Bottomless Dreams

armorhues:

marocharim:

English was my first language.

As a toddler, my first study materials were a set of flash cards that my mother used to teach me the English alphabet.  All my storybooks and coloring books were in English.  The cartoons I watched, and the music I listened to, were all in English.  My mother required me to speak English at home.  She even hired tutors to help me learn to read and write in English.

At school, we used English to learn about numbers, equations and variables.  With it we learned about observation and inference, the moon and the stars, monsoons and photosynthesis.  With it we learned about shapes and colors, about meter and rhythm. I learned about God in English, and I prayed to Him in English.

English is the language of the classroom and the laboratory, the language of the boardroom, the court room, and the operating room. I have been taught that English is the language of privilege and connections.  My own language is foreign to me.  I speak, think, read and write primarily in English.

Filipino, on the other hand, was always the ‘other’ subject — almost a special subject like PE or Home Economics, except that it was graded the same way as Science, Math, Religion, and English.  My classmates and I used to complain about Filipino all the time.  We used to think learning Filipino was important because it was practical: Filipino was the language of the world outside the classroom.  We used Filipino when we were outside the classroom; when we bought things from the tindera, when we had favors to ask from househelp, when we asked to be fetched by our drivers.

That being said though, I was proud of my proficiency with the language.  Filipino was the language I used to speak with my cousins and uncles and grandparents in the province, so I never had much trouble reciting.

It was the reading and writing that was tedious and difficult.  I spoke Filipino only when I was in the province; it did not come naturally to me.  English was more natural; I was taught to read, write, and think in English.  In the same way that I learned German later on, I learned Filipino in terms of English.

It was really only in university that I began to grasp Filipino in terms of language and not just dialect.  Filipino was not merely a unique language, derived and continuously borrowing from the English and Spanish alphabets; it was its own system, with its own grammar, semantics, sounds, even symbols.

More importantly, though, Filipino was its own way of reading, writing, and thinking. There are ideas and concepts unique to Filipino that can never be translated into another. Try translating bayanihan, tagay, kilig or diskarte.

Only recently have I begun to grasp Filipino as the language of identity: the language of emotion, experience, and even of learning. And with this comes the realization that I do, in fact, smell worse than a malansang isda.

Then again, perhaps this is not so bad in a society of rotten beef and stinking fish. 

* - Revised by rearranging paragraphs and editing some sentences.  Now it makes sense.

Damn son, you should’ve gotten @marocharim as your copy editor! And that’s all I have to say about the subject.

This is what I meant when I said that if there’s anything James Soriano is guilty of, it’s bad writing. Kudos, @marocharim! And I agree—lose the last line. It defeats the whole purpose of the exposition, contrast and the sudden change of heart.