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Me and the English
Language
by Lowell Uda
The
oral test was simple—saying
thumb, thimble
and three
correctly—to learn
whether I, a Sansei or
third generation
Japanese-American in
Hawai'i, was English
standard material. I was
lucky because, my Nisei
or second generation Mom
and Dad didn’t speak to
us kids in Japanese, and
they didn’t force us to
attend Japanese language
school.
Japanese-American
children whose parents
spoke Japanese in the
home had trouble
pronouncing words that
included the th
sound. If I failed the
test, Mom said, I would
be pushed onto the
non-standard track that
would lead to trade
school. I would have to
attend McKinley High,
called “Tokyo High.”
“You like go da
kine bobora
school?” Mom would said.
The Japanese word
bobora meant
“country bumpkin” and
“fresh off the boat.”
If I passed the
test I’d go on the
English standard track
that led to Roosevelt
High School and then to
college. Dad finished
the ninth grade and Mom
the eighth grade, so
they wanted me, their
firstborn, to study hard
and get a college
degree. They didn’t want
me to do “pick and
shovel” or cane field
“hoe hana” work.
They wanted me to be a
professional.
Mom began preparing
me in earnest for the
dreaded English Standard
Test. She’d say, “Say th—th—thumb.”
I’d repeat, “Th—th—thumb.”
She’d say, “Okay,
now say th—th—thimble.”
I said, “Th—th—thimble.”
She’d say, “Say th—th—three.”
And I said, “T’ree.”
“Dat wrong,” Mother
said. “You going
flunk.”
“I was kidding,
Mom,” I said. “It was a
joke.”
“You t’ink dat
funny,” said Mom. “I
going tell Daddy on
you.”
Practice paid off.
When I was finally
tested, I said, “Thumb,
thimble, three”
correctly, and attended
Lincoln School. Two
years later, my sister
took the English
Standard test. We
drilled her and drilled
her. “Thumb, not t’umb,
you dummy,” I said,
coaching her. Surely she
would do as well as I,
older brother, did. But
she choked up. When the
teacher asked, holding
up her thumb,
“What is this?”
my sister said, “T'umb.”
“And this?” the teacher
went on, showing a
thimble in the palm of
her hand. My sister
said, “T'imble.” “And
how many fingers am I
holding up?” the teacher
asked. My sister said, “T’ree.”
That was it, conclusive
evidence that my sister
belonged in the
nonstandard English
school system. My sister
ended up at Lunalilo
Elementary.
I grew up terrified
of the English language,
as if the English
language were God, and a
punishing God at that.
The most shameful
moments in my life had
to do with the English
language. I'd say
something in what I
thought was my best
English and be totally
misunderstood. In great
chagrin, I’d have to
repeat or restate
myself. Was it the
strange Hawai'ian lilt in
my voice or the Island
pidgin I spoke when I
was off guard that
caused me to be
misunderstood? I often
used the pidgin stay
in place of to be
verbs. Someone would ask
me, “Where is your
brother today?” And I'd
answer, “He stay sick,”
or “He stay play hooky.”
Further, even when I
paid attention my
sentence subject didn’t
always agree in number
with the verb. “The
colors of the moon
is...” I’d say. This
tended to make me mumble
or talk as if I had bad
breath when I spoke to
someone in authority. I
never felt safe speaking
up in grade school and
high school classes.
Yet I felt that I
had much to express. I
knew I was so full of
love and beauty and hope
and wanted to let all of
it out. On the other
hand, I knew from
experience that I had to
be silent or be subject
to overt rejection. I
felt ugly, angry and
unacceptable, rejected
for my very roots. I
believed I should not
express my thoughts or
feelings if I could not
speak or write properly.
Surely, I thought,
attending college on the
mainland United States
was out of my reach.
At the University
of Hawai'i I met a
teacher who changed my
expectations. I don't
remember her name. She
praised my writing in
spite of the errors. She
said there was a lot
I wanted to express.
What I felt and thought
mattered. I did not have
to be perfect to be
valued and to express my
thoughts and feelings
passionately.
What a gift she
gave me! My experiences
counted, even the most
painful. There was
meaning to my life. I
could express my anger
and longing—what I felt
and thought—with
conviction and
enthusiasm.
The writing began
to gush out of me. My
friends in Engineering
took notice. I was
getting B's on my
compositions, while they
were getting D's and
F's.
