themselves have not been shown, of tourists learning ancestral songs they themselves

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have been denied, and returning to relative affluence elsewhere, while the descendants of the original owners of the land and its culture remain disconnected, dispossessed, impoverished. Consequently, I’d like to see Indigenous language restored to communities of descendants, and consolidated and regenerated there. That would provide one form of healing in itself, to say nothing of the subsequent sharing and the potential for appropriately grafting Australian society to this continent and its deeper histories.

CH A P TE R 2

From bilingual to linguist Michael Clyne

Growing up in wartime and postwar Melbourne I was born in Melbourne, six weeks after the outbreak of World War II. My family, being of Jewish ancestry, were refugees from Nazism soon after the Anschluss − the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. My father, a Viennese, had travelled a lot and had lived and worked in Japan for a number of years. He had visited Australia briefly during that time and had since entertained the idea of migrating here. My mother had actually been born in Budapest, but moved to Vienna with her parents at the end of the World War I. As my grandfather’s first language was Hungarian and my grandmother’s was Croatian, I imagine that a good deal of family communication had taken place through German as a lingua franca. I only acquired a few words of Hungarian – I learned to count up to about seventy, a few greetings and children’s songs. I only overheard Hungarian very occasionally, when my mother and grandfather were conversing in private. Hungarian proved a bit of an embarrassment the one and only time I visited Hungary, in 1994. Every time I had to encode or decode a sum of money or a telephone number, I had to first count up

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to that number. My colleague from the Hungarian Academy warned me of impending dangers because my pronunciation sounded native-like and created expectations that I could actually speak the language. When World War II broke out, my parents were declared enemy aliens and for a number of years there was a fear of being interned. They had to report to the local police station once a week and were not permitted to leave the municipality of Prahran without authorisation. My father, who was an industrial chemist, had special permission to go to work outside the defined area, and my mother to see a German-speaking dentist in the city. We led a rather isolated life. I was an only child and had little contact with other children. We spoke German at home, in our first-floor flat. English was spoken in public places, including the backyard where the neighbours could hear. When German was spoken, it was whispered. This was not a time at which languages other than English, and especially German, would be tolerated in Australia. We had both German- and English-speaking people in our social networks, with the latter increasingly predominating. In accordance with wartime security precautions, my parents had to sell their radio, which received short-wave broadcasts, and their camera. They were able to purchase instead a three-valve wireless, the reception on which was somewhat inferior to that of today’s transistors. I had acquired English as well as German mainly from my parents and spoke English with their non-native accent. My father taught me Austrian military songs of World War I and I learned English nursery rhymes from my mother – ones she read to me out of a book, with a strong Austro-Hungarian accent. The ABC and later the 3DB Children’s Session1 acted as a corrective influence, though the ‘cultivated Australian’ they passed on to me was not sufficient to prevent the designation of ‘the little Viennese boy’ at Kindergarten. Nor did it save me from being harassed by Mrs Wiseman, the speech training teacher at the local Church of England primary school which I attended. ‘Micky must lose his accent!’ she instructed in my Grade 2 report. It was perfectly evident to me and everyone else that the exaggerated British English which she tried to impose on us was totally unreal and I had no intention of allowing myself to be coerced into speaking that way. Once I changed schools in Grade 5, I

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also changed my accent within a few weeks to a cultivated Australian one acceptable to the new school. To come back to Kindergarten, I found it an absolute bore – going for rides on the slippery dip and climbing on the monkey bars. But there was a much greater problem, an insurmountable one – I could read and write. I had little visual talent or imagination, and when we got butcher’s paper to draw on, my repertoire comprised trees, trams and buses − the sum total of my early experience in the suburb and backyard. I would always end up writing newspapers. My teacher found this very alarming and advised my mother to hide paper, pencils and newspapers from me and to cut the radio wires. Fortunately the advice was not taken and in any case, I ran away from Kindergarten and decided to listen to the ABC’s Kindergarten of the Air instead. Once I was at school, English became my dominant language. I read a lot and wrote poetry in it. I still spoke German at home, but I could neither read nor write it − we did not have access to German children’s books or magazines at the time. The environment in which I existed was assimilationist and I was intended and predestined to be ‘British’. When I was about seven, my father would give me a lesson on Austrian history every Saturday afternoon − in English − to counteract the British bias in the school curriculum. But one of my passionate interests was languages. The few tins of sardines or herring and packets of imported cheese that we were able to buy were studied very carefully and I learned words in Portuguese, French and Norwegian from wrappers and tins. After the war, my parents traded in their return passage for a radiogram, which enabled my father to start a collection of 365 seventy-eight RPM records − classical music, Viennese songs and German/Austrian and Hungarian folk music. Records were played daily and recreated aspects of a prewar middle-class Central European environment. For me this reinforced Viennese classicism as the basis of my musical preference and gave me a large repertoire of German lieder and folk songs. Next to the German language, music was the second Austrian cultural value that I have maintained. This is still very much part of me, and my new year has not begun until I

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have conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra playing the Radetzky March on the SBS telecast of the New Year’s Day concert!

The role of languages After the war, there were more and more relatives arriving from Europe, speaking Hungarian or Czech as well as German. At the age of seven or eight, I embarked on the compilation of a multilingual dictionary of basic words, drawing on all the resources in the immediate family – in English, German, French, Hungarian, Latin, Japanese, Spanish, Croatian, Italian and Czech/Slovak. It showed me not only how different Japanese was from the other languages but also − what I hadn’t expected − that Hungarian was very different. About this time, my verbal imagination started running wild. For instance, I construed immun (important because of frequent and very painful vaccinations) as ‘im Moon’, imagining that you had been sent flying off the face of the earth to the moon. I imagined the dog (der Hund − a masculine noun) to be the husband of the cat (die Katze − a feminine noun). And I enjoyed making bilingual puns. When I was in one of the upper grades of primary school, my parents were constantly amused by my attempts to write German, entirely based on English orthography, and decided that I needed a penfriend in a Germanspeaking country. My father got me one from his old school in Vienna. After a few years the penfriend stopped writing and, remembering how beautiful Swiss stamps were, I decided to take the initiative and wrote to a Swiss young people’s magazine. The response was quite overwhelming and for a while I had no less than six Swiss penfriends until I eliminated all except the most interesting, whom I met personally much later, on my first overseas trip. School was a monolingual environment in those days. However, I found French at late primary and early secondary school both interesting and difficult − interesting when it really involved learning the language or learning about it, but often difficult because we had to draw all the animals and objects we were learning the French names of, and drawing you will recall

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was not my forte. But French became more stimulating in the senior classes, especially because my teacher, like the English and German teachers, was happy to answer my constant questions on etymology. German was introduced in Year 8, and our teacher was Dr Billigheimer, an inspiring prototype of a nineteenth-century Mannheim secondary school professor. His mission was to civilise ‘uneducated’ Australian boys with a diet of Goethe, Schiller and Lessing, nineteenth century poems set to music by composers such as Schubert and Schumann, and play readings. This I thoroughly enjoyed, particularly studying the poems set to music. Because German and French poetry counted as inter-school competitive activities, they, like debating, made up for my abominable lack of skills at sport − a tremendous disadvantage in a boys’ independent school. Taking German as a subject at school was the main thing that helped me maintain my German, which had become very much a weaker language. German poetry competitions at the university (for in those days there was only one in Melbourne) and occasional visits by members of the Department of Germanic Studies to school German functions kept me aware of the possibility of taking languages at the university. My school principal encouraged me in this and suggested, for instance, I do honours in Germanic languages and become an academic.

University studies Once I entered university, Babel, the languages building, became my intellectual home. German German replaced Austrian German as my variety, for I had swallowed the German prejudice that the real German was spoken in North Germany. The range of languages offered at the University of Melbourne in those days was rather limited. I kept up with French, although I did not particularly enjoy it. Despite Dutch, which I took up in first year, not being chronologically my third language, I adopted it as such. In a sense it became my own language. I acquired German because it was spoken at home and English because it was the language of the wider community − the one I shared with the rest of the Australian population. But Dutch I acquired myself, with the help of outstanding and dedicated

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teachers who cultivated my interest in the language and the culture. I later did Norwegian, Icelandic, Frisian, Swedish, Italian and Greek to my great pleasure, but only in Dutch did I develop native-like proficiency. Dutch was not very difficult for a German−English bilingual to learn, but it is the close proximity to those languages that actually prevents many German−English bilinguals from gaining full mastery of Dutch. At first I used German and English as a crutch and then developed conversion formulae to get me to Dutch, as I later found Dutch−German−English trilinguals doing in a research project in the 1990s.2 I will never forget my embarrassment in the second lesson of Dutch when I was asked to read De zon schijnt and tried so hard to say ij [εΙ] that I forgot about the sch [sx]! My reward came when I studied in Utrecht for nine months on scholarship and had a hard time convincing customs officials and others that I wasn’t a returning Dutch migrant. But I received an even greater thrill the first time I heard the non-standard reflexive pronoun zijn eigen (literally ‘his own’) used. It had featured prominently in my honours thesis, but it wasn’t until my third day in the Netherlands that I actually heard it for the first time, from a talkative young boy in the local shopping centre. Although on entering the university, I believed that I was going to study philology, the overwhelming emphasis in my coursework was on literature. In the third and fourth years of my degree course, a non-award linguistics program complemented the relatively small amount of linguistics available in our language courses. Fourth year was a real delight because it allowed a certain amount of specialisation, in my case in linguistics, and my overseas studies in Utrecht and Bonn enabled me to continue that specialisation.

One person, two or more languages Studying in Bonn, the two semesters after Utrecht, greatly strengthened my German. It gave me confidence to use it more; equipped me to communicate in it in many new domains. Up to then, English provided the basis for my ways of speaking in German; for English was still very much the dominant language. Through regular contact with German in academic

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contexts − later including visiting professorships and research leave in Germany, frequent participation in conferences and visits to universities in German-speaking countries − I have developed the capacity to lecture, address public meetings and do media interviews in German. While English remains my dominant language, it only takes me a few hours in a German-speaking country or with a visitor from overseas to ‘warm up’. Some idioms are more apt in German or in Dutch than in English, and I enjoy communicating with bi- and trilinguals so that I can use them. I like some Dutch expressions because they are different to English and German! These include om een uur of zeven (literally: ‘at an hour or seven’; ‘seven o’clock’), een stuk of vijf (literally: ‘a piece or five’; ‘about five [things]’), een uitstapje doen (literally: ‘to do a little step out’; ‘to go for an excursion’); op die manier? (literally: ‘in that manner?’ ‘is that what you mean?’), tot overmaat van ramp (literally: ‘to the overmeasure of catastrophe’; ‘to make things worse’), gaan (to go) plus infinitive to denote the beginning of an ongoing activity − for example, we zijn Nederlands gaan leren (literally: ‘we have gone to learn Dutch’, ‘we began to learn Dutch’). On the other hand, some Dutch ways of behaving communicatively are impossible for me to use, and that may be the result of not really ‘owning’ the language. Turning almost any noun into a diminutive is an example. I know a number of people who have quite different personalities in their two languages. This is probably not the case very much with me. In spoken German I employ more stylistic variation than in English and am able to express myself in a more literate way, thus sounding more learned or academic, without it appearing pompous as it would in English. It may appear odd that German has become such an ‘adult’ language but German German was not one of my first languages; my childhood variety was Austrian German. The only time I experience any clash between the two is when I attend a conference in Austria involving people from Germany and Austria. I think my German then becomes more Austrian than it would be in a conference presentation in Germany. On the other hand, I find it frustrating that it is impossible to make puns in normal colloquial German the way we do in Australian English. As a bi- or trilingual rather than a person who speaks two or three

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languages ‘with monolingual proficiency’, I need more than one language to communicate. That is because, although I now monitor my German (and Dutch) for influences from other languages, the boundaries between English and German have always been a bit blurred. For instance, I cannot recall us using at home any other word for ‘kitchen sink’ than die Sink. Der Spültisch (rinsing table) sounds quite bizarre. As I had had all my school education through the medium of English, my entire school vocabulary in German had been originally derived from English. This was rectified through studying German at university and living in Germany. However, I find it liberating that Wie geht’s? is not just a greeting like its equivalent ‘How are you?’ in (Australian) English − following it, people are prepared to swap notes on their ailments and advise each other on how to overcome them. I also appreciate the weather routine in English as something more than expressing banality. It provides a transition from the initial greeting to the main body of the conversation. On the other hand, German gives you the opportunity of being creative in moving from the initial greeting to a conversation without the benefit of a next step routine such as weather talk. I understand the need for German speakers to express special relationships or a greater degree of social distance by the choice of du or Sie as the pronouns of address. In fact, this is the subject of a research project in which some colleagues and I are currently engaged.3 However, I have a strong Australian preference for first names and that leads me to prefer du as well. I will usually introduce myself as ‘Michael Clyne’ and not ‘Professor Clyne’ or simply ‘Clyne’, as would be the case among monolingual German speakers. I am quick to suggest to my interlocutors that we use du, which they are usually willing to do. Next time I see them, they can’t remember what address pronoun we employed in our last conversation, indicative of the increased laxity of du relationships.

Sorting out dual identity as a scholar After returning home from graduate studies in Europe, I was appointed to a junior position at Monash, a recently established university, teaching

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German language and linguistics. I remained in the German Department for twenty-six years, until I was appointed to a full professorship in Linguistics at the university. I had been working on more general topics all along as well as on German or Germanic ones. The transfer from the German Department to the Linguistics Department removed the nexus between my ‘other language’ and my academic career. It enabled me to extend research and teaching across language and cultural groups without having to apologise for it. It also removed the obligation to duplicate publications for German- and English-speaking audiences. The move meant that I would no longer have to defend the existence of German Studies generally and of linguistics in a literature-dominated German Department. Also, I expected I would be able to organise my overseas trips and study leave to travel anywhere instead of feeling the need to spend at least some of the time in German-speaking countries. But it didn’t really work out that way. In fact, I continued my research on German sociolinguistics and travelled to German-speaking countries more than ever, as the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, German unification and European integration created interesting new sociolinguistic conditions. Just as I have a dual identity as a person – as an English and a German speaker − I also developed a dual identity as a scholar – as a linguist and a Germanist.

Studying and teaching bilingualism As a second-year university student, I accidentally came across a copy of Einar Haugen’s The Norwegian Language in America while browsing in the library. I was so fascinated by this pioneering study of bilingualism and language contact in an immigrant context that I could not put it down. It resonated with me because of my bilingual background. My mother’s letters to me when I was studying overseas, with interesting patterns of transference and code-switching, provided me with additional motivation to write my PhD on German−English bilingualism in Australia. Throughout my academic career, in both German Studies and Linguistics, helping others to be bilingual and to understand their bilingualism

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has played an important part in my teaching, whether it was a course on languages in contact or a German language program specially designed for second-generation bilingual students. I have been involved in setting up and evaluating bilingual education programs, advocating bilingualism and opposing discrimination against students with a home background in a language they are taking at school. Researching and practising bilingualism have run parallel in my life.

Empathy with other bilinguals In 1973 I returned from study leave in Germany and the United States to a radically changed Australia, in which the crumbling assimilation policy was replaced by multiculturalism. The introduction and expansion of migrant languages in schools, which I had been advocating since my first published article,4 had become part of the platform of a diverse lobby group, many of them Australians of non-British descent. The multicultural revolution had made the bilingual a normal alternative Australian. In 1974, Monash − my then university − established a Centre for Migrant Studies and I was its foundation chair. Through its activities I was now in contact with many bilingual Australians from a range of language backgrounds and had an empathy for them as bilingual Australians. At the time, it was important for all languages and cultures represented in Australia to be seen as part of the multicultural enterprise. New opportunities were presenting themselves for language teaching, especially at the primary school; for multilingual broadcasting; and later multicultural television. There were numerous German-speaking organisations. I had never had much contact with them, but there was a need for an umbrella organisation to represent the interests of the third most widely used language in Australia, other than English. So, with a number of other people, I started one and used it as a platform to encourage bilingualism and the learning and teaching of German; I presented a regular segment on this on the German program of the ABC’s new multilingual station. Soon after, a number of us in the fields of linguistics and language teaching started pushing for a national languages policy, which was

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accomplished,5 and for a few years languages played an unprecedented role in public debate. The 1970s and 1980s were a time of rapid change, when federal and state governments and opposition parties were very receptive to new ideas and almost anything was possible. It was very exciting to live through this period and be part of such developments; it was exciting to be an Australian at this time, when we were held up as a model by so many colleagues and others in the rest of the world.

Which language to whom? There are particular people whom I identify as German-speaking or Dutchspeaking and with whom I will always use that language. They are recent arrivals or visitors or people older than myself. English has always been the language I used to second-generation Australians (except my daughter and students whom I taught when I was in the German Department). My mother and I continued to speak German to each other until she died at the age of ninety-two, except when there were non-German speakers present, and at all times in the presence of my daughter. Being the Germanspeaking parent of an actively bilingual daughter and a passively bilingual dog, I find it hard not to use German to small children and animals.

A bilingual child If there was one thing that I found more exciting than being an academic (socio)linguist, it was being a father. In this case, my enthusiasm for bilingualism went hand in hand with my relationship to my daughter. Joanna is one of the people with whom I share my bilingualism most. My wife, Irene, and I raised her bilingually according to the ‘one parent one language’ strategy. Irene doesn’t speak German. Irene and Joanna always speak English to each other and Joanna and I always speak German to each other. We started this arrangement from the moment Joanna was born. I had read quite a lot about the one parent one language strategy and about the cognitive advantages of bilingualism6 and observed my former

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colleague George Saunders7 and his wife Wendy as they adopted the strategy with their two sons. I was convinced that bilingual language acquisition was both feasible and desirable. By the time Joanna was born, I had been quite heavily involved in setting up and evaluating primary school bilingual and second language programs in German, and had been observing young children being immersed in German. I was quite delighted at how well Joanna responded to being raised in two languages. Having a ‘special’ language in common with her, I believe, made our relationship all the more special, and she understands me very well. Raising a bilingual child involved going through some of my own experiences a second time in a more reflective way and a far more supportive environment than Australia during my childhood. I did not conduct a study of her language development as I did not want recording her speech to interfere with family relationships. However, I did manage to jot down anything she said in my presence about language or languages. Because Joanna was raised according to the one parent one language strategy, she was very critical of people switching languages, and identified as English-speaking interlocutors anyone offering her ‘mixed language’ input. This even applied to my mother, until Joanna was three and a half. Nowadays she will often transfer words and expressions from English in order to express something that she has not experienced in German. Until we took her to Europe the first time at the age of three, she had only heard German from older people. On this and two subsequent visits to Germany, she acquired some peer group register in German − something I never had the opportunity to learn. I am sometimes asked how we have managed to communicate as a family when we have two languages. This was never much of a problem. When Joanna was a small child, she would address one person and not two at a time. She would face one of her parents and say what she wanted to in ‘their’ language, and then do the same for the other parent. While I used the two languages in different contexts of situation when I was growing up, Joanna acquired English and German in the same context. She has therefore been involved in far more opportunities for translation than I

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had. I believe that she is a more competent translator than I am. Irene, who had made a few not very successful attempts to learn German by attending classes, actually acquired more through the immersion situation of which she was a passive participant than through any of the classes − so much so that when we went to Germany in 1988, she was able to communicate quite well bilingually with her sociologist colleagues speaking German and herself speaking English. As Joanna grew older, the three of us did need to discuss matters of a serious nature − family plans or career options − and that has been done in English, our common language. As soon as Joanna and I are communicating directly, the language is German, and that is still the case now that she is twenty-five. This pattern has not been disrupted by outsiders. From an early age, she has always been happy to initiate German to me in front of others who do not understand the language and took it upon herself to act as an interpreter for the others. She has always promoted the position that she had something extra that many others did not. Between the ages of four and six, she often proudly compared her bilingualism with the monolingualism of many of her kindergarten and school friends.8 One of many instances was when, at the age of four years eleven months, she enquired of a monolingual professor of Geography who had rung me: ‘Don’t you get bored speaking only one language?’ Also, she has been very happy to be different. For instance, one time when she was about ten, I was collecting her from school and she walked through the school grounds and on to the road reading a book. When I expressed some concern about this dangerous practice, and pointed out that none of the other girls were reading a book while walking across the road, she started speaking English to me, which she continued to do for the entire trip home. Before I drove into our driveway, she said: ‘Other little girls don’t read books while they’re walking across the road, other little girls don’t speak German to their daddies, get the message?’ and switched back to German. So her bilingualism was part of a more general individuality which I had to respect. It was bilingualism that characterised her identity. When she was seven, one of her classmates came to play. Noticing that

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Joanna and I were speaking German to each other, the other little girl asked Joanna if she was German. ‘Oh no,’ she said, quite offended, ‘I’m bilingual’. I cannot envisage a life without at least two languages. My languages are inextricably connected. English is very much my dominant language, as it is Joanna’s and that of most others who have grown up in Australia, but I need at least two languages to be myself. For the past fifteen years, some colleagues and I have been conducting workshops for parents raising their children in more than one language. In my presentations I am able to draw not only on my research and that of others but also on my experience as an Australian-born and raised bilingual and the father of an Australian-born and raised bilingual. The experiences related by the parents, the questions they ask and the discussions that take place between parents all contribute to my understanding of how bilingualism works in practice and how problems in achieving and managing it can be overcome. Over my remunerated academic career, lasting forty-two years and four months, whatever else I was working on, aspects of bi-, tri- and multilingualism were always part of my research agenda. Not only has bilingualism, based on the foundations of my own language acquisition, been an essential part of my life − there has been a close link between living bilingualism, studying bilingualism and helping others to attain and maintain it.

CH A P TE R 3

Three worlds: Inheritance and experience Brij V Lal

To be an Indian from Fiji is to be a complex bundle of contradictions. It is to be formed and deformed by a unique mix of social, cultural and historical experiences. Although the Fijian constitution defines us as ‘Indian’, we are, in fact, marked by a confluence of three quite distinct ‘civilisational’ influences: South Asian, Western and Oceanic. Generalisations in these matters are always risky, but the truth will be obvious to people of my age, the post-World War II generation growing up in Fiji. Our religious and spiritual traditions, our dietary habits and general aesthetic sense (in music and cinema, for instance) is unmistakeably South Asian. Our language of work and business and general public discourse, our educational system and legal and judicial traditions, our sense of individual and human rights is derived from our Western heritage. And our sense of people and place, our sense of humour, our less charged ‘she’ll be right’, ‘tomorrow is another day’ attitude to life in general, comes from our Oceanic background.1 A century of enforced living in a confined island space has produced overlapping and inseparable connections. The precise contribution of one influence over another on us, our world view, on the general shapes

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of our thought and action, would vary from time to time and from place to place. It would depend on our educational background, the degree of exposure we have had to external influences, the family circumstance and our network of relationships. There will be variation and diversity. We will accentuate or suppress a particular aspect of our heritage depending on the company, context and perhaps acceptance: more English here, less Indian there. Nonetheless, every Indian person from Fiji will carry within them the traces of the three primary influences which have shaped them. Most Indo-Fijian people of my age would have three – sometimes more – languages: Fiji-Hindi, Hindi,2 English and Fijian. Proficiency in the last three would vary. A person growing up near a Fijian village, or with extensive interaction with Fijians at work or play, would speak Fijian more fluently than one who grew up in a remote, culturally self-enclosed Indo-Fijian settlement. Likewise, a person from a rural area is likely to be more fluent in standard Hindi than his or her urban cousin who did not have the opportunity to learn the language formally in primary school. And someone who grew up in a town or city and went to a government or Christian school is likely to be more at home in English than a person from the country. But every Indo-Fijian person, without exception, would be able to speak Fiji-Hindi without prior preparation. That is the language that comes to us naturally. It is the mother tongue of the Indo-Fijian community, the language of spontaneous communication among ourselves. It is the language that connects us to time and place, to our childhood. It was the language through which we first learned about our past and ourselves. It was the language that took us into the deepest secrets, stories and experiences of our people. Our most intimate conversation takes place in Fiji-Hindi. Our thigh-slapping sense of humour, earthy and rough and entirely bereft of subtlety or irony, finds its most resonant voice in that language. And its influence persists. Whenever we Indo-Fijians meet, even or perhaps especially in Australia, we are very likely to begin our conversation by asking Tab kaise, ‘How are you?’ This is less an enquiry than an effort to establish an emotional

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connection. Yet, the irony is that we do not accord Fiji-Hindi the respect that it deserves. Purists tell us that it is broken Hindi, a kind of plantation pidgin, with no recognisable grammatical pattern, full of words with rough edges and a vocabulary of limited range incapable of accommodating complex thoughts and literary expression.3 We are slightly embarrassed about its humble origins and apologetic to outsiders, especially from the subcontinent. Its use is properly confined to the domestic sphere. It is not the language we use in public discourse. There is no Fiji-Hindi on Fiji radio, there is nothing in the newspapers. The media uses – has always used – standard Hindi. That is what hurts: the continued calculated neglect and the sniggering put-down of the language by the Indo-Fijian cultural elite. The startling gap between the reality of our private experience and the pretensions of our public performance could not be greater. I cannot comment on the deeper structures and origins of the language, but common knowledge and popular understanding suggest that Fiji-Hindi is ‘cobbled together’ – as the critics would put it dismissively – from the dialects and languages of northeast India, principally Avadhi and Bhojpuri.4 Formal Hindi was not the mother tongue of the immigrant population; these two languages were. They then merged into Fiji-Hindi, with subsequent additions of words, metaphors and images from South Indian languages, and Fijian and English.5 This was the new lingua franca which emerged on the plantations. The plantation system was a great leveller of hierarchy and social status. The caste system gradually disintegrated, and with it the finely-regulated cultural order that the immigrants had known in India.6 The new regime rewarded initiative and enterprise, and individual labour. The living conditions on the plantations produced new cross-caste, cross-religious marriages. People of all ranks and social and religious backgrounds lived and worked together, celebrated life and mourned its passing communally. They had no other choice. From that cloistered, culturally chaotic environment emerged a new more egalitarian social order, and a new language − Fiji-Hindi. Old ways had to give way and they did. New vocabulary and grammar had to be mastered, new ways of looking at the world acquired. The Indian

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calendar – Pus, Bhadon, Asarh, Kartik – was, or began to be, replaced with the Roman calendar. English words entered the new vocabulary: ‘town’ for shahar, ‘school’ for pathshala, binjin for benzene, kirasin for kerosene, kantaap for cane top, ‘bul’ for the Hindi word baile, phulawa for plough. And in areas near Fijian villages, Fijian words entered the language as well.7 This humble new language − levelling, unique, unadorned, a subaltern language of resistance, drawing strands from a large variety of sources − is the language that comes to me naturally. Yet it is not the language that I would speak on a formal occasion, while giving a public talk in Fiji or an interview to a Hindi radio station in Australia. I am expected to use formal Hindi in public discourse. Everyone expects this of a cultural or political leader. It confers dignity and status on him, earns him (for it is rarely her) the people’s trust and acceptance. To be able to use Hindi fluently is to be seen as someone who has not lost touch with the people, is still connected to his roots, can be trusted not to betray the interests of the community. Over the years, I have given dozens of public addresses in Hindi. People express genuine appreciation that I am still able to speak the language, after being away from Fiji for most of my adult life. ‘Look,’ they say to the supposedly wayward younger generation losing touch with their cultural roots, ‘he lives in Australia but still speaks our language. He hasn’t forgotten his roots. And neither should you!’ Notice that Indo-Fijian identity in this quote is tied with Hindi. The same people who applaud me for speaking in Hindi would talk to me in Fiji-Hindi in private; to speak in formal Hindi with them in private, informal situations, would be the height of pretension. It is all tamasha (theatre). I am glad I am still able to read and write Hindi. I would be the poorer without it, but for me it is a learned language all the same, with all the limitation learned languages bring with them. Those who hear me speak the language fluently have no idea of the amount of effort I put into preparing my speeches. Although I don’t actually read the text in order better to connect with the audience (as all good teachers know), each word is written down, in Devanagri script, the speech rehearsed line by line several times over, virtually committed to memory. Proper imagery and metaphors have

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to be chosen with the help of a bilingual Hindi−English dictionary, because what is clear to me in English is often obscure in Hindi, and the forms of address are different. The disparity between the private, painful effort of preparation and the appearance of a polished public performance is deep. For years, I unthinkingly accepted the need to speak formal Hindi. It was the expected thing to do. No other alternative, certainly not Fiji-Hindi, was conceivable. I could speak in English to Indo-Fijian audiences, but that would be pointless, talking over their often unlettered heads. I felt curiously elated that I could read and write and speak the language better than many of my contemporaries; it was my badge of honour and pride, my way of demonstrating that I could still connect with my people. But I now realise the hypocrisy of my action: a reluctance to acknowledge the fraud I was perpetrating on myself and on others, thinking that Hindi was my mother tongue. When it clearly was not. Hindi was the medium of instruction in most Indo-Fijian community schools from the very beginning, and an examinable subject for the Senior Cambridge School Certificate in the postwar years. From the start, the colonial government was keen on Hindi. It encouraged the spread of English because it was the ‘official and business language of the colony’, but Hindi – or Hindustani – could not be ignored. ‘Hindus and Muslims alike will need it in different forms as the key to knowledge of their religions and literature and as the means of communication with their relatives and co-religionists in India. And for a considerable section too busy with their own affairs to undergo much schooling, and imperfectly equipped to use a foreign language as a vehicle of thought without danger to their practical relations with their environment, their “mother tongue” must remain both their sole means of communicating with others and the sole means of expressing their thoughts and feelings.’ Hindustani was important for administrative purposes, too, because ‘an adequate knowledge of Hindustani must be needed by the European community in touch with the Indians, the more so because without it, it is, and will be, impossible for the European official or man of affairs to get into close touch with just those classes which to a large extent depend on him for help and guidance’.

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And finally, there was the broader consideration ‘that Hindustani is the lingua franca of probably a larger number of inhabitants of the Empire than English itself and is spoken in a number of colonies besides Fiji’.8 The government’s agenda is understandable, but it is not entirely certain that Hindustani was the ‘mother tongue’ of the indentured migrants, who came principally from the Avadhi−Bhojpuri speaking areas of northeastern India and the Telugu, Tamil and Malayali speaking regions of the south. For the south Indians, Hindustani was not the mother tongue at all, and in the north, Hindustani or Urdu was the language of business and administration and the cultural elite, a legacy of the Moghul era of Indian history; it was not the language of the mass of the peasantry. And it is not at all certain that Hindustani was the language spoken in other colonies whose immigrants, too, had derived from the same regions as the immigrants in Fiji. For administrative convenience, then, Hindustani was imposed as the ‘mother tongue’ of the Indo-Fijian community. The government’s position was supported by the Hindi-favouring IndoFijian cultural elite, although many of them did not prefer Hindustani – which was a mixture of Hindi and Urdu – but a purer form of formal Hindi. They also wished for more extensive English instruction in primary schools.9 The preference for Hindi or Hindustani (but not Fiji-Hindi) reflected a wider process of ‘sanskritisation’ taking place in the community in the postindenture period. For many Indo-Fijians, indenture or girmit (from the agreement under which the immigrants had come to Fiji) was viewed as a period of unspeakable shame and degradation. That ended with the abolition of indenture in 1920.10 Community leaders sought to establish voluntary social and cultural organisations to erase the memory of a dark period in their lives, and to impart correct moral and spiritual values to their people. This was evident in virtually every aspect of Indo-Fijian life.11 The Fijiborn discarded rural Indian peasant dress of dhoti (loin cloth) and kurta (long flowing shirt) and pagri (turban) for Western-style shirt and shorts and slacks. In religion, animal sacrifice and other practices of animism in rural India gradually gave way to cleaner forms of Brahminical Hinduism.12

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The caste system, with all the ritual practices associated with it, slowly disintegrated. Hindu children were given names after gods and goddesses – Ram Autar, Shiv Kumari, Saha Deo, Ram Piyari, Latchman – to erase caste distinction. All these represented a conscious, deliberate dissociation from a past understood as painful, embarrassing and degrading.13 The public embracing of Hindustani as the lingua franca was a part of that effort. Both Hindustani and Indian history and culture were promoted in the colonial curriculum, and published in the School Journal edited by AW MacMillan.14 Stories of great men and women, of kings and queens and historical events of great antiquity appeared, all designed to make the IndoFijian children proud of their ancestral heritage, of their ‘motherland’: stories about Siddhartha (Buddha), Rabindranath Tagore, Emperor Akbar, Pandita Ramabai, Raja Harishchandra, people like that. The journal also highlighted the great achievements of the British Empire, and published pieces on important places and peoples in it. There was nothing – or very little – on Fiji and the Pacific; little beyond some amusing anecdotes on the Fijian people. So not only the language, but the mind and soul of the Indo-Fijians was nourished by stories from our two ‘motherlands’: India and England. The actual ‘motherland’, Fiji, was left undiscussed, disregarded, confined to the fringes of the humorous anecdotes. Our immediate past was ignored not only because it seemed mundane but also because it was the site of deep contestation. Indenture was an indictment of the government, whom the labourers saw as having a complicit role in the atrocities which they endured on the plantations. India was safer. The emphasis on India and things Indian, hero-worshipping and frankly romantic, continued in the postwar years in the specially composed school texts, Hindi pothis, by the India-born Ami Chandra.15 English was the second language taught in the Indo-Fijian primary schools. The aim was to give school children an elementary knowledge of grammar and vocabulary − the sort of rudimentary knowledge required to understand official instructions and notices − and occasional snippets from the great texts of English literature. The texts used in the postwar years were the New Method Readers, Caribbean Readers, The Oxford English Readers for Africa and the University of London’s Reading for Meaning.

