The discussion on accents in the comments section of my last post ages ago reminded me of an interview I conducted a little while back with a community activist based in South San Francisco. She had asked me about my relatives, and where I was from, and I responded in Tagalog. She said (also in Tagalog), “It’s a good thing that you’re not forgetting how to speak the language. Some people here have only recently arrived, and they say they don’t know how to speak Tagalog anymore.”
I liked hearing that. (There’s a little more to unpack in her statement, but I’ll leave that for now.) But there was no chance I would have forgotten Tagalog anyhow — how could I? It’s my first language, a genuine mother tongue, the voice of my home, inseparable from my first 19 years of my life in the tropics before going to graduate school in a colder climate.
But English was there too, like a parallel soundtrack — not just because I was educated in a school system that still taught children to sing “Philippines My Philippines” with lyrics that began, “O beautiful for spacious skies / for amber waves of grain / for purple mountain majesties”, etc., uncritically adapted from the American original — but also because American Pop was everywhere around me, in the television and books and music and movies I consumed. (Some scholars would probably say I was already thoroughly Americanized (and colonized) even before I left the Philippines, to which I retort in advance: only if you let it.)
Those English skills were acquired unevenly, however: reading and listening came first and most easily, followed, with a little less grace, by writing. Speaking English, on the other hand, was the unexercised muscle, the deflated car tire dragged along asphalt by the other three wheels. (For college, I went to an agricultural school in the provinces, and one of the ways we boonie-dwelling college students differentiated ourselves from those in the city, i.e., UP Diliman, was language: over there, when people ask you for the time, they ask it in English, we’d whisper to each other.) But there was good reason for this unequal development: there was no need to talk to anyone in English because Tagalog — and Taglish, really — worked just fine.
So when I moved to the States, the daily grapple began: my Tagalog tongue refusing to cooperate, linguistic synapses working double time, trying to furiously stitch those strands of hearing and thought and speech together, my voice shaking when asking a question or making a comment in class. Store clerks spoke slowly to me, and I knew why. Unlike American-born Asians who would, for obvious reasons, take offense at such slow talk, I secretly appreciated this. It gave me a chance to think, a few seconds more to shape the words in my head.
I wish I could say this was the beginning of a romantic, semi-desolate life in exile — a man perpetually in dialogue with his different selves, split between the two identities evoked by the two tongues, spouting charming malapropisms, like some tweedy character out of some book by Nabokov — but of course not. (Besides, the idea of myself being “in exile” is too ridiculous to contemplate.) My slide into upstate New York-accented English was perhaps embarrassingly precipitous, so much so that a year later a classmate said, “You were born in the Philippines? I thought you were from Cleveland!”
I didn’t like hearing that at all. Just last week I was talking to this woman on the phone providing tech support — I was in the Bay Area, she was in Quezon City, in the Philippines — and she said (in Tagalog) that she wouldn’t have figured I was actually from the Philippines because I sounded “kanong-kano”, or very American. I didn’t like hearing that either.
***
My Filipino interviewees from Daly City would reserve their ire for fellow Pinoys who “pretended” they didn’t understand Tagalog. (Though who is to say, since Tagalog’s only one of many Philippine languages?) And then there were the contemptible Filipinos who were ashamed of their accents: “Ayaw nilang masabi na meron silang accent,” said one. “Sabi ko, pag nawalan kayo nang accent, hindi kayo Pilipino.” [They don't want it said that they have an accent. I say, when you lose your accent, you are not Filipino.]
I haven’t really lost my accent at all, honest; it lies dormant, ready to be sprung on the listener as a shared confidence. Give me a few minutes with a Tagalog speaker and you can’t hear the moment when I “turn on” the Tagalog accent, when my “cellphone” slips into “selpone” — it just happens. My friend Linelle, who is Filipino Canadian but living in California, tells me it’s not just the accent that shifts, unconsciously, in the presence of fellow Canadians or Filipinos; it’s the topics, the vocabulary, the mannerisms, the code-switching, an entire ethnolinguistic repertoire that — to me, at least — is the equivalent of comfort food.
(Although, to play a little devil’s advocate: when you hear one of your own peeps speaking in very heavily accented English, dear reader, does it sometimes make you cringe, just a little? And if you say in a huff, Of course not!, is it not this same first-generation immigrant accent that provides the fodder for comedians’ stand-up routines, even if they’re meant to be affectionate?)
So when I write that Arnel Pineda’s Tagalog accent is noticeable — my friend Barb writes that Pineda sings “Dohn’t geeve up” on the chorus of “Never Walk Away”, and it’s true — it’s not meant to be disparaging in any way. (I’ve played the new Journey songs to non-Filipinos and they simply can’t hear the Tagalog accent, but Filipinos, I think, hear it right away — yet another little secret between us.) Rather, his accent is a constant aural reminder of who he is, of who I am, of something that will never be lost, of something I have no intention of giving up.