Chapter 2

My Mother’s Tongue


It was a long, long trip and when we got there it was hot. We settled in an apartment in Phoenix. Dad got a job in the spate of less than a week. And we moved into a house even before I started kindergarten. We also bought a pool, took trips to Mexico, and traveled quite a bit. I saw the Grand Canyon.

Mom and Dad were very young back then. And they were very much in love. They hugged and kissed a lot. They also spent a lot of time behind a locked bedroom. Those were some of the happier days of my childhood.

One day, I woke up and my Mom had been teaching my brother and sister how to swim. Not to be outdone, I jumped in the pool and swam all the way to the deep end while the other two were still in their water wings.

I don’t know why I associate the water with my ethnicity. But I do. I feel that having comfort in the water is something that marks my identity and reaffirms me as a man. Somehow I associate that ability to my heritage.

About this time in my life, my paternal grandparents, my Oma and Opa had been the dominant influence, as far as outside relatives go. Their names denote their ancestry – my grandmother, Oma had been second generation German-American. And Opa was Pennsylvania Dutch. They followed us out to Arizona to retire and be with us.

I got a sense that I was different from everyone else in the neighborhood. Phoenix, the Anglo-American center in Arizona, was very white. I didn’t see a Mexican or Black when I was growing up. The kids that lived on my street were white. We played next door because they had a tree house and more Star Wars action figures than we did. Or they played at our house because we were the ones that had a pool. I was not discriminated against and was very much accepted.

I knew that my Mom was different from others in her religion and her language. Every now and then, a friend of the old country would come over and they would back and forth in a strange sounding language peppered with wild laughter. It seemed to me that one could not speak Cebuano with out dotting each sentence with full throated laughter.

Mom and Dad also had friends that were Filipino. They also had kids our age and the three of us would play “red light green light” and “Simon says.” I had a small crush on one of the girls that was my age. She had long black hair, skinny and had pouty lips. Other than that I can’t conjure any other distinct imagery of her least of all her name. Mom and Dad had put out a bowl of potato chips for the guests. They had eaten a few but some still remained. Mom went to eat one then she returned it and threw the rest out.

She determined that the girl I had the hots for, just licked the salt off each chip and left the rest in the bowl – not a keeper.

I found myself finishing my mother’s sentences and correcting the pronunciation of some of her houseguests which we had from time to time. I developed a sense of what people had tried to communicate even before they said it.

I don’t know why I didn’t develop an aptitude for my mother’s tongue as I am pretty good at languages. Mom told me that she wanted to raise me so that I could fit in. But I guess there was probably some self-loathing racism that may account for my lack of linguistic élan.

At any rate, I would not be interested in any aspect of my mother’s culture until my relatives came over to visit.