When I talked to my mom on the phone yesterday, I inwardly cringed at how weird my own speech sounded to me. Not for the first time, I was acutely aware of the fact that I was mispronouncing the words I’d grown up speaking, more often substituting English words for the Romanian ones that seemed to escape me. As an eight-year old learning English, I couldn’t wait for the day when traces of my Romanian accent didn’t show up in my speech. Now, I’m not so sure that getting what I wished for was necessarily a good thing.
In third grade, speaking in class meant pretending not to hear the quiet titters of laughter emitting from behind me. I ignored them, and learned English in under four months. I still remember the first A that I got on a spelling quiz, and I’m sure my mom has it stashed in a drawer somewhere. On the last day of school, the teacher asked us to stand in front of the class and tell everyone what we’d learned that year. In what I assume was still a relatively thick accent, I proudly told the class that I had learned English. They laughed, but this time it seemed somewhat rooted in a sense of camaraderie, as if they were saying, “Yeah. You did it.”
I didn’t anticipate growing to love English as much as I did. In fourth grade, I wanted to be a scientist. By sixth, I wanted to be the next Great-American writer. Words made sense to me, and I found myself knowing the meanings of letter combinations I’d never seen before. It was magical. Being Romanian was still something I loved about myself –– it never stopped being part of my identity, but I knew that not having an accent had its benefits. I’d seen the way people looked at my mom when her accent gave away the fact that she wasn’t from here, and I didn’t like it. I could continue to love my heritage and background, but I supposed that not having an accent meant fewer pointed stares from people who assumed that “foreign” meant “alien.”
It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly my accent completely disappeared –– maybe sixth grade, maybe earlier. Sometimes it comes back if I’m angry, tired or speaking too fast. But now, I have an American accent when I speak Romanian, and it’s something I’m not particularly fond of. Having lived in the states for ten years with no opportunities to visit my home country makes me feel like I’m barely holding onto a piece of my identity that I cherish above anything else. Maybe it’s karma for being embarrassed by my mom’s accent when I was younger, or for not realizing just how much her accent represented.
So let’s redefine accents: My mom has one, and I think it’s one of the best things about her. It shows that she was brave and strong enough to pack up her life and move it across the Atlantic, just so I could have a shot at the kind of life she couldn’t have imagined for me otherwise. In third grade, I was too young to know that my own accent was something to be treasured for its uniqueness, and now I have to live with the fact that, when I visit Romania again, I’ll have a way of speaking different from that of the kids I finished Grade I with. I guess that’s okay. Whether I have an American accent speaking Romanian or a Romanian accent speaking English, I have to know that my identity is uncompromisingly my own.
