Car Talk

09/30/10

Every car you see on the road is like a small, semi-private universe where people’s lives unfold, in motion. Some times that universe is not so small (if you drive a 25 ft tall SUV to haul firewood from the sequoias growing in your backyard) and some times not so private (if you’re someone who likes your radio’s bass cranked all the way to 11 and then need to roll down the windows so they don’t shatter in your face after your head explodes), but most Americans spend so much time in their cars that this Colombian-American feels obliged to make the most out of the experience.

Photo by feastoffun.com

Now that I’ve changed my work schedule so I can leave work earlier, beat traffic, and pick up my kids before they undergo one of their sporadic five o’clock meltdowns, we can actually talk on the way home (instead of competing for who can whine loudest and drawn out everybody else’s cries with their own.)

Those daily car rides have become precious to me. I have two boys strapped to their seats and under the drowsing spell of a moving landscape. In other words: a captive audience.

So we do a lot of chatting in the car–the usual how was your day, what did you do, and so on. And not that I don’t love the company of my beautiful bride and mother of my children, but not having her in the car makes my vehicle a nice, motorized “Spanish-only” zone (somewhere in Arizona, a sherif or a lawmaker is getting their heart broken.)

We get into some pretty intense discussion about everything ranging from the Batman toy some kid brought to daycare to deep existential questions about the very nature of reality. The latter is something every parent is familiar with:

“Papá, what is that man doing”? -> “He’s cutting the grass, nené” / “Why”? -> “Oh, because he wants his lawn to look nice” / “Why”? -> “Oh, because people usually like things neat and pleasant” / “Why”? -> “Uhh, it appeals to a deeply rooted desire to control our environment and suppress chaos” / “Why”? -> “Agghhhh, well, it depends on whether your’re a Freudian or a Jungian….hey, look, a scooter!!”

Like any parent, some days I have less patience or energy for the endless back and forth, but I remind myself that every minute my kids are engaged with me in conversation (Spanish conversation no less,) is precious. The day will likely come when they don’t feel like talking to me, when they don’t feel like speaking Spanish any more, or when all their questions about the connection between lawns and human desires are answered, so I’ll suck it up and talk to them as much and as meaningfully as I can.

And for those days when my brain is fried, we have music!

(Latin) Music has been another fantastic tool to liven our rides and introduce many new words and topics of conversation. But music too can be a double-edged sword, especially if you’re like me and you find most “children’s music” unbearable. So while it is great to have reached a point where my son Gabriel has his favorite tunes and asks me to play them for him as soon as he gets in the car, it can also be tough when he starts dissecting the lyrics.

One of his favorite songs, “Jardín Encantado” has a line that says: “Voy a pelear por nuestro pan de cada día” (“I will fight for our daily bread”)

“Papá, why is he going to fight?”

“Uh, nené, he is saying ‘fight’ but what he’s trying to say is that he’ll work really really hard”

(the boy may be telling himself: “hm, I don’t understand figurative language yet, so next time I fight with one of my friends, I’ll tell papá I’m just working really hard…”)

Another song, “Corazón Espinado” says: “Mi corazón aplastado, molido y abandonado” (“My crushed, shredded and abandoned heart”)

“Papá, why is his heart crushed?”

“Uh, nené, because the woman he likes doesn’t like him”

“Why not”

“Uh, I’m not sure”

“Why????”

“Uh…[in my mind: maybe she is mean and superficial and doesn’t like him because he’s short and poor like papá was years ago when he had to endure the indifference of stupid, stuck-up chicks who didn’t realize how good he was..] “

Apologies, audience. But that was cathartic.

Anywho, commonsense conclusion here — any parent raising bilingual children will be well-advised to prepare and develop the mental endurance for as much chatter as they can possibly muster. The beauty of this necessity is that it builds language skills but at the same time, and more than anything, it builds closeness. Just be more careful than I have been and screen your lyrics, or be prepared to tackle some thorny topics.

