786: It's a Game Show!
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Okay, so we're going to try something different today, something we have never tried on our show. And I got the idea for this from a conversation that I had with Jayoung Fan. Jayoung did a story for our show a little while back, and she's not somebody who's normally on the radio, she's a magazine writer. And so when time came for her to record her script, she sat in the studio with one of our producers, Diane Wu, who had her read. And you know, it's a weird thing to sound like relaxed and natural while reading words off a page. It had totally soundproof room, hearing your voice on headphones. And Diane did with Jayoung what we always do, she'd tell her, you know, like, go back and do that sentence, a little looser or, you know, underlined in this word or whatever. And that just hits something in Jayoung in this way that doesn't usually happen. Having a fellow Asian American who looks exactly like me coached me through that process. Hearing exactly how much more American she sounded than me, it made me think anew about my voice and the way I speak English. Okay, I have a bunch of things to say to that. First of all, this idea that you and Diane look exactly the same, that's racist. You do not. Fair point, fair point. And then it's interesting to me that you perceived it as. Jayoung has thought a lot about the way that she speaks English and the way that others do. In fact, when she was seven years old and she came to the United States from China, this was in the 90s in a mostly white part of New Haven. And it was just understood, she said, that it was her job in the family to learn to speak perfect, accent-less English as soon as possible. And my mom and some of her peers had said, "Oh, you have this very narrow window in which your tongue can adjust the new language or not because Chinese is so different than English." And I really am, because I was seven or eight at the time, I really didn't even think of it as in the brain, I thought about it as the rigidity of my tongue, and I was so afraid of my tongue literally hardening in my mouth and not being able to contort to this language. And I think it immediately becomes a test of your ability to survive and thrive in this new environment. How well you can speak without an accent. Right, like I've been told, okay, you're going to be living in water for the rest of your life. Well, the better you can swim, I better get a few different kinds of strokes under my belt. And when you view that whole attitude now, how do you see it? The adult me doesn't necessarily endorse the goal of speaking accent-less English and the need to fit into the perfect American ideal, whatever that is. But that was what my parents thought was necessary to protect me in a foreign country. Diane did the hard work of mastering the countless little subtleties of pronunciation and usage to the point where she thought she sounded more or less like native English speakers. Friends, especially white friends, told her she didn't have an accent. And when she herself had little twinges of like, oh, maybe I sound different, she shrugged
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