Novel : Japanese expat children in 1970s- 1980s (3) Beyond the English Hierarchy

 

 It was 1978.

On the very evening my first year of primary school came to an end, our family boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where Father was waiting for us.

Before we left, Mum reminded my little sister and me of the same thing over and over.

 

"You'll love Hong Kong, you know. The food is absolutely wonderful, and there's so much British culture there as well. At your new school, you'll simply use the English we've always spoken at home. I think you're going to enjoy it tremendously."

 

She had spent much of her childhood and school years in Britain, after her diplomat father was posted there.

Father had grown up largely in Hong Kong, where he attended a British school.

 

We were going to Hong Kong.

I wasn't entirely sure what that really meant.

 

The only thing I understood was that the English we'd always spoken at home would now become the language I used at school as well.

 

When our plane landed in Hong Kong, the air was thick with heat and humidity.

Beyond the airport windows, countless lights shimmered through the evening haze, brighter than anything I'd ever seen before.

 

We walked along a long corridor and through the crowds.

The moment I spotted Father waiting for us, I forgot all about my little sister and dashed towards him.

 

"Daddy!"

 

He laughed and swept me up into his arms.

 

"Well, hello there, Mika. You made it at last." He smiled. "Rather warm, isn't it?"

 

That evening, we drove from the airport to Kowloon Bay.

Outside the car window, the city seemed to glitter without end.

 

Towering blocks of flats.

Shop signs crowded with Chinese characters.

The salty smell drifting in from the harbour.

Cantonese voices I had never heard before.

Everything was different from Japan.

 

When the Easter holidays came to an end, I started at a British international school.

I could follow most of what the teachers were saying.

The children, however, were another matter.

 

They spoke so quickly.

Their English was relaxed and effortless.

They had their own expressions, the sort that only children seemed to understand.

 

One day, after hearing me speak, a classmate burst into laughter.

"You talk like your mummy."

 

Children can be remarkably merciless.

I sounded like my mother.

In other words, I didn't sound like a proper child at all.

I was mortified.

 

From then on, I watched children's television every day.

I copied the expressions everyone at school used and tried them out the following morning.

Whenever they sounded natural enough for the others to accept them without a second thought, I felt absurdly pleased—and I added another phrase to my collection.

 

Then lessons began, and an even greater obstacle appeared.

Arithmetic.

Science.

History.

Scripture.

Every subject had its own vocabulary.

The English I'd spoken with Mother at home simply wasn't enough.

Every day I sat with my dictionary open, struggling through my homework until I cried.

Before long, even my Oxford Ladybird books began to feel far too easy.

I asked Mum if I might have something more challenging to read.

 

By the time a year had passed, I was finally able to keep up with my lessons.

It was around then that my teacher suggested I start using an English-English dictionary.

"Once you begin understanding English through English, your vocabulary will grow much more quickly."

 

I closed my Japanese-English dictionary and opened an English-English one instead.

Looking back, that simple change marked a turning point. It was the moment I stopped treating English as a foreign language and began accepting it as one of my own.

 

As the years slipped by in Hong Kong, something unexpected happened.

My Japanese began to falter.

Words I wanted to say simply wouldn't come.

 

Father noticed before I did.

Every Saturday he began giving my sister and me lessons in Japanese.

Kanji.

Japanese literature.

Japanese history.

Little by little, I worked my way through the books that filled his shelves—novels by Sōseki Natsume and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

Gradually, the Japanese I'd thought I was losing found its way back to me.

 

Every year, our school held an International Day.

Mother insisted that my sister and I learn the tea ceremony.

"If you're going to introduce Japanese culture," she would say, "show them something with real tradition."

Dressed in yukata, we knelt in seiza and whisked bowls of usucha.

Our legs went numb, and my knees felt ready to give way.

Yet when my friends from all over the world smiled and said,

"Beautiful."

I felt, for the first time, quietly proud of being Japanese.

 

Five years passed.

Then seven.

Then ten.

 

Before I realised it, I was seventeen.

By then, English had become as natural to me as breathing. I hardly noticed I was speaking it anymore.

 

Then Father's company announced another transfer.

We were going back to Japan.

 

On the day of my farewell party, my friends from Hong Kong, Britain, Singapore and Australia filled a scrapbook with messages.

"Don't forget us."

"Write to me."

I didn't cry.

Somehow, I felt that if I did, everything I'd lived through in Hong Kong would simply disappear.