Categories: Reflections, Tips, Trivial Occurrences

American Limbo

09/08/10

Poster from Showtime

When I finally get around to posting something new, it’s not something originally mine, but this story is really touching and super relevant to everyone who has ever felt stuck between two worlds, two cultures, or two languages. I hope I don’t get in trouble with Ira Glass or Chicago Public Radio for posting this, though I wouldn’t mind getting a personal call from Ira Glass where I would let him know that he is awesome and that I contribute monetarily to the show.

Click on the title below to listen. And don’t get depressed – there is a happy ending:

This_American_Life-American_Limbo.mp3

And of course, subscribe to the This American Life podcast and contribute tons of cash to the show because a show this important must continue to exist and thrive.

Categories: Reflections

Colombia 90210

08/26/10

Thanks to the ladies at Spanglishbaby.com for inviting me to contribute to their excellent website.

Photo by Alan Light

Read my essay “The New Anglo-Latino Household, or Colombia 90210” at SpanglishBaby.com.

Categories: Reflections

Terminated

06/29/10

With increasing frequency, when I finish a blog post, I look back on it with amusement, then with shame, and then I realize that while my blog is supposed to be about bilingualism, what I’m learning and sharing with my audience of 4 is really a set of basic and universal principles of parenting. But I already paid a whole two years of web hosting in advance so I might as well keep writing.

Photo by Dunechaser

One of those basic and universal parenting principles (or facts, rather) is that, just when you think your child is on his or her way to mastering something, they throw you a curveball. You’ll be bragging to your friends about how your toddler has the sphincter and bowel control of a seasoned interstate truck driver, and how he very maturely asks to be led to a toilet like a tiny adult, only to find him weeks later falling into a pattern of suddenly becoming silent and ceasing any play activity so he can retreat into a distant corner of the room to relieve himself in his pants, and telling you, all red-faced and out of breath, that he does NOT need to go the bathroom (of course not, business has been taken care of.)

Likewise, you spend months bragging on blogs about how you have a prodigious and precocious child (all parents think that, don’t we?) and how he displays an amazing ability to discern between the two languages he’s learning and against all odds, does not mix them, only to find yourself contradicted as soon as those boastful words leave your keyboard, or your big, arrogant mouth.

Three paragraphs in, here is what I’m talking about:

Gabriel is almost 3 years old now, and his vocabulary and fluency in both Spanish and English are impressive by any standard. But he is starting to mix the languages in ways he hadn’t before. And in ways that prove quite humorous at times.

Example: We have a rule in the house that we don’t leave the table until we’re all done eating. Last night, Gabriel asked his mother if it was OK for him to leave the table. She asked him to ask me if I was done eating and if I was, it was OK to get down. So Gabriel asks me:

“Papá, ¿estás terminado?”

Roughly translated: “Papá, are you terminated?”

This type of error is cute and funny, but I find it significant because it takes me back to the days when I worked at a school teaching Spanish to non-native Spanish-speakers. It hints to the resourcefulness that comes from knowing enough about two languages to be able take a sentence in one language and perform a word-by-word translation of it, ending up with a new sentence in the other language that’s not always correct.

There are examples of the reverse, too (applying Spanish sentence structures to English):

– “Papá say me that I could do it” (instead of “Papá told me that I could do it“) – The word in Spanish for “say” and “tell” is the same.

Likewise, there are times when Gabriel seems to forget some basic Spanish words when speaking with me and without flinching, just uses the English word in the middle of a Spanish sentence. This happens often with the names of colors, the names of animals, and the names of common household objects.

Just to be clear, I’m not worried or discouraged in the least (the dismay expressed at the beginning of this post was pure hyperbole.) But it is fascinating to be constantly proven wrong and kept on your toes by your children. It is fascinating to see the arranging and rearranging of their young brains, evidenced in the things they do and say (or the things they stop doing or saying.) It’s a good reminder that you never have it all quite figured out. You’re never really terminated.

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

So True!

