Wings

A typical immigrant, I desperately wanted to blend in from day one. One thing that I have not been able to get over is my "accent". In fact, as soon as someone brings up the word, I cringe.

The second time we met, RJ said, "Your speech... I cannot place it."

Smart move not to have said "accent". While my "accent" has been called exotic, unidentifiable, intriguing... (guesses have run the gamut of Scandinavian to vaguely European) instead of feeling unique and flattered, I feel self-conscious and inadequate.

All I ever wanted to was to sound American.

Over the years RJ has assured me that I sound "fine". "You speak clearly," he says. "And well." And I write well. I speak and write well for an immigrant - no, I speak and write better than some native speakers.

But somehow it is not enough. Sometimes, some woman would come on a late night talk show, and I'd point to her and poke RJ, excited and inspired, "That! I wanna sound like her!"

Since I was little it was observed that I had a talent in languages. I picked up foreign words and accents at ease. Mastering grammar in a foreign language was very intuitive for me. Rules could be applied universally. My brother has joked that foreign languages were hard to grasp because they were "meaningless sounds". But it was easy for me to assign meaning both visually and tonally.

Languages fascinate me. Why have this sound mean this particular thing? A group of people had to agree and apply the sounds in daily life. The process is utterly curious. I should've studied linguistics. Then there's Sign Language too which is on another level of fascinating.

But if I am so talented in languages, why can't I master my fucking accent?

I remember watching MTV in Germany that one summer in my early twenties: these German kids being filmed in Germany, and their perfect American accent. I was so jealous.

For years I prided myself in "blending in", or so I thought, among fellow Americans. Then there are betraying moments when I hear a recording of my own voice and I am defeated: that's how I sound?

Riley, one of my closest guy friends at a time - we've confided in each other many personal things, he's cried in front of me over his grandma's death, we've gotten over painful breakups together - at the end of our friendship, before he was moving back to Canada, casually joshed (I forget the context now), "You know, your accent, whatever you call that..."

Boy, if that wasn't one of the most wounded moments of my life. I thought I had "passed". I thought he was my friend.

My accent. Thirty years, this cross I bear.

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times Magazine dated July 23, 2017, on a voice coach who helps clients master accents to get (or secure) parts in Hollywood.

The idea is not novel. I've joked that I want a voice coach to "correct" my accent. BTW this it totally the difference between learning a language in a classroom than through immersion, through interaction with native speakers, the way a child learns how to speak. This is why my English will always be hodgepodge and mishmash, whereas this other language which I shall not name (other than my native tongue) I (used to, for over 10 years) speak fluently and without accent, as I was told by native speakers.

One of my best friends, IA, who was an English major and has been an English teacher all her adult life, has attempted to enlighten me with this school of belief that we mustn't label and judge "accents". There is no right or wrong accent in pronouncing the English language insofar as the cultural and historic circumstances make for an organic evolution. She even went so far as to say that grammar falls under the same umbrella of leniency.

No, no, no! I couldn't accept that. Surely there was right and wrong in pronouncing something! There are rules! One of the reasons I love grammar is that there are rules!

In the aforementioned article, the author Ryan Bradley writes about Gillian Anderson, "a rare case of an actor who is naturally bi-accented" due to her upbringing. In the U.K. she sound British; in America, she sounds American.

"It might seem like an act, but it's her personal history, which is exactly what an accent is: an ever-changing assemblage of sounds based on where we've lived, who we've known and our perception of how we should sound based on our surroundings."

I was blown away. It was a revelation. I have also expressed my speech and identity this way: I am everywhere I've lived and all those I've spent time with, and so is my speech. Now I see: it was never "perfectly American", whatever that ideal is, and it never will be.

Perhaps it is time to come to terms with my personal history. And in time, perhaps I can do better - celebrate it.