Spanish Lessons

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Have you ever stopped and wondered how language can affect you? Christine Marin in “Spanish Lessons” talks about her experience facing discrimination and how she discovers the power of her mother tongue (Kingston). Maxine Hong Kingston, a first-generation Chinese-American, in “The Language of Silence” talks about her struggles with adjusting to two different cultures and how she had to find a new voice for herself. I have gone through many of my own struggles with discrimination for speaking a different language, but I’ve learned to appreciate my mother tongue. No matter our struggles, we continue to work hard and appreciate our language. I grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, so I didn’t speak much English until I went to school. When …show more content…

When I think back to this, it reminds me of Marin’s article when she stated, “speak better English than the gringo, so that he could not ridicule [them] the way they had been ridiculed in school and work.”(Marin) I remember this is because our experiences were the same but instead the opposite. Her parents wanted her to speak better English than Spanish. In my case, it was the opposite. My parents wanted me to speak better Spanish than English. This was just one of my experiences with having to speak two languages. Although I started to speak more English, I would still speak Spanish with my friends. My friends and I would be talking in Spanish and we would catch glimpses of other kids glaring at us. At first, I didn’t really understand why they would glare at us and just ignore it. But as time went on, I started to question it even more. Although I questioned it, I never really understood why. Marin said, “I realized that the girl and her friends did not resent being outsung but resented the fact that we were singing in Spanish”(Marin). Not until I read Marin’s article was I able to fully understand that all those kids who would glare at me were simply upset they couldn’t understand what we were …show more content…

When lunchtime came, I would sit with my friends and other classmates at the lunch tables. I would open my lunch and eat it like normal. But one day my mom packed me a small burrito to eat for lunch. As I started to eat it, I heard a kid in my class complain about a “weird smell”. I ignored them not thinking much, but then I noticed them glaring at me. They just made a disgusting face at me and turned away. After I noticed that he was talking about me, I felt embarrassed and went to the trash can and threw away my food. After this experience, I told my mom to stop making me lunch and said I would just eat school lunch. This experience reminded me of the time Kingston shared her experience as a first generation. “I drank out of a toy saucer when the water spilled out of the cup, and everybody laughed, pointing at me, so I did it some more. I didn’t know that Americans don’t drink out of saucers.”(Kingston) Although our experience was different, I felt a connection to her experience. We both were judged for our cultural differences. She was judged for drinking out of a saucer while I was judged for my food. After this incident, my identity started to

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