06/25/10

Writing this post is awkward because it forces me to admit that much of my inspiration (read: desire to steal the idea) for starting this blog came from reading Metrodad — an incredibly funny, honest, and tender account of parenthood from a young father in New York City.

Cartoon by Metrodad?

I don’t know if he is the author of this cartoon, but I keep showing it all my friends who have two young children (which are many — we’re all just at that age). And of course, if you’re a parent, you totally get the humor in this — having two young children is tremendously challenging and exhausting, but at the same time, we all agree that we wouldn’t change it for the world. We just walk around like zombies with happy smiles frozen on our faces (when we’re not tearing our hair out and foaming at the mouth, that is).

Categories: Reflections

The Code’s Been Broken

06/24/10

I’m so busted! And busted on something that I wasn’t even aware I was doing: I had been taking advantage of my wive’s limited knowledge of Spanish to allow myself to get lazy in my parental discipline without her finding out about it.

Photo by atalou

I didn’t count on my beautiful lady’s brilliant mind and overlooked the fact that in these last 3 years that we’ve been parents together and I’ve been speaking Spanish around the house, she has developed an understanding of the language beyond my expectations. And that’s of course wonderful and admirable, but it sucks for me at times.

The other day, when we were all sitting in the porch and Gabriel was starting to fall into that whinny-tired-toddler zone where it becomes almost impossible to reason with him, I reached into the rich but poisonous treasure chest of false promises and I said to him in Spanish something about taking him to the park later, with the hope that this would quell the tantrum he was working up to.

And then I heard Mexican soap opera suspense music and turned my head to meet my wive’s piercing gaze. And she said to me:

“Don’t say it if you’re not gonna do it!”

(Second reference to The Sixth Sense in this blog:) I felt like Bruce Willis’ character in the Sixth Sense, except I hadn’t been dead this whole time (exhausted, yes)–I had been flapping my gums freely under the assumption that my wife didn’t know what I was saying.

On all counts, this is a great development: The language divide between me and my wife is narrowing; we’re all becoming a bilingual family. It’s just that if I want to be a lazy parent, now I’ll have to come up with a system of secret hand signals to bribe my boys.

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Authenticity (or “Damn you, Fleet Foxes!“)

05/24/10

Am I a caucasian, middle class, liberal arts-educated, urban hipster? Definitely not (refer to previous post describing my upbringing in agrestic and anachronistic working-class Colombia)

Would my taste in everything indicate otherwise? Definitely yes.

Do I find it obnoxious and patronizing when people ask themselves rethorical questions and then answer them? You betcha.

Does that keep me from doing it? Hmm.

Photo by inger klekacz

Music is important (indispensable, even) in my life and by extension (read: by imposition), in our family life. A random sampling of an afternoon soundtrack in our house could yield tunes by Elliot Smith, Andrés Cepeda, Depeche Mode, Silvio Rodríguez, Café Tacuba, Black Sabbath, Nirvana, The White Stripes, Helenita Vargas, Alci Acosta, Soda Stereo, Led Zeppelin, Pixies, Juanes, Juan Luis Guerra, Carlos Vives, Alí Farka Touré, and many others, in the span of an hour.

What does my iTunes library have to do with anything?

Well, since I’ve turned myself in to serve a life sentence in the wonderful prison that is instilling a sense of Colombianness in my children, I often struggle with my own sense of Colombianness–What does it mean to be Colombian? How do I live (and by way of example, teach my kids) “Colombianness.” Do I grow a luscious black mustache? Do I mix coffee into their formula? Do I learn to shake my hips like Shakira? (actually, I can already shake them just as well as she.)

It’s tough. For me, it’s a struggle between stereotype and authenticity.

One recent development that has brought this question to the fore is my obsession with Fleet Foxes. Not since I found The White Stripes had my faith in the possibilities of art and music been so quickly and intensely replenished. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is about to ban me, thinking that it isn’t an actual person but some kind of spam-bot that’s posting so many Fleet Foxes videos and links to my profile.