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There was nothing in these texts about Fiji or the Pacific islands. Here is the contents list of The Oxford English Readers for Africa, Book six for the last year of primary education: The story that letters tell, How messages are sent, The island by Cecil Fox Smith, Farmer’s work, The Arctic wastes, I vow to thee, my country by Cecil Spring-Rice, Sound and light, Different kinds of buildings, The bees by William Shakespeare, The fight against disease, The work of the Post Office, The discovery by JC Squire, The men who made the world larger, A wonderful little builder, Bête humaine by Francis Brett Young, Napoleon, Some stories of famous men, Bridges and bridgebuilding, Good citizenship, A famous speech from Shakespeare, On mercy by William Shakespeare and, finally, Some business letters.16 The list needs no commentary: it is Eurocentric and its intellectual orientation and purpose self-evident. Much the same trend continued in secondary schools, where English texts and examples were replaced with examples from Australia and New Zealand.17 I suppose the intention of the texts was to inculcate in us a deep pride in the British Empire (upon which the sun never set, we were taught to remember; and to remember, too, that Britannia ruled the waves, that ‘we’ had won the great wars of the twentieth century, that London was the cultural centre of the world, that the best literature, the best of everything – the Bedford trucks, the Austin and Cambridge and Morris Minor cars – came from England); to appreciate the good fortune of being its member, to be grateful for what little tender mercies came our way because we had nothing, we were nothing. I recognise the cultural bias of the texts now, and it is easy enough to be critical of their colonising purpose. But these large and troubling issues did not matter to us or to anyone else then. I recall the thrill, on a remote sugar cane farm with no electricity, no running water, no paved roads, of reading about faraway places and peoples. It was an enthralling experience, making imaginary connections with African children whose neat faces we saw in glossy imperial magazines that came to our school as gifts from the British Council. An acquaintance with them reduced our sense of isolation, expanded our imaginative horizon. And it is the appreciation of that enlarging, enriching experience that has remained with me.

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While we learned a great deal about the Western and the Indian world, there was nothing in books about Fijian language and culture, beyond the fear-inducing stories about a cannibal (Udr Udre) who had eaten a hundred men and marked each conquest with a stone – which was there for everyone to see. There were a few innocuous stories about Ratu Seru Cakobau, the wise and great Fijian chief who eventually ceded Fiji to Great Britain in 1874, and the Tongan intruder and challenger to his authority, Enele Ma’afu; but that was about all. Fijians remained for us objects of fear. Many an unruly child was sent to bed with the threat that Seru (or Emosi or Sakiusa or some other Fijian with a similar name) would snatch us away from our parents if we did not behave properly. The Fijian ethos as we understood it, often through the prism of prejudice, inspired no great respect. We valued individual initiative and enterprise; their culture, we were told, quelled it. We saved for tomorrow; they lived for now. We were the products of status-shattering egalitarian inheritance; Fijian society was governed by strict protocol. They ate beef; we revered the cow as mother incarnate. Our schools were separate. Fijians went to exclusively Fijian schools (provincial primary ones and then to the Queen Victoria or Ratu Kadavulevu), while we attended primarily IndoFijian schools. For all practical purposes, we inhabited two distinct worlds, the world of the Kai Idia and the world of the Kai Viti.18 Fiji has paid a very large price for its myopic educational policy. This, then, is my inheritance, and the inheritance of my generation: complex, chaotic, contradictory. I have lived with it all my life and throughout the course of my university education in different countries over the past three decades. It enriches me even as it incapacitates me; complicates the way I do and see things, the way I relate to people around me, the way I see myself. There have been many moments of sheer agonising desperation over the years when confusion reigned in my linguistically fractured mind − when I could not find words in any language to convey precisely what I wanted to say or how I felt about a particular place or person; when I felt hobbled and helpless, like the washerman’s donkey, belonging neither here nor there: Na ghar ke na ghat ke.

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English is the language of my work. I am not closely familiar with its deeper grammatical structures and rules of engagement and composition: alpha, beta and coordinate clauses; auxiliary, transitive and intransitive verbs; prepositions and subordinate conjunctions – these things confuse me even now. And its classical illusions to Greek and Roman mythology – Pandora’s box, Achilles heel, Trojan horse, Crossing the Rubicon, Cleopatra’s nose, Ulysses, Cyclades and Cyclopes; its references to the stories and people of the Old and New Testaments − to Job, John, Matthew and Abraham, the wisdom of Solomon, to quotations from the Book of Ecclesiastes and Ezekiel; its borrowing of words and phrases from European literature. It was years after high school that I realised that the phrase ‘to cultivate your garden’ came from Voltaire’s Candide, what TS Eliot meant by ‘Hollow men’ and why ‘April is the cruellest month’, what Heathcliff ’s windswept moors were about – all these things had to be acquired through surreptitious reading. They remain beyond my easy reach even now. Yet, my professional competence in the language is taken for granted. The journals and academic presses to which I send my work for publication make no concession to my chequered linguistic background. That is the way the game is played in academia.19 It has taken many years of learning and unlearning, many years of doubt and desperation, to acquire some proficiency in the language. I try to write as simply as I can (the only way I know, to be perfectly honest), which leads some colleagues, au fait with the lexicon of post-modern scholarly extravaganza, to equate simple writing with simplistic thought! I have sometimes been accused of writing fluently, but if only the readers knew the effort, the revision after revision and the deliberate thought that has gone into the writing. I recognise good writing when I see it; I envy the effortless fluency of writers who produce words as if they owned them. Essays and reviews in The New Yorker, for instance, with their wonderfully engaging prose, the breathtaking quality of images and metaphors, invariably provoke admiration in me (and conversely a depressing sense that I could never write like that, however hard I tried). I readily accept my limitations, my inability to produce with words meanings and miracles like those for whom English is the mother tongue. That is the way it is, and always will be.

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Some colleagues in the Pacific islands, non-native speakers of English, are more adventurous, less accepting of the conventions of the language. They are prepared to flout its rules, play with it in unconventional ways, bend it to meet their needs.20 They have ‘indigenised’ the language in interesting ways, encouraged, I suppose, by the liberating tenets of post-colonial and cultural studies. So what appears to me to be badly mangled English in need of a sharp, ruthless, editorial pen is avant garde poetry for them. In an appealingly rebellious kind of way, they are unapologetic, defiant in their defence of idiosyncrasy. Clearly scholarly conventions, styles and expectations have changed in the last two decades or so. The diversity tolerated now – perhaps even encouraged? –would have been unthinkable when I was learning the alphabets of the academe. I recognise, as I see the younger generation, that I am trapped by a different past and different expectations. I am sometimes accused of being a part of the ‘assimilationist’ generation which paid scant regard to local modes of expression, local idioms, but slavishly embraced the ethical and intellectual premises of colonial and colonising education and the English language. I suppose we are all products of our own particular histories. Writing formal academic English is one thing; speaking it colloquially quite another. To be reasonably effective, one has to have some knowledge of the locally familiar idioms and metaphors − a grasp of the local lingo, as they say. This is not so easy to acquire for someone who came to Australia half-formed. I have had to educate myself on the side about Australian society and culture and history and its special vocabulary. This has not been easy in an academic life filled with pressure to create a refereed paper trail that government bureaucrats can see and understand (and, most importantly, reward). The task is made all the more difficult because we had nothing about Australia in school beyond the most elementary lessons about Lachlan Macquarie, John Macarthur and the merino sheep, the gold rushes of the nineteenth century, the convict settlement and the squattocracy; cramming exercises in geography (which was the longest river in Australia, its highest mountain, its capital city, its tallest building: that sort of thing); and the occasional novel (Voss and To the Islands) in

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high school. Not surprisingly, Australia remained for us remote and inaccessible, the sahib’s country, a place to dream about, a land from where all the good things we so admired came: the Holden car, the refrigerator, the tram engine, the canned fruit, the bottled jam and the refined white sugar, so pure and so good that we used it as an offering to the gods in our pujas. Seeing Australia as a student from a distance was one thing; living in it, trying to get a handle on the texture of the daily lived life, was another. Its sheer size and variety: the hot, red featureless plains merging into the shrubby desert in the distance; the remote, rural, one-street towns on the western fringes of the eastern states; dry, desolate spaces along highways littered with the decaying remains of dead animals and the rusting hulks of long-abandoned vehicles − places that lie beyond the certitude of maps, at the back of beyond, as they say. I had to get used to the idea that golden brown, not deep green, was the natural colour of Australia; that its flora and fauna were unique. New words and phrases I had never heard before had to be learned and used in their proper context: Dorothy Dixer, galah, apeshit, blind freddy, rels, bulldust, coathanger, dingbat, wanker, drongo, tall poppy, scorcher, ripper, ratbag, ocker, my oath, knockers, bludger, dinky di, fair dinkum, perv, spitting the dummy − words which locals use effortlessly, but which are strange to newcomers. Nothing can be more embarrassing than using a wrong word at the wrong time, or committing a faux pas, in the company of people who assume you are as knowledgeable about the local lingo as they are. At a party in Canberra many years ago, I used the word ‘fanny’ in what context I do not remember. In the United States, where I had lived for a decade, it means female buttock, but here it meant something quite different (you know what I mean!). Pin drop silence greeted my remark, to use that tired cliché. Beyond vocabulary, I also felt as a new migrant that I should equip myself with the basic knowledge of this country’s history. One cannot be a university academic in Australia and remain ignorant of its history, especially when I live in Canberra and have as neighbours colleagues who have had a large hand in shaping the way we see Australia: Ken Inglis, Bill

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Gammage, Hank Nelson, John Molony, Ian Hancock, Barry Higman. But it is more than the desire simply to be ‘one of the boys’, ‘to be in the know’. When new migrants enter a country, they enter not only its physical space but also its history, with all the obligations and responsibilities that entails. To be effective and responsible citizens, they need to understand the inextinguishable link between the country’s past and its present. So I had to bone up on Australian history and folklore: Gallipoli, Eureka Stockade, Ned Kelly, the Anzac tradition, the debate about Terra Nullius, the Great Dismissal, the Bodyline Series and Bradman’s Invincibles, about Phar Lap, Mabo, Bob Santamaria and Archbishop Daniel Mannix, Dame Edna Everidge, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Simpson and his donkey, Kokoda trail, Patrick White, Gough Whitlam, ‘Pig Iron’ Bob, ‘The Australian legend’, ‘The rush that never ended’. I now know the names of most Australian prime ministers in roughly chronological order. I am passionate about cricket. My summer begins the moment the first ball is bowled in a cricket test match, and ends when the cricket season is over (and when the agapanthus die out). And I read Australian literature and follow Australian politics as a hobby. Gaps remain, of course. There is much catching up to do. I wish, as I write this, that I – and the Indo-Fijian community generally – had made half as much effort to understand the culture, language and traditions, the inner world of the Fijian people, among whom we have lived for well over a century, but about whom we know so little. Sadly, the ignorance is mutual. The curiosity and the thirst for new knowledge I have about this country, its past and its present, its vast parched landscape, is not matched − with few exceptions − by my colleagues and friends in Australia about me and my background, my history and heritage, the cultural baggage I bring to this country. I have sought to educate myself about the Judeo-Christian tradition, about the meaning and significance of Lent and Resurrection and the Last Judgement, for instance, or about the Sale of Indulgences, the Reformation, about Yahweh and the Torah. And I know a few Christmas carols too (‘On the twelfth day of Christmas . . . ’) But my Australian friends, perhaps understandably, have no idea about my religious and cultural heritage− about the Ramayana and the Bhagvada Gita, about the festivals we

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celebrate: Diwali and Holi and Ram Naumi, about our ritual observances to mark life’s journey or mourn its passing. It is not that they are incurious: they simply don’t know. My inner world remains a mystery to them. I regret very much not being able to share my cultural life more fully, more meaningfully, with people whose friendship I genuinely value. I often feel the process of understanding is a one-way street. Perhaps they have no incentive to know about me; it is I who have the greater need to know. I am the one who is the outsider here, not them. Perhaps things will change when – it is no longer a question of if – multiculturalism takes deeper roots, when the public face of Australia truly shows its diverse character, when more of us become more visible in the public arena rather than remaining as cartoon characters propped up for public display on suitably ceremonial occasions. The contrast with the United Kingdom is huge in this respect. There, as I discovered in my two extended trips there in recent years, multiculturalism is a publicly accepted and proudly proclaimed fact − in popular culture, in the universities, in the media. Multiculturalism is just starting its journey here. In Australia, in my experience, the primary line of demarcation is gender, not cultural identity. When we advertise positions, we are asked to make special effort to alert women candidates to potential employment opportunities. Universities require adherence to the principle of gender balance on committees. Few colleagues ask why there are so few Pacific and Asian academics in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, but many would remark on the gender imbalance in it. But I digress. English is my language of work, but it is inadequate in expressing my inner feelings, in capturing the intricate texture of social relationships which are an integral part of my community. There are simply no English words for certain kinds of relationships and the cultural assumptions and understandings which go with them. The English word ‘uncle’ denotes a particular relationship which most native speakers would understand. When finer distinctions are required, the words ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’ are added. But it is still inadequate for me. We have different words for different kinds of uncles. A father’s younger brother is Kaka.21 His elder brother is Dada. Mother’s

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brother is Mama. Father’s sister’s husband is Phuffa. They are all uncles in English usage. But in Hindi, each has its own place, its own distinctive set of obligations. We can joke with Kaka, be playful with him, but our relationship with Dada is more formal and distant. A Dada can be relied upon to talk sense to one’s father, with some authority and effect; a Kaka, knowing his proper place in the order of things, cannot, at least not normally. Similarly, ‘brother-in-law’ in English is pretty generic, but not in Hindi. Sister’s husband is Jeeja or Bahnoi, but wife’s brother is Sala. We have a joking relationship with the latter − he is fair game − but not with the former. Your sister’s welfare is always paramount in your mind. A troubled relationship with Jeeja could have terrible consequences for her. Older brother’s wife is Bhabhi, and younger brother’s spouse Chotki. Bhabhi is treated with a mixture of respect and affection, more like a mother. With Chotki we have an avoidance relationship, and keep all conversation to the bare minimum. We don’t call Bhabhi and Chotki by their names. Ever.22 And it would be unthinkable for them to call you by your name either. We relate to each other not as individuals, but as social actors with culturally prescribed roles. Some of the cultural protocols and restrictions governing family relationships have inevitably broken down in Australia, and even in urban Fiji, succumbing to forces of modernity and the culturally corrosive effects of accelerated mobility. You have no choice but to speak to Chotki if she is the one who picks up the phone. But my younger sisters-in-law still do not address me by my name, not because this is something I myself prefer − on the contrary. I am still addressed respectfully as Bhaiya, as cultural protocol, or memory of cultural protocol, demands. And I take care not to be a part of loose talk in their presence. All the children invariably call me Dada. It would be unthinkable for them to call me by my name. It is the same with my children when addressing their uncles and aunties. Even Indo-Fijian community elders and my friends would be called uncles and aunties, though this convention or practice would not apply, on the whole, to my Australian friends. So, in denoting the complex maze of domestic relationships we have, I find English inadequate.

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English has made greater inroads and makes more sense in other dayto-day activities though. When shopping for groceries, I often use English names. ‘Watermelon’, for example, not tarbuj; ‘bananas’, not kela; ‘rice’, not chawal; ‘onion’, not piyaz; ‘potatoes’, not aloo. But some vegetables I can only properly identify with the names I used as a child. I always use dhania, not ‘coriander’; haldi, not ‘turmeric’; karela, not ‘bitter gourd’; kaddu, not ‘pumpkin’; dhall, not ‘lentils’. I wish I knew why some names have remained and others have gone from memory. I was once a fairly fluent reader and speaker in Hindi, although now the more difficult sanskritised variety is becoming harder to understand. It takes longer to read the script and decipher its meaning. Listening to the news, on SBS Hindi radio for instance, I get the meaning but miss the nuances; painfully, the gap increases with each passing year. My Hindi, now more stilted than ever, is restricted to the occasional conversation with people from South Asian backgrounds: from India, Pakistan and even Bangladesh. There is an expectation on the part of many South Asians that I would – should – know Hindi because I look Indian and have a very North Indian name. It is not an unreasonable assumption. And I use it, as best I can, to establish rapport with them, to acknowledge our common ancestral and cultural heritage, to establish a point of contact, to define our difference from mainstream Anglo Australia. I cannot deny the enjoyment this gives me. Many weekend taxi drivers in Canberra are Pakistani university students keen to bolster their meagre incomes. When I travel with them, they – or I – would ask the obligatory question: ‘Where are you from?’ The taxi drivers would reply in English. Achha (‘Okay’), or Theek hai (‘That’s fine’), I am likely to say. If there is chemistry (about cricket, for example) we will continue in English-interspersed Hindustani. When words fail, or are unable to carry a conversation forward, we revert to English, but the connection has been made. That is the important point; that is what matters. Hindi comes in handy in my private cultural life. The music that fills my house, to the bemused tolerance of my children – Dad is playing his music again! – is Hindustani or, more appropriately, Urdu: ghazals (romantic

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songs) by Mehndi Hassan, Jagjit Singh, Pankaj Udhas, Talat Aziz, Ghulam Ali, and sweet-syrupy songs from Hindi films of yesteryear by Talat Mehmood, Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar and Mukesh. This is the music that arouses the deepest emotion in me, takes me to another world, can reduce me to tears. An even faltering knowledge of the language, often with the assistance of a dictionary, enriches my appreciation of the words in the songs. It is the same with movies, though the language of the screen, designed to reach the masses and denuded of flowery literary allusions, is much more accessible. Most Hindi videos these days are dubbed in English to reach the non-Hindi-speaking world (especially the Middle East and South-East Asia) or young children of the diaspora who have no Hindi − but the pleasure is not the same as listening to and understanding the dialogue in the original language. Hindi enables me to enter a wider culture and connects me to people and places that would otherwise remain inaccessible. In that sense it is like English, minus the fluency. I am glad I still retain some small knowledge of the language. But things of the heart, which give me meaning and deep pleasure, enrich my life, I cannot share with most of my Australian friends. The gulf is too wide; we are too different. Nor, to be fair, can I, try as I might, understand or truly enjoy the deepest aspects of their cultural and aesthetic life. I was on a remote prehistoric farm, beyond the reach of radio, when the Beatles were taking on the world! And the sporting heroes of Australia, with whom they grew up, are unknown to me. In everyday life, though, I do not use formal Hindi at all. To do so would be considered silly and pretentious. At home with my wife, and sometimes with my children, I speak Fiji-Hindi. It is my natural language. There are no standard conventions which I have to follow. Its loose grammatical structure enables me to improvise, to incorporate into the vocabulary English words of ordinary usage. That freedom is exhilarating. I use Fiji-Hindi when talking to other Indo-Fijians, not necessarily to converse at length in it, but to establish a point of recognition. The nature and depth of the conversation would depend on the closeness I have with the speaker. With most

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Indo-Fijian men, I would have no hesitation using Fiji-Hindi. I would be more reserved with Indo-Fijian women though, so as not to give any signal or hint of intimacy. Indian cultural protocol even today demands a degree of distance between men and women who are not close friends or family: hugging, giving someone a peck on the cheek and other Western forms of showing affection are out of bounds and considered improper. English would for me be the most comfortable medium of communication with them − neutral. It is the same with my wife when talking to Indo-Fijian men. With children of friends and family I normally speak in English, conscious that they might not – and many don’t – have Hindi or Fiji-Hindi. The Fiji-Hindi I speak now is not the one I spoke as a child. Then, it had few foreign words. But now, my Fiji-Hindi is increasingly filled with English words and phrases. I suspect it is the same in many urban parts of Fiji too. Drinks aur Dinner hai (It is a drinks and dinner party). Kafi late hoi gaye hai (It is getting quite late). Lunch kar liha (Have you had lunch?). Kutch trouble nahi (No trouble); Bada bad hoi gaye (Does not look good); Us ke support karo (Support him); Report likho (Write a report); Walk pe chale ga (Will you join me for a walk?); Telephone maro (Ring). My Fiji-Hindi would sound strange, unfamiliar, to people of my father’s generation back in rural Fiji. My children’s precariously limited, English-accented Fiji-Hindi would be incomprehensible to them, just as their language, full of rustic references and vanished metaphors and words would appear vaguely strange to us. There is some sadness in this perhaps inevitable change. It is the price we pay for ‘progress’, I suppose − for living away from our place of birth. Fiji-Hindi was the language of my childhood. It was the only language of communication between me and my parents, both of whom were unlettered and are now dead. It was the language through which I saw the world once, through which I learned about our past and ourselves, told stories and shared experiences. That Indo-Fijian world, and my mother tongue, will go with me. Fiji-Hindi is my mother tongue, not that of my children, who have grown up in Australia. They have some faltering familiarity with it, but that will go with time. It is the same with other children – or young adults – of

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their age. There will be little opportunity or incentive for them to continue with the language. Fiji is their parents’ country, they say, not theirs. For most of them, English will effectively become the only language they have. Some Indo-Fijian families in Australia and elsewhere, traumatised by the coups and the ravages of ethnic politics, have actively sought to erase their memories of Fiji and things Fijian, even Indo-Fijian. The rejection of FijiHindi is a part of that process of denying the past. Others have actively sought to embrace aspects of Indian subcontinental culture. Their children learn Hindi or Urdu in community-sponsored language classes. They attend temples and mosques to learn the basics of their faith and celebrate all the most important festivals of the Hindu or Muslim calendar. Classical dance and music classes flourish in many Indo-Fijian communities in Australia. Hindi or Urdu, I suspect, rather than Fiji-Hindi, will be the second language of choice for the new generation. Born or brought up in Australia, they will have their own contradictions and confusions to deal with. Their problems and preoccupations will be different from mine. I admire the way they are adapting to their new homeland in ways that I know I could not; I did not have the skills to do so. Confident and resourceful and inventive, they are completely at home in cross-cultural situations. The cultural gulf between their world and that of their Australian friends in music, film and general aspects of popular culture will never be as great as it is for me and people of my generation. My fears and phobias, my confused and confusing cultural inheritance, won’t be theirs. Mercifully, their destinies won’t be hobbled by mine.

CH A P T E R 4

Playgrounds and battlegrounds: A child’s experience of migration Irene Ulman

I was born in Russia in 1962. In 1972 our family emigrated to Israel and two years later we moved to Australia. This second migration, when I was just under twelve, was a much harder experience for me than the first. For me as a child it was naturally hard to understand what was ‘objective’ reality (the physical and social environments) and what were my own internal processes − such as becoming an adolescent. As a child it’s natural to think that whatever you are experiencing is your own isolated, personal problem. A child might ask: ‘What can I do to stop being shy? What can I do and say to be popular?’ ‘Is this happening to me because I’m in Australia, or is that how it is for any child my age, in any country and in any language?’ As a child I tried, and mostly failed, to draw the distinction between internal and external realities. So to this day the cultural and linguistic shift I made in the process of migrating is coloured by what I experienced as a child. I believe that my relationship with languages, particularly with the English language, was a consequence of my experience as a migrant child, and so were some of the choices I made later in life − such as what language to speak with my own children.

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In this chapter I will talk about my ‘double migration’, and how adopting a new environment at nine seemed easy but moving later as an adolescent led to prolonged confusion; my concern with bilingualism and my relationship with my two main languages, Russian and English; and the dilemmas in choosing one language over the other, especially with my children – a choice I am continually facing today.

Russia and Israel I grew up in St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, in a Russian-Jewish family, in the intelligentsia milieu (the Russian term for the educated middle class). Even then it wasn’t a strictly monocultural environment. I had a clear sense that we were living with Russian culture and language at home and with Soviet culture and language outside our home. School belonged to that outside culture, for example. I knew that some things were taught at school because they were in the ‘school program’ and teachers had to teach the set program. I understood that the teachers were not lying out of spite; they just had to comply. And so my first lesson in cross-cultural communication came from Soviet doublespeak. There were many other cultural influences. I read a lot of Russian and translated literature. By the time we left Russia my father had read quite a few Dickens novels to me and my brother. My parents had friends in the United States and Europe, and we had books and records in French and English. Language was very important. When the subject of migration came up, I wrote in my diary that we were learning French because we were emigrating to Israel. There was a sense which I grew up with that language, or languages, were a way to discover the world. When we moved to Israel, I plunged into my new environment with an openness and optimism which I can still remember. I accepted that moving countries meant a complete change and I went about my

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natural business absorbing the language and behaviour codes of my new playground. I’ll describe some of the codes of my Israeli ‘playground’. In my school playground in Israel children’s language and behaviour were essentially upfront. Aggression was normal. Children threatened to bash each other up and often did. In an ongoing conflict, which had a special word, b’rogez, or ‘to be in anger’, girls would send a mediator to each other and ask ‘to make peace’ (lehashlim, from the word ‘peace’, shalom). They would say, for instance: ‘Ilana wants to know if you want to make peace with her’. And you had to send a message back with a yes or a no. These playground rules, as I perceived them, meant that I had to change myself and act against my instincts. In my case they were the instincts of a well-behaved girl (to use the Russian phrase, iz intelligentnoy sem’yi), or ‘one from a family belonging to the intelligentsia’. Once I told my brother to go and punch a girl from my class because she’d said insulting things about our family. He said: ‘Why should I punch her? You do it.’ I went up to her and punched her, and we bashed each other up. Or rather, being way bigger and stronger, she bashed me up, which was humiliating. Going over this episode, I don’t even remember what I did (hit her in the arm? kicked her leg?), but I remember how hard it was to walk up and actually punch this girl. Physical violence was totally alien to the way I was brought up. I suppose I had to overcome my background to adapt to what I thought to be the rules of the game. I suppose I felt that this violent way of settling scores was an important behavioural code for me to internalise. It was my playground camouflage. Considering that this was happening with the backdrop of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, it’s not surprising that I remember having to adjust to a relatively clear-cut war and peace mentality. I associate that period with fighting, making up, with phrases like: ‘I hate you’, ‘I’ll bash you up’, ‘if they bash you up, I’ll defend you’. Whether it was a similar experience for other Russian migrant children in other schools or in richer suburbs, I don’t know. But those were the codes

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of language and behaviour that I had quite happily absorbed by the time we migrated to Australia a few months before I turned twelve.

Australia I had been looking forward to applying in my new playground everything that I’d picked up in Israel. I was quite shocked to find that none of the codes I had equipped myself with were of any use here. In Australia, I was suddenly confronted with what felt to me like a very confusing lack of transparency. Subtext emerged as the new form of communication. Things said were not necessarily things meant. I received a blow when a girl who said she was my friend renamed me Martha and talked about me, thinking that I didn’t understand. Then a girl (whose name I thought was Lorraaaahyne until I saw it in writing) asked me if I was her friend. I naturally said no. She said: ‘Ough, why not?’ I explained that I didn’t know her well enough to be her friend, and she said: ‘But you’ve known me all year!’ Later, her friend (whose name I thought was Treeeesa) asked: ‘Why did you tell Lorraine that you’re not her friend? What’s she done to you?’ It was hard to know how to use this word ‘friend’ in a way that would be helpful to me and would advance my social life, without compromising the principle behind words like ‘friend’ or the phrase ‘being friends with’ someone. My idea of friendship came from a combination of the books I read and our own family values. Once, in Israel, my mother and I had a big laugh when our neighbour made gushingly enthusiastic comments about some newly acquired friends of theirs. She had said something like: ‘Imagine! They’re our newest friends!’ − the implication being that the best thing about them was that they were new. In contrast, my mother’s most valued friends were the old friends whom she’d just left behind in Russia, possibly forever, and this rapture over a totally new friend was very funny to both of us. My idea of Romantic Love was also bookish, and suddenly I was quite alienated by the sexual behaviour of the kids my age who acted as though

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they were a different species to me. I watched their hugging and kissing and I had no reference points for any of it. I had no way of checking how twelve- and thirteen-year-olds behaved in the other two countries I related to − Russia and Israel − and in the absence of concrete information I concluded that twelve- and thirteen-year-olds were different in Australia. But this time, I was unable to adapt. This second migration was making me an observer, not a participant. I found the words ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ threatening because they were more direct in their implications than I thought was the case with their equivalents in Russian. In fact they had no real equivalent in the Russian that I knew. Today I still use the English words ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ when speaking Russian, as do many other Russian speakers in English-speaking countries. The Russian equivalents − ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ (mal’chik, devochka) or drug and podruzhka (friend and female friend) − do not have that unambiguous clarity of ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ that I had such trouble with when I was thirteen. Other phrases I also had no translation for were ‘going out together’ and ‘going round’. (These are also commonly imported into Russian by Russian speakers in English-speaking environments.) In my first couple of years in Australia, I deciphered my ‘playground’ through a mix of family values, the way we used language at home, the books we read, and my own interpretation of all the above. And the age difference from one migration to the next made a simple ‘life translation’ impossible. My second migration was far from seamless. I felt displaced. There are two words that stayed with me for years which I associated with being a migrant and an outsider: People said I was ‘different’ and they also said I was ‘interesting’, or the things I said were ‘interesting’. Well, I hated being different and I especially hated being interesting. Both those words were pejorative and communicated cold alienation. In fact, ‘different’ meant ‘alien’ and ‘interesting’ meant ‘weird’. One year later, I shifted to a Jewish school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, which turned out to be less of a culture shock, and I stayed there for the

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next five years. I was dux of the school in the HSC, which included coming first in English, and I assumed that I had overcome feeling like a migrant and an outsider. This sense of security ended as soon as school did, when I was confronted with an Australia I hardly knew existed and with forms of language I had never encountered. One anecdote . . . My first official interpreting job was in Murray Tyrrell’s vineyard in the Hunter Valley, where Murray Tyrrell was hosting two engineers from the Soviet Union. We arrived at the reception and the room went quiet as Murray Tyrrell began to speak. He finished his first sentence and waited for me to interpret. But to my utter horror, I had no idea what he’d just said. I simply didn’t understand a word of his Australian English. I can’t even remember what I did next, I was so mortified. This happened when I was eighteen and in my first year of university. It was a shock to realise that my English wasn’t anywhere near as native as I would have liked to believe. Australia, after all, was a socially and linguistically complex environment and I had never even been to the Outback. Later, when working at ABC radio, I started meeting Aboriginal people and felt as though I’d just migrated again. There was a whole new vocabulary, new accents, a different sense of humour and different conversation rhythms. I responded by continuing to absorb and copy, just like when I first came to Australia. When I was a migrant child, copying people’s speech was a basic instinct; years later it was still an instinctive thing to do, a way of expanding my outlook through language. .

Identity and language My BA thesis in English Literature was on Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, in which Nabokov recreated his Russian life in the English language. Speak, Memory captures the process of Nabokov translating back and forth, from Russian into English and vice versa (he wrote his autobiography in English, then in Russian, then reworked the English).

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In her recent book Mary Besemeres calls this process ‘self-translation’. I strongly identified with this process. Nabokov was supremely confident in his bilingual powers. He claimed that if he had wanted to, he could have made an effortless transition from Russian to English writing, simply by resorting to ready-made language formulae. But, he claimed, that would have been far too easy, and so he chose to create his own individual synthetic language. As I analysed Nabokov, I compared my process to his. I thought my case was quite the opposite. I was also creating my own synthetic language, but felt that it was to compensate for not having absorbed enough of the original. My synthetic language, as I saw it, wasn’t wholly independent, but a product of picking and choosing from different people and spheres of life. I wanted to be a true native English speaker and a bilingual, which I defined as being supremely confident and equally at home in both languages. In my mind, there existed a state of true bilingualism, and a great example of it was my youngest brother, who was only two months old when we left Russia and whose Russian was excellent and highly literate. I, however, questioned whether I could claim English as my language. I was conscious of specific gaps in my English, and even today there are still moments when I am not 100 per cent sure whether to use a definite or an indefinite article. This uncertainty is a puzzle to me, because having come to Australia as a child, I would have thought this should never have been a concern. More understandably, there are gaps in my knowledge of the English vernacular. In Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman describes the sensation, with which I’m familiar, of using a colloquial phrase which you didn’t grow up with and which doesn’t really belong to you because you don’t come from the culture that produced it. Questions rush through your mind. Is it an authentic thing to say? Will you look and sound authentic? You are not sure you can pull it off, you want to try it on for size, and there’s a moment of uncertainty. To avoid looking and sounding fake, I have done things like use a deliberately fake voice, or an exaggerated Australian accent, as if quoting someone

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else or using someone else’s voice. It’s as though I were borrowing something before deciding to appropriate it. And speaking of borrowing and appropriating, I’m aware that some of my favourite phrases and expressions have a specific source. Sometimes I even visualise the people to whom I owe some of my language when I say something that I associate with them. Some of my colloquial language goes back to my early days in Australia. When I say ‘Far out!’, I’m back in my school playground. Swearwords came later in my development. The most common ones pop out automatically, but I’m not totally comfortable using them as sentence fillers (as in ‘fucking brilliant’). Some words, like ‘awesome’, come from my children’s vocabulary. I use ‘awesome’ cautiously, unlike the word ‘cool’, which for me is one of the best in the English vocabulary (one of the coolest!). Of course I borrow language from my children, as most parents I know do. The only difference may be that for me it’s yet another in a series of contexts and vocabularies from which I have borrowed, more or less consciously. Being a migrant, a self-translator and a copycat has created a sense of suspension and self-conscious use of language that I could do without. It’s as if I’m asking myself: ‘Is this expression mine to use?’ In this sense, self-translation is a natural state for me. Except it’s not a cross-cultural or ‘cross-lingual’ kind of self-translation. It’s a different sort, with me adjusting my language to fit my sense of who I am. At times it can feel like I’m looking at myself from a distance, and it can take away from the immediacy of an experience and create moments of ‘in-betweenness’, or a kind of time lag.