 

When I returned to Japan, I transferred to a school with a large number of returnee students.

It was there that I discovered, for the first time, that English itself seemed to have a hierarchy.

The English classes were streamed by ability, with those who had spent the longest time overseas placed in the highest groups.

Most of them, however, had come back from America.

The first time I spoke in conversation class, a ripple of laughter ran around the room.

"Can't you speak English?"

For a moment, I thought I had misheard.

I was speaking English.

And yet I was being asked whether I could speak it at all.

I replied with as much dry sarcasm as I could manage.

"I speak English. Not American, thank you very much."

 

The classroom fell silent.

A few students frowned quite openly.

 

After the lesson, several others approached me quietly.

"So you speak British English?"

"I was in Scotland."

"I went to a British school in Kenya."

There were only a handful of us, but I wasn't entirely alone.

 

One of them remarked, almost as an afterthought,

"Apparently American English is considered the standard in Japan. I've heard British English can even put you at a disadvantage in exams."

 

A hierarchy?

Surely not.

 

Yet when I opened my Japanese-English dictionary, there it was in black and white.

〈US〉

〈Brit.〉

 

Separate spellings.

color.

colour.

 

Even different pronunciation guides.

American English—the standard in Japan.

British English—the variety that might count against you.

Until then, I'd never imagined there could be a ranking among the different Englishes I'd grown up hearing. At last, I understood what that quiet laughter in class had really meant.

 

From that day on, I threw myself into learning American English.

The pronunciation.

The spelling.

The intonation.

 

I didn't want to make mistakes.

I didn't want people looking down on me.

Looking back now, I think that was when a small sense of hierarchy first took root inside me.

 

At university, I majored in English linguistics.

In the department, where many of the students were returnees, all sorts of English could be heard around me.

 

American.

Canadian.

Australian.

Singaporean.

British.

 

And yet, among all these varieties, I was desperately clinging to what I regarded as "genuine American English."

 

Years spent overseas.

Pronunciation.

Vocabulary.

 

Before I knew it, I had begun judging people's English.

Oh, that's not American, so it's inferior.

She was only overseas for five years. No wonder her English isn't very good.

 

Then there was one particular girl.

She had returned from New Zealand, and frankly, her English wasn't particularly impressive.

But in conversation class, she spoke without hesitation.

 

She made mistakes.

Even when she made the sort of mistakes that I would have found embarrassing, she didn't seem to care in the slightest.

In class, even when speaking directly to a professor, she simply expressed herself in her own words.

 

I found myself becoming increasingly irritated by her.

English was a foreign language.

If she kept making mistakes, couldn't she at least be a little more humble about learning it?

And I particularly disliked the fact that she made no attempt to speak American English.

 

Then, one day, Professor Brown, the Scottish professor who taught our conversation class, said something to me.

"She's not perfect. But she's willing to communicate in English. That's what really matters."

I was about to argue.

But no words came.

 

I could have pointed out dozens of mistakes in her English.

Yet that wasn't what the professor valued.

 

That evening, for the first time in a long while, I took out the airmail letters I'd received from my friends in Hong Kong.

There it was.

The British English I'd grown up with.

colour.

favourite.

flat.

When I was younger, simply seeing those spellings had made me feel at home.

 

So why had I become so obsessed with deciding which English was better?

 

I had almost forgotten the English spoken by the women at the food stalls in Kowloon, with their Cantonese accents.

The English spoken by the older men I used to pass in the streets of Hong Kong, coloured by Mandarin.

The Indian-accented English spoken by the people who worked for Father's company.

 

I'd almost forgotten something that important.

 

In the spring of my final year at university, I was offered a position at a bank with a branch in Hong Kong.

 

After receiving my degree, I went straight to a bookshop.

I would have to brush up on my Cantonese.

I would have to learn about finance.

 

I wanted to go back to Hong Kong.

Back to those humid nights, glowing with neon light.

There would be so many more people for me to meet, speaking so many different kinds of English.

 

Not only in Asia.

I might meet people from the Middle East, South America and Europe.

Of course they would have accents from their own countries.

And that was perfectly natural.

 

As for the girl who had tried so desperately to conform to some idea of "genuine American English" in Japan—

I was ready to say goodbye to her.

 

I would accept English in whatever form it came.

 

And somehow, I felt that I could go much farther in life than I ever could when I had been busy competing over which kind of English was the best.