But for all their mind-blowing wonderfulness and beyond-their-years musical depth and maturity, the Fleet Foxes are a bunch of white twenty-something Seattle boys singing in a style (and dealing with subjects) evokative of a Medieval, rural folk existence that their Scandinavian ancestors are much more likely than my own to have ever experienced.

So what happens when all that my boys listen to and see for two weeks straight is their old man belting out Fleet Foxes songs at home, in the car, while doing dishes, while sleeping, while going the bathroom…? And what happens when they see me dusting off my old guitar so I can start learning to play as much of the “Fleets” catalog as I possibly can with my own worn, Carpal Tunnel-Syndromed fingers? Do they start feeling like I might move the whole family to the boys’ maternal, Norther-European branch of the family tree?

That was my worry. But leave it to your children to teach you truth, to ground you in reality, to keep you authentic.

Just yesterday, as I was driving to the store with my boys, Fleet Foxes playing in the car stereo, my boy Gabriel says to me (100% in Spanish):

“Papá, he is screaming. He is telling him to come back home because it’s time to go to bed.”

And because I have my eyes on the road and my mind in the wintery meadows of medieval Norway (thanks to Fleet Foxes), I assumed we had just driven past some guy talking to his kid, and Gabriel was just adding dialogue to what he had just seen. So in a typical, dismissive and absent-minded parent kind of way, I said:

“Huh?…oh, huh? oh yeah?…”

And my mind flies back to Norway…

But as the song kept playing on the stereo, I realized that Gabriel was picking up on the song’s lyrics:

♪♫ You should come back home, back on your own now…♪♫

So now, I’m re-engaged and Gabriel confirms that he too, is rocking out to the Foxes and conversing with me about it in Spanish. A couple of minutes later, when the song “Mykonos” starts playing, he says to me:

“Papá, that’s the song about the sun.”

[LYRICS: ♪♫ And you will go to Mykonos, with a vision of a gentle coast, and a sun to maybe dissipate, shadows of the mess you made…♪♫]

So what if the music is not in Spanish?

Should I ignore the fact that much of my “Colombian” childhood and teenage years were spent being in love with Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman? Or that I spent several months of my “Colombian” 1994 trying to find a cardigan sweater like the one Kurt Cobain wore to the MTV Unplugged show? Should I hide from them the fact that as a 16 year-old, I got creative in the kitchen, coming up with the perfect concoction of water and flavorless jell-o that would make my hair take the shape of Brandon Walsh’s hair from 90210. Should I stop asking rhetorical questions?

I wish I were a more laid back kind of parent who concerns himself only with ensuring his children don’t die by securing them food and shelter. That style was perfectly adequate for my parents’ generation and about a thousand generations before them. But alas, I’m from a generation that doesn’t trust its common sense and obsessively seeks validation and parenting cues from books or worse, blogs!

OK, lunch hour is over. The moral of this 12,000-word diatribe: Don’t try so hard. When your children see that you’re happy, they’ll join-in on the happiness. And then you can talk about it, in any language that feels true.

Categories: Reflections, Tips, Trivial Occurrences

Duplicity

04/26/10

Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that language is more than just words. I’m not talking about the cliché that X percent of communication is non verbal (although that’s very true.) I’m referring to what percentage of your being, of your “personality”, comes through in the things you say and how you say them. Lately, one of the things that brings me the most joy is to watch Gabriel interact in English with his mother and his maternal cousins, aunts, uncles, granddad, and nana. I feel like I’m watching another copy of my beloved son, created for the English-speaking world, being wonderful, clever, and delightful in new and different ways.

[Note of self-consciousness: the reader must understand that I adore my second boy Samuel just as much, but because this blog is about language and Samuel doesn’t yet speak, his appearances on the blog are limited.]