Choosing between languages One other important gap I experienced in the English language had to do with the words and phrases that mothers use with young children. I can see now how much I wanted to go through those stages in English with my own children. It was one of the things that motivated me to speak English with them, even though the original plan was to speak Russian at home, since English was going to be their language no matter what.

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When my first daughter was born, I found it easy to speak Russian to her. It was natural to use the simple affectionate talk, the language that my mother used with me. This changed around the time she was between three and four, when she started coming home speaking English, and especially when she began to ask questions in English. I reacted with a very strong urge to support her in this new enterprise. There were probably three basic motivations for the switch that then occurred, from Russian to English: Bilingualism is not standard or common in Australia, as it is in Europe, for example. In Australia being from a ‘non-English-speaking background’ is more commonly associated with the migrant experience. I believed that the shock of my second migration had affected my personality. I wanted to avoid anything in my daughter’s childhood that could potentially undermine her confidence. I saw no reason for my child to feel like a migrant, which in my experience was to be an outsider. The other motivation was my own need for the ‘childhood English’ that I had missed out on. I had a somewhat irrational fear that my child might miss out on it too. There was a third, much less conscious motivation. I was being given an opportunity to become more of an English speaker myself, and get closer to the core of English by speaking it with my children. It was like a second chance. So by the time my daughter Rivka went to school, English had become the main language between us. When my second daughter Shoshana was born, I developed a three-way conversation pattern in which I would say something in English to Rivka and automatically repeat it in Russian for Shoshana. Those three-way conversations were curious, but strangely enough they came naturally. As with Rivka, I spoke only Russian to my second daughter until she was about four.

Conflict I was able to do this without sacrificing my children’s Russian altogether, because my parents were actively teaching them Russian. But the fact that

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I now speak mostly English to my daughters is a source of conflict, particularly with my mother. My parents are committed and talented teachers and, in addition, my mother is a talented lobbyist. She never ceases to argue that my language strategy, or its absence, has been detrimental to what was always thought to be an important cause – for my daughters to be bilingual. My partner, Sergei, is from Russia and speaks Russian to the girls. They address him in either Russian or English. I often act as a kind of moderator, assuming the interpreter/translator role, even though no one is actually asking for a translation. Actually what I’m doing is bridging the gap between our family languages. Recently I caught Sergei in the act of explaining a science lesson to Rivka in English. I told him he was on a slippery slope, but I had no moral authority to insist. Besides, I understand that when he explains a science concept in Russian, Rivka doesn’t understand a lot of what he says. If he could find a way of explaining science in the kind of Russian that she could understand, we would perhaps have a bilingual child. But we are what we are. Sergei speaks in complex scientific terms and is not very good at simplifying them, at least not in Russian. I would happily translate them into simple Russian if only I knew the science. And ultimately, we could all do so much if we had the time. Time is the ultimate reason for most of our compromises. I prefer to think of bilingualism as a process rather than a state. It involves levels and stages. And so our children may have the option of being bilingual if they absorb enough now to develop later. Since starting to think about this chapter, I have used more Russian with them and found it encouragingly easy to start conversations in Russian, even if they don’t last. My mother recently shared a little bilingual joke with my ten-year-old. She asked her: ‘Ty sure?’ (‘Are you sure?’). Normally mixing languages, except for a joke, is not in our family practice. My ten-year-old replied in Russian: ‘Ya absolyutno uverena’ (‘I’m absolutely sure’) and added: ‘No ya khochu skazat’ tebe, chto iz-za etogo ne nado byt’ worried’ (‘But I want to tell you that you don’t need to worry about it’).

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This playful code-switching by a child who is not (or at least not yet) fully bilingual was meaningful to us because, if nothing else, it showed an awareness of language and an ability to play with it, and surely that is the best possible starting point.

CH A P TE R 5

Returning to my mother tongue: Veronica’s journey continues Zhengdao (Veronica) Ye

I will start these reflections on my bilingual and bicultural life with an extract from an essay I published in 2003, ‘“La double vie de Veronica”: Reflections on my life as a Chinese migrant in Australia’,1 after the title of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film La double vie de Veronique. The present chapter continues the theme of my essay, focusing more closely on my experiences of returning, for a time, to my mother tongue, Shanghainese. I am Chinese, and I am also Australian. My life as a migrant in this vast land began in January 1997. The second day of my arrival marked my 23rd birthday, and a new chapter in my life. I thus embarked on a new life journey, wading into the unfamiliar waters of a new culture. Before coming to Australia, I had never been outside the People’s Republic of China, being born and raised in the more or less racially homogenous city of Shanghai. Every day has been different for me since I entered this new country. Every day has presented me with challenges and new discoveries about my surroundings and about my inner self. And, every day has brought me wonders, disbeliefs, confusions, agonies, frustrations, and myriad other

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feelings in bridging and living with the tremendous differences between two languages and cultures. This essay reflects upon a few selected aspects of my life in this new country over the past five years or so. Fragments of my life, in retrospect, record an ‘inward journey’ − my thoughts, sentiments, emotions, and above all, my inner worlds, reflecting upon what it means to be a young migrant living in, with, and between languages and cultures. It is not a chronicle of my life, but a conscious attempt to recount my suantiankula2 in this lucky country, which is so dramatically different from China.

Coming to Australia I came to Australia to join my Aussie husband, Tim, then my fiancé. Fate brought us together. The university that I went to was also attended by Tim, at that time a foreign student on a scholarship to study Chinese there. My coming to Australia put an end to our long wait that endured many years. It was only when I landed in Australia that I realised how limited my knowledge of Australia was and how unprepared I was for my life in this new country. It was beyond my imagination. The rules of ‘being polite’ are so different between Chinese and AngloAustralian cultures that sometimes I find Aussies to be utterly ‘impolite’ or sans renqingwei (human touch/interest) from the vantage point of Chinese culture. An ‘honest’ response of ‘no, sorry, I can’t’ to a request of any kind, or an upfront negative request of asking others not to do something, which are perfectly polite and acceptable from an Anglo point of view, simply leaves a Chinese with little mianzi (face). A Chinese is obliged to say ‘yes’, even if unwilling: qingmian nanqüe as the expression goes (‘It is hard to refuse human relationship and face’). For a Chinese, human relationships are built, bound, and strengthened through mutual obligations, renqing (human feelings) and yiqi (personal loyalty). When a person does a favour for another person, there is renqingzhai (debts of human relations) to repay. One refrains from expressing one’s own ‘wants’ so as not to harm the mianzi (face) of others, or to put others into trouble, making others feel bad. Personal ‘wants’

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Between languages [ . . . ] the struggle between English and Chinese is constant. When speaking English, I may think in English, but only partially; the next moment, it flicks back to Chinese. Sometimes, I get confused, the two languages merge − one on top of the other. I can hear myself speaking in English, but the substance seems to be in Chinese. It is my thoughts wrapped in a loose mantle of another language. I am desperate in trying to find the perfect fit, the best expression. But, often, after a careful search of an array of synonyms, I still fret about that word. It pains, distresses, and angers me not being able to fully express myself in another language. I mourn quietly, in the corner of my heart, the loss of meaning, the subtlety, and the beauty of my own language in the trajectory of trying to reach the other shore of another language. English,

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though it has become my main language for communication, is just a shadow of my self. It is at home that I feel much more relaxed, where I am free to speak either Mandarin Chinese or English, or a mixture of both, as I choose. Tim and I have taken to speaking our own homemade language between English and Chinese, which has been developed as a result of living with the differences between the two. But my heart aches constantly for Shanghainese, my own dialect. I miss speaking it. I miss the sound of it. Though I have learned to speak and think in another language, it is not the same as engaging in my mother tongue. I miss the images and smells that it evokes of my hometown, and the past that it connects me to. It surprises me constantly how all my interjections are exclusively in Shanghainese, how I remember numbers only in Shanghainese, and how I often unconsciously add a particle of my own dialect to an English sentence.

Emotionally, I remain Chinese In adapting to a new environment and culture, some of my ways of thinking, my attitudes, and even my judgments, have changed by varying degrees over the years. But I know I remain fundamentally Chinese deep inside. My sense of self is Chinese. And I feel most at home when I can express myself, especially my feelings and emotions, in the Chinese way − subtle, implicit and without words. I smile to smooth over embarrassing situations. I wear big smiles even when my heart is crying and bleeding. Feelings are my self, and should only be known to me. I do not feel comfortable talking about my true feelings, as doing so, my inner self feels stripped and vulnerable. Chinese ideas about ways of expression of emotion are so different from those of English that such expression is often misinterpreted and misunderstood, which places stress on cross-cultural relationships. A ‘honey’ in public would make me blush. I was brought up with the Confucian code of behaviour that nannü shoushou buqin (‘man and woman

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T R A N S L AT I N G L I V E S do not touch each other’s hands’). Any intimate behaviour in public would make me extremely uncomfortable. Any expression of emotion should be controlled and subtle. Chinese couples do not say ‘I love you’ to each other, as people in Australia do over the phone, when seeing each other off, and before going to work. We do not place so much emphasis on verbal expressions of love and affection, because they can evaporate quickly. For a Chinese, love and affection are embodied in care and concern, in doing what we believe are good things for the other party. We ‘force’ our husbands to eat in the belief that it is good for them. We criticise them directly as a way of showing endearment and true concern. We do not need to compliment our husbands, saying ‘I am proud of you’, because ‘honeyed’ words are niceties for social purposes. As long as we know this in our hearts, we do not have to say them out aloud, and the other party would know this. When we say our innermost thoughts to our partner and point out their ‘bad sides’ for improvement, we are thinking truly and purely in the interest of the other; it is the ultimate care. It took a few years for my husband to get accustomed to this Chinese ‘logic’ of love, and for me to be more communicative in expressing my love and affection. To me ‘honeyed words’ are lubricants in the relationship. But in discovering and coming closer to these different ideas about the ingredients of ‘true love’, we found that our ways of expression can be multi-dimensional. Though I have also come to ponder more about the importance of words, I still believe that the essence of true love lies in deeds. My parents have never said ‘I love you’ to me; neither have I to them. Even the first time when I left them for a long time, flying ten thousand miles to another part of the world, at the airport, we fought back our tears and urged each other repeatedly to take care; we wore the biggest smiles to wave good-bye to each other, to soothe each other’s worries. Just like any other Chinese parting between those who love each other, there were no hugs and no ‘I love you’. Yet I have never doubted my parents’ profound love for me. I know that they have worked hard so that I could live a better life; and they will always be there for me. These are comforting thoughts, ones that have always sustained me and given me strength in these years of absence.

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As I write this, my mother is staying with me in Australia for a short visit. It is her first visit to Australia since I migrated here. Every day, when I get off the bus near my home, I see her emerging from behind a bush, walking towards me across the street, and trying to take my bag, which is often heavily loaded with books. We walk side by side in silence toward the house. We feel a bond that is beyond words. I always wish that the road leading to the house would be longer so that I could prolong the moment, and the eternity contained therein. The picture of her face emerging from the hill is deeply etched in my memory. I know, emotionally, that I will remain Chinese in Australia.

Everyone has a home town (guxiang; ‘old, former native place’). It is often where we are born, our birthplace. Everyone has a mother tongue, the language that we first use to express ourselves and connect with to the outside world, even if it is a sign language. Our home town and our mother tongue are often (although not always) intertwined. My home town is Shanghai, and my mother tongue is Shanghainese. Very recently I was there, in Shanghai. It is a place that is one of the fastest developing in the world, with half of the world’s concrete being consumed there every year and with seventeen million local residents (and six million migrant workers from other parts of China and other countries) moving around on foot, on bikes, on mopeds, on the subway, in buses and private cars. I stayed there for a month. Every minute, I felt thousands of different bursts of energy moving around and surrounding me. My ears hurt every day from the non-stop noise, and they are still hurting. My throat was often sore from the smog. And my head swelled whenever I plunged into the seas of people. I had to get used to the crowded buses and subway again, to eating in local restaurants face-to-face with strangers while others stood right next to me waiting for me to finish so they could secure a free seat. All of these were things I grew up with. But doing them now brought me a lot of pain, especially after spending most of the last seven years in Australia, where I have been spoilt. I got used to space, learned to avoid close personal contact, and became accustomed to the quiet and peaceful country-style life that initially unnerved me, with chirping birds instead of the jostling

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traffic, human movements and the morning physical exercise music that used to wake me up, coming from the loudspeakers of the nearby kindergarten. To be honest, I found it physically challenging to live in my native city again. I felt pushed all the time; it was hard to stop to take a breath. I was torn between the desire to return to the bush capital of Canberra to resume a self-paced, easier and quiet life where I could sip a cup of tea facing the garden, and the desire or even longing to stay in Shanghai longer, because there were certain joyful things there that could not be taken with me back here, to Australia. Returning to my home town is returning to my mother tongue. Returning to my mother tongue is a joyful and heart-warming experience, especially for a young adult immigrant like me who now lives her life mostly in her second and third languages. My heart was filled with joy the whole time I was there, because I was able to be bathed in my mother tongue: speaking, hearing and communicating in it every minute of every day. My ears took delight in hearing those familiar sounds uttered by people around me and in hearing them coming out of my own mouth. My eyes took delight in seeing everywhere signs written in squarish characters that I could recognise instantly without any attempt at spelling them (with Chinese languages, people never say ‘how to spell’, only ‘how to write’). My hand also enjoyed hand-writing characters most of the time. (The complexity of inputting characters on a computer means that it is actually a lot easier and quicker to hand-write things in China, even when there is a computer nearby.) No one ever asked where I was originally from when I spoke my language. It is the language that I can speak without thinking of where to place my tongue inside my mouth, and I can have full judgement about whether it is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate to say things in certain ways. It is the language that shaped my earlier and most lively experiences, that makes me who I am. This time, the joy of being able to speak my native tongue was like nothing I had felt before, because I was able to speak it with the same kind of fluency and confidence as when I first left for Australia seven years ago. This time I did not feel that I had contracted ‘aphasia’ or ‘dyslexia’ as I had

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felt when I was there in 2002. This time, the joy of regaining my fluency was like that of fish being scooped back into water after leaving its natural environment for a while. It was triumphant, satisfying and deeply rewarding to harvest the joy that resulted from my hard work. Since that earlier trip, I had put a great deal of effort into catching up with my own language in an environment where I rarely had the opportunity to speak and use it, where my daily communicative language was English, and at a time when my mother tongue was growing and changing rapidly as a result of increasing contact and communication and exchange with the outside world. Who would ever have thought that a native speaker would have become ‘retarded’ in their own language? But it is true that when I returned to Shanghai in 2002 − on my saddest trip (to my father’s funeral), as I recorded in my essay ‘La double vie de Veronica’ − I found myself, from the first day, suffering badly from, or even paralysed by, ‘language lag’. Initially, I stammered in trying to carry out even basic social interaction. English, which had become the most-used language in my life over the previous five years, continued to exert a strong force on me and have some mysterious control of my speech organ − my mouth. I had to speak slowly, trying to rise above the thick cloud that formed the frontier of my linguistic repertoire. It was as though I was searching for a key to a door that had been locked for a very long time, a door that could connect me to the ‘here and now’. It was as though I was searching for a route to a spring that had been inaccessible for a long time. Of course, it was not forgetting. Our mother tongue is something that we never forget. I knew that when I spoke English, it was always caught up in the waves of the magnetic fields created by my mother tongue or by Mandarin, my second language, in which I learned to write. I could always hear the loud background noise. They have always formed the inner layer of my English. Even when I hardly spoke my mother tongue in Australia, my most immediate responses, like interjections, were still always in my Shanghainese. When I saw or heard of people suffering or dying in tragic circumstances, I would smack my mouth ze, ze, ze while shaking my head to express my sympathy, lamentation and pity. I could hear myself saying

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in my heart something like this: ‘so miserable, this person’s fate is bitter’. Of course, when coming out of my mouth, it usually became something like ‘How unfortunate!’ Personal feelings of disappointment, sadness and a sense that I can’t do anything about something will prompt me to sit speechless and sigh ai, rather than saying anything else. This way of reacting is simply part of my experience that is impossible to sever from ‘me’. But most of the time, I am a silent mother-tongue speaker. I speak it only in my heart and in my thought, but not in my mouth. For example, even if I use English numbers, they have to be processed and remembered first in my Shanghainese. I simply cannot perform any numeral tasks in any other tongue. I still always remember telephone numbers and count and perform all calculations solely in my Shanghainese. When I received a clock as a wedding gift, although I thanked the gift-giver, I could not help feeling dismayed. The expression describing the action for giving a clock rhymes with ‘paying last respects’ in Shanghainese. (I will never give an umbrella as a gift to a couple as in Shanghainese the sound of umbrella rhymes with ‘separate’. I would choose the number nine for the date of happy occasions because it rhymes with the word for ‘eternity’.) I still always think in conventional fixed expressions and playful sayings in my language, especially when they can put things in a succinct way. When my Aussie husband does not take the initiative in doing housework and does things only after being pushed, I grumble at his reluctance: ‘why like toothpaste that has to be squeezed’, ‘why like the bead on the abacus that will not move if not plucked’. But I never thought that the long disuse of Shanghainese would have cut off my speech from the spring of my mother tongue, and would have blocked the flow which should have been smooth and unimpeded and effortless. Returning to my mother tongue that time, I felt completely out of place. It shocked me. It also shamed me. It took some time to bring the language to the surface. Once the door of my mother tongue was opened, it gushed out, erupted like lava from a dormant volcano. The language finally found its natural course with ease. After I had not spoken my own language continuously for several years,

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each word that I uttered seemed to carry full weight. It struck a beat in my heart, its meaning so real and pure. It made me so conscious of what I said. The first time I called a middle-aged female shop assistant ‘aunty’ in a shoe store to get her attention I shocked myself. I also felt rather awkward in actually becoming so close linguistically with a stranger after I had hardly used any title or form of address to people for a long time. Do I dare to call a shop assistant ‘aunty’ in Australia? The idea intrigued and amused me. But what else could I have called her if not ‘aunty’? I could have called her ‘comrade’, but that would have been outlandish. She would think I was from another age. When a relative gave me some farewell gifts, I heard myself saying zijiren, wenshenme name keqi (‘We are insiders, why you are being so polite?’). I was immediately taken aback. Am I not familiar with this ‘insider−outsider’ distinction? Of course I am. I think in these terms in Australia with my Australian husband all the time. Whenever he replies to my email with something like ‘thanks for your email’ or when he says ‘I appreciate it’, or ‘you might want to do it this way’, I get upset and reply in English ‘why are you treating me like an outsider’, for Chinese couples do not use such formal language. But for a long time, I myself have not spoken these words in Shanghainese. I have not heard the sound of them for such a long time. When I hear them now, they seem unbelievably forceful, pure and shocking. By speaking them out, I feel the true force of the word zijiren, which simply cannot be replaced by the English word ‘insider’. I know how deeply I have been drawn into a way of interacting with people that depends on the distinction between zijiren (‘insider’) and wairen (‘outsider’). Hearing myself speak Shanghainese, I felt enlivened again in my native place. I felt a great excitement that spread all over me like a shockwave from the sensory organs − the ears and the mouth − to my heart. It felt as though there was no lag in time between my words and my thoughts and feelings. I realised how I thirst for speaking and hearing my language. Those sounds flowing from my own mouth are so natural and dear to me, coming straight from my heart.

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The sounds of our mother tongue are like no other sounds. They are the first sounds coming from within ourselves, giving tangible forms to our thoughts and feelings, which put us in touch with the outside world and with the people around us. They are the sounds that are most dear to us. Of all the sounds that we can hear, they are the most meaningful to us. They are in fact internal to ourselves. I realised how not hearing the sounds of my mother tongue from my own mouth for such a long time had made me feel so distant from the past that I had left behind in the other land, the past that I could not take with me. I felt that I was floating during those years, as if even time was disjointed. Once we move across ten thousand mountains and a thousand seas, our past − the past that is known only to the people there − is forever left behind. Our mother tongue becomes an invisible umbilical cord, the only thing that sustains, nurtures and links the me of ‘here and now’ to the me from there. Returning to my mother tongue after being away from it made me realise how vital it was for me to have a coherent sense of self, and to be sustained by it, from my body to my heart-mind. For the meaning of each word that I utter carries with it the full force I want it to have. It is an integral part of me. During that saddest trip, linguistic jetlag seemed to be hovering. I felt as if I had been left behind by the time train that my native city had embarked on. When I first left Shanghai in January 1997, China was still a planned economy. Chinese universities had just started phasing out job-allocation (previously, all graduates were allocated jobs). At that time no houses could be bought or sold, and few people had their own cars. But when I returned in September 2002, all university graduates were free to find their own jobs. Along with that, job interviews, job fairs and changing jobs became hot topics; allocated housing no longer existed; people could now buy and sell houses, they could take out loans; ATM machines were everywhere, EFTPOS started becoming popular, people owned their own cars and newspapers which previously were simply in black and white started to include colour pages, and extras on ‘finance’, ‘cars’, ‘housing’, ‘jobs’ and ‘travel’.

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Before 1997, I had never written anything on a computer using Windows, and had never used email. A telephone was installed in our little apartment in the old part of Shanghai only in 1996, and I used to talk with my boyfriend − now my husband − in a public telephone booth where people were waiting impatiently next to me. But when I returned in 2002, one million Chinese people regularly accessed the Internet, and at least one billion SMS messages were exchanged daily between people’s mobile phones. The change had been enormous. So it was with the language that grew and evolved to equip people to talk about the new aspects of their lives – change that for them had been gradual but for me was like a huge leap. All that vocabulary, which has now become so much part of the everyday conversation and daily speech, became once again new to me. I had to acquaint myself with it. And I had the daunting task of catching up with the Shanghai linguistic ‘maglev’ (a locomotive powered by magnet that travels at 430 kilometres per hour, and which only exists in Shanghai). Were many of the concepts that I mentioned before new to me? They were when I arrived in Australia in 1997. I learned the whole English vocabulary that allowed me to carry out basic living tasks in Australia where, for me, it was not a matter of learning new labels for the same things in a foreign language, but of learning completely new concepts, and new ways of living through new names. I did not have concepts such as EFTPOS, real estate, ramp − all those new things fascinated me. I remember that I used to read and study every single advertisement that came to my hand. And I accumulated many scrapbooks. But I never thought of translating any of those things into my mother tongue. Those things, along with those concepts, did not exist in my mother tongue at that time, and did not exist in the world that I had lived in. I learned the way of life in Australia and gained new ‘world knowledge’, not just through observations, but through learning a whole new English vocabulary. Once again in 2002, unexpectedly and rather strangely, I had to do ‘matching games’ with my own language (whereas one might expect translation to be always from our own language to a foreign language). I was matching the new Shanghainese words to my pre-established concepts learned in English

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through my experiences living in Australia. Of course, the local expression of international trends did not mean that new Chinese counterparts to existing English words would be identical to what the English concepts stood for (even the fillings of the wrap in the Chinese KFC are made of duck meat). And often a new term was drawn from the building stock of Chinese characters. Like solving a crossword puzzle, I found myself trying to figure out the meaning and referents of all those new terms, such as lingtongka (a magic card, a bankcard). It is not good to feel left behind by the trend of one’s mother tongue. I do not want to be a foreigner in Shanghai, a sojourner, but a native Shanghainese. The place has already transformed itself into something new and unfamiliar to me, thanks to the enormous changes in the city’s way of life. At least, I want to feel more at home in it. My mother tongue is the only bond that can transcend time and space. When the only connection appears weakened, it is a sad feeling to be left behind. A fish that has never left its water never knows what water means to it. A fish that has never returned to water will never know the impact of the water on it. If I hadn’t returned to my own language after a long time, I would not have realised what my mother tongue means to me, and to my sensory and mental needs. My linguistic lag in my mother tongue, and the effect it had on me, shocked me into the realisation that the only way to maintain and catch up with my language was to take the initiative myself. I returned to Australia with the determination of ‘returning to my mother tongue’ every day. And in the time since, that is what I have done. Each linguistic world that I live in carries with it and evokes a personal history that I connect to. Although my life now is mostly spent away from my native place, by returning to my mother tongue I can live these parallel lives simultaneously. To me, my ‘history’ is no longer locked in the past, but forms part of my present and future.

My linguistic background Like every other fellow Shanghainese, I can be said to be a Shanghainese− Mandarin bilingual, and I myself seem to have a fairly clear, though not

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absolute, division of labour in using the two. I use Shanghaihua (‘speech of Shanghai’) whenever and wherever I speak to my family and fellow Shanghainese. Like any other dialect in China (fangyan, ‘language of a place’), it can be written in Chinese characters (hanzi, ‘sinograph’), which can again be read out in any other Chinese dialect thanks to the non-alphabetical property of the Chinese characters. Since my schooling and formal education were conducted in Mandarin Chinese (putonghua, ‘common speech’) – the official language, medium of instruction, and the language of the media in Mainland China − and all texts are written in characters and meant to be read out in spoken Mandarin, I tend to use it to read formal and literary writings. (I should point out that Mandarin Chinese is the language that most foreign students learn.) I also think about ‘scientific’ knowledge, such as the table of elements, in Mandarin Chinese as a result of my formal education. It is not that I can’t read an article in Shanghainese. I once did so to a group of elderly people as a task assigned by the neighbourhood committee. But I found it awkward, because I did not associate Shanghainese with anything ‘formal’. However, the immediate sound and meaning associated with any street signs or any things to do with everyday life are nothing but Shanghainese, and this is especially so with respect to the name of delicacies, the kind of architecture, and anything that is distinctive to Shanghai. Mandarin is based mainly on the Beijing dialect (Beijinghua, ‘Beijing speech’): it corresponds to the standard written Chinese language (zhongwen, ‘texts of China’) and can be notated in the auxiliary romanised form popularised in the last two decades which, regrettably, I have had to use for this chapter, as there is no standard transliteration system for Shanghainese. I consider English my third language. I started learning it in Year 5 at primary school, and I studied it all the way through middle school, and up to university, as a compulsory subject. The main method of teaching was grammatical translation. Upon graduation from the department of Chinese Linguistics and Literature with a BA, I had a fairly good command of basic English, but it had never influenced my way of thinking and experiencing the world until I moved to Australia.

CH A P TE R 6

East meets West, or does it really? Jock Wong

An Anglo man visits a grave with some flowers. He notices a Chinese man placing a bowl of rice respectfully before a grave. Curious, the Anglo man walks up to the Chinese man and asks, ‘When do you expect your friend to come up and eat the rice?’ The Chinese man replies with a smile, ‘The same time your friend comes up to smell the flowers’. – Internet joke, with some modification Obviously, anyone who has had any genuine cross-cultural encounter would find out soon enough that there can be many differences between two cultures. In Singapore, where I grew up, I saw differences among the Chinese subcultures, but more so between the three major cultural groups: Chinese, Malay and Indian. I saw obvious differences in the way we dressed, the things we ate, the festivals we celebrated and, above all, the languages we spoke. I first lived in Australia as an undergraduate from February 1989 to February 1992. Now, living in Australia and interacting with Anglo Australians on a daily basis for the second time (from February 2002), I have been brought to a greater level of awareness that norms from different

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cultures do not simply differ, but could well be at odds with each other. This was something that did not strike me the first time, although it was already obvious at that time that some of the norms that were typical of Singapore Chinese culture were not embraced by Anglo Australians, and vice versa. It took a long time, a lot of searching and reflecting for me to realise that many of these cultural differences are deep-rooted and have nothing to do with good or bad moral values, or right or wrong behaviour. They are simply, yet profoundly, different ways of looking at the same thing. In this chapter, I would like to share with readers my experience of navigating in two cultural landscapes – Chinese and Anglo – as a cultural outsider in Anglo-Australian society, and the dual personas I am still developing to manage this act. I will talk about my cultural background and the things I had to learn and ‘unlearn’ later in life to penetrate the Anglo culture and think like its people. Lastly, I will see what I have been left with in this pursuit of cultural versatility.

Linguistic barriers Right from birth, bilingualism has been part of my life. My late paternal grand), in parents, with whom I had lived since birth, came from Taishan ( ), China. They spoke mainly the language of Guangdong province ( ), which is a member of the Yue ( ) family of languages. the area, Siyi ( Naturally, they also spoke to their children, who were born in Singapore, in ; Siyi. However, they also acquired Cantonese or Guangdong hua ( ‘Guangdong speech’), another Yue language (very different from Siyi at least phonologically), to communicate with fellow immigrants from Guangdong, as it is the region’s lingua franca. Presumably because Siyi is uncommon among immigrants to Singapore from Guangdong, my paternal grandparents and their children, including spouses, who constituted a close-knit extended family, have mainly spoken to the next generation (mine) in Cantonese, although they spoke among themselves either in Cantonese or Siyi. As a result, even though Siyi was very much used within the extended family and I could understand a fair bit of it, I cannot speak this language beyond a few words.

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In addition to Siyi and Cantonese, I was also exposed to Mandarin and English at an early age. One of my paternal aunts was a teacher who taught in Mandarin and, when I was small, spoke to me in Mandarin regularly to make sure I knew the language from a young age. In kindergarten and during the twelve years of formal education that ensued, I learnt English and more Mandarin. Because I grew up in such a multilingual situation, multilingualism − both at the individual and at the community level − has for me always been something to be taken for granted. It is nothing remarkable. Unfortunately, although I can speak three languages − Cantonese, Mandarin and English − I do not have so-called native-speaker competency in any of them. While Cantonese is my first language, I mainly speak it at home and in casual speech with some acquaintances. I acquired Mandarin as a second language and, when I was a student, I spoke it mainly during Mandarin classes. Because I use Cantonese and Mandarin mainly in casual speech, I am not good at discussing complex issues or topics in these two languages without resorting to lengthy and awkward paraphrases. Ironically, of the three languages, I am most fluent in the one I acquired last − English − mainly because most of my formal education was conducted in this language. I can use English in a much greater range of genres than I can Mandarin or Cantonese, but the fact remains that I cannot speak it like a native ‘Anglo-English’ speaker can.1 In short, my command of each of these three languages cannot in itself meet my total expressive needs. That is why for me, and presumably for many Singaporeans as well, bilingualism or multilingualism has evolved to become a daily necessity. In Australia, I have to rely solely on English to communicate with Anglo Australians. Relying only on English, I often cannot find words to convey important meanings found in Chinese. I remember I once had difficulty explaining to a British man what a common Singaporean household item was. It is a long cylindrical pillow-like thing that one hugs with arms and legs to sleep and it is called a ‘bolster’ in Singapore English. The problem was that the same word in Anglo-English denotes a cylindrical pillow or cushion which is much smaller and serves a different purpose, namely to

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support some part of the body. To explain this concept, I had to paraphrase the word. However, while it may be relatively easy to paraphrase a word that denotes a physical item, it is not so straightforward when it comes to describing emotion. For example, using English, I find it exceedingly difficult to tell my friends that I sek ( ; literally ‘kiss’, but here it roughly means ‘dote on’) my nephews very much; nor is it easy to express my feeling of mm ; very roughly, ‘unable to emotionally let go of something sedek ( which one feels strongly for’) to a friend when we are about to part. As a result, I often find myself handicapped when it comes to the expression of my culture-specific emotions. Then again, not being able to find an English word to express a Chinese meaning to an Anglo-English speaker does not seem to be a major issue for me. After all, I can resort to a paraphrase, even if it might sound like a clumsy way to get the idea across. Also, what I cannot express in English is often something I would rarely need to refer to in Anglo culture. What has posed a bigger problem to me has been how language is used in interaction. Even though I speak a variety of English, I have on many occasions experienced immense difficulties interacting with Anglo Australians because of cultural differences reflected in ways of speaking.

