As recently as 20 years ago, moms in America worried that their young children would not learn English—even though they themselves spoke it. Jeane Deligero Forrest, who is from the Philippines, was one. Although she spoke to her daughter, Amber, in English, she also talked to her in her native Tagalog when Amber was little.
Jeane’s story on how she immigrated to the “wrong” America first, and eventually to the actual United States, is filled with the kinds of setbacks, serendipities and unwavering determination typical of so many who come here.
The Tagalog that she spoke to her daughter was one of the few things Jeane brought with her to the U.S. from the Philippines. It is the common language Filipinos speak “to understand each other,” Jeane says. “There are three hundred sixty dialects in the Philippines.” Jeane’s family spoke Ilonggo as well as Tagalog.
But once in the “real” America, Jeane soon stopped talking in Tagalog to Amber. “I got scared,” she says. “I was afraid she wouldn’t learn English.” Much later—too late, actually—a pediatrician told her that young children are perfectly capable of learning two languages at the same time.
“Missing a part of my history”
When Amber was 14, Jeane took her to the Philippines for the first time to meet her family members. Jeane’s childhood home there was a marked contrast to Amber’s comfortable home in Florida—a bucket of cold water for a shower, a cot for a bed, an open window for air conditioning.
None of this bothered Amber. What did trouble her was not being able to converse with her family. She knew some rudimentary Tagalog phrases, but they were not enough.
“It felt like I was missing a part of my history,” Amber says. She and her relatives had only the breezes wafting from the window to fill “those long, awkward silences.”
A mother-and-daughter gift
It’s not all that surprising, then, that today, Amber (who appears to have inherited her mother’s determination) is learning Tagalog. And it’s Jeane who’s inspiring her—by learning another language herself. “Spanish is an important language to have,” she says.
For this Mother’s Day, Amber has a simple gift she is giving her mom. You can hear it here, in Episode 4 of America the Bilingual.
Some of my favorite reading on the languages they carried
If Jeane had known about the 1986 book, The Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism, she might not have agonized over whether to speak to her young daughter in Tagalog. Kenji Hakuta, an emeritus professor at Stanford, explains in his clear, gentle prose how half-baked science misinformed generations of Americans about the supposed disadvantages of bilingualism.
Another Stanford professor, David M. Kennedy, shared with me over a glass of wine a few of his favorite books on American immigration: The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People, by Oscar Handlin, and Becoming American: An Ethnic History, by Thomas J. Archdeacon.
David’s own article from 1996 article in the Atlantic Monthly, “Can We Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?,” is 21 years old and as fresh as ever.
For a delightful little book on American immigration, I recommend American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction, by David Gerber, in which he leads us through the three great waves of American immigration. I learned how what seems new in today’s immigration debates isn’t. All in just 160 pages, in a book that fits handily in your pocket and your mind.