Photo by Maddy Lou

Likewise, I love and gush at the awe with which my wive’s family watches Gabriel and me speak in Spanish and I feel like they too are marveling at seeing the boy function in this wonderful, impenetrable world that they can only watch from afar. They probably feel like Louise Lane felt when she learned that Clark Kent can kick loads of ass when he puts on that red cape and lets a greasy black curl hang over his forehead.

And all of this has made me reflect on my own experience as a learner of English as a second language.

Humor is my trademark. I like to joke about the trivial and about the sacred. That’s just how I get through the day, how I relate to others, how I communicate. Humor is a very serious matter to me (I’m allowed one cliché per blog post.) So when I arrived in the USA in 1996, this wide-eyed, ambitious 20 year-old Colombian had one, and one fear only: that my adequate but still limited command of the English language was going to prevent me from really getting to know anybody and worse yet, it would prevent them from experiencing my sense of humor and getting to really know me!

There were times during my first few years in this country when I felt like I could never really feel at home here. I felt like I hadn’t connected deeply and personally with anyone who wasn’t from Latin America or Spain. And that feeling sporadically made me consider the idea of going back to Colombia. But in time, something clicked. When my subconscious somehow began to decipher the nuances of the English language, the variances of tone and rhythm, and when my vocabulary and level of comfort with the language grew and freed up brain power to dedicate to comedic timing, things changed, and drastically. I soon began to develop meaningful friendships with English speakers and I began to feel at home.

[OK, Ruben, we get it, you’re, like, the next Chomsky or something…now get to the point!]

The point is this: watching my boy Gabriel command two languages so easily and naturally, and anticipating that Samuel will be just as skilled, fills me with joy because I feel like I will love two boys, fourfold. And I feel like they have been given the keys to two worlds of human connection, learning, meaning…being. And that’s really cool. I know this, because that’s what happened to me. And now I have two homes in this world, both of which are full of beloved friends.

Categories: Reflections

Spay-dar (Spanish Radar)

04/20/10

[Apologies for the failed attempt at cleverness with the title. I welcome suggestions]

Assuming things about people is a dangerous thing, but it’s human nature. I’m sure there is some evolutionary-psychological explanation for why we form opinions about people when we first look at them: group survival, territoriality, escaping potential mates going through midlife crises and carrying tons of emotional baggage, fear of commitment, and credit card debt. And as much as I consider myself an open-minded person, I too assume things about people all the time and I don’t like it, because it diminishes my ability to learn and appreciate.

Photo by Batara

Because of this, I’m also careful to raise my children with as little exposure as possible to any racial, ethnic, political, social, sexual, gender, or comedic bias that may permeate through what I inadvertently say. So how in the world do you explain my 2.5 year-old boy Gabriel going around, daringly speaking Spanish to strangers, based (seemingly) on the way they look?

It hasn’t happend just once, twice, or three times. I’ve already lost count. We’ll be at the park (we live in a pretty diverse neighborhood with a nice mix of white, black, hispanic, east african, american indian, and asian people), and a “hispanic-looking” person will walk by and be stopped in their tracks by a very forceful “Hola!” from Gabriel.

Bear in mind that I have several Latin American friends who look “white” (not all of them are cute black-haired little things like me,) and at the bilingual daycare my sons go to there are white children who partake in the Spanish-speaking. So I would assume that my boy’s experience is that people of many colors may or may not speak Spanish.

The most interesting part of this phenomenon has been that, every time, Gabriel has been right. So invariably, he gets an enthusiastic “Hola, ¿Cómo estás?” back from the innocently-racially-profiled person.

This past weekend, Gabriel and I were walking around the lake looking for geese we could taunt, when a young girl with fair skin and long, light brown hair mostly hidden under her helmet, rode by us on her bike. Gabriel looked up at her and yelled “Hola!” to which the girl gave an “Hola!” right back as quickly and as naturally as if they were two neighborhood kids running into each other at a park in Bogotá.