Cultural barriers My experience in Australia has shown me that knowing the forms of the language cannot always ensure successful cross-cultural communication, even in mundane matters such as a casual, friendly greeting or a simple request. Having lived in Australia for over five years, I have found that one of the main barriers to cross-cultural communication has to do with how speakers perceive personal autonomy. Personal autonomy ranks highly on the hierarchy of Anglo values, but it is not a notion that people from many other cultures emphasise or even conceive. Like many Singaporeans of my time, I presume, I was not ‘born with a silver spoon in my mouth’. For the first eighteen years of my life, I lived with my extended family in a three-bedroom unit. My family of four occupied

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one bedroom, my uncle’s family of five another, and my paternal grandparents the third. My two paternal aunts, although they had a place of their own, came to our place for dinner after work each day. With so many people under one roof, there was hardly any room for privacy, especially since the walls which separated the various rooms within the unit did not extend to the ceiling. In short, privacy was not a notion we were concerned with. Living as an extended family gave us a practical means of combining our resources, but it also meant that we saw ourselves more as a unit than as individuals. Common Anglo rules of politeness, which express respect for personal autonomy, simply did not exist in the household. When a person wanted another to do something, this would be expressed in some imperative form and there was an expectation that the addressee would do it if he or she possibly could. The issue of whether he or she wanted to do it did not surface. ‘Thank you’ was mainly said when receiving a special gift, and even then only from someone younger to someone older in the hierarchical Chinese family; as far as I can remember, my parents have never said ‘Thank you’ to me. In fact, I would consider myself ‘lucky’ if my mother did not criticise something which I had bought for her as a present. ‘Sorry’ was also unheard of. I suppose my family’s speech norms were unremarkable within the Cantonese context, in which politeness − depending on the situation − could be seen as a distancing device. In fact, one of the Cantonese terms for polite), which may be roughly translated into ‘reminiscent of ness is hak hei ( a guest’. In other words, being excessively polite could be interpreted as seeing ; ‘external people’) or, roughly, an outsider the addressee as a ngoi yen ( ; ‘self-person/people’) or ‘insider’. In of sorts in contrast to a zigei yen ( Cantonese culture, it is very important to treat zigei yen differently from ngoi yen and one way of doing this is through expressions of politeness. Cantonese people avoid being excessively polite to zigei yen (‘self-people’). Because I know Mandarin, I was able to frequently access Mandarin literature and movies that depicted traditional Chinese themes. As a result, many core Chinese values concerning human relations which I inherited through Cantonese became even more firmly ingrained in me through

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Mandarin, as many Cantonese key words can also be rendered in Mandarin. The value of Cantonese zigei yen (‘self-people’) was reinforced for me by the same expression in Mandarin: ziji ren. In fact, through Mandarin, my understanding of ziji ren, especially with friends, was carried even further. ; In traditional Chinese culture, close friends are regarded as xiongdi ( ; ‘arm and leg’) for men and jiemei ( ; ‘brothers’) or shouzu ( ; ‘having deep feelings ‘sisters’) for women. Shouzu qing shen ( ; of brotherhood’) is a commendable state of fraternity. A shenjiao ( ; ‘know-self ’), who can read ‘deep relation’) and especially a zhiji ( one’s innermost thoughts and feelings, represent quality friendship at its highest level. Physically, it is acceptable for close friends to be xingying bu li ; ‘form and shadow don’t part’) or cheng bu li tuo ( ; ( ‘the balance doesn’t part with the weight’) or, in English, constantly seen together. Above all, a true mark of friendship is when people bu fen bici ; ‘to not distinguish between one another’). That is why, with ( close friends, I try to bu fen bici. However, my experience in Anglo-Australian society tells me that heterosexual Anglo men tend not to forge intimate relationships with friends. In fact, they seem uncomfortable with the thought. Unlike Chinese people, they would not want to regard a spouse, much less a friend, as an extension of themselves. Although Anglo women, by contrast, seem much better at forging intimate relationships than their male counterparts, it is also difficult to bu fen bici with them. This seems to be because Anglo people are so mindful of one another’s personal autonomy and space. To them, everyone is a clearly demarcated individual and there is every inclination for an Anglo person to differentiate him/herself from another. The chances of finding a zhiji in Anglo culture are as good as the chance of finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no matter how much one is prepared to sacrifice for friendship. In fact, even the use of common, everyday expressions like ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’, and requests made in the form of a question often seem to me a step backward in the process of bonding with an Anglo person. Such polite expressions often stop a Chinese from seeing the addressee as a close friend or ziji ren. Consequently, I have

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often felt a distance between myself and my Anglo friends because nobody considered me a shenjiao or ziji ren and there was no one I could view as such, no matter how long we have known each other. From a Chinese per; spective, our interaction could be described as yi li xiangdai ( ‘treating one another ritualistically/politely’), which connotes a considerable amount of social distance. The relationship would appear to be junzi ; ‘gentlemanly relation’), which is classically dan ru shui zhi jiao ( ; ‘thin as water’). ( On the other hand, because Anglo culture values personal autonomy and space, I felt a curious sense of freedom when I first came to Australia in 1989. People allowed me to do what I wanted without any need to conform to any social standards. Now that I am living in Australia for the second time, the experience gets even better. In Chinese-dominant societies, including Singapore, there seems to be a strong tendency for people to conform to social standards. In Australia, there is far less pressure to conform and so, coming from Singapore, Australia is like a breath of fresh air. Living in Australia, I have also grown to appreciate having personal space. I even enjoy being on my own sometimes, as having someone to do things with might mean having to accommodate him or her in some ways. I had not felt like this before I came to Australia. Now, not only have I accepted regard for personal autonomy as a personal value, I overtly express it using, for example, tags like ‘you don’t have to’ or ‘only if you want’ when I ask an Anglo person to do something, even though such expressions can sound very distancing from a Chinese perspective. At the same time, I also find that my speech norms are tending towards ‘Anglo English’ in other ways. Cantonese people tend to speak definitively. Before I understood Anglo-English norms, I was often frustrated with the tentativeness expressed in Anglo-English speech, as many things appeared to be stated in terms of probability and likelihood and nothing seemed certain. For example, when I asked an Anglo friend if he or she wanted to do something (for example, go for a drink), often I would get something like ‘could do’, ‘might do’, or ‘probably’ − rarely something definitive. When the Anglo person wanted to do something, he or she would often say

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something like ‘I might do this’. I was constantly unsure about a lot of things which were said and thought that Anglo-English speakers lacked commitment both to what they say and to the relationship. Now, I seem to have mastered the art of disguising definitiveness in the form of tentativeness and terms like ‘could do’, ‘probably’ and ‘I think so’ are part of my verbal repertoire when I interact with Anglo people. Another area of change has to do with perception of seniority. Chinese people in general place a lot of emphasis on a social hierarchy based on age. That is why it was and, to some extent, still is difficult for me to address people older than me by one generation using their first names. However, this seems to be the norm in Anglo culture. For example, when I addressed a British friend’s father as ‘Uncle Chris’ upon our first meeting, he insisted that I refer to him by his first name, which made me feel like his contemporary rather than his junior. Now, as long as I’m within Anglo culture, I have less inhibition than before when addressing people by their first name, regardless of age. Cantonese people tend to overstate while Anglo people tend to understate. In Cantonese, adjectives are not uncommonly modified by words like ‘very’ or ‘really’. For example, during one of my visits home to Singapore in 2004, my mother told a friend of hers in Cantonese that I had lost some weight and ; ‘very fat’). The truth that the previous time I was home, I was haofei ( is that I have never been overweight in my entire adult life. My Anglo friends, on the other hand, often understate with hedges like ‘a bit’, ‘kind of’ or ‘sort of’. Initially, I had the impression that Anglo culture lacked passion because everything that was said seemed so toned down and suppressed. Now, understating things so as to sound rational and not emotional seems like the right thing to do. All in all, I seem to have learned how to see things from an Anglo perspective and it is almost as if I have acquired an Anglo persona.

Internal conflicts and possible solution However, just because I now have an Anglo persona, it doesn’t mean that my Cantonese-Chinese persona is gone. It is still alive and well in me and I feel

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as though I have to suppress it every time I let my Anglo persona speak. Yet, whenever I interact with a fellow Chinese who speaks to me using Chinese speech norms, it will ‘rise’ to the occasion and at such a time I would need to suppress my Anglo persona. Although I am used to my Anglo persona now, whenever I interact with a close Chinese friend, I instinctively find it refreshing, as I feel I can put aside all the Anglo rules of politeness and we can interact with each other like ziji ren. In a sense, having two cultural personas – Anglo and Chinese − can allow one to effectively penetrate two cultures. However, given the fact that an outsider norm can go against an insider value and vice versa, a bicultural person can constantly find him/herself struggling with two insider norms that are at odds with each other. When I interact with Anglo Australians, deep inside me the Chinese persona feels isolated because I cannot seem to form any intimate bond with anyone. Interestingly, this feeling of isolation eventually led to a feeling which I had never experienced before – a mild sense of depression. I experienced it for the first time one and a half years into my PhD program. In Australia, I gather depression is not an uncommon condition; it reportedly affects about 20 per cent of Australians at some stage of their lives. By contrast, I have never known anyone in Singapore suffering from depression. Even though according to a report referred to in an article from Channel News Asia about 5 per cent of the Singaporean population experiences depression, I find this difficult to believe.2 This is because ‘depression’ is an Anglo-specific word; people in Singapore may experience something that appears similar, but it probably wouldn’t be depression. In fact, my brief encounter with depression tells me that it could well be the by-product of a culture that values personal autonomy and space, in situations where people feel disconnected from others. Because people in Singapore culture do not see themselves as individuals, and they benefit from a network of emotional support from family and friends, they are at a much lower risk of this emotional state. Staying in the company of Chinese people was not the ideal way for me to combat depression either, because my Anglo persona would feel stifled. The only way out was to rely on my Christian faith and willpower.

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When insider norms are at odds with each other, even everyday expressions can pose a challenge. When an Anglo Australian says something like ‘you don’t have to’ or ‘thank you’ over small matters, there will be two reactions within me. The Anglo persona will, of course, appreciate the respect for my personal autonomy. However, the Chinese persona will sense that the person is keeping a distance and will feel isolated. On the other hand, when a fellow Chinese asks me to do something using an imperative, the Chinese persona will feel the closeness but the Anglo persona will feel imposed upon. In everyday interactions, I find that I am in a kind of love−hate relationship with people I see as close to me, including, and especially, family members when I visit them. These daily challenges tell me that the two cultural personas are here to stay. Although there are many obvious advantages in being bicultural, I don’t feel that I totally belong to either of my two cultures. Because of this, I now sometimes envy monocultural people who remain in the comfort of their own cultural zone. Developing a bicultural identity can therefore be a lonely affair, as not many people seem to understand or empathise with a bicultural person. It seems that, to many people, a cross-cultural experience involves little more than sampling cuisines and wearing clothes from another culture, and visiting cultural fairs. As an Anglo-Australian consultant puts it: ‘For many Australians, the obligatory “Europe tour” after finishing school or University is considered as a means of cultural development. Whilst understanding our European neighbours [as she puts it] is immensely valuable, often such expeditions really involve drinking copious amounts of exotic beer (a worthwhile task if undisguised [sic] as cultural understanding!) and snapping shots of renowned monuments and sites.’ Another Anglo Australian tells me: ‘I was introduced formally to the concept of multiculturalism in high school, where we studied it in Geography and they organised an annual Multicultural Week. Through these I came to associate multiculturalism with exotic food, costumes, and customs. Of course, this is a naïve view.’ To quote one more Anglo-Australian consultant: ‘I think the Australian community needs to increase their engagement in or exposure to cultures different from their own. I could as a start see more of the events

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on offer at the Multicultural Festival in Canberra, and by doing so expose myself to some physical/oral traditions that differ to those I have experienced as an Anglo Australian. Discover the history behind Greek dancing as opposed to jazz ballet.’ Even the fact that a person speaks two languages does not fully guarantee that he or she experiences biculturalism at the core. since it is often possible to express one’s own cultural values using another language. For example, ‘English’ is said to be spoken in Singapore, but most Singaporeans do not seem to be familiar with the value of personal autonomy; they have adapted English forms to express Chinese values instead. In the hope that I would be understood, I once came up with the idea of sharing my own cultural norms with some Anglo people. Given that Australia is a multicultural society and most Anglo Australians are presumably proud of their country’s cultural diversity, I thought that by making my close Anglo friends understand where I come from culturally, the burden of juggling two personas might be lessened. I told some of my closest Anglo friends that, in Chinese culture, people do not see each other as individuals. They also do not place as much emphasis on what they want to do as what they can do. They do not need to be thanked for the slightest matter and often do not make an issue out of doing what others want. I said these things to some Anglo friends in the hope that they would thank me less frequently and stop asking me what I want so routinely, which often leaves me lost for words. The people with whom I shared this seemed to appreciate me telling them about these differences. However, even with the benefit of such insider information, it remains difficult for Anglo people to deviate from their own cultural norms. For example, while they may understand that a Chinese person is not being rude when he or she does not express words of appreciation like ‘thank you’ often enough, it doesn’t stop them from thanking the Chinese person themselves. They continue to be excessively ‘polite’ with me, even though I have told them that words like these make me feel alienated. Although I had been bicultural as a traditional Cantonese and a modern Singaporean, it was only when I lived in Australia for the second time

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that cross-cultural differences became so jarring to me. It was here that I experienced conflicting values and then came to understand them. Ironically, this sense of conflict became stronger because of a conscious effort on my part to understand Anglo culture from the inside through research and personal experience. In this process of discovery, I have unknowingly become more and more Anglified. Now I can say that I have at least two cultural personas – Chinese and Anglo − and, as mentioned, these two personas are in many ways incompatible. One values group integrity; the other, personal autonomy. One constructs a hierarchical relationship based on age and seniority, while the other upholds egalitarianism. One tends to overstate, while the other prefers to understate. Some people might describe Singapore society as one where ‘East meets West’, because it contains both Chinese and Anglo (American and British) cultural components. However, my experience as a Chinese−Anglo bicultural person tells me that, while the two cultures can co-exist, they rarely ‘meet’, because of conflicting cultural values. Because of this, I guess I will continue to feel simultaneously like a cultural insider and an outsider − in both cultures. This is, obviously, a frustrating situation and it seems to me that many Chinese people residing in Australia have avoided it. Some may have tried to penetrate the Anglo-Australian culture but, in the end, many seem to prefer to remain in the comfort of their own cultural zone and stay in the company of fellow Chinese. As a result, Chinese communities in Australia could in many instances appear exclusive. In university colleges, it is not uncommon to see Chinese people dining at the same table, often excluding fellow Anglo residents. However, I shall not be discouraged. Despite the frustrations, I want to have the best of both worlds and to be able to navigate in the Chinese and the Anglo cultural landscapes effectively. I want to be able to enjoy the fruits of both cultures. At the same time, I also want to get out of my current discomfort zone. I have a vision. In my vision, there is a culturally neutral persona. Because this persona does not have cultural baggage, it does not come into conflict with any cultural norm and provides a neutral

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standpoint from which the person can interact with anyone from any culture effortlessly. Does such a persona exist? I do not know for now but, if I have to, I think I will spend the rest of my life searching for it.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all my Anglo-Australian consultants for sharing with me what cross-cultural understanding means to them. I am also grateful to the editors for giving me the opportunity to share with others my experience as a bicultural person in Australia. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my Anglo friends for sharing with me the value of personal autonomy.

CH A P T E R 7

Growing up between two languages/ two worlds: Learning to live without belonging to a terra1 Andrea Witcomb

Many migrant experiences have a common narrative. After all, people usually migrate because they are seeking a better life elsewhere or because they are forced to leave their country of origin. When narrated, these experiences are frequently framed by narratives of progress – one overcomes initial adversity, makes good and prospers. For many, questions of identity revolve around the problems of cultural assimilation versus cultural preservation − a problem recognised by governments and given the semblance of a solution by the concept of multiculturalism. There are examples, however, where the distinction between one’s origins and one’s eventual destination are not so easily demarcated. My experience is one of those. Born in Portugal, to an English father and an Australian mother, I don’t think I have ever belonged anywhere. Coming to terms with that knowledge has taken a while. My story begins somewhere around 1939. One year before, my mother was born in Sydney, Australia. She mostly grew up in Newcastle, where she studied to become a classical musician and later moved back to Sydney, where she taught at Sydney Conservatorium. In 1939, however, my father

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was already twenty-six. He was working towards his doctoral degree in Medieval French at Cambridge University when World War II broke out. A linguist, he, like many other university graduates, was reserved for Special Services when the universities were closed down. In 1940, after an abortive attempt at being sent into Denmark (Hitler invaded just before he was due to leave) he was sent to Portugal, in the employ of the British Council. He hardly ever talks about the war years, but we gather that his time was spent not only in teaching English and the value of English culture to the Portuguese: Portugal was of course a neutral country in that conflict, with ports valuable to both sides, and a centre of espionage. My father, or Pai as I call him, fell in love with Portugal and stayed on after the war – initially with the British Council and eventually as an academic at Coimbra University in the Faculty of Germanics. In a sense, he was the first migrant in our family although the circumstances of his migration were not the usual ones. There was never a conscious moment when he decided to leave England. He just decided to stay in Portugal after world events took him there. He learnt to speak Portuguese like the locals and made his home there. The majority of his friends were Portuguese and he never considered himself a member of the expatriate community. He intended to live his life in Portugal and, in 1963, even converted to Catholicism as part of his effort to belong to Portuguese society. He never married however. In 1963, my mother was in London, studying at the International Cello Centre. She had a choice that summer holiday – she could either go to the Edinburgh Festival or to an International Summer School for cello players, run just outside Lisbon by a well-known American cellist. She chose the latter. In Cascais, she met my father who was attending the same summer school, having just taken up the cello. He was fifty, she twenty-five. Three months later, they were married and my mother had made the decision to live in Coimbra. A year and a bit later – January 1965 – I was born. My British birth certificate marks my double identity as both British and Portuguese. It records not only my place of birth as being different from my nationality but also my parents’ efforts at finding a name that crossed both languages. Thus, on my birth certificate I am Andrea Buckland Witcomb.

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Andrea because it was so close to the Portuguese Andreia and Buckland because that was my mother’s maiden name and in Portugal every child carries both their mother’s maiden name and their father’s surname. This double identity remained with me throughout my childhood and was expressed particularly in language. My father, though he called me Andy, always spoke to me in Portuguese. This was so even when he spoke in English to my mother in my presence. My relationship to him as a child is defined by the Portuguese language. We were also very close. Every night he would sing me to sleep and recite a little verse he had made up and which I still remember and sometimes recite to my own children: Muito boas noites (Very good night) Dorme muito bém (Sleep very well) E até manha se Deus quiser. (And until tomorrow if God so wishes.)2

I would not go to sleep until he came upstairs and sang or, later on, spoke these words, which he did unfailingly every night. As I grew up, all my thirst for knowledge, for explanations was given to me by Pai in Portuguese. He was the one who instilled in me a love of books, of debate and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. My mother, on the other hand, was just beginning to learn Portuguese as I arrived so she spoke to me in English and then increasingly in both languages. I am told I refused to speak either until they sent me to a local kindergarten at the age of two, whereupon I promptly decided on Portuguese. Portuguese became the language of my childhood – I spoke it, I thought in it, I read it. All my friends were Portuguese children. I went to the local primary school and later preparatory school and high school. Occasionally, this dominance of the Portuguese language was broken by my mother singing English songs as she did not know Portuguese ones, and by my Australian grandmother sending a book over which my mother would read to us. Vo, as we called our grandmother, also came to visit us twice and I became accustomed to listening to her telling us stories of her childhood in English. By her second visit, when I was ten years old, I was perfectly able

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to converse with her. We were also exposed to English by watching Skippy and countless western and other Hollywood movies at our neighbour’s house – they had a TV and we did not. I became pretty good at listening to the English and reading the Portuguese subtitles at the same time. The majority of our books were in Portuguese, however, and I was introduced to European literature in translation. As a six- and seven-yearold I read through all of Enid Blyton’s books in translation. My mother would read us Nodi in Portuguese. I read the classic French fairytales and the Grimm Brothers tales in translation as well. As a ten-year-old, I read Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen in Portuguese, as well as Agatha Christie, Jules Verne and Louisa May Alcott. One of our next-door neighbours was a famous Portuguese poet and his wife, who was Belgian, used to take me up to their attic and allow me to choose a pile of books. I would end my visit by going to see Doutor Torga in his study, stretching out my hands and getting a handful of caramels. We were great friends, he and I. But it isn’t only through the Portuguese language that I acquired a large part of my cultural identity. It is also through my experience of the place. I acquired a love of history by living on top of a much older Roman town. My primary school was built on Roman foundations, the university my father taught at was built on top of the old Roman forum. On Sundays we often went to Conimbriga − a ruined Roman settlement famous for its mosaics and Roman villa gardens. The original lead piping was still in the ground and the archaeologists were able to reconstruct the original fountains. Our family was known by the guards and they would always turn on the tap so that I could see the fountains (repuxos) in action. My father was a friend of the archaeologist in charge and he would tell me about helping out with the digging. To me it all sounded romantic and I decided, after I visited the conservation labs where they put the old mosaics together again, to become an archaeologist. This is a dream that I only gave up at the end of my first year of university in Australia. As a twelve-year-old I took to visiting all the museums, galleries and historical sites in Coimbra, together with some of my school friends. We

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became tourists in our own city and rewarded ourselves by walking into town and having afternoon tea at one of the many cake shops which doubled as tea rooms. The waiter came to know us, exclaiming as we walked in – here comes the creche! It was in Portugal too that I was taken to my first concerts and was introduced to classical music. I learnt the piano with a professor who taught at the local conservatorium. Every Sunday morning my father would mend his socks listening to classical music on the radio and often my mother would play us our favourite piano pieces − Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite, Haydn’s Turkish March and Bach’s Bist Du Bei Mir. Pai too would sit down at the piano, particularly on Sundays, and play choral music from his time as a choral singer in Cambridge. One of the last things I did together with Pai in Portugal was to attend an organ recital in the baroque chapel of the university. I remember feeling very grown up until I jumped out of my seat with surprise at the force and loudness of a particular piece called Batalha (or Battle!). I still have the program. My foreignness was taken in hand by our neighbours, with whose children we constantly played. They organised my confirmation, realising that my parents would do nothing about that. But they also gave me a much more important gift – I learnt to cook in their kitchen, observing and later joining in the kitchen activities. I absorbed how to make all the classics of Portuguese cookery, particularly the sweets. They also taught me how to embroider and do crochet – all activities in which my mother had neither the skills nor the interest. Mum was happy, however, to let me take over the kitchen whenever I wanted to; something that I and the girl next door, Maria João, frequently did. We made cakes and sold them to our neighbours, or made afternoon tea for our parents. Often, I also made dinner and certainly the dessert. At school I was occasionally taunted for having foreign parents, but for the most part I was part of the group. The educational system prior to the revolution3 was very conservative. Large classes, sometimes of fifty children to one teacher, were not unusual. Always a she, she would rule the class literally with a ruler, which she was not afraid to use. The focus was on the three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic. Writing and reading were based

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on a very traditional pedagogy – copying. Every morning we would copy a text from the textbook into our books. We would be marked not only for the accuracy of the copy but also for the degree of elegance in our handwriting. We used fountain pens and were not allowed to print. The only occasion when I had the upper hand over the teacher was when I had to teach them how to write my name. There is no K, W or Y in the Portuguese alphabet and my name has two of them. Luckily for me, I knew how to read and write when I began primary school and so was on solid ground the first time it happened. When we copied out letters, we also had to copy out the drawing – something I was hopeless at. Arithmetic was done by learning our tables by rote. Grammar was instilled in us by the most detailed unpicking of the grammatical structure of sentences and the learning of conjugations. By the time we got to preparatory school – the equivalent of Years 5 and 6 in Australia – we were able to operate to a fairly high level, though probably without much imagination. Prep school was organised like a high school, with a timetable, different classes for the different disciplines and different teachers. Everyone was introduced to a second language as well as doing Portuguese, science, music, history, craft, geography, maths and physical education. My second language was English of course. This was always hard for me, as my father had invariably taught the teacher and would frequently check my lessons and homework and often sent a written note to explain something the teacher had got wrong. You can imagine that I was not exactly popular with the teachers, as not only was my father in the background – immediately recognisable by my name – but my pronunciation was often better than theirs. My foreignness was certainly highlighted in my English classes. By the time I got to first year high school as a thirteen-year-old, we were required to take a second foreign language – in my case French. Science was split three ways into biology, chemistry and physics. We studied something like nine separate subjects. The number of students attending high school was so large that they had to organise the timetable like a university. We were not at school from nine to three-thirty every day, but had our classes

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spread from eight-thirty in the morning till six-thirty at night. I remember one day when I had maths from ten-thirty to eleven-thirty in the morning and again from one-thirty to two-thirty on the same day. We had homework in between those two classes and, unfortunately for me, I had a piano lesson as well! Needless to say, the homework never got done. The teaching was also done in a lecturing style, in lecture theatres. The teacher spoke, occasionally would use the blackboard, and we took notes. The syllabus was enormous and there was never time for revision. Only those whose comprehension and writing skills were good had a chance. Classes consisted of writing as furiously as one could. If we didn’t understand something we had to ask a question right there and then or the chance would be gone. We were not shy students as a result. Our concentration skills and ability to summarise quickly and effectively were also sharpened. We simply could not play around. This pedagogical approach also led to a school environment in which we were treated as young adults. At recess, which went for fifteen minutes, we would grab a quick coffee in the caf – as did our teachers. If we had an hour’s break between lessons we would use the library, go to the café or sometimes walk down to the botanical gardens as a group. We were not constantly under someone’s eyes but responsible for our own time and behaviour. As at university, classes were held all over the high school site, with five minutes to get from one classroom to another. While enormously stressful, the system did encourage independence and a mature approach to life. As a thirteen-year-old I was confident in my ability to go anywhere in town by myself, to speak to adults and to join in adult conversations. I was not treated as a little child by anybody. I was, however, stressed by the pressures of the system and would frequently come home in tears because I had no time to do my homework and was exhausted. Although my early childhood was idyllic, things changed after the Portuguese revolution of April 1974. While it was a bloodless revolution, and one I remember very well as I was one of two children sent back to primary school after lunch – lunch was always consumed at home – the years that followed were marked by political instability and economic depression. Governments would change frequently, going from almost communist to

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right of centre. The empire collapsed, and with it the Portuguese economy, which had relied on all the primary goods produced in Portuguese Africa. Suddenly, things like bananas, coffee and brown sugar became prohibitively expensive. Thousands of refugees from the former colonies – both black and white – came to Portugal to find a lack of housing, no employment prospects and no social security system. The crime rates went up. We were burgled three times – an experience which made us fearful of going upstairs in the dark, and of staying in the house by ourselves, even during the day. I remember our fear expressing itself in things like setting up traps for anybody that might come into the house unannounced, and leaving windows open so we could escape if necessary. Our father took to having a pistol under his pillow and he taught me and one of my brothers to shoot it in case we had to defend ourselves while he was away. With hindsight, this difficult period was the making of the Portuguese nation into a modern, democratic state able to play its role in the European Economic Union. At the time, however, everything was in chaos and the atmosphere was characterised by constant fear. Our own family’s economic situation also became precarious. My father lost his savings, which were all in shares in Africa when these were nationalised. We had only our holiday house which was constantly under threat of being occupied by the ‘returnados’ – the refugees who, facing the lack of housing stock, took to occupying empty houses and refusing to move. One summer Pai actually took us to our beach house, leaving us there with a pistol while he was back in Coimbra working at the university and guarding our city house, which we rented. Our personal economic situation was made worse by the fact that my father, as a foreigner, was never allowed to pay into a super fund during the period of the dictatorship. With no social security system, there was no pension for our family should he die. This was a fear that my mother lived with on a daily basis, not only because of his age but because she could see the effects of the political changes on his colleagues, many of whom suffered, or died of, heart attacks during this period. Frightened, my mother began to plan to get us away. I was her major confidant. Together we would study the Australian newspapers she got her

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mother to send over, trying to establish living costs. She knew that if she could get us all there, all we would have were the proceeds from selling our holiday house – if we could get the money out of the country – and what she could earn by returning to work as a piano and cello teacher. She knew Pai was unlikely to get work as he was already sixty-three years old at this stage. Eventually, she convinced my father of the necessity of leaving Portugal quickly if she and the children were to have a secure future. It took her over a year to get him to agree. Stressed out by the pressures of the educational system, frightened by the rising costs of living, the tension in the family and in the air around us, I was only too happy to leave. I had been preparing myself for the event by reading every book I could lay my hands on in my father’s extensive English library, beginning with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, with a dictionary by my side. I also thought that I would be at home – after all, we were only going to my mother’s country. I had no idea of the culture shock I was about to go through. My immediate response, given my desire to come to Australia, was not one of refusing to engage. On the contrary, I happily agreed to stay for a couple of weeks, together with one of my brothers, with some people whom I had never met but who were old friends of my mother’s. I was the translator as Diogo was only five years old and did not speak English. I remember my astonishment at the variety of foods and goods available in the shops. I wrote to my father, who was still in Portugal selling our house and finishing the academic year, to tell him we could have as much ice cream or tinned pineapple as we wanted – it was not expensive. It was also exciting – all of my mother’s friends wanted to see us, as did her family. But there were also moments in which I felt very distinctly that I was not at home. I was shocked by what appeared to me the temporary nature of Australian settlement. The physical fabric of the landscape looked to my European eyes as lacking in substance. I had never seen a fibro or weatherboard house before. Even bricks were unfamiliar, as houses are all rendered in Portugal. The lack of a long European past in the built environment was also disconcerting. The other surprise was the dress code – I had never seen

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people walking in public in thongs or barefoot, or showing so much bare skin. Nor had I ever heard children talking disrespectfully to their parents. I was in for a shock – this was not a traditional society. My mother thought that we should go to school as soon as possible to get us acclimatised, even though we arrived at the end of the year, in October. She gave us a couple of weeks off while she found a house to rent, with the help of family friends. Despite the fact that my mother went to the local high school to enrol me, spoke with the principal and explained that while I had grown up in Portugal I was familiar with English, the school insisted in putting me in remedial English classes and at the middle of the academic scale – this was a time in which classes were academically streamed. I know they had the best of intentions – but they had not bothered to talk to me or make any attempt to find out the extent of my language abilities or knowledge of the curriculum. The only tests I received were IQ ones, which were supposedly culturally neutral and not based on language skills. The result for me was an enormous culture shock. I found myself in a high school whose population came from a working class area of Newcastle and where a large proportion of students were the children of Italian, Greek and Yugoslav migrants working for BHP. I simply did not fit the picture. The academic standard was not very high and discipline was extremely poor. Some of the teachers seemed either to lack imagination or to make no effort to find out who their new student was. In my very first week, I was asked to participate, alongside the others, in a public speaking exercise in which we had to give a little speech about ourselves. I happily participated but no sooner had I opened my mouth than the teacher was asking me if I was Scottish! I patiently said no, I was not and proceeded to explain who I was and what my parents did. This was a big mistake. From that day on the students in that class would surround my desk as I was working, taunting me about my parents. A classical musician for a mother and an academic for a father, I suddenly found, was an enormous social handicap. The teacher did nothing to control the situation and eventually I just got up and left the class, going to the principal’s office and requesting that I be put in another class. I got the support of the social worker who was one of

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the few people who had some insight into my problems and who got the principal to agree to my request for the following year. In the meantime, however, I took refuge in the library, going there before school and at recess and lunch. The librarians became my only friends and gladly guided my reading. This time I read Charles Dickens in English, some of the novels of Graham Greene, all of Daphne du Maurier’s books, the historical novels of Georgette Heyer, Catherine Gaskin and so on. I read a book every two days or so. I realised that what I was doing was not only making sure that I became better and better at English – I was also seeking solace in a culture that was familiar to me. The attacks on my identity were so unpleasant that, rather than thinking I had to change in order to fit in, I just grabbed at what I could to give myself some stability. I found that stability in the escape that literature offered me. All the books I read took me back to Europe and into history. Slowly, I immersed myself in English and Portuguese began to slide away. Increasingly, we spoke English to one another at home, especially to my mother, and eventually between ourselves. The cultural values which I developed while in Portugal, however, did not slip away. In fact they became strengthened if only because I recognised them as a set of cultural values by coming to know their opposite. The price, of course, was to be labelled a snob by those who did not share that culture. My brothers, interestingly, chose the opposite route – to forget Portuguese, not to engage with academic culture and, with the exception of one brother, not to engage with classical music. Throughout all this time I communicated with my father through letters written on both sides in Portuguese. That was the only way I knew how to talk to him. I still have the letters he wrote to me. Rereading them now is painful to me. They document a time to which I cannot return, even with my father. For once he stepped off that plane in Australia he never once spoke in Portuguese to us again. Our relationship was now to be mediated through the English language. We lost our daily rituals, such as the little ditty he would say to us when we went to bed or the singing of Portuguese folk songs. I also lost a certain emotional landscape – a landscape in which

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he was an unquestioned figure of authority but which also allowed him to express emotion. For what those letters document is my father’s ability to express, through the medium of written Portuguese, his love for me. It is, I know, trite to say that English is a cold language. But the language my father used in those letters has a higher intensity – it is there in his use of a string of adjectives, in his use of superlatives, in his attempt to comfort me over my experiences at school. He also showed me his enormous pride in my ability to do well at school despite the circumstances. Something he did again when he read my honours dissertation and decided to congratulate me by writing a letter to me. The emotional landscape I lost was also the ability to remember Portugal by talking about it in Portuguese. The place and the language used to discuss it or to be in it have now been broken apart. And there is simply no one else with whom I can share those memories and that language. It is only by the force of my own will that I continue to remember as best I can. The fact that I did not grow up into an adult continuing to speak Portuguese also had its effects when I returned to Portugal with my partner at twenty-four. I revisited all my old haunts and indeed explored the country in a way I had never done before. But I also found, through staying with family friends, that when it came to Portuguese my linguistic landscape was that of a child rather than an adult. I found it very hard, for example, to speak to these friends using the familiar form of ‘you’. As a child, I had always used the formal version of ‘you’. I also found I did not have the vocabulary required to conduct more intellectual discussions. On one occasion, when I was having lunch with a very old friend of my father’s – a sculptor – we somehow got talking about Hegel. At that point my Portuguese completely failed me and I just burst into tears. His wife, Regina, who spoke very good English, understood what was going on. But poor Antonio had no idea. I recovered but we changed the topic of conversation. There is no getting away from the fact that I have been robbed of growing up in my first language. I think that the effect of that is a feeling of being territorially lost. Many people have a place that is important to them, that they call home. For the Portuguese, this is invariably their terra, the

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place where they were born, where the family house is and where they are known. It is the place they return to throughout their lives, even those who have emigrated. And they can maintain a relationship to it because they have kept a linguistic connection, continuing to speak in the same language with the same group of people. I haven’t. I have neither the house, nor the family, nor the language. The Portuguese I speak is that of my childhood. It takes me to a place which is very far away, almost a dream. English binds me to Australia but it does not represent my origins. And yet, Portugal and Portuguese are a place and a language which still surround me – in how I cook, in the word I use to ask my children if they want a cuddle (mimo, which really means more than a cuddle, pointing towards something which might be expressed as the creation of a space for just you and them). Mimo is something my mother still gives me. It is there in the word I still use for father (and just about the only Portuguese word that my father also uses with us). It is there in my need to have a sense of the past and to hang on to it, in my determination to hang on to culture with a capital C. But English is most definitely the language in which I express myself, in which I think, love and work. It is also the language in which I have finally grown to appreciate popular culture. It is the language which now belongs to me and to which I belong.

