It’s weird how articles I read trigger thoughts I have never considered. For my past posts, I have written about an issue that the article highlights and I have feelings towards; however, this article connected with me in a different way. In the article From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle, Min-zhan Lu writes about her experience of having a family language different from her school language, and how this difference affected her studies. Lu mentions how she moved from home to school, or from English to Standard Chinese, and had to accommodate for each dialect. However, when her languages overlapped, such as with her incident with her second grade homeroom teacher, the reactions from her classmates made her realize that her home/ family language was indeed special.
Possibly irrelevant to the concept of literacy, however, relevant to the idea of this article, is the way I can relate. I am not bilingual, but my family dynamic was definitely different from the majority of my classmates. Therefore, I suppose you could conclude that my family language was a little bit different from my classmate’s family languages. The issue that always made me feel different was my parents being divorced. My classmates would refer to their parents as mom and dad, as normal children do; for me, it was mom and dad…and Stephanie. At such a young age, how was I supposed to explain to my friends why my parents didn’t live in the same house, why I had two houses or why my dad was married to a woman who wasn’t my mom. At school, I never referred to my step-mom, it seemed that keeping her out of the picture was easier than including her, and I’m pretty sure that was my preference at the time regardless. Either way, the explanation that was required to follow the mention of her name wasn’t worth the mention in the first place. My classmates made the situation seem completely alien, which in turn made me feel the same way.
I understand that Lu’s classmates didn’t make her feel out of place, however just like Lu, at home, English was spoken and Standard Chinese was not, and the opposite was for school, there wasn’t a universal language for both. It was as if such a language, or family dynamic, was foreign to the other, almost unheard of. The reason Lu spoke Standard Chinese in school is because it was the required Working-class language, the reason I didn’t speak of Stephanie at school is because a family is “supposed” to be mom and dad. Things are considered the norm for a reason and when the norm is interrupted people seem to become disorientated and confused, wondering why things are different for one person but not everyone else.
So my concern this week is about what made you different? Or what kind of family language did you have that set you apart from your school language? How did you deal with the difference?
I thought the separation of language from school and home in this piece was extremely interesting as well. I think that it is crazy impressive how well she was able to keep them separated which could end up being extremely confusing in the long run. Your questions about our family backgrounds is interesting to me because I wonder how many people have had something that is this extreme. For myself I have smaller examples of this in my life such as at home I worked really hard at trying to impress my brother with my smarts. I don’t think that this was a drastic change from home and school but I don’t know the likeliness that any of us get exactly how different and hard it must have been for Lu. Now I am curious if there was more to your change in your language as compared to your classrooms than just your parents divorce. If you felt in one house you had to act one way and another in the opposite house and then a whole new you at school. This is just me thinking out loud.
I’m not sure that I ever had different languages at school and home, but I did need to censor certain details of my life.
When I was about 12, my older brother started to express symptoms of mental illness that caused a lot of trouble at home, that I felt I could not speak of outside of the family. It was something we dealt with together, but not something other people could know about. My brother was 7 years older than me, so a lot of my teachers had had him as a student and would ask about him from time to time; regardless of the reality of how he was, I always said he was doing very well, and would sometimes make up positive things in his life so no one would get suspicious.
Even though now I know that reaching out may have helped the situation, I felt that sharing what was happening to him and my family as a result was wrong because it would invite others into what felt to me like a private knowledge.