Aarna Week #1 - My Greatest Failure as the Daughter of Immigrants

     As a second-generation immigrant, my greatest failure is that I can’t speak my mother tongue. Despite going to weekly Telugu classes as a child and growing up in an area surrounded by people who spoke the same language, I only absorbed maybe a fifth of what was being taught to me.

    In comparison, my mom is trilingual. She was taught English at school and spoke Telugu at home, until she moved to north India with my grandparents, where they only spoke Hindi. She picked up a third language while adapting to an unfamiliar environment completely on her own, all at the same age that I struggled trying to retain a second language.

    At this point, I think it’s been enough years since I fell out of touch with Telugu that both my grandparents and my parents have given up on me learning it. While I try my best to form sentences over the phone in hopes of connecting with them, they’ve stopped expecting me to. Every time they switch to broken English to wish me a happy birthday or ask about my life, it feels like a reminder of something that I couldn’t give them.

    Despite trying to connect with my culture in other ways, I still feel the void created from the absence of understanding my mother tongue. When I listen to traditional songs or prayers, and sometimes sing along, I often wonder what language I’m even speaking in. Every festival when I listen to stories of mythological characters and gods, I feel like I’m always waiting for my mom to find a good break where she can translate everything I missed. 

    The feeling of aunties and uncles switching to English when they speak to me is one that I will never forget. It makes me wish that I had tried harder or practiced more as a kid, but also makes me worry about the future. I yearn to be a part of a community that represents my culture, but as I grow older, I increasingly feel the barrier that not knowing Telugu has created. Not being able to carry such a key part of my heritage into the places that I want to go makes me feel a sense of anxiety and shame. 

    Who am I without representing the people that came before me? Who am I if I am not able to represent my heritage and my culture? While these are questions that I will continue to figure out for myself, I hope to hear more stories of people like me. Stories of the people who have had to balance their heritage with their home in America.


                                             My brother and I years ago at an event for my Telugu school, Paatasala.

                        

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