CH A P TE R 8

Two languages, two cultures, one (?) self: Between Polish and English Anna Wierzbicka

I have been trying to translate myself from Polish into English, and also from English into Polish, for more than thirty years. For almost as long as that, I have also been reflecting on this experience and writing about it.1 Here, I will present nine vignettes from my bilingual and bicultural life, as I noted them at the time I had these experiences – nine entries from my linguistic diary. I will start with emotions, then move to the fields of memory, family interaction, values, and interpersonal relations; I will end with some reflections on the ‘immigrant condition’ as I experienced it through my participation in the National Library’s Oral History Project. The basic biographical facts are these: I was born in Poland. I came to Australia with my husband and a baby daughter when I was in my early thirties. I came here to live because I had married an Australian. Before that, the thought of emigrating from Poland had never crossed my mind.

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Wzruszenie (emotion) Yesterday I received, as a gift, a CD of some religious music. It was sent to me by a musician whom I had recently met and it included some of her own music, as well as that of some other composers. I listened to the CD last night and this morning I started writing an email to her to thank her. The thought I wanted to express was very clear in my mind, and it was one which formed itself in Polish: słuchałam ze wzruszeniem (I listened with . . .). But as I struggled to transfer this thought from Polish into English, I realised that it was not possible to do so. The participle wzruszony can be readily translated into English as ‘moved’ (I was moved), but it is not possible to say in English that one listened to some music with an emotion corresponding to the word ‘moved’. In English, ‘being moved’ is a momentary emotion and there are no words or forms which would allow the speaker to present the same emotion as extended in time. Presumably, the idea of being ‘moved’ for a long time is inconsistent with the Anglo cultural script of emotional control: one can admit to having been moved briefly, and there are linguistic resources for reporting such an episode, but evidently, people are not usually expected to be ‘moved’ for a long time. The closest one could say to convey the message that I intended would be ‘I listened with emotion’, but this would sound so archaic and so literary that it would be totally inappropriate in an informal email. So the only practical solution was to change the intended message and to say something like ‘I listened with great pleasure’, or ‘I really enjoyed listening to . . .’ And that’s what I did – but in doing so, I felt that I was changing not only my intended message but also my own self. To tell the truth, I don’t really like the English word ‘enjoy’ (as I don’t like the word ‘fun’) and it doesn’t feel natural to me to describe my feelings in those terms. ‘Pleasure’, which does have an equivalent in Polish, feels all right to me in many contexts, but this is not what I wanted to express on this occasion. Once again, a small linguistic difference – in this case grammatical rather than lexical – reflects, I feel, different emotional norms and

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expectations, and highlights the necessity of translating oneself,2 along with what might have been one’s originally intended message.

My baby granddaughter I have a baby granddaughter, who lives far away from me (in Perth) but whom I often visit. When I come back from these visits (to Canberra), and when my Anglophone friends ask me how she is, I am often stuck for words. I just can’t find English words suitable for talking about my tiny granddaughter. It is not that I am unfamiliar with the register of English used for talking about babies, but I feel that this register does not fit the emotional world to which this baby belongs for me. No doubt one reason is that Polish was my first language and that as such it is endowed with an emotional force that English doesn’t have for me. But this is not the only reason. Another reason is that Polish words which I could use to talk about my baby granddaughter do not have exact semantic equivalents in English and therefore feel irreplaceable. For example, I could say in Polish that she is rozkoszna, using a word rendered in Polish−English dictionaries as ‘delightful’, but I couldn’t possibly use the word ‘delightful’ about her myself – not only because it has no emotional force for me but because its meaning, which is not identical with that of rozkoszna, doesn’t fit my way of thinking and feeling about this baby. Rozkoszna has a greater emotional force by virtue of its meaning, and ‘delightful’ would sound, from the point of view of a bilingual but culturally predominantly Polish person, too light, too objective and too lacking in emotional intensity. In fact, in English, too, most people would probably be reluctant to describe their own child or grandchild as ‘delightful’, because the word appears to imply an outsider’s perspective and a lack of personal emotional involvement. They might, however, describe their own child or grandchild as ‘adorable’, or as ‘a cutie’, or ‘a sweetie’ or ‘a dear little thing’; and they might describe other people’s babies as ‘gorgeous’. None of these options are available to me. I feel I couldn’t use any of these expressions about my little granddaughter, not only because they all leave me cold (not being anchored in my childhood experiences and thus having no visceral

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emotional resonance) but because their meaning does not fit my own way of thinking and feeling, and so they would not sound ‘true’ to me. Of course when people ask me about my little granddaughter they are not asking, at least not overtly, about my emotions, and theoretically I could reply providing, in a non-emotional language, some information about her development. But this, too, goes against the grain of my Polish emotional scripts. In Polish, the language used for talking about babies relies on a wide range of emotionally coloured diminutives, and to talk about a baby in a purely descriptive language would seem strangely cold and loveless. For example, in Polish I could say that she now has a lot of loczki (dearlittle-curls), or that she has six za˛bki (dear-little-teeth), or that for her age she is still malutka (dear-little-small). Since English doesn’t have such diminutives, I would have to use descriptive ‘loveless’ words like ‘curls’, ‘teeth’ or ‘small’, and I feel I couldn’t do that. I might add that in Polish I would never say to a baby something like ‘I’ll wash your hands’ or ‘I will give you some milk’ using the plain words for hands or milk − I would only use the diminutive forms comparable to ‘handies’. Although I rarely correct my family’s Polish, which is extremely good, I do sometimes correct them when they use, in reference to this baby, non-diminutive words such as re˛ka (hand), usta (mouth), głowa (head), nos (nose): ra˛czka, I’d say, usteczka, główka, nosek. Speaking to or about a baby in English, one could use the word ‘handies’ (in the plural) but not ‘handie’; and one would normally not use ‘mouthie’, ‘nosie’ or ‘headie’. In Polish, however, such diminutives not only exist but are virtually obligatory in speaking to or about a baby, at least in a family setting. If plain, non-diminutive words were used for a baby’s eyes, ears, hair, legs, back and so on they would all sound very cold, clinical. As a result of all these factors, when I am asked about my granddaughter, I often find myself mumbling, inadequately from everyone’s point of view, that ‘she is well’.

Pamia˛tka (roughly, ‘souvenir/memento/keepsake’) My Polish friend Jadzia sent me a beautiful little volume of poetry: poems from Pranie (a forester’s cottage in northern Poland) by the Polish poet

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Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyn´ski. I immersed myself in these poems and experienced them, above all, not as poetry but as a visitation from the Polish language. So many words which I haven’t heard, or pronounced, or thought, for so many years. What struck me most, however, was the central role that the Polish concept of pamia˛tka (which has no equivalent in English) plays in that little volume. Only weeks earlier, I had written a paper on the Polish words related to ‘memory’ and ‘remembering’ and pamia˛tka was one of the key words discussed in that paper.3 In Gałczyn´ski’s slim volume, edited with meticulous care by his daughter (half a century after his death), each page includes, at the top, an image of an open book, old and shabby but with the lines still legible. It is a child’s prayer book, which Gałczyn´ski’s mother gave him for his first communion, na pamia˛tke˛; that is, ‘to be a pamia˛tka’. And it was, as the poet’s daughter tells us, a gift which Gałczyn´ski – not a Christian: . . . kept with him throughout his life, which travelled with him through all his successive abodes in so many different cities, which survived the war and travelled with him from Anin, near Warsaw, via the Polish eastern border post at Hankiewicz, through Kozielsk [a Soviet camp where thousands of Polish officers were murdered by the NKVD], through German Stalags, penal battalions, field hospitals, DP camps, post-war migrations of the displaced across Holland, Belgium, France, through countless places and situations, through parties and moments of solitude, despondency and timid, incipient hope. That small children’s prayer book accompanied him everywhere. Unlike so many other objects which he also regarded as important, he never lost or forgot about it. That most treasured of all his possessions returned all the way with him to his beloved native-land.4

To me, that volume of Gałczyn´ski’s poetry, with the reproduction of his most precious pamia˛tka on every page, was a striking confirmation of the importance of the concept of pamia˛tka in Polish culture, and in the Polish language. It was also a striking confirmation of the idea that the whole field

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of ‘memory’ is different in Polish and in English; and that the Polish words related to memory – such as pamia˛tka (plural pamia˛tki) – belong to a different cultural world. In so far as these words are a part of me – of my Polish self – I, too, belong to a different cultural world. The concept of pamia˛tki rodzinne (family pamia˛tki), which has no equivalent in, for example, English, German, French or Russian, has a great salience in Polish culture. Again, the salience of this concept in Polish culture will be understandable to anyone familiar with Poland’s history; and so will be the salience of the concept of pamia˛tka in general. For example, during World War II Warsaw was reduced to rubble by the Germans, with 90 per cent of its buildings in ruins, and after the war it was rebuilt and its historic Old Town meticulously reconstructed. During the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, 200,000 inhabitants were killed and those who were forced to leave the burning city left, in most cases, with little more than their family photos and other pamia˛tki (as I remember from my own experience, as a six-yearold child). Arguably, the word pamia˛tka reflects historical experiences of this kind and implies an attitude of treasuring the past and wanting to keep it firmly in one’s memory. It also seems to suggest an appreciation that the framework of one’s life can be destroyed, that the continuity of this framework cannot be taken for granted, and that since the material links between the present and the past are likely to be fragile and limited, they should be an object of special care and devotion (almost veneration, like relics). The most frequent collocations with pamia˛tka include pamia˛tki rodzinne (family pamia˛tki), pamia˛tki przeszłos´ci (pamia˛tki of the past) and pamia˛tki narodowe (national pamia˛tki). As these observations indicate, the Polish concept of pamia˛tka is very different from the Anglo/English concept of ‘souvenir’, with its connotations of travel, sightseeing, tourism and the implied wish to remember some distant places which one has visited. Pamia˛tka has to do, primarily, with history; souvenir with geography. ‘Souvenir’ evokes freedom of movement and facility of travel, whereas pamia˛tka evokes transience of life, loss and destructibility of the past. ‘Souvenir’ brings to mind,

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primarily, enjoyment, whereas pamia˛tka suggests, above all, nostalgia and devotion. Some of these dimensions link pamia˛tka more closely with ‘keepsake’ and ‘memento’, but one could not speak of ‘keepsakes of the past’ or ‘mementos of the past’, as one speaks of ‘pamia˛tki of the past’, or ‘national pamia˛tki’. Above all, neither ‘keepsake’ nor ‘memento’ have the implications of something of great emotional value, as pamia˛tka inherently has. Gałczyn´ ski’s Wiersze z Prania (poems from Pranie) illustrate well the significance, and the emotional resonance, of this concept in Polish culture; and they make me realise how much this untranslatable Polish word means to me.

Suggestions and ‘pressure’ I’ve just caught myself saying to one of my daughters the following sentence: Chciałam ci zasugerowac´, kochanie, z˙ebys´ pojechała do mnie do pracy samochodem . . . ‘I wanted to suggest to you, love, that you take the car to go to my office . . . ’

I would never have uttered such a sentence if we were living in Poland. The verb zasugerowac´ (to suggest) is a direct translation from English, and the whole speech act – a suggestion – is a direct borrowing from the Anglo communicative style, normally used by my family members when they speak English. In Polish, family members don’t speak to one another about everyday matters using the verb zasugerowac´ (to suggest) or the noun sugestia (suggestion). These words do exist in Polish, but they are not used in everyday speech as their counterparts are in English, and their range of use is much narrower. The examples offered by the Doroszewski’s monumental dictionary of the Polish language don’t include any cases of interpersonal interaction but are restricted to ideas, works of art, phenomena related to hypnosis, and the like.

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What I might have said to a family member in Polish before my Polish had undergone the influence of ‘Anglo cultural scripts’ would be something much more ‘direct’ – a combination of the imperative with an endearment, and perhaps with the introducer wiesz (literally: ‘you know’). Wiesz, kochanie, pojedz´ do mnie do pracy samochodem. ‘You know, love, take the car to go to my office.’

Of course in English, too, a mother could sometimes use the imperative to make a suggestion to a daughter, but the verb ‘to suggest’ and the noun ‘suggestion’ are also widely used in everyday speech, including family talk (for example, in the phrase ‘it’s only a suggestion’). The Anglo cultural script − don’t tell other people what to do − appears to have a powerful hold on most Anglo Australians, including my family members, and the pervasive use of ‘suggestions’ in everyday English speech is a clear manifestation of this. In Polish, people don’t speak like that. For many years, I didn’t speak like that to my family members either. As I reflect on the changes in my Polish which have taken place during my three decades of living in Australia, in a cross-cultural family, this is one of the changes which strike me most: the penetration of Anglo-style ‘suggestions’ into my Polish communicative style. I can well imagine that my family members would smile when they read this. I’m sure their perception is that my Polish family talk is still saturated with imperatives and doesn’t come anywhere near what they perceive as the Anglo norms. I wouldn’t dispute that. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that I’ve come a very long way from the ‘direct’ Polish style full of imperatives as well as endearments in the direction of Anglo-style ‘suggestions’. I’m sure that my sister who lives in Poland doesn’t say to her daughters things like chciałabym ci kochanie zasugerowac´ and that her daughters would never expect her to say anything like that. This is not a matter of personal style, of being more or less ‘bossy’, it is a question of speaking idiomatic Polish. Cultural scripts feed into idiomatic ways of speaking, as well as shaping the vocabulary and other aspects of ‘language code’.

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As I discussed in a recent paper, Anglo culture has developed a high art of ‘suggestion’.5 There is nothing similar in Polish culture; when I use the language of ‘suggestions’ in my Polish family talk I am exercising Anglo cultural scripts, and departing from my old Polish scripts. It is my Anglified self speaking (or so I feel).

‘Tact’ and ‘sincerity’ This morning, we had a visitor – a friend of mine and of my daughter Mary, whom we hadn’t seen for a while. In conversation, the visitor asked me how I liked a much-discussed recent book on a topic important to all of us. I could feel Mary’s eyes on me, and I knew what she was thinking: she was hoping that I was not going to ‘blurt out’ exactly what I thought, in the Polish way. We were both aware that my criticisms could offend the visitor, who obviously had a very positive opinion of the book in question and in fact had a personal connection to it. I was keenly aware of the different cultural scripts, Polish and Anglo, applying in a situation of this kind. I drew on all the resources of my Anglo self and I chose my words very carefully. I didn’t say what I knew the visitor expected and wanted to hear but neither did I express, frankly, my own opinion. I said instead that − as he knew − the book was controversial, and that having just read it I could understand the objections raised by its critics. The visitor smiled pleasantly and we moved to another, safer, topic. Afterwards, Mary and I compared notes about the visit. I expected Mary to compliment me on how Anglo my behaviour was on this occasion. Instead, she told me that although she appreciated my effort, she felt that my behaviour wasn’t as considerate as I thought because I didn’t say anything positive, to balance my implied criticisms. She reminded me of the Anglo rule (so well identified in Eva Hoffman’s memoir) of saying ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’.6 Speaking one’s mind is recognised as a value in both cultures. In ‘Anglo English’, however, this value is expected to be balanced against other values,

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such as seeking the common ground, ‘validating’ one’s interlocutor’s opinion, avoiding ‘inflammatory’ statements, looking after the interlocutor’s feelings, mitigating one’s opinions to avoid offending the interlocutor, and so on. In Polish culture, on the other hand, speaking the truth (as one sees it), and saying what one really thinks and feels has a higher position in the hierarchy of values, and in fact tends to be seen as an absolute value. In Polish, telling the addressee ‘exactly what one thinks’ (on a topic known to be controversial and even sensitive) does not mean a disregard for the addressee. But the focus is not on protecting the addressee’s feelings, but rather on truthfully expressing one’s own. The good will towards the addressee is shown by telling the other person frankly what one thinks. Genuine closeness, it is assumed, is achieved through opening oneself to the other person and sharing one’s thoughts with him or her, without retouching them, or toning them down to protect the other person’s feelings or sensitivities. When such matters are discussed in our family, someone would usually say: ‘But what about hurting the other person’s feelings? Aren’t Poles concerned about that at all?’ ‘Of course they are, or can be,’ I reply. But the prevailing hierarchy of values is different: Polish language has no equivalent of the English expression ‘white lies’, and Polish culture places a greater value on truth and sincerity in relations with others than on those other people’s feelings. Or so it has always seemed to me. As far as feelings are concerned, the emphasis in Polish culture is on an outpouring of serdecznos´´c ; that is, roughly, ‘heartfelt warmth towards others’ (from serce ‘heart’), rather than on the negative value of ‘not hurting other people’s feelings’. In Polish, one can emphatically disagree with other people, reject their views as ‘wrong’, exaggerate the differences, engage with great gusto in heated arguments. None of this would be considered as offensive or hurtful as long as it is compensated by serdecznos´´c (warmth). Mainstream Anglo culture, as I experience it in Australia and in my own cross-cultural family, is different. As I compare myself with my sister and with my friends in Poland, I feel I have become quite Anglo in that respect myself. But I know that that’s not what my Australian family members think. They value the Polish serdecznos´´c, but they also value the Anglo caution in

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telling others what one thinks on controversial and sensitive subjects, and the Anglo emphasis on not hurting other people’s feelings, and I know that in their perception I am still not sufficiently Anglo in this respect.

Speaking in English to my daughter Clare My daughter Clare and I had an argument today, during our usual morning walk (on the way to work). The matter was personal, and the disagreement (which, as we agreed later, was based on a misunderstanding) was painful. With the theme of ‘translating lives’ at the back of my mind, I was keenly aware that we had both shifted from Polish into English. Usually, if at some point during our conversations Clare shifts unconsciously into English, I ask her to move back to Polish, and she does. This time, however, I made no attempt to revert to Polish, and I heard myself pressing on in English. The longer this went on, the greater (I felt) the emotional distance between us. It seemed that a chasm had opened: this was not our usual, close, Polish-based relationship. Later in the day, we exchanged loving emails in Polish and ‘made up’. But I continue reflecting on the psychological meaning of that use of English in my own speech to my daughter. Is it that I was angry and could only express that anger to Clare in English? Perhaps. But it also seems to me that I felt misunderstood (on an important personal matter), and that at that moment our usual closeness (always expressed in Polish) didn’t seem to be there, and so the normal use of Polish was somehow emotionally blocked. The distance I felt speaking English to Clare hurt no less than the disagreement which triggered that shift to English in the first place. It seems to me that it was that sudden feeling of distance, of being hurtfully misunderstood, which was more responsible for the shift to English than any anger. I think I could be angry with Clare in Polish but I can’t be distant.

Listening to Polish records I’m listening to Polish records. It’s Polish church music, songs and hymns. Lately, I’ve felt a need to immerse myself in this music, and to focus, with

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special attention, on the words. For example, there is the eighteenthcentury song Kiedy ranne wstaja˛ zorze, ‘When the lights of the dawn are rising’, which invites people to praise God at the break of the day, with all of nature. As I listen to this song, memories of childhood appear. We used to sing this song each morning at a summer camp during my early girlhood. I can’t remember now who organised that camp and why Christian religious songs were so very much a part of it (in communist Poland). Anyway, it was (and still is) such a popular song in Poland that I must have sung it with various groups of people on countless occasions in my childhood and youth. Its evocative power (for me) is enormous. While listening to the record with Kiedy ranne and other Polish songs which I feel are so much a part of my life and a part of me, I happen to be reading a particular book – New Directions in Cross-cultural Psychology. The first paper, by Zygmunt Bauman, is entitled ‘Identity in the globalizing world’. In Bauman’s view: ‘instead of talking about identities, inherited or acquired, it would be more in keeping with the realities of the globalising world to speak of identification as a never-ending, always incomplete, unfinished and open-ended activity in which we all, by necessity or by choice, are engaged’.7 In the same context, Bauman refers, with approval, to the Norwegian anthropologist Frederick Barth, according to whom ‘boundaries are not drawn to fence off and protect already existing identities’; rather, ‘it is exactly the other way around: the ostensibly shared, “communal” identities are by-products of feverish boundary drawing’: It is only after the border posts have been dug in that the myths of their antiquity are spun and the fresh cultural/political origins of identity are carefully covered up by the genesis stories. The stratagem attempts to belie the fact that, to quote Stuart Hall (1996), what the idea of identity does not signal is a ‘stable core of the self, unfolding from the beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change’.8

As I listen to the Polish religious hymns, I try to test the theories of Bauman, Barth and Hall against the reality of my own life. It is true that by

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listening to these records at the beginning of my fourth decade in Australia, I’m engaging in the activity of self-identification. In a sense, I’m even doing it consciously. Lately, I’ve been catching myself frequently making my ‘things-to-do’ lists in English rather than Polish. It seems to me that I’ve been doing that increasingly. Does that mean that my Polish is retreating in my life? I don’t want this to happen. So my early-morning listening to Polish records is not only due to nostalgia but also to choice. But does it mean that there is, in my case too, no ‘inherited identity’, no ‘stable core of self ’? I don’t think so. Hall’s generalisation reflects, above all, his own experience. But my experience is different from his. Of course in my case, too, there has been change. There have also been choices and more or less conscious acts of identification. For example, my frequent trips across the world from Australia to Poland (at least thirty, over as many years) have been such acts of identification. Above all, the daily effort, over so many years, to preserve Polish as the main language in our Australian household has been an act of identification. The question of ‘Who am I?’ (a Pole living in Australia or something else?) is inseparable from the question of ‘Who do I want to be?’ But in my case at least it would be absurd to say that there is no ‘inherited identity’. In the case of my sister who has always lived in Poland, with Poles, there is nothing but the inherited Polish identity. I know that after my three decades of living in Australia I am culturally different from my sister. I am also culturally different from my daughters, with their dual (Polish and Australian) roots and with their lives lived wholly (or almost wholly) in Australia. In his afterword to a book entitled Cultural Memory Australian cultural historian Greg Dening has written: ‘I suspect that each one of us experiences personally the disappearance of a zero point: that moment when the divisions between a Before and an After are blurred, that moment when a new “I” and an old “I” merge, when apparent discontinuities are transformed in the continuities of living’.9 But in my own life, the zero point that I remember has not undergone any blurring. I can date that moment very precisely: it was on Christmas Eve of 1972. Up to that point, I was both ethnically and culturally 100 per cent Polish. After that point, I started a

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cross-cultural journey and have become, culturally, partly ‘Anglo’. At the same time, I believe that there is also in me, by necessity and by choice, a stable core of Polishness.

Listening to Rota (oath) Once again, I’m listening to my favourite Polish records, those with Polish religious and patriotic songs and hymns. One of the songs is called Rota, ‘oath’ (literally: ‘oath formula’). It is an anthem which was composed by the poet Maria Konopnicka in 1908, a decade before Poland regained, in 1918, its national independence, which had been lost to the partitioning powers − Russia, Prussia and Austria − at the end of the eighteenth century. It is impossible for non-Poles to appreciate the impact that this song has had, for a century, on successive generations of Poles, for whom the twentieth century was no less turbulent and dramatic than the preceding one. The song starts with the words of a collective oath: Nie rzucim ziemi ska˛d nasz ród, nie damy pogrzes´c´ mowy . . . (‘We will not abandon the land from which our stock comes, we will not allow [our] language to be buried’). Not an easy song to listen to for the successive waves of Polish emigrants in the West, especially those who can’t see themselves as political exiles. I have often wondered about the emotions evoked by this song among my fellow émigrés. My own emigration was due to the simple fact of having married an Australian (we met in England) and, personally, while of course I felt sad, I have never felt guilty about ‘abandoning the land from which our kin comes’ (although my family in Poland for a long time did think of my emigration as an act of national betrayal). But the second part of Konopnicka’s ‘oath’ raises a question for me too. When I read language memoirs of migrants of other national and ethnic backgrounds I am often struck by the absence of a ‘patriotic’ perspective which for Poles is often very salient. The idea that it is somehow one’s patriotic and moral duty to maintain one’s language and to pass it on, successfully, to one’s children is one which I have often encountered among Poles and seldom among other migrants. This peculiarity of the Polish diaspora is easy

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to understand in terms of Polish history. Of course people’s attitudes differ, and not all Poles living outside Poland feel equally strongly about the ‘duty’ to maintain Polish in their homes and in the homes of their children. But the peculiar Polish word wynarodowic´ sie˛ (to betray one’s nation by ceasing to be, emotionally and linguistically, a part of it) expresses the collective Polish point of view clearly enough. There is of course a conflict between the Polish ‘cultural scripts’ of language maintenance (seen as a sacred duty) and the Anglo scripts of ‘personal autonomy’. Do the Polish parents in Anglophone societies have a right to ‘put pressure’ on their children to keep their Polish? From the point of view of those around them, they don’t have such a right; and they often come to identify with that point of view themselves, to varying degrees. Judging by my own experience, the ‘battle’ for language maintenance in an Anglophone society can be a key aspect of daily life for decades. How much pressure is acceptable? What price in interpersonal relations should one be prepared to pay for keeping the language alive? How often should one intervene to try to redirect the spontaneous flow of talk from English to Polish? In our home – where Polish is still the main language – these questions arise for me every day. I’m pondering them again today, listening to Konopnicka’s old-fashioned and yet still stirring words: nie damy pogrzes´c´ mowy. Of course the historical context in which she wrote these words was vastly different from the one in which I’m listening to them today. Her focus was on the deliberate policies of Germanisation and Russification in a Poland subjugated by the neighbouring powers. But the long tradition of battles for the Polish language in Poland lives in the cultural memory of all Poles, including those living in English-speaking countries. According to the Australian sociologist Jerzy Smolicz, for Polish immigrants (in contrast, for example, to those from Italy, Greece or Holland) language is a ‘core value’. I certainly have a sense that it is so in my life.

The interview I have just sent off to the National Library the transcript of an extended (three-hour) interview about my life which they recorded some time ago

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for their Oral History Project. It has taken me several months to read this transcript, which was sent to me last year and which I was asked to check; and I know that the delay was due not only to my perennial lack of time but also to a certain inner resistance. I had to force myself to read this transcript because I think I was afraid of being confronted with my English-speaking persona talking to people about my life. Would it still be my life? Would it still be my voice? In the end, the experience of reading the transcript proved less traumatic than I had subconsciously expected. I was struck, however, by the extent of the speaker’s (that is, my own – my English speaking self ’s) linguistic insecurity reflected in the language of the interview. The recurring question: ‘Is that what it is called?’ (and its variants) is one reflection of that insecurity. In several places of the transcript, it is obvious that I was groping for words and was worried about what felt like a failure to find the right ones. Here is an example from my account of our life as children in a German forced labour camp: Anna Wierzbicka: Well, I remember rats, there were lots of rats – do you call them rats? I should probably call them water rats. Barry York: We have water rats. Anna Wierzbicka: Are they still called rats, water rats would you call them? Barry York: Yes. Anna Wierzbicka: I think there’s another word, but maybe not, I can’t remember. So the little boys without supervision would just chase those rats and I just remember, you know, a boy holding a rat by the end of the tail over a fire, things like that. I remember six little mice were born under the pillow of a woman next to us, so that’s also a vivid memory – because it was just one big hall where there were about 30 bunks next to one another, doubles, you know.

In several places, I was clearly clutching at a word which I felt was inappropriate and which I none the less found myself repeating in a passage because it was the only one that I could think of at the time. A prime example is the word

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‘chase’, which I used repeatedly in telling the story of what I lived through as a six-year-old child during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The Germans ‘chased’ us (our family, and everyone else from our block of flats) from our home (that is, they kicked us out); and then they ‘chased’ us, with a crowd of other people (that is, drove us, like cattle, through the streets) to a big market place called Zieleniak, a long way away; and then they separated, at gunpoint, my mother and children (my eight-year-old sister and myself) from our father and grandmother, whom they ‘chased away’ (that is, forced to move in a different direction from us) while forcibly putting our mother and us children in a cattle train and sending us to a labour camp in Germany. There is a genuine linguistic problem here: the Polish words which are essential to my memories of that time are verbs like wyrzucic´, wype˛dzic´, pognac´ and odegnac´, and these words simply don’t have exact equivalents in English (and perhaps in ‘Anglo’ collective cultural experience and historical memory). They all imply brutal physical actions directed at people. They conjure up images of ‘throwing people out’ (like things, like garbage); of ‘driving’ people out, or away, like cattle; of physically tearing families apart (like things, like rags). Of course, such linguistic problems can be overcome by speakers who feel at home in English, but that’s not how I felt when I was telling that story. I could hear myself speaking like a child, and I was painfully aware of my inarticulateness, my inability to tell my story in English faithfully and clearly. No doubt it was not an accident that it was in telling that particular part of my story (my memories of the Warsaw Uprising) that English failed me most. Those memories were of course traumatic; and they had no analogues in anything that I have lived through in my Anglophone life. But my infantile fixation on the word ‘chase’ and my inability to translate these experiences into English illustrate something that is evident throughout the interview: my feeling of linguistic insecurity in English, or at least in certain registers of English – registers which native speakers might regard as quite basic. I don’t feel linguistically insecure in academic English. On the contrary, when I speak about semantics, or about language and culture, English is

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the language that I think in. Using it I feel fluent and confident. I also feel that English serves me well in everyday life, in getting things done on a daily basis. But to describe in English what I have lived through before coming to Australia – that’s a different story. And so, reading the transcript of the interview, I noticed with amazement, and with acute embarrassment, a constant repetition of the phrase ‘sort of ’. I was aware at the time of the interview that I was feeling linguistically insecure, but I certainly wasn’t aware of repeating, again and again, that absurd little phrase ‘sort of ’ – sometimes in most inappropriate places. (For example, during the German occupation of Warsaw, people were rounded up in the streets and ‘sort of shot’ – there was no ‘sort of ’ about it, these people were being shot dead, and even as a small child I knew that well.) This recurring ‘sort of ’ could be dismissed by a charitable reader as an inconsequential linguistic tic – but I don’t have such a tic in my normal English-speaking life! I confess that before sending off the ‘authorised’ version of the transcript to the National Library I deleted most of the ‘sort of ’s. But I also left several of them in, because I think they show something important not only about me, but also about the immigrant condition.