“Can borrow your
papers?” asked one of my
friends from drafting
class.
“I don’t know,” I
said. “Why?”
“Like see da kine
dey like.”
“No copy,” I said,
handing him a couple of
my papers. “No get us in
trouble.”
“Naw, nevah,” he
said.
Later, I saw him in
the student union with
his study companions
reading my
compositions and
laughing. What was so
funny? A couple of
weeks later, this friend
of mine copied one of my
compositions and handed
it in to his English
instructor.
It was a dim move.
Didn't he know that the
instructors teaching
freshman composition
shared office space and
talked to each other? My
friend was hauled into
the Dean's Office and
disciplined.
“I warned you not
to do that,” I said to
him. He said, “You t'ink
you so smart....” And
the separation between
us—between me and my
cohorts—widened. They
began calling me
“banana,” yellow on the
outside and white on the
inside, and “haole
fight,” fighting for the
white culture. They
angered me. I stopped
sharing even my answers
to math and engineering
problems. And I began
plotting my escape to
the mainland United
States.
I grew up unaware
that English standard
schools were established
in the 1920s long before
I was born, to separate
haole—white—kids
whose parents couldn’t
afford to send them to
private schools like
Punahou
from especially the
Japanese kids who spoke
pidgin or substandard
English. The haole
parents feared these
Japanese kids would
pollute their children’s
superior English and
impede their academic
success.
The dual public
school system appeased
the haole parents, but
for those overseeing the
shape and development of
the Hawai'ian society
between the First and
Second World Wars the
dual system was only a
partial solution.
With the growing
threat of an ambitious
Japan in the Far East,
the challenge for the
overseers was to instill
American values into the
Japanese kids—to
Americanize them. The
greatest obstacle to
this end, the overseers
believed, was the
Japanese language
schools, where Japanese
children were taught not
only the Japanese
language, but also
Japanese cultural and
ethical values. They
feared that these
teachings would
strengthen the Japanese
children’s allegiance to
Japan and weaken their
allegiance to the United
States of America and
should be suppressed.
The myth was that if a
Japanese child spoke
proper English, it was a
sure sign that he had
become a proper and
loyal American.
While my English was not
perfect, I never doubted
that I was an American.
Yet I spent my freshman
year at the University
of Hawai'i feeling like a
fearful and confused
baby. Caught between
cultures, in limbo,
slowly losing connection
with the Japanese
language and culture and
far from confident with
the English language and
the American culture, I
began asking, Who am I?
What am I called to do?
By the end of my
freshman year I had won
a Hawai'i Sugar Planters
Association scholarship
which allowed me to
matriculate at the
University of Utah in
Salt Lake City as a
chemical engineering
major. But I had come to
love the English
language and began to
write stories, articles
and poems. After a
couple of years I
dropped my scholarship
and switched to English.
I wrote about the
challenge of Sputnik for
The Utah Chronicle,
the student newspaper. I
published
autobiographical fiction
and personal essays in
The Pen, the
student literary
magazine, and became the
prose editor. I
continued to study
writing in graduate
school and eventually
returned to Hawai'i to
teach English at the
University of Hawai'i.
I was “a local boy
who made good.” I
remember calling roll my
first class, the palm
leaves rattling so
familiarly outside the
window. I was home at
last. I came upon the
name spelled T‑h‑o‑m‑a‑s
and pronounced it with a
“th” instead of T like
“T omas.”
"Th omas Araki," I
called out. "Hold up
your hand. Th omas?"
For years, I had to
watch myself: thumb,
thimble, and three. But
T omas, not Th omas.
I have come to
embrace my location in
life with roots in two
cultures, the Japanese
and the haole, or maybe
I should count four
cultures, the Native
Hawai'ian, which raised
my mother, and the
Mormon, in which I was
baptized. All were a
gift and blessing. All
have nurtured and
challenged me, and
continue to make me who
I am.
After overthrowing Queen
Liliuokalani in 1893,
the United States
annexed the Territory of
Hawai'i. “Those
overseeing the shape and
development of Hawai'i”
between the World Wars
were the Big Five, an
oligarchy of
multi-million dollar
corporations. The Big
Five consisted of Castle
& Cooke, Alexander &
Baldwin, C. Brewer &
Co., American Factors,
and Theo H. Davis & Co.
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