You Speak My Language?

A little language can get you to strange places.  I know, because using language to get things done worked better for me than hitting a baseball or finding girls who worshipped me.  Words came easy in school, and being curious (and lazy) I signed up for foreign languages when I was a kid.

It started with Spanish in the 9th grade in Southern California.  It seemed easiest and a large percentage of the kids were Latino — except they called themselves Pachucos, wore pegged pants, and made believe they were Mexican hoodlums.  Spanish class was a piece of cake with an easy A on my report card. 

But our family moved to Jersey the next year and I signed up for a second, then a third year of Spanish.  Playing to the grade point I also enrolled in a first and then a second year of French.  The words were all pretty similar; only the accent was different.

I managed to graduate and my dad introduced me to a summer job at a church-related work camp in Yuquiyu, Puerto Rico.  I bought my own machete for about two dollars and was ready to turn second-growth jungle into future farm land.  It was great meeting Puertoriqueños — and Yankees — my age.  But when I’d ask a simple question, like “How far is the beach from here?” they were mystified.  And I realized my Castilian pronunciation (with Jersey accent) was totally alien in Puerto Rico.

I let the languages go in college, except for a disastrous year wrapping my tongue around German.  I had no genetic advantage being half German.  Confronted four years later with military conscription, I beat the system by enlisting; I traded an extra  year of service to avoid going to Vietnam.  Along the way, I was given a language test.  That turned out to be nothing more than Esperanto, an artificial language created as an international medium of communication based on European languages.  Not a problem, except that period had a high cutoff score so the Army sent me in a different direction.

Well, I thought, getting off the plane in Korea, maybe I could learn something.  I did.  The little kids shouted at our platoon, “[expletive] you, G.I.”  Meeting local ladies in a bar, “I’d ask, would you like to see a movie?”  A sweet lady named Pyongtaek Peggy, would answer, “Machts nichts, GI.”  Machts nichts?  “What are you saying?”  “Is your language, GI.  Not mine.” 

The military had created one world that spoke a hodgepodge of Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese. English and German.  After a year, I moved on to Taiwan, the Republic of China, because I couldn’t survive in America on my corporal’s pay.  I loved Taiwan and ended up marrying a woman who was raised speaking the Hakka dialect, grew up speaking Taiwanese, remembered a bit of Japanese from the wartime occupation, learned to speak Mandarin after 1949,  and finally English. 

On our first trip to Quebec, Canada, years later, she whispered, “How do you say ‘How are you?’ in French?”  For the rest of our vacation, she asked everyone she met, “Comment-allez vous?”  The Canadians loved her, and so did I.