CH A P TE R 9

My experience of living in a different culture: The life of a Korean migrant in Australia Kyung-Joo Yoon

Encountering a new culture I was born in Seoul, Korea, and migrated to Australia in 1995 with my husband and two sons. For more than thirty years I had lived in Korea with Korean culture and tradition. I will start with some anecdotes of small cultural shocks that I experienced when I came here for the first time. I had the impression that people competed with each other in apologising and in thanking. To me, the strangest thing was that people used the same expressions even within their immediate family circle. For example, when I went to the house of a friend of my small son Emmanuel, a five-year-old boy said ‘thank you’ to his mother when she gave him a drink. I remember feeling quite awkward about the way the boy thanked her for such a small favour. To me he got what he was entitled to get since any mother is responsible for providing a young child with whatever he or she needs, so he should not have felt the need to thank his mother, at least not with words. Beyond doing things like giving her child a drink, there are so many other uncountable things a mother does that are not necessarily known to her son. One cannot ever

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thank her for all of those. The relationship between parents and children is beyond the level of that kind of thanking exchange. In Korea, it is thought that a child owes a debt of gratitude to his or her parents, and everyone knows that debt is never repayable. Certainly, one can’t repay it with words. There are a number of sayings about this debt in Korean. The child who thanked his mother for a drink gave me the impression that he acknowledged the favour as if he did not owe her anything else. In Korean culture children are not taught to thank their parents in a context like that, although they are taught to thank other people including strangers. Instead, children are taught to keep in their hearts the never-repayable debt of gratitude towards their parents. They do not have to express gratitude in words but they are responsible for bearing it always in mind. I was not sure whether I should teach my children to do the same as other kids here do, or not. I have seen Anglo-Australian parents put a lot of effort into teaching their children to be polite, to say ‘thank you’ or ‘please’ for every single favour done by anyone, including family members. The common way that they did this was by asking a question like ‘What is the magic word?’ At the time, I had no idea how to understand that exchange. I learnt only later that the question itself was a kind of riddle with an expected answer. I could sympathise with the idea of the need for politeness towards others, expressed by thanking and apologising. But I felt awkward teaching my children to use ‘thank you’ or ‘sorry’ with me or my husband. I felt this would mean my children were treating me in the same way as they would complete strangers. From a Korean perspective, people should be treated differently within personal relationships, and those who are in kin relations take a special place in one’s life. Strategies of thanking and apologising have to be different for different relationships. I remember one experience that is related to treating all people in the same way. One day I went to pick up my seven-year-old son John from school. He was in Grade 1 and I was amazed to see him talking to a couple of ladies who appeared to be mothers of his friends. It looked very strange to me. I didn’t know why I felt so strange at that moment. Later, in the car,

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I started to think about why I felt like that. Then I realised that this kind of scene would not be observed in a Korean school setting. In Korea, children are not treated in the same way as adults are. Adults do not really think that a child at the age of seven can take part in conversations. Of course they talk to young children, but not in the same way as those ladies did who talked to John, paying full attention and listening actively. I could see them nodding and laughing when John was talking to them. I saw they were treating him as if he was one of those with whom one can have a conversation. In Korea, people would treat children who are at that age in a somewhat different way, at least in that context. But I liked the idea that people are respected regardless of their age. I’ll return to the issue of age later since it is one of the key cultural values determining various aspects of life in Korea. In the car, when I asked John (in Korean) who the ladies were, he said: ‘Oh, you mean Jennifer?’ I said ‘No! I’m not talking about one of your friends, I mean that lady (acwumma) whom you were talking to’. He said: ‘Yes, she’s Jennifer’. I fell silent, feeling quite awkward, and then said: ‘Oh, okay’. I felt very odd about him calling that lady who seemed to be my age by her first name. Perhaps I expected him to say something like ‘someone’s mother’. Even though I already knew then that in this culture everyone is referred to by their first name, it was uncomfortable for me hearing a seven-year-old boy call a lady around the same age as his mother by her first name. My knowledge of this culture did not necessarily guarantee my psychological willingness to assimilate such new cultural norms. I felt that it would take some time, highly likely a long time, for this new cultural norm to take root in me. I was brought up in a culture where there is a wide range of terms of address, besides first names. First names are acceptable only in a narrow range of situations: they are used among young children and among very close friends of the same age, and they are used by adults towards young children. In my first years in Australia I remember moments when I was stunned into silence by things that felt awkward: a friend of mine referring to her mother-in-law as Brenda; a five-year-old boy, the son of my Indian friend, calling me by my first name; a daughter of my friend referring to

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her father as Nick; and students calling lecturers by their first names during lectures and seminars. Although I knew that this was a very appropriate way to address other people in Australia, I felt reluctant to practise it myself for quite a long time. I have noticed that in this culture people start conversations by introducing themselves by name, as if names by themselves can explain anything. From a Korean point of view, it would be much more informative to introduce oneself by referring to someone whom both parties know (someone’s mother, father or friend), by conveying information about one’s age (although not directly), or by referring to one’s job. Among Koreans it is very hard to start a conversation without having this information, especially about age, since one has different options for various obligatory slots in a sentence, depending on the age of one’s interlocutor. If one does not know the age of the interlocutor, one normally chooses honorifics as these are safe and will not offend anyone. Therefore, the first thing that Koreans would like to know about other people when they interact with them is age. There are different tactics for finding out this information, apart from guessing from different contextual clues: asking about the animal of their year of birth (tty) (for example, ‘I was born in the year of the rabbit, what about you?’); asking about the year they started tertiary education (hakpen) (one usually starts at eighteen); asking about siblings and their ages, then guessing, and so on. It is the same when young children of different ages mix. The first question is ‘What grade are you in?’ or ‘How old are you?’, since among children things are more straightforward. I don’t think people normally introduce themselves by their names. The usual way to introduce oneself is by titles such as teacher, professor, manager, director, or as someone’s mother or father. It would be possible for someone never to know the name of their closest friend if they met when they were adults. When I happen to be with people from both cultures, Korean and Australian, I feel quite amused observing myself reacting differently towards the two parties. For instance, when we moved into a new house we invited a few families whom we had known for years − both Korean and Australian friends of ours. When my Australian friends said something nice about our

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new house, my husband and I would automatically thank them. Then the conversation flowed quite nicely in a pleasant atmosphere in which I felt good about the house too. But when our Korean friends commented on something nice about the house, I immediately said something negative such as: ‘No, but there’s a lot to work on’. Then they continued to praise it and my husband would counter with another negative response. While I practised two different conversational routines involving praising I laughed silently inside myself. In Korean culture, responding to any kind of praise by thanking means agreement with what was said. This means that one thinks good things about what one has done; in our case, buying a good house. One is not expected to think or say good things about oneself in Korean culture, for this can be seen as arrogant and overly proud. Therefore, negating any praise is an expected conversational strategy. By contrast, in Aussie culture, it is appropriate to thank someone for praise given without necessarily agreeing with the given opinion. From my experience, I think thanking is usually due to the goodwill of the interlocutor who gives praise in order to be nice. I knew that there were two different underlying assumptions behind those exchanges. I’ve also discovered, talking to other immigrants, that I was not alone in taking the routine ‘Did you have a good weekend?’ as a genuine question. I learnt that conversational routines like this are also culture-specific. It took me a bit of time to learn new cultural assumptions and expectations. I understood that the knowledge of the language alone would not guarantee full communication with people from a different linguistic and cultural background. Having experienced problems in communication for some time, I tended to feel uncertain, insecure about how to interpret our conversations with Anglo-Australian friends and colleagues. Sometimes I felt guilty about not having enough knowledge of the new culture. I knew that it was not my fault, but since my culture was not a part of the mainstream culture I thought I was the one who had to take care of any misunderstandings. Of course, monolingual Aussies would not know what it is like to belong to a cultural minority.

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Not just words: Different ways of thinking Since I began further study in linguistics, I have been interested in language and culture. I have come to understand that language shapes the way people think and feel, and vice versa. I remember that I often felt that I could not describe in English what I was feeling. At the beginning I thought it was due to my lack of knowledge of the language, but I realised later that this was not always the case. I could not find in English exact expressions matching my bodily sensations. The symptoms that I could describe with such words as ssulita, salalaphuta, khokkhok ssusinta or ssahata (referring to stomach aches), could not be described in English. The first expression is usually translated into English as ‘acute or burning pain’. However, neither seemed good translations to me, especially ‘burning pain’, which put me in mind of the pain that one feels when one burns oneself. To me, there was no relationship between the concept of ‘burn’ and the pain that I had in my stomach. However, the Korean expression ssulita did not have translatable alternatives in English other than ‘burning pain’. So I had to use that expression, feeling that I was not describing accurately the pain I felt. There is an expression in Korean, hwakkunkelita, which is used for something like ‘burning pain’, but this expression is not used for the kind of stomach ache that I had. Through this experience I learnt that the categorisation of physical pains and aches is also language-specific. One cannot necessarily find the same category of pain in different languages. Some match and happen to have counterparts, but not all. Whenever I had to describe my symptoms in English to my doctor, I felt awkward as I knew that those expressions in English did not correctly describe my bodily sensations. At the same time I knew that they were the best compromises between what I wanted to say and what I could say. I felt quite frustrated since I was uncertain whether the doctor could diagnose me correctly because of my limited description. The same applies to emotion. I remember that I could not express some kinds of emotion, such as those described in Korean as miwunceng or siwensepsep, that I felt towards one of my relatives when he moved far away. The expression miwunceng is translated as ‘love−hate’, which in my view is very

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different from the original meaning. The Korean term for emotion miwunceng refers to a mixture of feelings towards someone that develop over a certain period of time (often a long period). It involves bad feelings experienced when being with that person, feeling responsible for helping that person, and feeling guilty because of not being able to do good things for that person. When I wanted to share how I felt with my friends in English I had to explain my emotion in a very limited way with some words which existed in English. I knew that I could be understood correctly straight away by my Korean friends if I used the Korean expressions. There were so many instances when I realised that I had to adjust myself to fit into the categories of English in order to express my emotions. I feel that I can discuss both my sensations and my emotions accurately in Korean, but not in English, and that by trying to describe them in English I misrepresent them. I have also noticed differences between Korean and Anglo-Australian culture not only in the kinds of emotion that one feels but also in the constraints on expressing one’s emotions. When I watched a television news report about a whole family dying in a car accident and leaving two young children orphans, I felt a little strange about the reaction of the grandmother of the children who had lost their parents and sisters, and of the other people who were interviewed. They were either close friends of the family or relatives. However, they reacted in a very calm way and tried not to express their emotions. From a Korean’s perspective the funeral was also too peaceful − without mourning, weeping or fainting. Then I understood that the uninhibited expression of personal emotions in public was not permitted in this culture, at least not as much as in Korea. It is much freer in Korea for people to express grief in public in such a tragic situation. In fact, it is seen as natural and human to let out extreme emotions. I could easily imagine that relatives would tear up their clothes or faint out of uncontrollable emotion if it happened in Korea. People would not feel anything bad about the dramatic display of grief. There is in Korean culture no presumption that emotion interferes with logical thinking. In Korean, one organ, maum, can carry out all these functions, while the functions of reasoning and feeling are separated by two different organs in English, linked with the

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concepts of ‘mind’ and ‘heart’. The emphasis on logical thinking in Anglo culture may have brought about caution in expressing strong emotions. From a Korean viewpoint, it could be healthier if one felt free to express one’s feelings in public without shame or guilt. Through my own experience I have discovered that there are many English expressions that do not have counterparts in Korean, and vice versa. Often they are related to cultural values that do not seem to exist outside these cultures. Those which I feel have played the greatest role in my life between cultures include ‘fair/unfair’ (as used among siblings), ‘independence’ (from one’s parents), ‘tolerance’ (for people from different cultures), ‘enjoy’ (school or a particular school subject), kamwun (family honour), cosang (ancestors) and phiscwul (blood vein; that is, family), unhyey (indebted), contaymal (honorifics) and pelusepsta (ill-bred). Different cultures also seem to have different hierarchies of values. What is obvious and natural in Korean can be impossible to express in English unless one explains it with a long list of sentences, and vice versa.

The daily challenge of cross-cultural communication at home My husband and I are not the only ones to struggle with cultural differences. Since we raise our children pretty much in the way in which we were raised in Korea, my two boys, John and Emmanuel, seem to experience similar conflicts to those we experience. But in their case, they take Aussie culture as the norm and accept Korean culture as family tradition and ethnic heritage. Both are fluent in Korean, which we encourage them to speak at home. From an early age, they knew how to manipulate the language for their convenience and their purposes. For instance, Emmanuel switches from Korean to English when he wants to be equal to his big brother. He then calls him John, which is never possible for him to do in Korean − one cannot call one’s older siblings by their first name in Korean. This happens often when they play a game and start to argue over who did what wrongly. As soon as Emmanuel feels that he has to argue on the same level, he suddenly changes the language. They continue to argue until the

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problem is solved. However, when Emmanuel feels that he is vulnerable in the same game and wants to appeal to John’s good will so that he will treat him well, he switches back to Korean and calls him hyeng ‘big brother’, framing him as someone who is supposed to be ‘above’ him and protective toward a younger sibling. Their relationship with one another doesn’t stand still. It changes with the language they speak, and they often choose the language depending on how they want to relate to one another in a given situation. This is somewhat similar to my own relationship with them. When I speak with them in English they address me as ‘you’, which makes my status equal to theirs. In Korean, a mother is never addressed as ‘you’. There is no second person pronoun for mother. Terms of address and reference for mother are always emma or emeni, which both mean mother. The boys switch language from Korean to English when they want to address me as ‘you’. In fact, my cousin who lives in the United States said to his daughter that he didn’t want her to address him as ‘you’. I can understand why he feels uncomfortable being called ‘you’ by his own kids and I sympathise with him. It is as if I were one of all those other people who could be ‘you’ to my children, which I feel awkward about. I did not go as far as forbidding them to address me as ‘you’, but I urge them to speak in Korean when they talk to me. At the end of each day I want to share with them, as much as possible, what they did, felt, thought. When they hesitate to say something I often say something like ‘you can talk to me about anything, I’m your friend’ in English. However, it is awkward to say the same thing in Korean. I have to say ‘I am someone like your friend’, which is the closest translation. When I feel that I am challenged by something that, from a Korean perspective, seems inappropriate, I say something like nay ka ney chinkwuya?, which can be translated as ‘Do you think I am your friend, huh?’ Unintentionally I contradict myself by saying ‘I am your friend’ in English and then ‘I am not your friend’ in Korean. Then I realise that I falsely assumed that the two concepts, ‘friend’ and chinkwu, are the same. I now know that they are different concepts. While age is not involved in the concept of ‘friend’, it is

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a critical part of the meaning of chinkwu in Korean. In Korean, one cannot call someone older a chinkwu (‘friend’). When I talk to my children, I often feel that we are not fully communicating. Then to make sure they understand what I want to say I switch from Korean to English. I want them to understand me and I want to understand them. In my experience, miscommunication between Korean parents and their children (in an English-speaking country) is often caused by the different styles of interaction, including eye contact and tone of voice. In Korean culture children are not encouraged to look other people in the eye, especially when talking to adults. Looking their parents in the eye and speaking back to them straight away is considered impolite and rebellious. The same applies to speaking back after being scolded. Children are supposed to explain themselves after a while, not too soon after being told off, even if they have a very good reason. Most Korean children who are brought up in Australia, however, speak back to their parents looking them directly in the eye, which makes their parents even angrier because it is a typical case of pelus-eps-nun (being ill-bred). Children feel that it is quite unfair when they are scolded even more after having explained their reasons in an appropriate way (from their perspective). In fact, they are taught here to make eye contact in order to express their confidence and respect. In the book Friendly Kids, Friendly Classrooms, I saw the following: Anxiety and low self esteem are communicated by the following non-verbal behaviours: lowered eyes avoiding eye contact.1

In Australia, children are specifically taught at school to look into the eyes of their interlocutor when they want to express themselves clearly. This norm is expected to be applied to all people, regardless of age and status. Korean parents who are new to Australian culture are not familiar with this norm. This brings about communication problems between them and their children. Children feel confused about the rules of non-verbal

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communication because of the reaction of their parents. Young children, particularly, often feel uncertain and confused. Sometimes they feel guilty about offending their parents unintentionally. This is something we often hear about from people in the Korean community in Australia. Another challenge is making a decision about the extent to which I want to go along with the cultural norms of this society. In Korean culture, children (even adult children) always have to listen with respect to what their parents tell them they should do. Parents have every right to give advice and impose their own will when necessary. In fact, the expression ‘giving advice’ is not used in Korean between parents and children, presumably because that expression implies that children have a choice between complying and not complying. The most common expression is pwumonim mal-ul tutta (literally: ‘listen to the words of your parents’), which is often heard in ordinary conversations. Traditionally, children are expected to follow all the wishes of their parents, no matter what. Parents are believed to know what is best for their children. When children do not want to obey, parents put pressure on them or force them to comply by making them feel guilty if they don’t, and in Korea it is believed that this right is given from Nature. Most issues in life are influenced by parents: what degree to undertake at the university, areas of occupation, marriage. There are lots of soap operas dealing with the conflict between parents and their children in relation to marriage. In contemporary Korean society, young people want to choose their own spouses and yet parents still want to influence them. Parents believe that they have to guide their children who do not have enough experience and wisdom; young people want to make their own decisions. Although the degree of involvement with children’s lives varies from individual to individual, the general tendency is quite different from that of Anglo-Australian culture. In fact, many Korean parents are shocked when their teenage children want to be independent when they go to university in Australia. The cultural expectation is that children can leave their parents only when they create their own family. One should never want to be independent from one’s parents. The relationship is lifelong until one’s parents pass away, and may be seen as persisting even after their death.

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I did not intend to fully adopt this very traditional relationship with my children because my personal view on parenting does not really match with this. I accept that my responsibility for them as a mother will last until the last day of my life on earth. I do not want to put a burden on their shoulders for every single decision that they make. I have learnt that respecting personal autonomy and not imposing one’s will on other people, including one’s own children, are among the most important Anglo-Australian cultural norms. Although my husband and I try to interact with our children without any intention of imposing our will on them, sometimes they feel that we are blunt and imposing. One day I realised that they could have formed this impression because of the language we use. When I speak in Korean I use bare imperatives since there is no such device as ‘whimperatives’ (‘could you do this’, ‘would you do this’ and so on) in Korean. I ask my children to do something using the same form that is also used for orders or commands. This is not seen as problematic at all in Korea, where people believe that older people or parents can express freely whatever they want younger people, including their own children, to do for them. When one wants to be polite there are other devices, but those are not used for one’s children. In fact, it would seem funny for parents to say something to their children using polite language, as if they were someone distant or equal. However, I can understand why my children feel it is a little bit unfair for us to tell them in Korean what to do, instead of asking them whether they could do it. I have learnt that the cultural rule of avoiding ‘imposing’ on others is unconscious but quite prevalent in Anglo-Australian culture. Consequently, I tend to switch from Korean to English when I want to ask my boys to do something, mostly small things such as emptying the recycling bin, putting things back in their place after using them, setting the table, taking care of the mess after playing, and so on. I now realise that cultural norms go hand in hand with the language that is a vehicle to carry those norms. It is quite difficult to imagine the idea of egalitarianism being expressed in Korean, where honorifics and other linguistic devices are used to distinguish between social levels. In fact, from a close examination of honorifics

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in Korean I concluded that Korean has a wealth of specific mechanisms for differentiating ways of speaking and behaving which reflect and pass on hierarchical and status-oriented models of society.2 Korean has a rich system of honorifics, where speakers are forced to choose between honorific and plain forms of address both lexically and grammatically. In some of my research, I have proposed several cultural scripts related to the use of honorifics. Korean people generally think that some people are above or below other people (in a social sense), owing mainly to age, and there are both verbal and non-verbal constraints on how one addresses those who are believed to be above. People of a lower status in terms of age are obliged to use honorifics towards people of a higher status. It is not possible to avoid this dimension of verbal interaction. Accordingly, in every interaction people are required to make a decision as to whether their interlocutors are ‘above’ them or not. Korean parents who are shaped by this social value find it quite challenging to adjust to Aussie culture, where everyone is considered equal regardless of age.

Where am I? I have seen that most migrants around me have gone through more or less the same process of settling in a new culture: feeling enthusiastic about a new type of life, having high expectations of a new society, experiencing culture shock, feeling depressed about the uncertainty, putting a good deal of effort into acculturation, and settling into their own way of dealing with the new culture. There are of course psychological ups and downs in this process. I often reflect on how I have changed in my ways of thinking about myself and other people around me, what I feel, what is good to do, what is bad to do, what is good to know, and so on. I often come to the conclusion that I have changed in those aspects to some extent. I wonder about the choices that I have made in the past and where they are going to lead me in the future. I had to choose my stance in order to deal with my children in a consistent way. My husband and I have discussed over the years our discovery that

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we have been shaped by Korean culture as well as by ways of thinking in our new culture which we have learnt through our mistakes and frustrations. Sometimes I ask myself the question: ‘Where am I now?’ I don’t think I have all the answers for all these wonderings about what is the best way of thinking and living. What I know for sure is that I have come to be sensitive to the differences between ourselves and others; that I have come to be open to those differences and less hasty in making judgements, less inclined to have prejudices. Also I have come to realise that despite the differences we can still communicate if we want to, because there is a common ground on which people can meet. I have been fascinated by the idea that there are universal human concepts shared by all people in the world. These concepts are proposed in the theory of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which I see as a potential tool for identifying and explaining underlying cultural values.3 Often I explain to my children that ‘some people think it is good to do such and such, while some other people think it is not good to do the same thing’. I find it very clear and then they can understand that there is diversity in what people believe is good and bad. The critical thing is to understand the differences between cultural groups to avoid unnecessary hostility often caused by lack of mutual understanding. I believe that I have been lucky in two of my choices: living in Canberra, where multiple ethnicity is a recognised and valued reality, and taking an interest in linguistics and, through linguistics, in the area of cross-cultural communication which has enriched my life.

CH A P T E R 1 0

Between z˙al and emotional blackmail: Ways of being in Polish and English Mary Besemeres

As far back as I can remember I’ve been interested in how different languages seem to capture reality differently. This interest comes directly out of my own bilingual experience: my mother is Polish, my father Australian, and I grew up speaking Polish at home, albeit a Polish gradually infiltrated by the English I spoke during the day. Because of trips to Warsaw throughout my childhood and my maternal grandmother’s – Babcia Marysia’s – stays with us for several months at a time in Australia, Poland was a very real place to me. In this chapter I explore the question of what sort of emotional and social world I inhabit when speaking Polish – who the language allows me to be, in effect − and how that represents a shift from who I am able to be in English. I also touch on the dynamic that Russian seems to create when my mother and I speak it together, the degree to which English is the natural language between my sister and me, and my ongoing attempts to raise my daughter Lizzie – Elz˙bietka – bilingually. My father studied Russian at Melbourne University, and he had taught himself Polish by the time he met my mother. They met at Oxford where he was working on a PhD in Soviet history and she had a short-term

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visiting fellowship away from her research position as a linguist in Warsaw. He joined her in Poland and I was born there, in 1972, but we left for Australia when I was ten months old. My sister was born in Canberra two and a half years later. We visited Poland every few years until I was nine, and then three more times in my teens. I’ve been ‘back’ eight times in all, most recently on a trip with my sister to take part in celebrations for Babcia Marysia’s one-hundredth birthday in 1998. Our visits were usually for about one month; the longest was for three months, when I was nine − long enough for me to attend primary school in the suburb outside Warsaw where my relatives lived. My main memory of this is that we had to wear different shoes, a bit like tennis shoes, inside the school, and a kind of pinafore over our ordinary clothes rather than a uniform. In some ways, Poland felt familiar: it was the country which corresponded to the language and, in part, the culture of our home in Canberra. But it also had a certain glamour because we had to travel such a long way by aeroplane, and we met people we never otherwise saw, so that the glimpses we had of their lives seemed particularly exciting. The relative shortness of our stays meant that the intensity of the whole experience was heightened. For a long time, I had a conviction that life in Poland was more interesting than in Australia, even though materially it was obviously more difficult. There were long queues, shortages of basic foods and goods such as meat, milk, salt, sugar, soap and toilet paper; at the same time, people seemed more alive to me in some way. The political situation was oppressive, and there were dissidents among our friends who were jailed during the period of martial law imposed after the rise of Solidarity in 1981. Hearing these friends of my mother argue about politics, late into the night, I felt as though I were part of a subversive underground community. Australia seemed safe and dull by comparison. It wasn’t until my last year of school, when I became friends with a perceptive and funny girl whose family were several generations IrishAustralian, that I began to appreciate an element in Australian culture that I couldn’t find in Poland: the sense of humour which allowed us to tease one another relentlessly but in an entirely friendly way. When I tried joking

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with people my own age in Poland in this sort of way, they would look at me in surprise: what was this girl doing?

Not-quite-Polish in Poland In Poland, my lack of ready idiomatic phrases and occasional small grammatical errors are apt to give me away as a non-local, although not immediately. When I visited Poland in my teens (at fourteen, seventeen and eighteen), I would pick up slangy phrases from my cousins and friends there, like w sumie (‘all in all’). When I heard myself use w sumie I could feel the little boost of localness and ‘authenticity’ that it gave my Polish, making me sound like someone who’d grown up there: the ‘me’ I would be if we had never left. I would enjoy it, but with a sense that this local accent wouldn’t last, that soon my Australianness would make itself felt. Using phrases like that felt a bit like playacting. A girl I used to write to in Poland, the daughter of a friend of my father, commented once in person on how fajne my letters were – something like ‘cool’, a teenage term of approval – and also how ‘unusual’ they were. I sensed that she was referring to my unidiomatic turns of phrase − either direct translations from English or the result of experimenting with what I thought sounded right when I couldn’t quite remember how to say something. Though intended as a compliment, her comment was mildly disconcerting, making me feel a bit self-conscious about my written ‘voice’ in Polish. From our visit to Poland when I was nine, I remember walking with a friend of my mother − Lucylla, whom I called Ciocia Lucka (Auntie Lucy) − by the river Wisła, looking at some green bushes and plants near the water, which I wanted to explore. I said to her that the greenery looked zapraszaja˛co. I was wanting to say that it looked ‘inviting’. Lucylla, who was a literary scholar and spoke some English (she had a daughter in Australia whom she had visited a few times), recognised my borrowing, and with a whimsical smile explained to me that what I’d done was translate an English phrase directly into Polish. I remember appreciating her tone,

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which wasn’t patronising, instead drawing my attention to a conundrum of language: that Poles didn’t think in quite the same way as English speakers. The moment marks for me a heightened awareness of how my Englishlanguage life couldn’t be easily transposed into Polish, and vice versa, although I have other, probably earlier memories of being puzzled by differences between Polish and English words for things.

Books for children in Polish and English The Polish children’s books I read growing up in Australia had a certain lyricism which made them very different from English-language ones. Stories in Polish often conveyed a wistful mood. There was none of the expectation of humour that seemed built into stories for children in English – British classics like Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh and Beatrix Potter’s books, and Australian ones like The Magic Pudding − books that I also loved but which didn’t transport me to quite such a haunting other world. When I was fifteen I translated one of my favourite Polish books into English: The Adventures of Sindbad the Sailor, a highly idiosyncratic version of the tale from the ‘Arabian Nights’ by Bolesław Les´mian, a Polish-Jewish writer who I later learned was a major poet between the world wars, but at the time I thought of as a children’s author. I wanted to make this story, which I had found so fascinating, accessible to children in Australia and in other English-speaking countries. I got as far as sending a letter to a couple of publishers. One of them even expressed tentative interest, but alas, never responded to the manuscript I sent. I found that one of the hardest things to translate was Les´mian’s tendency to repeat phrases for effect with some slight variation. For example, in a scene where Sindbad awaits the decision of a ship’s captain whether or not to throw him overboard because he might bring bad luck, Les´mian dwells on the captain’s long silence (to be silent, in Polish, is an active verb, milczec´): The captain frowned, fell into deep thought, and was silent. He was silent for so long that his silence began to seem as threatening for me as the deadly calm

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of the sea was for the ship. The longer he was silent, the greater my unease. I held my breath, listened tensely, and waited. It seemed to me that for the duration of his silence I had stopped existing. Finally the captain spoke after a long reflection and an even longer silence.1

In English this kind of repetition seemed completely redundant, whereas in Polish it was pregnant with suggestion, incantatory, part of a spell the author was casting, and at the same time for an older reader it had a sly, tongue-in-cheek quality quite unlike anything in Milne, Potter or Carroll. While the amount of repetition in Les´mian’s writing is distinctive, the difficulty of translating passages like these effectively reveals how writing in English is shaped by expectations that authors respect readers’ time and their right to engage their interest elsewhere – children included. I remember being puzzled as a kid that the list of contents in Polish books was always at the end. The lack of interest in readers’ convenience seemed of a piece with the patience expected of readers of Przygody Sindbada Z˙eglarza. Now that I’m reading books both in English and in Polish to my twoyear-old daughter Lizzie, this whole gap between children’s imaginative worlds in the two languages is striking me with renewed force. Books for children are reflective of the ways in which a culture views children, and hence how adulthood is constructed. Children’s literature plays a part in shaping adults, and in some ways I feel closer to the kind of self fostered by Polish children’s literature, which seems more open to loss and less concerned with the factual and the everyday. Because I want to speak Polish with Lizzie, I sometimes try to translate English-language books into Polish as I read them to her. It’s the seemingly most basic books which have proved to be among the most resistant. The ‘touch and feel’ series, for instance, escape my translating ability. In Polish, it seems, people don’t teach children to notice whether things are furry, rough, smooth or shiny. I hear myself saying about a teddy, jego ogon jest zbyt szorstki, ‘his tail is too rough’, and it sounds ridiculously wooden; zbyt is a stiff, academic word, not colloquial, like ‘too’, and szorstki is hardly in a kid’s repertoire. Poles don’t seem to care for measuring relative roughness

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and smoothness, and more generally, perhaps, they’re not so interested in teaching children to investigate the world through sensory detail. I suppose this may change if touch and feel books from Britain or the United States come onto the Polish market. The focus on textures in children’s books in English seems to indicate a preoccupation with empirical reality in ‘Anglo’ cultures, the continuing mark of British empiricism perhaps.

Russian with my mother I was drawn to studying Russian at university because of the Russian novels I’d read in translation and been held in thrall by, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and strange, memorable stories by Gogol and Chekhov. There was probably also something appealing about a language that was historically related to my home language, Polish, but unlike Polish had an obvious significance on a global scale because of the Cold War. During my first year of study I began to practise Russian with my mother, who had retained the Russian she learnt at school and continued to communicate in it with friends she was in touch with in Moscow. Gradually it developed into a special language for us, and I found myself speaking it with her more often than Polish. Russian has a playful element for us; when we speak it together it sounds shutlivo, igrivo, joking. It’s harder for us to get angry in it, so in an argument we would tend to revert to Polish, and sometimes arguments could be held at bay through the playfulness of Russian. She would use phrases like bros’ (literally: ‘throw’; ‘quit talking about it’) deadpan, but with the hint of a smile, and the more cajoling davaj ne budem (literally: ‘give we won’t’; ‘let’s not’), which amused me so much that I’d start laughing helplessly. These words gave her a new, humorous kind of tone; they were very different from the more annoyed-sounding Polish term przestan´ (stop!). And I liked to say these Russian words back to her, so they introduced a more egalitarian, almost schoolgirl tone between us. I don’t see this playfulness as a characteristic of Russian in general, but only of Russian for my mother and me, as we use it. Its particular meaning for us has a lot to do, I think, with it

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being a secondary language in relation to Polish, a language we don’t have to use and therefore don’t have to take entirely seriously.

English with my sister My sister and I have always spoken English together. To speak Polish when we’re by ourselves would feel artificial. Growing up, the only times when we did were on buses or in taxis, to keep our conversation private. An extension of this now that we live in different cities is in writing email: when we want to make sure no one else could understand an intercepted message, we write in Polish, struggling a bit with some of the expressions we don’t know good counterparts for. It acts as a kind of code then. When we write birthday or Christmas cards to one another they tend to be in a mixture of Polish and English, with the Polish words often truncated to one syllable; for example, ´scisk instead of ´sciskam (I hug you), or słod, short for słodka (sweet). The Polish words are there I think as reassurances of warmth; writing without them would feel strangely undemonstrative. But shortening them is also important, ensuring that they don’t sound overly sentimental in English, making them part of our distinctive home language, a bilingual lexicon created initially by our father and added to by us over the years. Words like ´scisk reflect the influence of Australian English on this family language, the impulse to diminish the seriousness of words by reducing their length, as in ‘mozzie’ for mosquito, ‘rego’ for registration, or ‘Juz’ for Justine. At the same time, we never sign our cards or emails with our English names, but always with a shortened version of a diminutive, Polish in Clare’s case and Russian in mine. Instead of ‘Klarusia’, Clare writes ‘Klar’, and I write ‘Masz’, short for ‘Masha’, my Russian name. To sign ‘Mary’ or ‘Clare’ in our messages would sound unaccountably harsh and cold.

