6 minute read
Losing My Accent
Losing My Accent,
Finding Connections Across Cultures
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By Melynda Joy Schauer
My experience of becoming a third-culture kid in a missionary family and learning to code-switch are as intertwined as a kudzu vine and a pine tree; it’s hard to untangle the Asian influence from my Southern roots.
I had no idea that I spoke with a thick Southern accent until I was eleven and attended an orientation with other families who were also moving overseas as missionaries. An older boy from a northern state told me I sounded “so Southern” and asked where I was from.
“Alabama?” he asked with disdain when I answered. From his reaction I immediately realized there were people from other places who looked down on my home state and would judge me purely based on how I sounded or where I was from. No one had ever commented on my accent or made me feel uncomfortable about being from Alabama before then, probably because I’d lived in rural Alabama for my whole life.
Somewhere in the first two and a half years that my family lived in the Southeast Asian metropolis of Macau, my Southern accent disappeared. I attended an English-speaking school with a handful of other students, but many of them spoke fluent English as their second or third language. My first exposure to code-switching was watching my Brazilian friends speak perfect English to me, change into Portuguese with each other, then speak Cantonese to the bus driver without missing a beat.
I remember sitting in our seventeenth-floor apartment in Macau, watching our treasured home videos that we carried with us from America and being genuinely shocked to hear the strong Southern drawl coming out of my mouth as a child. I could hear the difference in my own voice; not only was I removed from the purely American version of myself by distance, but also by the very way that I spoke.
When I was thirteen, my family moved back to our small town in Alabama for a couple of years and I distinctly recall reconnecting with a friend whom I’d last seen waving goodbye from the church hallway. She’d said somewhat forlornly, “See you in two years,” on my last Sunday at church. When we met again as incoming eighth graders, she looked stunned when I opened my mouth.
“You talk funny,” she said. It wasn’t said in a mean or derogatory way, but I realized my lack of a Southern accent set me apart from my classmates and also from the girl I had been before I moved.
Though I blended in on the outside as a white American girl with dark blonde hair and blue eyes, on the inside I felt so different. How would I ever fit into the world of American middle school? I’d spent the last few years on the other side of the planet, changing drastically, while my classmates had stayed in our same small hometown.
I learned other forms of code-switching when I entered an international boarding school in Taiwan in the tenth grade after my family moved back overseas. At fifteen, I had to learn entirely new communication and survival strategies: how to navigate the Taiwanese airport and bus system in Mandarin, a language I’d never spoken before, simply to get to my school; the spoken and unspoken rules of dorm life; and new lingo from classmates who spoke English in class and Chinese in conversation.
My international high school had its own dialect that changed slightly with each year, as teenage slang tends to morph. If I had to define it, I’d say most of us spoke English with very neutral American accents (think broadcast news reporter), with a hint of a California coastal sound, and vocabulary from multiple cultures mixed in. Even to this day, sometimes I get odd looks for the way I describe air conditioning as the “air-con,” or ask someone to “close the lights.”
I still remember the first time I understood a sentence in Mandarin during my first semester. One day after school, a new acquaintance told me in English she was so hungry, then repeated the phrase in Mandarin to a Chinese friend: “Wo hen e,” patting her stomach. I’d just learned that phrase in class, and it clicked. Slowly, over time, I picked up more Mandarin, learning how to order my favorite teas, barter to get cheaper clothes, and find my way home in a taxi.
During school breaks, I’d return to my family in Macau, where Cantonese was the common language. So we’d code-switch into using Cantonese in the markets and at the bus stop. As a family, we mainly spoke English to each other, but because my parents and brothers and I were all studying either Cantonese or Mandarin or both, we’d sometimes switch into a “Chinglish” blend to tell stories or make jokes.
Melynda Schauer 2005 Macau: Melynda, age 18, in Lim Loc Garden in Macau in November 2005.
During visits back to the States in the summertime, my younger brothers and I realized that our shared (but not fluent) Mandarin allowed us a codelanguage of our own to make observations about American culture. In a way, our unique codeswitching bonded us; it was a realm that very few completely understood the way that we did.
I’d never heard the term code-switching until I was probably in my early twenties, and I realized it described something I’d been doing for over a decade but had never defined.
Code-switching goes beyond using different languages and dialects, however; it can include the complex nonverbal communication we use when connecting with other cultures as well.
When I began college in Alabama, I had to learn just how much information to share when making new friends again. Since I didn’t understand a lot of the cultural references my peers made (I’d missed about a decade of American TV and music), I’d listen and wait for something that we had in common. When I did meet friends who had traveled or lived overseas, there was immediately a deeper connection, and our conversation moved into a more serious realm faster.
My code-switching skills came in handy not only for surviving college in America, but also in helping my journalism career. Code-switching as a TCK taught me to look for a common point of connection, something we instinctively do to connect with others and build trust in relationships. This skill is extremely helpful when conducting interviews and making phone calls for a story, as well as building relationships with co-workers.
Some may consider code-switching a way to enforce boundaries and establish “tribes” who speak and think the same way, but a deft codeswitcher can also use this communication skill to bridge gaps and overcome differences. Many thirdculture kids quickly realize it’s humbling to admit that you don’t fully fit in to one world or the other, but this can also open the door to knowing people who are very different from yourself.
My evolving stages of code-switching encouraged curiosity and a willingness to learn from people different from me, and it’s a skill that has yielded rich fruit in friendships on both sides of the planet.
Melynda Joy Schauer is an adult TCK who grew up in Macau, Taiwan, and Alabama. She now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and two sons. She keeps her international side alive by meeting international students in her city and finding the best bubble tea everywhere she goes! https://linktr.ee/ Melynda_joy
