Capinpuyan| 1 Aimee Lorraine C. Capinpuyan Mr. Maximino Pulan Jr.

En 101 M02 Mar 23 The Speak English Drive I had always been good at English. No other language came more naturally to me as a child, and it was all thanks to countless afternoons spent watching the Disney Channel with my then-caretaker, Yaya Beth. When I started schooling, my teachers were delighted by my American accent and would often ask me to say or read something, anything, in English. Why? I would ask, and they would always answer, Because we want to hear your voice. I didnt see why my accent was such a big deal, but I felt like a superstar nonetheless. Grown-ups seemed to take me more seriously when I spoke to them in English. My classmates too were amused with the way I spoke. However, one can only feel special for so long before feeling left out. In grade school, I became increasingly aware that my classmates conversed with each other in Bisaya and spoke to only me in English. I was asked questions like Do you understand Bisaya? and even Are you American? I had gone from celebrity to alien in one grade level.

Capinpuyan| 2 Not wanting to feel left out, I spoke to my classmates in what Bisaya I could muster, even if it meant having to pay one peso to the Speak English Drive for every non-English word I said. My efforts succeeded only in reinforcing the language barrier that I realized now stood between me and my classmates. I would stutter, mispronounce, and misuse words. I thought myself a fool for having so much difficulty speaking a language that came so naturally to everyone else. I tried practicing my Bisaya at home, where my substandard speech felt safer in the ears of my family. Although my parents would occasionally laugh at my horrid Bisaya grammar, they were always sympathetic to my linguistic plight. My dad, trying to mock me and help me at the same time, spoke to me and my siblings purely in the dialect, and with an intentionally strong accent to match. My mom, whose dream it was for her children to be able to talk to their grandfather in perfect Chinese, smelled the opportunity before it even presented itself. Why dont you speak to them in Chinese instead? she said. Be part of the cool kids. But I didnt want to be Chinese OR part of the cool kids. I just wanted to be normal. Normalcy was a rather difficult thing to achieve, I soon realized. At home, for as long as I can remember, my family and I spoke a strange hodgepodge of the three languages. A good portion of it consisted of Chinese and Bisaya words that were conjugated as if they were in English. An everyday conversation would go, Chia-

Capinpuyan| 3 chia na ta. Wait lang, Im ilis-ing. I never noticed how silly we sounded until my uncle pointed it out. Yaya Beth had even started to speak like us, telling my brother whenever it was bath time Ali na, I will punas you. I was fully aware that what we were speaking was a linguistic homicide, and so I never dared speak this devolved version of Chinese/Bisaya/English (Chibislish?) to anyone outside my immediate family. While my mother was happy that she had managed to sneak in quite a number of Chinese words into her childrens everyday home vocabulary, my grandparents were disappointed that I did not speak Chinese fluently (I quit Chinese lessons in third grade). They didnt like that what little bits and pieces I knew from the Chinese language had to be strung together with English and/or Bisaya words. By high school I was certain of who I was, or at least who I was supposed to be according to everyone else. Around my friends, I was the Englishera who would struggle to connect with people in Bisaya. With my relatives (at least from my moms side), I was the apo who didnt finish her Chinese lessons. With my family, I was myself, whoever that was, and I was free to butcher as many languages as I wanted. Speaking in my home language liberated me from the pressures produced by the two institutions I interacted with most often: school, and family. Free from the gaze of the outside world, my siblings and I were any race we wanted to be, be it

Capinpuyan| 4 American, Chinese, or Filipino. At home, we were all three, and at the same time we werent any. Our language had somehow afforded us the power to transcend labels and to transcend societal pressures, at least when speaking to each other. By high school, all my attempts at speaking coherent Bisaya had diluted my previously American accent into a more Filipinized way of pronouncing words, even though I still could not trill my Rs. Nobody marked my accent as American anymore. Instead, people said I had slang accent, (slang kaayo ka) a hybrid of the American and the Filipino. I had grown more comfortable with Bisaya, and could carry satisfying conversations in the language. My classmates, meanwhile, had adopted a different perception of English. Whenever someone who normally speaks Bisaya would speak English, he or she would be met by char, or, very loosely put, the colloquial Bisayan combination of wow and ikaw na. It is an expression that is a reply to someone who has said something meant to give the impression of depth and meaningfulness. (Kaya pa nimo? Kayahun. Char!) English phrases, though not evidently deep or meaningful in nature, were responded to in this manner. (A typical canteen scene: Coke ray ako. Unsay imo? Ill have one iced tea. Char lang! Ininglish lugar!) English speakers were a special bunch. In a city where the majority speaks a Philippine dialect, speaking in English has come to signify intelligence, power, and wealth. English has created a distance

Capinpuyan| 5 between the educated and the uneducated, the person of authority and the subjects, the upper class and the lower class. This distance is created and reinforced by projections of the media and from various national institutions. The medias role in projecting English as a class and cultural divide is rooted in the depictions of English speakers in films, telenovelas and in variety shows. In telenovelas and in films, the members of rich families are portrayed as English speakers. In the audience participation segments of variety shows, members of the audience who mispronounce English words are poked fun at by the host. On a wider scale, national institutions also contribute in creating a distance by mystifying the language, by placing the English language on a golden pedestal and announcing, You will have a good life if you learn to speak English well. Schools, for example, enforce Speak English campaigns which involve either a form of reward for fluency in English or a punishment for speaking in a dialect apart from English. In high-paying call centers, agents are trained to speak with an American accent, thus reinforcing the idea that speaking English is a signifier of wealth. The Philippines has been subjected to these governing ideas since the beginning of English in the Philippines, and they continue to propagate in modern society. From the time of the Spaniards to the colonial American period up until this very day, foreign languages have come to connote both affluence and influence.

Capinpuyan| 6 One of the highlights of my senior year was when my friend Jason and I were chosen to be a part of the Rotary Clubs Youth City Councilors Week. This was an annual affair that the Rotary Club held in partnership with the Cagayan de Oro City government wherein juniors and seniors from both private and public high schools across Northern Mindanao were elected temporary seats in the city council and spent one week in City Hall working with their city council counterparts. The election itself is a rather peculiar process. Approximately sixty students from different schools are gathered in a room, where one student is chosen in advance per school to run for the position of Youth City Mayor. Since there are usually around twenty schools involved, there are about twenty candidates running for one mayoral seat. Each of these twenty candidates is then given five minutes to speak in an attempt to win the votes of the remaining students. Finally, the votes are determined by a show of hands, and the candidate with the most votes is elected Youth City Mayor. The candidate with the second largest votes becomes the Youth City Vice Mayor, and the next student after that gets First City Councilor, and so on and so forth. The results were that seven of the ten students with the highest votes were from private schools. The whole ten of the elected leaders gave speeches in flawless English.