Z˙al A concept that comes into my relationships with Polish people particularly forcefully is the feeling captured by the word z˙al. Z˙al has a range of

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connected meanings in Polish, including an emotion similar to sorrow,2 and another one closer to regret, but the one I have in mind here is the feeling that someone has towards a person they love, who they think has wronged them – a feeling that’s likely to lead to a wyrzut or a strong ‘reproach’. People say: Mam ˙zal do niej, ‘I have ˙zal towards her’, or on ma do mnie ˙zal, ‘he has ˙zal towards me’. Because the feeling can be ongoing, it resembles the English phrase ‘to bear a grudge’, but whereas ‘grudge’ in English sounds unreasonable, in Polish, to feel ˙zal towards another person is considered natural, and has no negative connotations. I’ve encountered this feeling very often with my Polish relatives, and with Polish Australians who are close to our family. The most characteristic aspect of the feeling is that it appears to arise when people think that you have not been sufficiently warm towards them. The criterion of warmth, at least in my experience, has often been readiness to spend a lot of time with the people in question or with others who matter to them, even when there are good reasons why you can’t. At the end of a short visit to Poland when my sister and I were in our late teens, my aunt complained to my mother that Clare and I hadn’t spent enough time with one of our cousins, and yet we’d seen some of the children of my mother’s friends (who were friends of ours). The fact that we found the cousin in question difficult – something that my mother tried gently to explain – and that we’d actually spent more time with her than with our friends, whom we saw only very briefly, was no excuse. To Ciocia, rodzina (family) is paramount, and the claims of friends can’t compete. To be fair, I know she would not hesitate to put herself out to help any of us if she knew we needed it. At the time, however, I found Ciocia’s expression of ˙zal directed against us both painful and annoying. It seemed unfair, but I was sorry when I heard the description my mother gave of her sister’s wide blue eyes looking surprised and pained at the news that her nieces didn’t find her daughter easy to be with. A close family friend of ours in Canberra, whom we also call ‘Ciocia’, often makes it clear to us that she feels ˙zal for our failure to see her more often. When I lived in Canberra I tended to feel, similarly, a sense of the injustice of her ˙zal – didn’t she know that we were all busy, that we couldn’t

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always make it to dinners that she had organised? When she’d start to say something to me that expressed her ˙zal, I would try to change the subject and inwardly shrug off her complaint, while reassuring her of our affection by putting my arm around her. When I have mentioned episodes like these to Australian friends, their perception has often been that the Polish person has been trying to manipulate me emotionally, resorting to ‘emotional blackmail’. While I know what they’re talking about, I don’t feel that’s the case. I know my Polish relatives don’t see their feeling of ˙zal as anything but justified and I don’t think they are even unconsciously trying to manipulate me. The ‘emotional blackmail’ explanation seems to me to distort what’s going on, to impose a cultural vision from the outside, though it’s one that I’m familiar with. It presupposes that we are all separate, that people should not try to exert pressure on others by making them feel bad; the phrase ‘guilt trip’ conveys a similar idea. At an intellectual level, the notion that selves are ‘relational’ has had a significant impact in the humanities – interestingly, influenced by Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin among others – and it’s a conception of identity that I personally welcome. But in my daily conversations with people at university, relationships continue to be talked about in ways that affirm people’s right not to be ‘pressured’; ways of speaking that I’m sympathetic to and yet can’t help but see as culturally specific. When I’m with Polish people, part of me is liable to react with irritation to the ˙zal that I can see I’ve caused. But another part is susceptible to feeling guilty. It’s a peculiar way in which I feel, culturally, that I’m both Polish and Australian.

Raising Elizabeth bilingually According to authors Una Cunningham-Andersson and Staffan Andersson, the best way for children to learn both parents’ languages is for each parent to speak with them in their own language from the beginning.3 I’m trying to apply this principle with Lizzie, but my difficulties in doing so bring out the complexity of my – and therefore of our – linguistic situation. If I was asked what my ‘mother tongue’ is, I’d say Polish: it’s what I was brought up

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speaking at home, and what I continue to speak with my mother, and part of the time, with my father. It’s a language that means a great deal to me; one that I feel connected to at a deep level. And yet English in some ways feels more natural; it’s the language I speak with my husband, Nigel, with all my friends, with neighbours and colleagues. It’s the language of every day, the medium I spend most of my time in. Mostly, it’s what comes first to me when I talk with Lizzie; I often have to remind myself to speak Polish, so it’s rarely spontaneous. A name I have for her reflects this effort midword: instead of the standard diminutive from the Polish name Elz˙bieta, ‘Elz˙bietka’, I often call her ‘Lizus´ka’, adding a Polish diminutive suffix, us´ka, to the first half of ‘Lizzie’. Some words, though, come most readily in Polish. When I want to comfort her I say: nie płacz, kochanie, nie płacz, malutkie, (‘don’t cry, beloved, don’t cry little one’) and a string of other Polish endearments like słoneczko (little sun) and serduszko (little heart). When she does something naughty and funny, I say Uch ty łobuzie, ty łobuz (something like ‘you rogue’, said to children in Polish), and I notice that Nigel says łobuz now too, and makes up phrases like ‘łobuz alert’, so it’s entered our home language. Yet perhaps our very emphasis on her łobuzowatos´c´ is inspired partly by the Australian word ‘cheeky’; Nigel is always telling Lizzie that she is cheeky. And maybe I’m influenced, too, by my father’s frequent use of ‘łobulik’ when I was growing up, the affectionate diminutive he coined from łobuz, which again seems to me to reflect a characteristically Australian valuing of mischievousness. In Lizzie’s first year and a half, speaking Polish to her was easier than it is now. Now that she has been learning to say words like ‘dog’ and ‘duck’ at daycare – she pronounces them ‘doh’ and ‘duh’ – it seems all the harder to teach her the Polish for these, piesek and kaczka, which are a syllable longer. In fact, when speaking to little children Poles commonly make diminutives out of nouns, so a duck would be three syllables, kaczuszka. To teach her the Polish for bee, pszczółka, and book, ksia˛z˙eczka appears an impossibly uphill task, making me wonder how Polish children ever learn to speak their multisyllabic, consonant-clustered language. How did I do it?

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Probably the most intangible aspect of Polish in my life now is the extent to which Polish culture and language influence my academic work. My ways of thinking in academic contexts are profoundly shaped by English. There aren’t ready Polish equivalents for words that I often use when I write, like ‘capture’, ‘convey’, ‘suggest’ and most importantly, ‘seem’. While there is a way of saying ‘seem’, wydaje sie˛, it’s not used as often as ‘seem’ is in English and it belongs more to spoken than written language; it would sound very weak in a research paper. I don’t see how I could write without such words. Words like ‘suggest’ and ‘seem’ are crucial, because they signal to the reader that I’m not claiming to have some superior knowledge about an area but rather am exploring it. In Polish there’s no similar emphasis on tentative knowledge; either one knows or one doesn’t, and in academic writing one generally does. From what I’ve read of Polish academic writing, the prose is much more elaborate; elegance in Polish does not equate with spareness or conciseness, but rather with what, to an English ear, sound like flourishes and verbal bows. I like to think that my tendency to write long, involved sentences in first drafts is influenced by Polish diction, but then I wasn’t educated in Polish (apart from a few hours each week at a community school) and so haven’t really been exposed to the pressure of different norms of writing. As a teenager at Polish school in Canberra on Friday evenings I struggled in my class essays to go beyond the vocabulary I used in writing letters to my grandmother. I think the deepest mark that Polish makes on my research is in the awareness it gives me of a different way of seeing the subject, a different way of posing the question, and a desire to find out how others experience the world through the double lenses of interlingual vision.

CH A P TE R 1 1

The journey of self-discovery in another language Anna Gladkova

I arrived in Australia from Russia in 2004 to study for a PhD in linguistics. I made this decision after spending a year as a visiting student at the Australian National University in 2002. The experience and knowledge I gained in 2002 built up my belief that studying in Australia could be an ideal step, because it would allow me to research the Russian language and culture which are native and dear to me via English, which had been the language of my professional interest in previous years.1 I started learning English at primary school when I was seven years old. My parents sent me to a school where ‘in-depth’ teaching of English was offered – a kind of program that was quite rare in the majority of schools in Soviet Russia. We practised English five days a week and in high school several subjects were taught in English. My parents’ knowledge of English − the only foreign language they could say a few phrases in − was very limited. They believed that by sending me to an ‘English’ school they could compensate for something that was missing from their lives and give me an opportunity for a better future. English was a very exotic subject, especially in the city where I lived. My city of birth, known as Gorky then, was closed to foreigners due to its

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massive industrial and military production.2 Foreigners were not allowed to go there without special permission. In such an environment the experience of someone speaking another language was unreal: none of my family or friends had been abroad and we did not know what it was like to have friends from another country. I remember very vividly the pictures of famous sights of English-speaking countries which decorated our special ‘English language classroom’ at school. They were almost like pictures of a Martian landscape for us because we knew they were from a different world which was out of reach. Mastering drills of English grammar in that room I never imagined that in fifteen or twenty years I would see many of those sights and go through the experience of becoming part of an Englishspeaking society. By the time I finished my studies at the university in the mid-nineties, the ‘other’ world was coming much closer – many exchange programs started and universities offered opportunities to study abroad. Nizhny Novgorod (no longer Gorky) became an attraction for foreigners due to its ‘closed’ past and an exhilarating rate of change initiated by a group of highly ambitious young politicians who wanted the city to become a testing ground for democratic and economic reforms in Russia. When I came to Australia I embraced the opportunity to immerse myself in English. It was a chance to use and test the knowledge that I had accumulated over the years. I assumed that my skills in English were good enough to ‘navigate’ successfully because I had studied English professionally in Russia at a Linguistic University and, after graduation, taught English at the same university for several years. However, living in an Englishspeaking environment and studying issues of cross-cultural communication made me understand that speaking good English and building successful communication entails much more than using the right grammar and vocabulary. My new level of understanding English as well as my own identity as a Russian speaker developed through attending a university course on crosscultural communication. The idea that differences in speech practices of

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different cultural communities are determined by differences in their ways of thinking and conceiving the world was a revelation for me. As I learned about other cultures, their norms and speech practices, I understood that there are no right or wrong ways of speaking – other norms are just different, but as humans we develop an attachment to the ones we grow up with and then tend to consider them to be the best. Now, when I have an opportunity to think back about this learning experience, I have a strong belief that every newcomer to a multicultural society like Australia should go through a similar program. It is also highly desirable for those who have lived in this country all their lives and are only familiar with one culture and language. Attending the course broadened my understanding of the significance of communicative norms, but the most important lessons I learned from my own experience. Some of my previous linguistic and communicative habits were quite easy to change. I learned to sound positive and to express my negative feelings as little as possible. I noticed that in Australia I hardly ever heard people complaining about their headaches, whereas in Russia one cannot get through a single day without hearing such complaints on the bus, at work or at home. In Russia I did not even think of them as ‘complaints’, but rather as an integral part of life. Do people here have headaches less often? Maybe. But they definitely speak about them less often. Learning to tone down my manner of expression was more difficult. In Russian it is good to show one’s emotional involvement in everything one does. The strong expressions I used sometimes met with silence or disapproving looks which would make me understand that I had said too much. In describing my impressions of travels in Australia or films I watched I dwelt too much on what exactly I felt at different moments. I noticed that this quality of mine which was perfectly acceptable in the Russian-speaking community would be perceived as unusual among Australians, who use fewer words when talking about their emotions. Even though I knew about the notion of personal autonomy in Anglo culture (a concept which does not exist in Russian), the actual discovery of its invisible boundaries was quite painful and led at times to

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misunderstandings and losses. As a Russian speaker I assumed that this notion had flexible boundaries. I had no problem with expecting it in formal situations, but when everyone seemed friendly – why bother about any boundaries and formalities? In Russian culture in a formal situation it is important to be reserved and ultra-polite. In a casual situation openness and emotionality are the norm. The friendly interaction style that seemed to characterise Australian culture made me assume that ‘formalities’ were no longer required. When wanting to show my closeness and appreciation of a person I would start dropping the unnecessary (at least for me then) English ‘politeness’ terms of ‘would you’ and ‘could you’ and use a straight imperative and then realise that it was inappropriate. I once said to an Australian friend: ‘Come here and look at it!’ He remained motionless and said: ‘Never say things like this to people here unless they are close to you’. ‘How close?’ I inquired. ‘Very close’. Since the boundary between being close and very close seemed fairly obscure to me, I decided not to use a straight imperative again. Still, adding ‘would you’ and ‘could you’ seems cumbersome and I don’t feel like doing it when I am happy and want to show people that I am enjoying their company. At other times, I would forget about the need to keep asking whether someone would prefer to do something on his or her own rather than doing it ‘to keep me company’ – za kompaniiu, as we say in Russian. Similarly, my desire to express my friendly feelings to others by making it clear I want to keep them company would be perceived by English speakers as a lack of initiative and overdependence. Russian seems to be able to conceptualise the idea of communal activity much more readily than English. One needs just one word to say how many people are doing something together as a whole – vdvoem ‘two people together’, vtroem ‘three people together’, vchetverom ‘four people together’ and so on. It is only living in Australia that I have come to understand the emphasis placed in Russian-speaking society on doing things with others rather than by oneself. Often, instances of miscommunication result in the need to explain my expectations and beliefs. I notice that there are basic ideas that I find hard to

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communicate when speaking in English because they belong to the part of my personality that has been shaped by the Russian language – something that Mary Besemeres called ‘losing self-orienting concepts’.3 When I find some joke or a piece of art poshlyi – that is, lacking taste and low – I have no exact words to communicate my idea with the necessary precision. There is no way of expressing this negative judgement in English as directly as I can in Russian. How can I communicate the values of dushevnost’, iskrennost’ or serdechnost’? These are personal qualities of giving without regret or ulterior motive, being open, kind, warm-hearted, ready to communicate. It is hard to find exact equivalents for them in English and the existing words − ‘warmth’, ‘sincerity’ or ‘cordiality’ − are less common and culturally salient. It seems to me that my personality is oriented towards certain concepts and words which feel entirely natural and are very important to me. As soon as I translate them into English they sound marginal, weak and unconvincing. Along with important values, some social practices are missing in my life now as well. I once got rather emotionally confused as one of a group saying goodbye to our colleague and friend Cliff Goddard, who had come to work at our department for several weeks. Three of us from our department watched him pack his backpack. There were a few words about the expected long drive, a short ‘Bye!’ and then he was walking down the corridor. For me it was so emotionally empty – no hugs, no kisses, no reminder to drive safely as a way of showing care, no warm wishes for the time we will not see each other, no words confirming when we will next meet (something that I would expect in a similar situation in Russia). It seems that in contemporary Anglo-Australian society, where mobility is an everyday reality and necessity, parting with people goes almost unnoticed and the fact that people might not see each other again, or soon, is not perceived as something to be regretted. This is so different even from contemporary Russia. For Russians a special meaning is attached to whatever happens at proshchanie (farewell). Proshchanie is a common and important word which usually incorporates a small ritual. It is not that the ritual of saying goodbye in Russian society is more complex than in an English-

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speaking one. In Russian the semantic domain of proshchanie is more elaborate than that of ‘farewell’ in English. When leaving someone who is important in your life it is necessary sdelat’ chto-to na proshchanie (literally: ‘for the parting’; ‘to do something at parting’), which can include hugging, kissing, making a sign of the cross, saying some important words, and giving something as a memento. There exists another informal folk tradition of posidet’ na dorozhku, ‘to sit down a bit together before parting’. When someone is leaving, people who come to say goodbye have to sit down near packed suitcases and mix occasional words of care with meaningful moments of self-explanatory silence (a scene I experienced many times in recent years in Russia when going away on work-related trips). Even the mobility of modern life cannot prevent me from longing for these expressive scenes of departure. Thinking of these two different cultural attitudes I remember that in Russian to describe leaving without saying goodbye there is an expression uiti po-angliiski, ‘to leave in an English manner’. Coming across familiar forms of expression fills me with joy at seeing something dear and native and at the same time I am sad, because it is so rare in my experience here. One day during a small gathering a Hungarian friend of mine, hearing something funny, started laughing in a way that I haven’t heard for a long time. Her voice was light and quite high as she laughed. She was sitting on a couch and as she laughed she buried her head in the pillow, then raised her head, splashed her hands in between and repeated this several times, repeating the words that made her laugh. She laughed like that for quite a while. It looked and sounded so familiar to me. I realised that what she was doing is what we call khokhotat’ in Russian.4 Khokhotat’ is a Russian word for ‘laugh’, but it is not the same as ‘laugh’, ‘giggle’ or any other English word. Khokhotat’ is a light and catchy type of laugh when one forgets oneself and gives oneself over completely to laughter for quite a significant amount of time. It is interesting that English does not have the same word as khokhotat’, but what is more interesting is that I don’t meet people here who can khokhotat’. It is true that people here giggle, guffaw and laugh, but the sound of those is not the same for me as the sound of khokhotat’.

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Apart from learning to sound and be more ‘Anglo’ I am also learning to be a part of a multicultural society. In my department, apart from Australians, I meet Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Singaporean, Polish, Spanish and German scholars. For someone like me who spent all her previous life in a closed city it is an entirely new experience. My social interaction outside the department is significantly determined by where I live. I chose to stay in a college on campus which offers lodging for research students. Its residents come from various national and cultural backgrounds: Mohammad, Arvin, Babak, Zohair, Abid, Yuko, Poom, Wei, Di, Deepak, Wasan, Judit, Sambit . . . so many names which are absolutely new to me. Every person brings with them a variety of habits, accents, intonations and facial expressions. The arrangement at University House is that the kitchen is shared by the residents.5 It gives us ample opportunity to socialise and learn about each other’s backgrounds. It has become a common practice to organise potluck dinners, when residents cook and bring their ethnic food. Cooking starts in the evening and the kitchen becomes full of smells specific to different parts of the world – Thai and Chinese sauces, Indian spices, Italian herbs, European cakes . . . every aroma blends in the air and yet remains very distinct. When the cooking is over the table is full of an unbelievable variety of dishes – Indian curries, biriany, Italian pasta, Thai lemongrass chicken, Iranian rice cooked with a crust, Russian and Ukrainian borsch, German leek pie, Spanish omelette, Iranian chicken salad, Japanese sushi, Chinese dumplings, South American bean dip with sour cream. I can’t imagine where else I could experience such a variety of cuisines. In the interaction with these people I notice the emergence of my double identity. I long for such qualities as dushevnost’, iskrennost’ or serdechnost’, which are appreciated in my language and culture. At the same time I look at their manner of expression through the prism of Anglo cultural norms that I have come to know. For example, I found it rude when an Indian friend of mine held out a glass of juice to me saying: ‘Have this’. This pattern of behaviour would be quite consistent with Russian ways of interaction. Even though intuitively I knew that he probably did it out of

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good will, I felt he was imposing on me by using a direct imperative in this context without asking if I wanted that juice. I was at a loss when he got annoyed when I thanked him for a dinner he invited me to. It turned out that in Indian culture friends and relatives do not thank each other. All I could have said is that the dinner was tasty – that is already a very high degree of appreciation. Greetings with my Pakistani friends at college turn into detailed descriptions of my life; a simple ‘Hi!’ is not sufficient. They show their interest and affection by constantly inquiring about my life – what I did during the day, where I went, who I spent time with. Now, these questions seem too personal to me as we are in a country where personal autonomy is valued. Since English is the only language we can all speak and understand, I would now prefer to confine myself to its rules. But gradually I get used to this variety of expression as I get to know these people better. I learn that Iranian men like to tell fascinating stories, especially when they are together, and they will not let you go until you have laughed. If you are having a dinner with Iranian men, it is long, loud and entertaining with lots of stories to laugh about. My Sri Lankan neighbour greets me in a way he is perhaps used to in his culture by asking me to confirm what I am doing at the moment: ‘Going? Going to the office?’ ‘Yes, going to the office,’ I reply. Or: ‘Cooking? Cooking dinner?’ ‘Yes, cooking.’ At first this way of greeting left me quite puzzled, but gradually I got used to it and now I even like it. I also learn that almost the opposite meanings can be attached to the same things in different cultures – a valuable lesson. One day my Indian friend brings me flowers for my birthday. His face is radiant and he extends two roses towards me – pink and red, wrapped in beautiful paper. I am startled. I try to show happiness on my face, but very soon I can’t hide my disappointment any more. Two roses? In Russia an even number of flowers is only for the dead. After fourteen, it does not really matter, but two is so obviously even. ‘Why two roses?’ I can’t help inquiring. ‘Oh, in India two is a very good and lucky number. When you have things, it is good when there is a couple.’ ‘But why pink and red?’ I ask. ‘It is so serious. Why not something lighter; white, for example?’ ‘Oh, red and its shades are all very

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good, but white is for the dead,’ he replies. I am happy to have fresh and beautiful flowers and try to assure myself that two is a very good and lucky number and it is good that I didn’t get white roses, but I put them separately in different vases because in Russia we don’t put an even number of flowers together. Who are these people to me? We eat together often, go places, travel, chat, watch movies, share our life stories, tell each other about the food at home that we miss most. They are my friends. I don’t hesitate to tell other people here that I am going out with my University House friends or that I will celebrate Christmas with my University House friends. But when I return to Russia for a vacation and have to tell my family and friends about these people I can’t pick the right word. Are they druz’ia – the most obvious Russian equivalent for the word ‘friends’ – or priiateli – another translation? Drug (friend) is someone one knows for a long time and with whom one develops a very close bond. It is necessary to be in constant contact with a drug, to share each other’s lives. Even though I get to know some residents at University House quite well, I can’t call them druz’ia in Russian. We enjoy our time together, but we also know that this time will end, we will have to be in different parts of the world again and there is no certainty that we will ever see each other again. The English word ‘friend’ suits such a relationship because it reflects the reality of a mobile society, where people often change the place where they live and have to find a way to enjoy their short-term relationships. In Russia most people are much less mobile; many live in one city for their whole lives and therefore establish closer ties that are expected to be lifelong. Priiatel’ is someone with whom one establishes a less close relationship than with drug, but this word is sometimes even used in a negative sense for someone with whom one has friend-like, but superficial relations. I don’t actually like this word and think that I care for my friends at University House more than I would for priiateli. I want these people to be my druz’ia, but at the same time our reality stops me from thinking in these terms. As I am away from Russia and time passes by, I notice that I begin to feel a certain detachment from some of the people I used to call druz’ia

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in Russia. Long distance and separation contradict the pattern of constant interaction with druz’ia. During one of my visits home I meet a friend and after a conversation she tells me that I am not Russian any more. I say nothing in return, but I can’t help wondering what makes her think so. When I am back in Australia after Christmas I receive an email from another friend and former colleague who writes about her family’s celebration of the New Year at her aunty’s dacha. She describes how enjoyable it was: sunny frosty days, starlit nights with fireworks. And then the letter says krome e˙togo, kak i voditsia u russkikh – bania, vodka, garmon’ da losos’; that is, ‘besides, as is common among Russians – the bathhouse, vodka, the accordion and salmon’. This phrase is used to refer to a lengthy, joyful celebration free from any sense of formality. Reading this line of the letter makes me uneasy. Why does she decide to remind me of how Russians commonly celebrate the New Year? I can’t imagine her explaining these things to me like that several years ago when we worked together and saw each other almost every week. These words make me feel that she excludes me from the group of people who commonly celebrate New Year at a bathhouse with vodka, salmon and accordion playing. It is true that I have never celebrated New Year before in that way myself, but I don’t want to be excluded from the group of people who usually do so. There are still some things about me that remain hard to explain to people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. One of them is the very simple and natural issue of my name. The system of Russian names is different from that of English. In Russia most people have a full name, which consists of the first name, patronymic (derived from the name of the father) and a surname. This name is recorded in one’s passport and people know each other’s full names. At the same time there are many variations of the first name which can reveal different shades of attitude. The choice of name is usually not up to the person, but rather to others with whom he or she interacts. In official situations I have to be called by my first name and patronymic (that is, Anna Nikolaevna), but otherwise people choose from a large number of

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derivatives to call me by. For people who do not wish to express any particular attitude and choose the most standard form I am Ania; my relatives and many of my friends and former colleagues call me Anechka – a form showing lots of affection, or Aniuta – which is also affectionate but to a smaller degree and sounds more ‘grown up’. My grandmother is the only one who calls me Aniutochka – a form which expresses a kind of ‘double affection’. My former schoolmates still call me Anka – the name of a wellknown character of the civil war − to show a ‘buddy’ relationship between us. Coming here I find it really strange that I have to choose the name I would like to be called by. Being called Anna by everyone seems so boring, but speakers of English can’t really comprehend that Anna, Ania, Anechka, Aniuta, Aniutochka, Annushka, and Anka are all my names, equally meaningful and important for me. When I ask my close friends here: ‘So how should I introduce myself?’, they say: ‘It is your choice and you have to decide’. It seems to me that this act of choosing my name is symbolic of a change in my character prompted by the language and culture I live in now – I’ve gone from allowing others to name me and thus to show how they want to relate to me to deciding on a name for myself, a conscious personal choice which I have never made before.

CH A P T E R 1 2

Foster mother tongue Eva Sallis

My father is German. He was born, as was my grandfather, in a German community settled from the 1860s in Palestine. My father’s village was a tiny place known as Wilhelma. Palästinadeutschen, this small community was popularly called. More formally, its residents were the Tempelgesellschaft, the Templers. Most were shipped to Australia in 1942 and housed in detention camps in Tatura in Victoria and Camp 14, Loveday, in South Australia. The community in Palestine was finally dissolved with the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. When my father’s uncle stepped off the ship at Port Phillip Bay, having been transported more or less as a prisoner of war of the British, he knew he had arrived in a foreign land − neither Germany nor Palestine. He spoke German in Palestine, so he used his other language − experimentally − on the first Australian he saw on the docks. As-salaam ’aleikum, he said. Waleikum as-salaam! came the instant, stunned reply. Tehki Arabi? (’You speak Arabic?’) and the Australian kissed my great-uncle welcome to the new land.

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My great-uncle is thought to have said that from that moment he felt at home in Australia − its one Arabic speaker was there to welcome him as the Germans were locked up. As-salaam ’aleikum (‘Peace be upon you’). These are, one recently arrived Iraqi refugee said to me, the sweetest words in the world to hear. I heard his loneliness, then, because everyone wishes peace upon you, in every encounter, in the Middle East. There it is a commonplace formality, not a sweet delight. I was in a taxi in Melbourne recently, reading the Melways for my driver who could not read English. I guessed he was Arab, so I greeted him with these sweetest words. His eyebrows shot up and he beamed his reply. Tehki Arabi? he said. I wanted to say it was an old Australian tradition, at least in my family, but I was suddenly too sad.1

I learned Arabic as an adult. I studied intensively for seven years and will continue developing it all my life. Today I am imperfectly articulate in text and word, imperfectly literate, imperfect in tongue. To be perfect, I am told, I would have to migrate, leave Australia, and live, work, write in Arabic space and place, learn to be me among Arabic speaking and thinking people. There is a cure, I am told by Arab friends, for my limping tongue. It is easily obtained and free for everyone in a far country. But I live in a linguistic Third World, a land in which languages are threats and too often stamped out and forgotten, and in which I am sufficiently a curiosity to be asked to write on war, terrorism, Islam, Saddam Hussein. Acquiring a language that bridges polarised cultures is transforming, selfredeeming. It can give good, as opposed to destructive, power. It can heal many things in self and others. And yet such learning was and is in many ways inscribed with pain. When the mermaid of the fairy story migrates from sea to land, exchanging her tail for legs and feet, she must live also with permanent pain. It is this pain that intrigues me most, for it persists alongside the consciousness that learning Arabic has been at the centre of some of the most important experiences of my inner and public life.

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Learning Arabic came in stages. The usual metaphor for learning a language is enrichment. Learning Arabic was an unravelling, slow at first. I was undone. It became compulsive because there seemed to be no way to retreat, to repair this unravelling without undoing more in a search for material to remake myself. How tied a self can be to its language! How possible is it to make a self of one’s own in another language? A different linguistic self is a different thinking, social being who has different expressions, a different mode. When I open my mouth in Arabic I am trapped in a mode of charming (imperfect) formality, and this colours not only who people think I am, but who I feel myself to be. This is far deeper and more organic than role-playing. It is not performing a script. It is giving body and soul as best I can (imperfectly) to the words and phrases that carry myself to others. These selves, my Arabic and English selves, are not mutually exclusive: there is a crossover between experiences, such that I can write in English about what my Arabic self has experienced. But these selves are noticeably different, to the point of having subtly different opinions and understanding of humour. I gesticulate a lot when I speak Arabic. I have a different body, embodiment. When did that start? Why is it natural? Arabic is part of me. I am a novelist, and many of my novels deal overtly with Middle Eastern culture and language; and the experience of migration. I am born to migrants, and live in a land in which almost all people are migrants, and those who are not are almost all displaced. Even when my fiction has nothing overtly Arab, it is about ideas that are born from the perceptions bilinguality has given me. Most happy experience of all in the long journey: I am useful, sometimes even loved for my ability, now, among new refugees and migrants from the Middle East. My friends laugh at my inventiveness as I manufacture fresh metaphors effortlessly to replace the concepts I can’t find at the tip of my tongue. I am an oddity, but liked. I have found my place, a place for my tongue, in Australia. Perhaps Arabic is my better half − even if I am a fool, a clown and a cripple, and must speak plainly and formally, or make only comical metaphors.