So I thought: “Aha! Your spay-dar is not infallible, you little stinker. You just said “Hola” to an ‘Anglo’ girl who just happened to know the word ‘Hola'”

Four or five seconds later, someone called out to the girl, in Spanish, from down the road and when I looked in that direction, I saw a group of people who appeared to be her family and whom we later found (when they caught up with us on the trail) to be speaking in Spanish to one other.

Some people find my looks to be “generically ethnic,” so I have been told I look anything from unequivocally Colombian to possibly Mexican, Middle Eastern, Romanian Jewish, Spaniard from Andalucia, Italian, etc, etc, etc. Once, a guy spoke to me in Arabic and then got frustrated with me when I told him I didn’t speak the language! But I’ll have to assume that if Gabriel didn’t know me and saw me riding my bike in the park, he would think I look like a kind, handsome stranger and greet me effusively “Hola!”

I plan to vigilantly watch for his ‘spay-dar’ to fail so I can give him an impassioned speech on open-mindedness and tolerance. Or maybe I should learn from him instead and say what naturally comes to mind, make that human connection, and shrug it off if I was wrong, because all that matters is that I made somebody smile.

Note: No, we don’t taunt geese.

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Unbreak My Heart

04/17/10

I’m an optimist by nature and the medications I’m taking only enhance that virtue. People who know me understand that behind my wry, deadpan sense of humor and my unperturbed, stony face beats a heart made of marshmallow that expects from life nothing short of rainbows and clouds made of cotton candy. So I harbor the hope that my kids will love their Colombian culture so truly and deeply that they will make an effort to make Spanish a constant part of their lives.

Photo by Wolfgang Staudt

But I’m almost 34 years old and having my mushy marshmallow heart torn apart or set ablaze in a bonfire time after time has added a healthy dose of harsh realism to my worldview. That’s why I’ve been mentally and emotionally preparing for the day when my boys will give me the much dreaded:

“NO MÁS, Old Man. We’re going English only. It’s not you, it’s us, and what we’re going through. But you’re a great guy and we’re sure there is a nice kid out there who will give you the Spanish chatter that you deserve.”

I just didn’t think that day would come so soon.

A month or so ago, I was subjecting my son Gabriel to the usual cheap psychological reverse engineering tricks that I believe give me a logical map of his beautiful mind:

– “Gabriel, what language do you speak with Papá?”

– “Spanish!”

– “And what language do you speak with Mamá?”

– “English!”

(And here is where I naively doubled-down…)

– “And what language will you speak with your baby brother Samuel?”

– “English!”

(Papá gets lightheaded and the coronary artery of his marshmallow heart catches on fire…)

– “You’re not going to speak Spanish with Samuel?”

– “No…” (in a “duh” kind of tone)

– “Why not?”

– “Cuz I don’t want to…”

That ended the conversation very coldly. How can you argue with that? The boy doesn’t want to speak Spanish to his baby brother, and that’s that.

But c’mon! He’s not even 3 years old yet! In the next 15 years he’ll probably go from wanting to be an ice skater to wanting to be a firefighter to a stockbroker to a freelance journalist for People Magazine until he finally settles for being the lead singer in a popular, non-derivative garage rock band. The optimist in me kicks back in and acknowledges that I can’t take too much stock in the findings of my cheap psychological trick applied to a 2 year-old boy.

Fast-forward a week or so and what do we have? The realization of every bilingual-parent-turned-desperately-insecure-blogger’s dream: When Gabriel is in the room with Papá and Samuel, Gabriel addresses Samuel in Spanish. When it’s Mamá instead of Papá in the room, Gabriel addresses his baby brother in English. And when both parents are in the room, he switches back and forth depending on the language of the dominant conversation that’s taking place.

The moral of this convoluted fable of heartbreak? Just like with any other aspect of parenting, all you can do is take it easy and stir the ship in the direction you charted for your crew. The tide might take you off course every now and then, but love, optimism, and focus will shift things back to that rightful place of rainbows and sweet skies. Or not, but most likely, yes.

Categories: Tips, Trivial Occurrences