Home in the Meadowlands

“Soch-ks, Soch-ks”

As she tries to wrap her lips around the hard consonants of the English language, my grandmother fumbles with my small Nike garments. Turning them over and over, she attempts to enunciate the lone word in her English lexicon without much success.

“No es tan dificil, abuela. Solo tienes que pronunciarlo con un poco mas fuerza.”

My appeals in her native language prove fruitless. At eight years old, I can think of few other ways to help her pronounce the word correctly. My brother storms off in frustration, unable to understand why his grandmother can’t grasp both English and Castellano—the Catalonian name for Spanish. My grandmother, a fragile brunette of nearly seventy whose love for her only nietos knows no bounds, speaks four languages, but English is not one. After another hour of difficulty, we stop. Attempts at different clothing items have proven no more successful, and trying to explain the concept of hyphenated words—far more common in English than Spanish—is beyond me. The disappointment is etched into both of our faces: hers because she feels she has let down her oldest grandson and mine because linguistic barriers are the harder of the two chasms I have to cross to talk to my grandmother. Traversing the Atlantic Ocean is simple by comparison.

Mi mama, proficient in regional dialects Aranes and Catalan, as well as globally known English, Spanish, and French, shares her mother’s myriad fluencies. I inherited little of the affinity for languages. Even as she spoke Spanish to me from a young age, I struggled to pick it up. Sounds and syllables that flowed smoothly from her mouth stumbled in mine. The understanding was there, the speech was not. As such, our interactions are confusing to most bystanders; her mellifluous castellano and my brash, Texan-accented English make for unique bilingual dialogues. Ashamed of the broken Spanish I speak, where the melodious romance language is turned into a stumbling rendition of incorrectly pronounced double ells and misplaced accents, I resort to the more comfortable English in our conversations.

When my family travels to Bossost, the rural town of 1,200 in which mis abuelitos have spent their entire lives, my shame bubbles to the surface when I am forced into awkward introductions with family and my mother’s friends. Monosyllabic answers are the norm; deflecting questions about my life with a simple “estoy bien” has become commonplace. My understanding is near fluency, but comprehension matters little when I cannot express my thoughts in the language.

As I grow into my twenties, shedding vestiges of puberty as I simultaneously fight my seemingly never-ending battle with stubble, my diction has expanded while my annunciation has stagnated. In Austin, I didn’t make the grating, harsh-consonant heavy sounds of my peers in Spanish class; in Spain, my attempts at speech lack the harmony of romance languages spoken by a true native. Yet, there is progress. Recently, I am increasingly less reluctant to speak and the joy on my grandmother’s face is palpable. After conversing with me in Spanish, her face lights up until I meander back into the comforting English I share with my brother and father—where the linguistic idiosyncrasies are familiar and the pronunciation manageable.

However, internal difficulty with the basic tenets of the Spanish language is just one part of the problem of reconciling disparate languages into a cohesive identity. When applying to college, my friends joked that my choice to label myself as a Hispanic on the ethnicity component of the CommonApp was an affirmative action ploy. More hurt than I let on, I submitted an essay centered on my memories of Spain, a de facto defense of my Hispanic identity. Disparate heritages ranging from rural Spain to Ashkenazi Jew have created an odd amalgam of ethnicities with which my brother and I identify. My agnostic mother once told me that my grandmother, a devout Catholic, was beside herself when she learned we would be raised as Jews. My Chicago-raised father communicated with his parents-in-law from the start in French, unable to comprehend the Spanish swirling around him at the dinner table.

Repeated attempts to teach my grandmother English are my way of trying to collect under one banner the heritages that pull me so many ways. Perhaps by inviting her into my American world, I hope, we can share a connection that transcends our communication boundaries. Her feeble attempts at English are a longstanding joke—“Soch-ks” are frequently pointed to and laughed about. As my Spanish improves, our conversations have lengthened and monosyllabic responses have expanded to sentence fragments and the occasional full sentence. Playing games and watching television together provide a communication buffer of sorts; sharing experiences without talking brings us closer together while keeping the articulation demons at bay.

Fourteen months after my grandfather passed away, I’m think every day of my grandmother—my last remaining grandparent and my only relative I still struggle to communicate with. Eleven months of the year, our relationship exists over the phone. For a woman terrified of Siri—la senora que vive en el telefono—Facetime is hardly an option. In her advanced age, with scoliosis crippling her movements, I’m quite aware that there may not be many more meetings. We will embrace, we will make jokes about “Soch-ks”, we will feast on deviled eggs and tasty macarrones, and we will once again try to cross that linguistic chasm. My broken Spanish, her mellifluous castellano. Ten years later, still trying to find a linguistic middle ground.

David P. Freed ‘16 is an applied mathematics concentrator in Mather House. He both enjoys kaleidoscopes and anti-jokes.