Why I changed my mind about raising my child to be bilingual

There were two things I despised growing up as a kid in New York: Saturday mornings at Korean School; and piano lessons – the kind that required Czernys (and recitals with frilly dresses). So when my 4-yearold daughter asked to learn to speak Korean and play the piano, I panicked.

In our neighborhood, when your children reach their fourth birthday, there is something called “The Lottery” in the public school system. It feels equivalent to an arms race, and it determines where your child will go to kindergarten.

It begins with a set of school tours, which can go something like this. A chipper guide walks a set of anxious parents through the hallways. An eager mom clutches an oversize binder with printed spreadsheets, while another parent asks whether the compost in the cafeteria really gets composted. I, on the other hand, am too sheepish to admit I don’t even know what questions I’m supposed to be asking.

What I do know is that there are a lot of families vying for a spot at the bilingual Spanish school.

Some cite findings that bilingual people benefit from several cognitive, neurological and social advantages over others. But truth be told, I didn’t fully believe those claims. I knew well that there were outliers.

I am bilingual. I speak Korean and English. But I am the first to forget your name at a party, and there are plenty of problems I cannot seem to solve. Plus, there were hundreds of kids applying for an estimated three open spots, for families like us, that is, who don’t speak Spanish. So we said we would not apply.

But after a presidential election and threats to resurrect a wall, followed by the accounts of migrant children separated from their families at the border, we changed our minds. We put the bilingual school down as our first choice.

And we waited.

Here’s how it works. Your child’s name is entered into a cryptic computer system, which accounts for things like socioeconomic status, language abilities and siblings. I envision it as a mega-jackpot lottery, the kind where there are little plastic balls flying about in a tub, and a woman on prime-time television selects a few and announces the winning numbers. That’s what it feels like on school lottery day.

(In real life, a letter from the school district arrives – sent across town via the U.S. Postal Service – to inform you of your child’s placement.)

And on that fateful spring day, against all odds, we were offered a spot.

Playgrounds and supermarkets buzzed with the question that week: “Where is your kid going to kindergarten?” When we shared our news, I could hear the marvel in their voices: “It’s a unicorn! Your family has won the lottery.”

Fast-forward to the end of summer and the first week of school. My daughter was an inch taller, had learned to ride a bike and wanted to learn to tie her shoes. But she had not slept in weeks. She woke in the middle of the night sobbing in what sounded to me like gibberish. I held her and convinced her to take a deep breath.

“I can’t understand you,” I said. “See?” she lamented, “This is what it’s like when I go to school.” She was referring to what it felt like when they spoke Spanish at school and she did not.

In that moment, I remembered. I came to America as a small child from South Korea, and on my first day of school, the teachers spoke English, but I did not. While other parents wore shorts, mine showed up in suits, to prove that somewhere once, they were the educated ones who held jobs that warranted a suit or tie.

Soon there were evenings when no one could help with my homework. I remembered the faint pencil lines my mother would draw on my assignments, marking the English words she could not understand. She would thumb through her Korean-English dictionary, which was weathered and worn, and scribble in the margins the words she wanted to learn, too.

Eventually I stopped asking her for help. I was just a child, but my mother turned to me to fill in the blanks at the doctor’s office when she did not know the word for “pain.” She had me translate at the grocery store when she could not find the ingredients to cook the foods she remembered eating.

Early on, I had resolved that I was going to be the “American mom” I had always wanted. The one who made meatloaf, tied soccer cleats and sat at the kitchen table to help you with your homework, instead of working long hours and worrying constantly about how to fit in.

But it was the first week of school for my own daughter now, and I found myself waiting outside her classroom, where the other parents had gathered. They halted their rapid Spanish as I approached. They would lean in to greet me and kiss me on one cheek. I’d awkwardly wonder if I should turn my other cheek, too?

I pulled a folder from my daughter’s backpack, full of assignments that I could not understand.

For months I wondered: Had we made the wrong decision? Had we really won the lottery?

But then came the day when my daughter stopped crying. The day when I heard her singing softly to herself a song she’d learned in Spanish. The day I saw her leap happily into the arms of her teacher at school, and she did not turn back to find me. And the day she came home and asked, “Mama, why don’t I speak Korean, too?”

That’s how we found ourselves at Korean School on Saturday mornings. She explains this to me: “Mama you were born in Korea, but I was born here.” At age 5, she doesn’t quite have the words to explain and she doesn’t fully grasp the borders that we have created. What is a city or a state or a country? But when we travel, she knows enough to ask “What language do they speak here?” When she makes drawings, she mixes her crayons and her paints until she finds just the right color of brown or peachy white. Never yellow or black, because those aren’t real skin colors, she says.

Mama, she tells me, you were not born here. But you are American.

I was born here she says. I speak English and Spanish and a little bit of Korean. But I am not Korean. Or Spanish. She smiles proudly and says, in her 5-year-old voice: I am an American.