When you uproot your entire life and move to another country where they do not speak your native language, you are faced with these fears on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis. I am extremely self-conscious and hyper aware of other people's reactions to my actions. Chalk it up to years of being the mediating middle child. While this makes me very compassionate, empathetic, and eager to please, (and so modest!) it also makes me susceptible to being taken advantage of and I often find myself wantonly sacrificing my needs in the name of simplicity. I'd rather suck it up and take the misery myself than rock the boat too much.
I am slowly starting to see that this is neither helpful nor fair and above all, it's not sustainable. What I find most is surprising is the catalyst of this shift: I think a lot of this change was spurred by language.
As a language teacher and lover of languages/culture in general, I have always been fascinated by the idea of linguistic relativity: that our language affects the way we think, act, and perceive the world around us. Take the Chinese word "guanxi" for example. It's usually translated to "network" or "connection" but it's more so the concept of the dynamics of relationships between people and how your behavior can build or destroy them. Linguistic relativism suggests that part of the reason the Chinese are a collectivist culture is because they have words like this that focus on the work of maintaining many relationships. Not surprisingly, we don't have this type of word in Western languages, where cultures are much more individualistic. We can have a chicken or the egg conversation about this all day, but the idea of linguistic relativity states that the word happened first and the actions followed.
I have an interesting example of how this came about in my own life recently: I just finished my first year with Kedge/CEL and we had to validate our final paystubs before everyone went on summer vacation. I noticed that I still had not been paid for a few jobs I did in the last couple of months. I had written several very polite emails about the problem, in my loveliest French, and everyone assured me that it would be addressed tout de suite. Two months later, nothing was fixed and I was annoyed.
One afternoon, the coordinator, Georgina, called me into her office to see if we could get this matter resolved. She prefers to speak Spanish with me, probably because it's her native language and she knows that I speak it and she doesn't speak English. She started showing me her records of when I worked and what I had been paid for and I noticed right away that she had not written down all of the dates I had told her about. My Spanish is rusty to say the least so I was forced to speak in somewhat simple, direct and clipped sentences. Faltan dos días aquí. Con las otras fechas, son 8 horas en total. I also noticed that they hadn't included my hours for these language dossiers that I had corrected. Every three dossiers was equivalent to an hour of work. Tengo también 10 dossiers, entonces tres horas a pagar. She tried to come at me with this, "Are you sure it wasn't four for an hour?" madness and I quickly replied with, No. Tres. Estoy segura. At the end of the conversation, she had confirmed the 11 hours I was missing and sent a corrected version of my payslip to the administrators.
Never in my life have I stood up for myself like that. Normally, there is a lot of "Well, I'm not really sure" and "Could we take a look at that again?" and "I could be wrong" and "I'm sorry to be such a hassle!" but there was none of that this time. I was calm, clear and I cut right to the chase. I have no doubt that some of my previous hang-ups were compounded by socialization (women who stand up for themselves are bitchy and demanding while men are go-getters) and maybe a bit of feeling too young to be taken seriously, but I find this language factor to be really interesting: If you don't have enough words to mince, you have to get right to the point.
You often hear polyglots say that they are different people depending on the language they're speaking. I suppose I always believed that to be at least somewhat true but this incident has convinced me. Could this conversation have played out the same way if we had had it in French? In English? Maybe. But my gut says that my brain was working so hard on making the right words come out in Spanish that I didn't have any mental energy left to be (excessively?) polite and accommodating like I normally am. On top of that, Spanish is a significantly less... verbose... language than, say, French. It is inherently more direct. Is this another reason why it was so easy for me to get right down to it while speaking in Spanish? Possibly...
Moral of the story: being multilingual has surprising, and in some cases, life-changing side effects. You simply can't underestimate the power of words.
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