Pyrrhic Victory over my Native Tongue: Part 1

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” a bold Filipina friend, told me once, out loud in front of others at a party. I had just arrived in Dubai, fresh off the plane from Chicago, and she was introducing me to a community of my kababayan (fellow Filipinos).

She was referring to the fact that I couldn’t speak Tagalog – my native tongue. How I lost it is a journey in itself.

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Soon after the Americans wrested control of the Philippines from the Spaniards, teachers came in hordes to teach English in schools at the start of 1900s. English gradually supplanted Spanish. Even as a government commission identified Tagalog as a national language, English never lost its standing – effectively creating a country with “disglossia” (two official major languages).

With their books, blackboard and chalk, teachers have a power far greater than soldiers with tanks, machine guns and ammunition to re-shape an entire culture. So the Americans wove their language into the cloth of Philippine life. Stitched it, even, on the very tongue of the Filipino. I remember asking another Filipina friend, for example, whether she had lived in the US, because her accent didn’t quite have that Tagalog sound to it. In fact, I could pick up some familiar American tone. She said, “No, I just watched ‘Sesame Street.’”

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My upwardly mobile parents not only moved the family into a well-to-do Manila suburb, but also enrolled me at the nearby Don Bosco school – where English was actually the primary language. This was a Filipino school, mind you. There was a separate class for Tagalog, although I have virtually no memory of it. I never really learned how to read or write in Tagalog, so I can only conclude that that class ranked quite low on the school’s ladder of priorities.

So, you see, by the time we left the Philippines in 1968, I was boy with an under-developed tongue for my native language. A weak tongue is easy to lose. The fact that I can’t speak it, well, what do I have to ashamed about? I was simply being swept by my parents in a certain direction, and in turn they were being swept by the American zeitgeist of the 1900s.

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I wrote about the wonderfully mistaken slurs of Jap and Chink directed at me, in my preceding journal entry here. But children at school didn’t stop at this, as they also teased me for my accent.

The th and the f sounds aren’t easy for a number of Filipinos. So 'third' and 'north' become tird and nort, and 'forty' and 'fifty' become porty and pipty. I remember one classmate who laughed at me, when he heard tief come out of my mouth, instead of 'thief.' Shameful, to say the least, as this sort of teasing happened more than once.

Sadly, one teacher played into this as well. As much as I learned English as a little boy, my command wasn’t very good. So, in 7th grade, when our English assignment was to read books and write reports, my report had run-on sentences; paragraphs with little structure or organization; and patches of spelling errors. In retrospect, I knew my report was terrible, but did the teacher have to speak about my report to the class as an example of bad writing? Hell, at least, he could’ve left my name out!