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My mother-in-law showed me the elements of a natural Arab penhand. Until she sat down with me at the back of the carpet showroom and painstakingly went through the different forms each letter took when hand moulded, handwriting had been illegible to me, and my own hand, as I discovered later, had all the bloated bellies and painstaking dots of a typical Westerner’s hand. Westerners’ Arabic sits as static as English on the page, each part discrete, turgid, pegged down by its precise dots. Westerners’ Arabic is conscious of the possibility of being misunderstood. Like any natural mother hand, Arab Arabic is fast and fluid. The dots have comet tails, the double dots are a simple dash, the triples a curved dash. The hooks of the siin are flattened to a line; the ta al-marbuta is no ta – it is a definitive, unique word-ending gesture, a closing downward stroke. Arab Arabic assumes that even if the writing is too fast for sense, you will know the word it means to suggest. I am proud of my handwriting. It is precious to me too that my motherin-law gave it to me. Later, as my Arabic improved, my parents-in-law became ambivalent. They tested my Arabic now and then in order to dismiss it, and both the test and the dismissal cut me to the quick. Even now, I cannot speak Arabic in my mother-in-law’s hearing without stumbling, conscious of defects. Early on they found that I understood dialect poorly, and then they forgot that I might over time improve and that I might understand what they were saying. It was a very painful time. Yet I remember many times my mother-in-law exclaiming proudly to family and friends that I was learning Arabic for their sake, so much did I love them and their culture. But their own children barely speak the language and don’t read or write it. How can I illustrate the ambivalence they felt? There was a time when we could all sit uncomfortably together in the seventies décor of their family lounge, and language was their refuge from me. Language was their outlet. Over time that was eroded. I was the intimate stranger, and they lost this refuge the more Arabic I acquired. My father-in-law assured me one time that Arabic was too hard for a foreigner to ever learn, and that I would never be able to read the books in his library; yet I knew that he longed for

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someone to be able to read them. Years later he pressed them into my hands to take home and read as best I could. He knew even then that I couldn’t possibly manage to read the embossed volume plucked from the twentyfive-volume set of the Kitab al-Aghany, that I would struggle through a few passages, that I would prove him right, and yet I remember that particular incident as one laden with warmth and quiet pride in what language I did have. Now that I can read his books, he is gone. He died seven years ago. I sometimes imagine that in these latter days, he might have lost ambivalence about my language and might have quietly enjoyed it. I wish he could have read my first published translations. Looking back, I see a series of seemingly random elements that drew me to an inevitable study of the language. My interest evolved over time. Its earliest roots are in my father’s origins in Palestine. From him I acquired a sense of the Middle East as a real place populated by real people, rather than an exotic ‘other’ space. My father didn’t speak Arabic, but if I had been asked as a child what languages would interest me I probably would have said German and Arabic. In my teens I taught myself the Arabic alphabet alongside Tolkien’s Elvish. In my late teens I met my partner Roger. In my twenties I began serious study of Arabic language and research on European views of the Middle East as expressed in the European interest in the 1001 Nights. Why choose the Arabian Nights? Why insist, against all commonsense, that I needed Arabic to undertake my research? I can’t answer these questions. When I first left home I enjoyed my freedom and independence. All choices, whether in study, clothing or food, were mine. Like many other students, I set up my first few share houses with furniture scrounged from hard rubbish and lucky finds in second-hand stores that were far from the beaten op shop track. One day, out at Gilles Plains where I was studying horse husbandry, I chanced upon just the right sort of store. Through the dusty windows, I could make out a jumble of teetering unmatched chairs and piled up objects: a bassinet, a golf club, fifties kettles and bar stools. And at the bottom, I could see something that looked like two huge turbans, one stacked on the other. I went in and picked my way through the

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labyrinth of Adelaide suburban detritus. They were beautiful. They were round, leather footstools or seats, ‘poufs’ we called them in those days. They were much like giant pumpkins, but made of leather in alternating leaves of black and camel, embossed with ornate gold arabesques. Each camel piece had a phrase pressed in gold into it and, in rising excitement, I recognised Arabic script. I bought them for $5 and lugged these tatty glories home. I couldn’t read the words. This was before I studied Arabic, and I had lost my early teen skills with the alphabet. I borrowed a BBC teach-yourselfArabic book, and painstakingly deciphered the letters. Layali Shahrazad. Could it be Sheherazade, the real Sheherazade? It was. Later, when I studied Arabic, it struck me as exceedingly odd that the Nights of Sheherazade should have been embossed on two tattered poufs in a junk shop in Adelaide, as if just for me. I held onto those two until recently. When I finally threw their faded and split carcasses out, I cut out one camel leaf of leather and kept it. But I can’t say that my furniture played any role in getting me to study Arabic. I like that it chose to agree, to language-coordinate with me. My first teacher was Dr Abdallah Osman, a softly spoken scientist from Khartoum, employed by the university for his mother tongue, not his education. I began with high and foolish hopes: three years of Arabic should, I told myself, give me enough to do the planned PhD. I would start my candidature in the second year, and build up my research reading as my skills developed apace. I gave a character in fiction some of the discoveries and disappointments of these years. Using language to unravel Lian became my second novel, The City of Sealions: Dr Suhayr Qabbani handed over the strange words and phrases in small daily packages, bundles of beauty and mystery. Lian’s love for them had its roots in the formalities of these gestures. Arabic carries the word of God direct to the heart and then back, Dr Qabbani told Lian. She scraped through everything else but by third year was reading laboriously in Arabic and was top of her class. But the words were as discrete as pebbles collected on a beach. She tried to read words, not sentences. Before she even read words she read letters. Jiim

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was beautiful, especially in isolation. The eye of a fish and the long, curled tail. Ha’ was his eyeless sister and Kha’ was Jiim in death. Alif was tall and elegant, the symbol of unisex grace. Miim lay like a pebble on the floor of sentences, shining and wet. Sun letters melted together, the hot consonants dissolving Lam, the definite article; moon letters stood out, sharp and cool, each consonant ringing clear. Arabic severed her from her friends and family in minute but insurmountable ways. It was as estranging as the sea was silencing. She yearned to study in an Arab country. She studied and did nothing else . . . Every day Dr Qabbani increased Lian’s wealth. It started with the nouns. Strange dry objects at first, specimens. They seemed to have no sensual or labial connection with their meanings. She accepted them as a code, learnt the decrypting techniques, accepting their disconnection from all feeling. Arabic was cold and lifeless but deeply interesting to dissect. The verbs were vague: weak, seeming at first like cheap string tying bundles together. But then certain knots and clots made nouns. Everything came from strings, thickened into veins, was either entrails of nouns or tools for moving their dead bits about. Dr Qabbani handed them over as if they were the frozen moments of something infinitely beautiful, infinitely sad. Her manner more than the words themselves intrigued Lian. The first word which rang a bell of its own meaning in her head was asfar or safra’, masculine and feminine yellows. For a moment language was incarnated, then it became code again. It was in second year that she saw the first stirrings of life in her oldest nouns. They had lain in her throat and dropped lifeless from her tongue countless times. They fell now, briefly, and then fluttered off like awkward fledglings, powering directionless and out of control through the air. A bird, a sparrow, ‘usfour, birds ‘asafiir, seemed to float like yellow butterflies, birds of paradise or coral fish leaping from their glottal first consonant into flight. Dr Qabbani smiled. Lian was entranced. In Arabic there is no relationship between bird and yellow but Lian’s first living words bled into each other and yellow coloured many and brought them to life on the wings of imaginary birds. Safara: to travel.

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She polished each word at first, lovingly, to see how they were going and was rewarded with the slow patina and then deep glow. She moved to polishing phrases, struggling through the rhythms of lines of poetry, so beautiful, unpalatable and unattainable that she felt like crying. Dr Qabbani repeated them to her and God’s language rolled glimmering and warm from her tongue and throat. Lian tried. The words huddled stickily together, halted at her lips and then fell from the cliff face stoically, again and again, like lemming army troops. Regimented, uniformed. Dr Qabbani’s poetry wheeled on thermals in a blue sky, pulsing wings in the warm air, powerful, shining, richly coloured. Red as rubies, gold topaz, hot blue lapis lazuli.

At the end of three years of university Arabic I had, like Lian, excelled. Dr Osman was a fine teacher, and I owe him a great deal. Yet all I had to show for it was a tongue silenced and broken, and a small laboratory well appointed in rules and principles in which I could time and again manufacture small fragments of perfect Arabic. I could not speak with people, and, more importantly for me at the time, I could not read a text without looking up almost every word in the dictionary. I still have some of the early pieces I painstakingly deciphered in my archive boxes. Reading them brings back the pain I felt in my excellent failure. My plan to read the 1001 Nights in Arabic, and to read commentary written on it in Arabic, had been revealed as foolish. Dr Osman continued giving private lessons until he finally got a proper job as a scientist, then the pressures of my nightmarish research project drove me to Dr Amal Abou-Hamden, then a medical postgraduate specialising in neuroscience, now a specialist brain surgeon. For nearly a year Amal gave me three lessons a week, working specifically on my research papers. I spent all money I had on Arabic, I cried at night and shunned my friends, and I improved. It is hard to describe the pain of being poorly in a language. I feel for those learning my mother tongue, clawing their way into a state of uneasy belonging in a conversation. Even now, I blush at making a mistake, am mortified for months at having, in the nervous rush of the moment, written something wrong, even nonsensical as I signed a novel for an ardent

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Arabic student. Being poorly drove me hard, just as being flawed still drives me. Successive intensive programs in Yemen were ostensibly research trips, but were, in the end, what made my Arabic come to life. The City of Sealions is the novel of those times and explores some of what this all meant. Once the language was alive for me, I also thrived in it, and Arabic and I have grown together steadily since then. I will always be a misfit – I use phrases that are archaic or local nowhere. I am understood, I am amusing, and I am a relief to refugees who live in isolation with their language for consolation. Where am I now? Studying Arabic influenced how I read in English. English sometimes has for me an Arabic shadow. Arabic always has an English shadow, as English is still by far my dominant language. Arabic made me appreciate the almost glassy precision of English, and to enjoy its strengths and weaknesses. Compared with each other, English is perhaps like mosaic chips; Arabic like oil paints. The most obvious influence on my writing is that of stories and tales. I have a feeling that storytelling grounds and deepens my work. I would have perhaps evolved as a more cerebral, less gutsy writer without the repertoire and impact of the many narrative forms that these stories gave me. I now find myself inventing them compulsively to illustrate and extend character. I am alive in my language. Odd in my language. Flawed. Good. My love is still literature. I have recently had published my first three translations: Two Banks with No Bridge, a small chapbook of poetry by the Iraqi-Australian poet Yahia al-Samawy,2 and two short stories by the Yemeni writer Abd al-Kareem al-Razihi.3 I hope these voices, crossing over through me into English, reach readers who can then begin to love them as I do. I like the phrase ‘foster mother tongue’. A foster mother might love you as much as a real mother and then again might not. A foster mother brings an uncertain fate, and might reject you. Yet a foster mother, whether she loves or doesn’t, rescues you. None of the loading ascribed to the word ‘step-mother’ weighs down ‘foster mother.’ Looking back over my life, I find I accept my

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ambivalent existence in my foster mother tongue. I accept its love and its resistance. And I know it rescued me: from my inheritance of Western prejudice and from an inheritance of fear. From many of my weaknesses. Arabic adopted me and I am nurtured uneasily between cultures by it.

Endnotes

Introduction 1. Leitner 2004, p. 1 2. With reference to Clyne and Kipp 1999 and Clyne 1991. 3. Compare Clyne 1994. 4. Compare Wierzbicka 2006. 5. See Besemeres 2002. 6. Haiman 2005, pp. 114−15. 7. Compare, for example, Donald 2001. 8. Murdoch 2003. 9. Compare Clyne 2005. 10. The word ‘Anglocentric’ builds, of course, on the word ‘Anglo’, which is increasingly used in current scholarly literature but which hasn’t yet entered colloquial English. In essence, the phrase ‘Anglo English’ refers to what the IndianAmerican linguist Braj Kachru (1985) has called ‘English of the inner circle’. In accordance with Kachru’s distinction between the ‘inner circle’ and the ‘outer circle’ of English, we can say that, for example, Australian

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

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English − different as it is in many ways from both British and American English − belongs nonetheless to the inner circle, whereas, for example, Singapore English belongs to the outer one. ‘Anglo English’ is an abstraction but in our view it is a concept that captures an important historical and cultural reality. It goes without saying that Anglo English is neither homogeneous nor unchanging, and the fact that, for example, Australian English differs in many ways from British English makes this abundantly clear. At the same time, to adequately characterise more recent ‘Englishes’ − that is, ‘Englishes of the outer circle’ such as Singapore English − and to fully understand them as expressions of local cultures it is eminently useful to be able to compare and contrast them with ‘Anglo English’. (For discussion see Wierzbicka 2006.) Sapir 1949, p. 162 Wierzbicka 2005. Malouf 2003. Krygier 1997. ‘Hybridity’ is widely and variously used in academic discourse, most prominently, perhaps, by cultural theorist Homi Bhabha, who invokes it when discussing aspects of the post-colonial condition. Krygier’s use of the term is more specific and ascribes a good deal more agency to the individual ‘hybrid’. For a recent Russian study raising similar questions with respect to Russian, see Glovinskaya and Zemskaya 2001. A significant anthology of migrant narratives which touch on language (without focusing on it exclusively) is Becoming American, edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah.

2. From bilingual to linguist 1. 3DB was a Melbourne commercial radio station owned by a newspaper company. The Children’s Session was run by Jean Lawson, an Australian children’s author. 2. Clyne 1997, ‘Some of the things trilinguals do’; Clyne and Cain 2000.

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ENDNOTES

3. 4. 5. 6.

Clyne, Kretzenbacher and Schüpbach 2004. Clyne 1964. Lo Bianco 1987. For example, Ronjat 1913; Leopold 1939−49; Cummins and Gulutsan 1974; Peal and Lambert 1962. 7. Saunders 1982. 8. Clyne 1997, ‘Retracing the first seven years of bilingual and metalinguistic development through the comments of a bilingual child’. 3. Three worlds: Inheritance and experience 1. An amusing example of this comes from a conversation I had with a Fiji Labour Party cabinet minister who was incarcerated by George Speight for 56 days. In 1987, he said, the Coalition government had lasted only one month, but in 2000, it lasted one year before it was overthrown in a coup. Next time, the government would last two years. That, he said, was progress! 2. I use Hindi for the sake of brevity, but my usage incorporates Urdu. In that sense, Hindustani is probably a more accurate term for the language I have in mind. 3. But see Moag 1977 and Subramani 2001. 4. For the regional background of Fiji’s Indian migrants, see Lal 1983, and also Siegel 1987. 5. I am concerned here with those descended from the indenture experience. In urban areas in post-indenture times, Gujarati words and expressions entered the language as well. To make a Khichri (mixed dhall−rice dish, a staple of the Gujarati community) of something was to make a mess of things. 6. See generally Mayer 1973. 7. For examples, see Lal 2006. 8. JR Pearson’s preface to AW MacMillan 1931. 9. Fiji Samachar, 27 June 1931, comments on MacMillan’s book: ‘This Handbook has been prepared for Europeans. The compiler himself

ENDNOTES

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

163

admits this; but Indian teachers can derive benefit from this work.’ For the language controversy in the 1940s, see Lal 1997, pp.109−10. This is treated in Lal 2000. For more discussion, see KL Gillion 1977. I concentrate here on the majority Hindu community. For the experience of Muslims, see Ali 2004, pp. 71−88. See also Ahmad 1962, pp. 325−36. See Lal 2001 for fuller discussion. MacMillan, a London Missionary Society missionary and long-time Inspector of Indian Schools, had served in India before coming to Fiji and joining the government in 1929. The first (quarterly) issue of the School Journal was published in 1931, replacing Raj Dut, which published government gazette notices and some children’s reading material. The Pothis were used in Fiji until independence in 1970, when a new curriculum emphasising nation-building, came into effect. A copy of this text is in my possession. I have discussed this in my ‘Primary texts’ in Lal 2004, pp. 239−50. But things have changed considerably in the last two decades or so, as migration and urbanisation have brought the two communities into great contact. Now nearly half of Fiji, both Fijians and Indo-Fijians, live in urban or peri-urban areas. If truth be told, as editor of several journals over the years – The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs, The Journal of Pacific History, and Conversations (a Canberra-based literary journal) I myself make little concession to the linguistic handicaps of the contributors. This is particularly evident in the work of ‘Niu Wave’ writers at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. I am unsure of the usage in India, though in some parts dada, for instance, can mean grandfather. I should use the past tense here because things are much more mixed in contemporary life. I still don’t call my bhabhis by their name. I don’t

164

EN D N O T E S

know their names! But I now address my younger brothers’ spouses by their first names. 5. Returning to my mother tongue: Veronica’s journey continues 1. ‘La double vie de Veronica’: Reflections on my life as a Chinese migrant in Australia. Reprinted by permission from Mots Pluriels 2003, vol. 23. 2. The literal meaning of this set Chinese phrase is ‘sour, sweet, bitter, and spicy’. It is used to describe the joys and sorrows of life. 6. East meets West, or does it really? 1. See note 1 in the Introduction endnotes. 2. The figures are taken from these web sites, which were accessed in October 2004: www.pfizer.com.au/DiseasesDepression.aspx www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/ 109824/1/.html 7. Growing up between two languages/two worlds: Learning to live without belonging to a terra 1. Terra: A Portuguese word for expressing the idea that one belongs to the place where one is born, by which is meant not the nation but the specific town or village. 2. I now know that this verse was a translation of Robert Schumann’s ‘Lullaby’ and sung to the famous tune he wrote. 3. Portugal was a dictatorship from 1928 until 25 April 1974, when the government was overthrown by a bloodless military coup. Elections followed six months later and the country took a socialist turn after years of enduring a right-wing dictatorship. It is now a modern democratic state with full membership of the EEU. 8. Two languages, two cultures, one (?) self: Between Polish and English 1. Compare, for example, my 1985 essay ‘The double life of a bilingual’

ENDNOTES

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

165

and in 1997 ‘The double life of a bilingual. A cross-cultural perspective’; compare also Wierzbicka 1994 and 1999. In the sense of Besemeres 2002. For the ‘Memory Workshop’ organised by Mengistu Amberber at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. See Wierzbicka in press. Gałczyn´ska 2003. Wierzbicka 2006 in Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context. Eva Hoffman 1989. Baumann in Boski et al. (eds) 2002, p. 37. Baumann in Boski et al. (eds) 2002, p. 36. Greg Dening 2001.

9. My experience of living in a different culture: The life of a Korean migrant in Australia 1. McGrath and Francey 1991. 2. Yoon 2004. 3. See Wierzbicka 1996 and Goddard 1998. 10. Between z˙al and emotional blackmail: Ways of being in Polish and English 1. Les´mian 1972, p. 17. 2. This second meaning of z˙al is movingly evoked in Peter Skrzynecki’s recent memoir, The Sparrow Garden, where he writes about the loss of his parents. 3. Cunningham-Andersson and Andersson 1999. pp. 30–4. 11. The journey of self-discovery in another language 1. The research project I am doing now is entitled ‘Russian emotions, attitudes and values: a study in cultural semantics’. 2. Gorky was the name of the city of Nizhny Novgorod from 1932 to 1991. Nizhny Novgorod was founded in 1221 on the Volga River. During the Soviet times it was renamed after the writer Maxim Gorky, who was

166

EN D N O T E S

born there. In 1991 the city was given back its original name. 3. Besemeres 2002, p. 24. 4. Wierzbicka (1998) has aptly conveyed the linguistic and cultural specificity of the word khokhotat’ in her article. 5. University House has been part of the Australian National University community since February 1954 and provides self-catered accommodation for full-time PhD students at ANU. 12. 1. 2. 3.

Foster mother tongue This is an extract from Sallis 2005. Al-Samawy 2005. Al-Kareem al-Razihi 2005.

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Index

Note: In addition to subjects and proper names, this index lists (in italics) words from several languages that are discussed in the book. Non-

see also Indigenous languages, Noongar Aboriginality, 1–2 see also identity, Indigenous

English words are followed by a rough

academic writing, 35–36, 35n, 36n, 138

gloss for ease of reference, but this

accents, 13–14

must not be taken as equivalent in

address, terms of

meaning to the word discussed in the text. Abbreviations used include

Chinese culture vs. Australian culture, xxii, 65, 77

Ar[abic], Ca[ntonese], Du[tch], Fiji-

Fiji-Hindi kinship, 40, 40n

Hindi [Fi-Hi], Ge[rman], He[brew],

first names, in Australian culture; in

Ko[rean], Ma[ndarin], No[ongar],

‘Anglo’ culture, 19, 77, 116–17

Pol[ish], Por[tuguese], Ru[ssian].

first names vs. titles, Australian vs. German cultures, 19

Aboriginal English see English, Aboriginal Aboriginal languages, xvi

honorifics, Korean, 117, 125–6 Korean vs. Australian culture, 116–17, 121–2

INDEX in Russian culture, 148–9 affection, showing of Chinese culture vs. Australian culture, 59–60 Indo-Fijian culture, 43

98n, 128–38, 143, 143n bicultural life, xxii–xxiv, 56–69, 70–82, 96–113, 114–127, 128, 134–8, 140–9 biculturalism, 80 bilingual (n.), xiii, xv, xix–xxi, xxiii, 12,

Polish culture, 98–9, 137

17–19, 21–22, 25, 51, 68

Russian culture, 142

German–English, 17

age, respect for Chinese culture, 74, 77, 81 Korean culture, 115–17, 121–6

Shanghainese–Mandarin, 68 bilingual (adj.) Australians, 21

Ali, Ahmed, 31n

authors, xix

Andersson, Staffan, 136, 136n

education programs, 21, 23

‘Anglo’ culture, 70–1, 73–8

experience, xiv, xvi, xx, 128

Anglocentrism, xvi, xvin

family, xxi, 22–5, 52–5, 85–6, 99,

apologising, xxii, 57, 74–5, 114–15 Arabic, xvii, xx, xxiv, 150–5, 157–9 Arthur, Jay, 9–10 As-salaam ’aleikum (peace be upon you, Ar), 150–1

102–3, 106, 121–5, 128, 136–7 life, xxii, 56–69, 96–113, 128, 130–1, 134–8 puns, 15 bilingualism, xix, xxi, 1, 21–5, 46, 51,

asking, 57–8, 74–6, 79–80, 102–4, 125

53, 54, 71

autobiographies, cross-cultural, xix,

German–English, 20

xixn Australian

personal narratives of, xv, xix–xx, xxn bilinguality, xxiv, 152

culture, 36–9, 57–8

bily (river, No), 10

history, 36–8

borrowing, linguistic ( Fiji–Hindi,

landscape, 10, 37–8 ‘slang’, 37, 51–2, 134

175

from English and Fijian), 28–9, 43 boyfriend, 49 b’rogez (to be in anger, He), 47

babies, 98–9 see also children

Brown, Hazel, 7–9

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 136

bu fen bici (to not distinguish between

Barth, Frederick, 107, 107n

one another, Ca), 75

Bauman, Zygmunt, 107 Besemeres, Mary, xiii–xiv, xxiii, xvn,

Cantonese, xxii, 71–2, 74, 77

176

INDEX

caste system, among Indo–Fijians, 28, 32 children, 22–5, 52–5, 98–9, 136–7 ‘one parent one language strategy’, xxii, 22–3, 136 personal testimony 13–16, 45–50, 85–93, 129–30 raising biculturally, 115–16, 121–7 raising bilingually, xxi, xxii, 22–5, 52–5, 136–7

117–18, 146, 150–1 counting in Hungarian, 12–13 in Shanghainese, 59, 64 Croatian, 12, 15 cross-cultural communication, 46, 57–60, 70, 73, 75–82, 102–6, 121–7, 140–9 differences, xix, 44, 80

see also babies; diminutives

experiences, xix, 79

children’s playground culture

family, 102–6, 121–6

in Australia, 48–50

relationships, 59–60

in Israel, 46–8

understanding, xiv, xvi, 38–9, 75–82,

children’s books (Polish vs. English), 131–3 China, 61–2, 66–8 Chinese characters, 62, 68–9 culture and cultural values, 57–8, 59–61, 70–1, 73–81 ‘insider–outsider’ distinction, 65, 74–6 language, xvii, 58 see also Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Siyi Clyne, Michael, viii–ix, xiiin, xivn, xxi, xxii, 12–25, 17n, 19n, 21n, 24n code-switching, 20, 54, 121–3

104–6, 127, 140–7 cultural literacy English language cultural references, 35–9 cultural values (in general), 80, 121, 127, 140–1 see also Chinese culture and cultural values, Russian culture and cultural values etc. cultural scripts, 103–4 Anglo, 97, 103–4, 110 Polish, 104, 110 Cummins, J-P, 22n Cunningham-Andersson, Una, 136 Czech, 15

communication, style of, 18–19, 57–60, 74–80, 102–6, 114–18, 121–6, 140–7,

Danquah, Meri Nana-Ama, xxn

152

de Courtivron, Isabelle, xix

community languages, xvi

Dening, Greg, 108, 108n

complaints, 19, 41

depression, 78

conversation routines, 19, 27–8,

Dewaele, Jean-Marc, xix

INDEX diminutives

177

69, 72–3, 80, 84–6, 88, 92–9, 101–3, 106,

Dutch, 18

108, 110, 112–13, 119–21, 125, 128,

Polish, xxiii, 99, 134, 137

130–2, 134, 137–40, 142–4, 146–9, 158

Donald, Merlin, xvin

Aboriginal English, 3, 50

Dutch, 16–19, 22

academic English, 35–6, 35n, 36n,

drug (friend, Ru), 49, 147–8

112–13, 138 ‘Anglo English’, 72, 104

education Australian, 13–17, 48–50, 91–3

Australian English, 9–10, 18–19, 37, 50, 134

Fijian, 30, 32–4

British English, 13

Israeli, 47–8

Singapore English, 72, 76

Portuguese, 87–9

ethnocentrism, xvi–xvii

Russian, 46, 139–40

Eurocentric, 33

egalitarianism, 28, 32, 34, 77, 81, 121–6 emigrants, Polish, 109 emigration, 56–7, 109, 114, 126 see also migrants, immigration emotions

family relations, 39–40, 53–5, 60–1, 65, 73–4, 79, 85, 90–1, 93–4, 98–9, 102–6, 114–16, 121–7, 133–7, 153–4 Fiji, xx–xxi, 26–34, 34n, 43–4

Chinese, 59–61, 73

people, 27, 28, 34

Korean, 119–20

culture, 34, 38

Polish, xxiii, 97–9, 134–6 emotional distance (when speaking a particular language), xxiii, 94, 106 expression of emotion Chinese vs Anglo-Australian culture, 59–61

French, 15, 15–16, 46 friendship Chinese vs. ‘Anglo’, xxii–xxiii, 75–7 Russian, Israeli, Australian, 48 Russian vs. Australian, 147–8 Frisian, 17

Korean vs Anglo-Australian culture, 120–1 Russian vs Anglo-Australian culture, 141

Gałczyn´ski, Konstanty Ildefons, 100 German language, xvii, xxi, 12–24, 150, 154

English language, xiii, xiv, xvii, xxii–

Austrian German, 16, 18

xxiv, 1, 10, 13–19, 22–5, 27–8, 30–2,

German German, 16, 18

35–6, 39–46, 50, 52–4, 58–9, 63, 65, 67,

Gillion, KL, 163n

178

INDEX

girlfriend, 49

perspective of, xx, 62

Gladkova, Anna, xi, xxiv, 139–49

see also emigrants, migrants

Glovinskaya, Marina Jakovlevna, xixn

imperatives, xxii, 74, 79, 103, 142, 146

Gorky, 139–40, 140n

intercultural communication, xiv

Greek, 17 Gulutsan, M, 23n

see also cross-cultural communication Indian culture and cultural values, 32, 38–9

Haiman, John, xv, xvn Hall, Stuart, 107–8 Haugen, Einar, 20

Indo-Fijian culture and cultural values, 26, 26n, 26–34, 39–44 Indigenous peoples

hierarchy, 28, 32, 34, 74, 77, 81, 121–6

languages, 1, 9–11

Hindi language, 27–31, 27n, 40–4

perspective, xx

Fiji-Hindi , xxi, 27–8, 31, 42–4 formal Hindi, xxi, 28–9, 31, 42 standard Hindi, 28

see also Aboriginal, Noongar, identity interjections in Shanghainese, 63–4

Hindustani, 27n, 30–2, 41

Italian, xvii, 15, 17

Hoffman, Eva, xix, 51, 104, 104n

Israel, 45–8

home language, 19, 59, 134, 137 honorifics, 117, 125–6

Jakobson, Roman, xv

Hungarian, 12–13, 15

Japanese, 15

hybrids, xviii–xix, xviiin Kachru, Braj, xvin Icelandic, 17

Kellerman, Steven G, xix

identity, 107–9

Kipp, Sandra, xiiin

cultural, 86, 93

khokhotat’ (laugh, Ru), 144, 144n

double, 83–5, 145–6, 19–20

Konopnicka, Maria, 109–10

bilingual, 24–5, 50–2

kinship terms (Fiji-Hindi), xxi–xxii,

bicultural, 77–82, 136 Indigenous, 5–6 Indo-Fijian, 29 Indo-Fijian culture, 26–34, 26n, 39–40 immigrants, 118 ‘immigrant condition’, xviii, 96, 113

39–40, 39n, 40n Korean language, xxiv, 116, 119–21, 123–6 culture and cultural values, 114–26 Kretzenbacher, Heinz-L, 19n Krygier, Martin, xviii, xviiin

INDEX Lal, Brij, ix, xxi, 26–44, 29n, 31n, 32n, 33n

179

see also emigration, immigration mimo, (cuddle, Por), 95

Lambert, WF, 23n

miwunceng (love–hate, Ko), 119–20

language

Moag, Rodney, 28n

contact, 20–1 learning, 5–7, 15–17, 68–9, 71–2, 139–40, 151–8 memoirs, xix teaching, 21–2

monocultural environments, 46 peoples, 79–80 perspectives, xiv monolingual

Latin, 15

perspectives, xiv

leave-taking, 60, 143–4

scholars, xvi

lehashlim (to make peace, He), 47

society, xvi

Leitner, Gerhard, xiii, xiiin

speakers of English, xvii, 24, 118

Leopold, WF, 23n

monolingualism, xiv, 24

Les´mian, Bolesław, 131–2

mother tongue, xxii, 30, 31, 35, 43, 56,

Lesser, Wendy, xix

61, 62, 63, 64, 65–6, 68, 136, 150, 157,

lingua franca, 32

158

linguistics, 20–1, 119, 127, 139

mm sedek (unable to emotionally let go

Lo Bianco, Joseph, 22n

of something one feels strongly for,

łobuz (cheeky, Pol), 137

Ca), 73 music, 85, 87, 93–4, 97

MacMillan, AW, 31n, 32, 32n

Austrian cultural value and, 14–15

Malouf, David, xvii, xviin

Hindi cultural value and, 41–2

Mandarin, 59, 68–9, 72, 74–5

Polish, 106–9

Mayer, Adrian, 28n

multiculturalism, xiii, xxii, 21, 79

mianzi (face, Ma), 57–8

multicultural

migrants, xxii, 49, 52, 53, 56, 119, 126, 152 child migrants, xxii, 45, 47, 50

society, xv, 80, 141, 145 television, 21

Chinese migrants, 56

multiethnic societies, xx

Korean migrants, 114

multilingual (adj.), 72

languages, 21

broadcasting, 21

studies, 21

country, xiii–xiv

migration, xxiii, 46, 49, 53, 152

multilingual (n.), xx

180

INDEX

multilingualism, 25, 39, 72

popular culture Australian/English-speaking, 42, 44

Nabokov, Vladimir, xv, 50–1 national languages policy, 22 Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), 127 ngoi yen (outsiders, external people,

Hindi, 42 posidet’ na dorozhku (to sit together for a bit before parting, Ru), xxiv, 144 priiatel’ (friend, acquaintance, Ru), 147 proshchanie (farewell, Ru), 143–4

Ca), 74 Nizhny Novgorod, 139–40, 140n Noongar, xx, xxi, 1, 5–7, 9–10 Norwegian, 14, 17

religion, 28, 31–2, 38–9, 44, 78, 84, 87, 97, 100, 106–7, 151 renquing (human feelings, Ma), 57 requests, see asking

Pai (father, Por), 84–5

Rodriguez, Richard, xix

pain, description of in Korean, 119

Ronjat, J, 22n

pamia˛tka (keepsake, Pol), xxiii, 99–102

Russian

Pavlenko, Aneta, xix–xx parents, 22–5, 52–4, 60–1, 73–4, 84–6, 93–5, 102–4, 114–16, 121–6, 136–7, 139 see also children

language, xxii, xxiv, 46, 49, 51–4, 128, 133–4, 142–4, 147 culture and cultural values, 46, 141–5, 147–9

Peal, E, 23n Pearson, JR, 31n

Sallis, Eva, xi–xii, xvi, xxiv, 150–9

personal autonomy, xxii, 73–6, 78–9,

Sapir, xvi–xvii, xviin

82, 102–4, 125, 136, 141–2

Saunders, George, 23, 23n

podruzhka (female friend, Ru), 49

Schüpbach, D, 19n

Polish

Scott, Kim, viii, xx–xxi, 1–11

language, xxiii, 96–103, 105–6, 108, 110, 128, 130–8 culture and cultural values, xxiii, 97–105, 131–8 politeness, 57–8, 65, 74–80, 104–6, 114–18, 121–3, 125–6, 142, 145–6 Portugal, 83–91, 87n Portuguese, xxiii, 14, 84–6, 88, 93–5

sek (dote on, Ca), 73 Seigel, Jeff, 28n serdechnost’ (warmth, Ru), 143, 145 serdecznos´c´ (warmth, Pol), 105 self, xvii, 1, 9, 17–20, 51–3, 56–7, 59–67, 93–5, 96–9, 102–13, 126–7, 130–1, 135–6, 142–9, 151–2, 158–9 self-translation, xix, 52, 95

INDEX self-translator, 52

181

values see cultural values

Shanghai, 56, 61–2, 66–7 Shanghainese, xxii, 56, 59, 61, 63–5, 68–9 shenjiao (deep relation, Ca), 75–6

wairen (outsiders, external people, Ma), 65

Siyi, 71–2

warmth, 105, 134–5, 143, 145

Skrzynecki, Peter, 135n

Wie geht’s? (how are you?, Ge), 19

Slovak, 15

Wierzbicka, Anna, vii–viii, xviin,

Smolicz, Jerzy, 110

xxiii–xxiv, 96–113, 96n, 103n, 144n

sociolinguistics, 20

Wilomin people, 7–9

sorry, xxii, 74–5

Witcomb, Andrea, x–xi, xxiii, 83–95

Soviet culture, 46, 139–40

Wong, Jock, x, xxii, 70–82

Spanish, 15

writing, 2–3, 158

suantiankula (used to describe joys and sorrows of life, Ma), 57, 57n

see also academic writing wzruszenie (being moved, Pol), 97–8

Subramani, 28n Swedish, 17

Ye, Zhengdao (Veronica), ix–x, xxii, 56–69

Tab kaise (how are you, Fi–Hi), 27–8

yiqi (personal loyalty, Ma), 57

technological change and new terms

Yoon, Kyung-Joo, xi, xxiii–xxiv, 114–27

Noongar, xxi, 6 Fiji-Hindi, 43

‘you’ (familiar/formal distinction), 19, 19n, 94

Shanghainese, 63, 66–8 terra (homeland, Por), 83, 83n, 95 thank you, xxii, 74–5, 79–80, 114–15 thanking, xxii, 65, 74–5, 79–80, 114–15, 118, 146 transference, 20 trilingual (n.), 17–19, 17n trilingualism, 25

z˙al (forceful reproach full of hurt, Pol), xxiii, 128, 134–6 Zemskaya, Elena Andreevna, xixn zhiji (know–self, Ma), 75 zigei yen (insiders, self people, Ca), 74–5 zijiren (insiders, self people, Ma), 65, 75–6, 78

Ulman, Irene, ix, xxii, 45–55 Urdu, 27n, 31, 44

zijn eigen (his own, Du), 17