During one visit home with my mother, she was watching the Weather Channel. “I always watch Weather Channel,” she said, “All day.” I asked her why and then said it again in my rudimentary Japanese, “Nande?” She smiled at my linguistic offering and replied, “Wakaranai.” I had to ask her what that meant. She said, “Mean ‘I do not know’.” Because I only knew one Japanese word for the phrase ‘I don’t know,’ I said, “I thought that was ‘wakarimasen’.”

“You and I are know each other,” she explained, “we friendly so we say wakaranai. Hmm,” she said, distracted for a moment as the weather woman informed us that a hurricane hit land, went out to the gulf around Texas, and then came back. She made a clicking noise with her tongue behind her teeth and said, “That is mean heart, ne?”

It would be strange to some perhaps—that she has just said about a hurricane that it had a mean heart. But I am instead deep in thought on two things: that English does not have different verb endings to mark whether relationships are formal or familiar, and that she has just said we know each other, this woman I have known but not known.

I once thought that my mother’s and my relationship was strained because we were too different. She is Okinawan and grew up with a culture different from mine. But the more I pay attention during our times together, the more I have seen how devastating an effect language has had on our relationship, and how much this has affected other areas of our lives. When she tries to explain something, if she is not successful she gets frustrated and angry or tired. In the middle of one conversation about an event that happened on the news that day she stopped mid-sentence, sighed and said, “Not matter, I cannot say.”

Since we do not speak the other’s language easily, our conversations take twice as long and command fierce attention. They must be free of confusing slang and idiomatic expressions, without sarcasm or metaphors. They must be centered in conversational context and undergone multiple degrees of simplification. They must not include jokes that might be incomprehensible due to a lack of understanding of the culture. I do not remember ever telling her a joke, and her language with me growing up was almost always in the form of commands. When she explains a joke from her culture, I find it just as amusing as when I have to explain something on Seinfeld; we don’t get it.

When we are young, we talk to our parents when we are hurt, upset, excited, or happy. And while we may not do this to the same extent as we grow older, it is this initial period of communication that establishes the foundations of a relationship. Through language we socialize our children and pass on our histories, our beliefs, our cultures. Through language we motivate them, encourage them, and inspire them. Through language we know where we belong, and to whom.

In countries where a multitude of languages are present, English may be used as a common ground for the media and for education as it serves the practical needs of the people. But English, while useful, is usually kept within its pragmatic boundaries because it is seen as a carrier of dissident values. The heritage language is the language that carries the connections to race, culture, and identity.

But such protection of language is not always guaranteed. Many immigrants move to America and actively give up their language in favor of English, and force their children to do the same. It is this purposeful loss of language and culture that I find fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time. Within language there exists value, superiority and strength. But there also exists detriment, criticism and disadvantage.

What does it mean then, to cherish a language? What does it mean to give up a language, to give up a culture? My mother, who put aside her own culture and language, wanted to assimilate and be a part of the American culture. She saw English as a cultural, social, and economic advantage and did not want her struggles with English to be ours.

But since the language was stuttering, the relationship became stuttering as well. There is a sense of helplessness for the rift that language caused between my mother and me, a sense of loss that I was not able to share with her like other daughters do with their mothers.

I am envious of girlfriends who call home, some in English, some in other languages, and some in both. They think nothing of the ease of which they communicate. At the same time I also feel guilty that I allowed it to be this way; if only I had listened more, understood more, been more patient. This is my burden, that I expected so much and in turn gave so little.

We did not have a socialization process, the ‘you look just like your aunt’ or ‘you remind me of your cousin’ conversations. She never said those things to me. On my father’s side of the family, I can name my fourth cousin twice removed, but on my mother’s side, I have cousins I’ve never met, and a grandmother I saw twice as my mother is the only member of her family in America. I know almost nothing of her history and so little of her past. On my father’s side, my history is vivid and colorful with cultural knowledge and relationships I have with people long since gone from this world. On my mother’s side, there is only silence and the darkness of unfamiliarity.

Because of the loss of the heritage language, my mother and I stand on opposite sides of a linguistic canyon, unable to find the bridge that will unite us. There is inexpressible pain when I observe mother-child relationships, happily chatting away in conversation, which proves their connection. The very thing that strengthens their bonds is the very thing that cuts through mine so severely.

I cannot express through Japanese words all my hopes and fears, she cannot express through English words all her desires and dreams. And so we stand across from each other, wondering what the other has to say, trying ourselves to come up with something the other will understand. Sometimes we look at each other and I wish we had the words within us, either hers or mine.

I grew up with one language yet I am connected to this invisible sense of myself, knowing and feeling that there was another side of me that I am not able to access due to language. In a very real sense, I am cut off from my heritage and all the associations of culture that language allows: the knowledge, wisdom and lessons passed down from generation to generation, unique cultural worldviews, and perhaps more frightfully, the people who were my ancestors as well as my living family members, who may look upon me as if they were dead, for I can communicate with them just as easily.

Through language, we say things, we think things, we become things. And when we are essentially closed off from our heritage languages, we are also closed off from what we may have been able to become. We lose more than just words.

I teach English as a second language education courses at a small, private university in the Midwest. My field in general does not pay much attention to the heritage language, only the building of English, for many good reasons. English is the language of success in America, a de facto official language. But it is in speaking my heritage language, however haltingly, that I gain a connection to my lost culture, and the gray, almost invisible images of my ancestors start to come into view.

During a recent phone conversation, my mother told me her friend and her friend’s husband and daughter went out to eat at the same Chinese restaurant my mother and I used to go every weekend during my father’s deployment to Iraq. She mentioned it casually but I felt something I had not in a long time: homesickness.

“Hmm,” I said, “that makes me homesick.” I had moved 600 miles away for a teaching position.

“Me too,” I heard her say quietly. I thought she meant Okinawa and her family there, the last place she felt she had control.

“Oh, you’re homesick too?” I said, smiling sadly into the phone.

“No. Homesick to you,” she clarified, and I had to strain my voice so that it did not crack.

Our topic changed to my degree program. She was concerned that since I went ABD, I would not finish the degree. She mentioned a conversation she overheard between my grandmother and father on what made me want to get a PhD.

I tell my mother that mainly, it was her. She always held education in such high regard. Maybe it was her cultural background, maybe her personal beliefs. Maybe she wanted something for her daughter that she felt she did not or could not have. Maybe it was all of these things.

She started to cry, and said, “Education most important.” I had never heard her cry. Not once.

“Don’t cry, okaa-chan,” I said, “why are you crying?”

“Lonesome, I guess,” I heard her quietly say. Her words are few but they speak volumes. Whatever demons she lives with, whatever aches her spirit, and conversely whatever causes happiness in her heart, it does it in a world that is singularly her own. There is no bridge between us, only a chasm that language has divided.

Who is to blame? Not my mother, who wanted her children to grow up belonging to their world, to not give anyone a chance to show us the racism she had been exposed to. Not my brother or me, who grew up as children do, not knowing what English was doing.

To some, the blame lies with my mother for not passing on her language. To others, the blame lies with me for not knowing what a great divide language would cause. Still others would point to the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts in which we found ourselves, in which blame could not be laid on one thing or person alone, an Okinawan woman who had moved to Southern Appalachia at the end of the Vietnam War, who had a different face and ate strange foods. A professor and mentor once said to me, “It’s no one’s fault, but everyone suffers.”

Through language, we say things, we think things, we become things. And when we are essentially closed off from our heritage languages, we are also closed off from what we may have been able to become. We lose more than just words.

© 2011 Yurimi Grigsby