Losing my Language
I have a confession to make, English isn't my first language. It's Indonesian. Yes, there was a time when I struggled to even speak English correctly. Though I was born in the United States, my Indonesian parents returned to their old country when I was three years old. I didn't return to the States until I was in the 7th grade.
I'll spare you the personal details. Now let's move on.
When I returned to the United States, I had to be enrolled in an English as a Second Language (ESOL) class. I remembered having a sort of inferiority complex because I didn't get to take the "real English class" like most of my classmates. It took me about two years before they finally put me in a non-ESOL English class. I must have been proud of myself back then.
Later on, my family returned to Indonesia again. But at this point, my parents wanted me to go to an American University. Because of that, they put me in an International School. Their plans worked because I was enrolled in Rutgers University in New Jersey.
And I have been living in America ever since.
This is all a long way of saying that I grew up having better Indonesian than English. But this is no longer the case. The only time I speak Indonesian nowadays is when I speak with my parents/relatives on the phone or other Indonesians who live in America. Even so, the ratio of English to Indonesian in these conversations is about half-and-half. Even with my Indonesian lady friend who is in Australia right now (it's complicated), we texted in English. That's how crippled my Indonesian is.
As the title says, I'm losing my language. Such is the effect of the Global American Empire.
Honestly, this is the reason why I decided to create this blog. In the last few days, I've been flirting with creating a new Substack newsletter in which I'd write in Indonesian. But I decided against it. And it's a good thing too because it'll be really bad. Firstly, I've not written long form in Indonesian since high school. Secondly, I've only recently published my writings in English.
I need to crawl first before I can walk once more.
But I do want to talk about Indonesia. I do want to talk about my roots. If there is one thing I know for certain about Americans it's that that they yearn to know their origins because of how deracinated they are. Meanwhile, here I am knowing exactly where I come from. I think it would be ungrateful of me to throw that away. God willing, I'll be able to talk more about it in this blog in the future.
At the moment, I have a lot on my reading list. One of them is a nonfiction book written in Indonesian. Once I'm done with that, I'll talk about it in this blog.
Until next time,
Michael P. Marpaung