"Speak English"

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look! -- it is too beautiful to eat.

Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: "In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan -- a creature that became more than was hoped for."

But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leavning the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, "This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions." And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.

-- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club.

I have read that prologue more times than I can count, more times than I can remember, and it always makes me cry.

When people tell immigrants to "speak English, like real Americans" -- or any variation of that same small and ugly sentiment -- what I hear in their words is the fear of the ignorant. I hear a deep and defensive ignorance, a fear of admitting that ignorance, a fear that would crush newcomers more worldly and knowledgeable into the same cramped little horizons so that no one might stand taller or see more than they do.

I hear people who know very little and recognize, somewhere deep, that they know very little, and who are afraid to let others know more. Who have only one language, and fear the not understanding that comes with confronting the limits of one's own knowledge, and whose answer is not to try to learn more, but to take that learning away from others.

I feel this because they took that language and that learning away from me. I should have grown up bilingual. I should have grown up speaking Korean as easily as I do English, learning words and rhythm with the ease that comes only from hearing those words and feeling those rhythms while you're too young to understand anything but the sound.

But I didn't, because my mother, like so many immigrants, came here and was told that anything other than perfect American English was less than. Less than worthy. Less than really, truly American.

So she didn't teach it to me. Didn't risk a daughter who might have some kind of an accent, however slight, and come out sounding different to match looking different (which was hard enough, at times, because of course the same ignorance that prioritizes "talking American" also prioritizes "looking American" and defines that with the same crippled and crippling racism). And so I lost a knowledge that should have been my birthright before I was old enough to comprehend. I lost stories and histories that can't be told in another language without losing their essence, because ideas take on the shape of words and forcing them into other forms must, always, alter their meaning.

And my mother remains self-conscious, some forty years after coming to this country, that her own English is not perfect American English. Which is the other side of the cruelty, of course: that it imposes the shame of inadequacy on people who have done far more to accommodate themselves to a strange and alien culture than the people mouthing this idiocy can ever understand.

Nobody wants to struggle with language. Nobody wants to be limited in understanding the world they occupy. When I was ten years old my parents put me in a German school in Germany. I didn't speak German. I didn't speak much at all, actually, for the three years I was in that school, because while my classmates were unfailingly kind and encouraging, and Germany at that time period and in that social class had nothing like the grotesque chauvinism of "speak English," it is still unpleasant to be a bumbling foreigner who mangles syntax and enunciation and can't understand the simplest things. It is embarrassing. Breaking through that barrier requires a courage that few people possess, and that I certainly didn't have at that age. I likely wouldn't have it now.

But of course that's the point. The point of telling people to "speak English" is not, actually, to encourage them to speak English. It's to tell them "shut up, you aren't wanted here." It's to say "you don't belong, leave, go away." It is to denigrate their efforts as never good enough, their accents as badges of shameful difference, their children as somehow un-American if they know too much.

And it's to say "I have only this one language (barely), and I'm conscious of the deficiency (barely), and I do not wish to be reminded that someone else -- someone of a different color -- might know more. I do not wish to be made self-conscious of my ignorance. So I will take away the knowledge that you have, make you embarrassed about passing it down to your descendants, and do my utmost to ensure that your future generations remain as stupid as mine."

That is what that is. It is the perpetuation of ignorance because of inadequacy. It is the use of shame as a cudgel to separate others from their heritage and knowledge.

It is stupidity wielded as an imperative, and it deserves scorn.