The Accidental Polyglot

What do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. Three languages? Trilingual. How about one language? Not monolingual, just American. As English speakers and inhabitants of the only superpower left, Americans are spoiled when it comes to learning and speaking other languages. A pity, given America's past and ongoing history as a country of immigrants. Instead of seeing the wave of immigrants as an opportunity to learn a different language, many Americans blame them for not learning English fast enough and speaking it properly. When traveling, say, in Europe, Americans complain that the French people do not want to speak English even though they know how. Another lost opportunity.

There's no better time to start learning another language than when you're very young. When I was growing up in East Java, I heard at least five languages spoken at the same time. I lived in my paternal grandparents' home in downtown Surabaya. My grandpa and grandma knew only the Hokchia language -- a close relative of the Fuzhou language in northern Fujian, China – and spoke it exclusively with my father and his nine brothers and sisters. They sent my father and his siblings to Chinese schools post World War II; consequently they spoke Mandarin with each other, with a heavy dose of low Javanese and the bazaar Malay commonly spoken among the ethnic Chinese community in Java. By the time my siblings and I entered school in the 70s, the Suharto regime had closed all Chinese schools, banned the usage of Chinese language in public, and constrained the celebration of Chinese festivals to private homes. As a result, my generation went to Indonesian schools and speak mainly Bahasa Indonesia. And so it was. We spoke bazaar Malay with the brothers and sisters; proper Bahasa Indonesia with the teachers and civil servants; Javanese with school friends, the housekeepers; and bazaar Malay with a smattering of Mandarin with our parents, aunties and uncles. With the grandparents, we spoke the little Hokchia that we knew and sign language.

My father and mother have nine brothers and sisters each, and we had to properly call the aunties and uncles in the Hokchia language. In Chinese culture, paternal aunties and uncles are called differently from the maternal aunties and uncles. The husband of your father's elder sister is not just uncle, he is "father's sister's husband". The wives of your father's brothers have ranks: father's big brother's wife, father's 2^nd brother's wife, father's third brother's wife, and so on.

It's amazing that the past four generations of my family have each been speaking a different main language. My grandparents spoke only Hokchia throughout their lives, my parents mainly speak Mandarin (although they also speak Hokchia and Indonesian), my generation speaks mainly Indonesian, and my children speak mainly English. Speaking a different language is a way to understand another culture, and it is probably one of the greatest gifts that parents can give to their children.

You May be Gay, but I am Gay-er

Many times people have asked me, usually after they get comfortable, "How is it that a Chinese looking guy like you have Gerdyman as a last name?" One confessed that she had expected the usual suspects as answers: I was adopted by German or Scandinavian parents after escaping a civil war somewhere in the Far East, I changed it after living in the USA to sound cool, etc. The truth is a little bit complicated.

I am Indonesian by birth and Chinese by ethnicity. Up till my father's generation (he is now 68), all Chinese people in Indonesia were also considered citizens of China. In the 1960s, economic envy and political pressure from the Army drove the Sukarno government to pass laws to force Chinese to stop trading in the rural areas, to choose Indonesian citizenship, and to change their names to anything but Chinese names.

Many Chinese Indonesians (Orang Tionghoa) decided to go to the ancestral homeland (hui guo) in Mainland China rather than suffer the indignities of discrimination. This was helped by the heavy campaign of the communist party to persuade Overseas Chinese (huaqiao) to return, hoping for foreign exchange after failed economic policies. The vast majority, my father included, did not see a future in Red China, decided to stay, choose Indonesian citizenship, and adopt a different name.

Since my family lived in East Java, naturally he looked for Javanese sounding names. Wanting to preserve the family name GE (Hokkian, pronounced like "gay" in English), he combined it with the Javanese suffix -diman, with an "r" to smooth things out. Hence, the family name Gerdiman was born. English was starting to replace Dutch as the cool foreign language of the archipelago, and so he replaced "i" with the Anglo "y", ending with Gerdyman, whereas his brothers and sisters all kept Gerdiman.

Prior to becoming a US citizen last October in 2006, I considered going back to the old family name. I weighed the costs and benefits and finally decided against it. I live in the San Francisco Bay area, and I can't imagine introducing myself as, "Hi, I am GE (Gay!)". Nothing against the gay people - my daughter's godfather is one - but I like to keep my sexual orientation clear and straight (pun intended). My son Joseph was born in December after I became a citizen. I soon realized I made a wise decision. You see, his middle name is Benjamin, and we often call him Joe Ben for short. My decision may have spared my son from future playground teasing: "Look, Joe Ben Gay is here, can you rub me, I just hurt my foot!". (Ben Gay is the popular brand of a pain relief ointment here in America).

Well, now I have an interesting story to tell. When I interview for a new job, the company interviewers expect to see a tall, blond guy. They almost always are startled to see a short Chinese guy walking in. It's a nice ice breaker. And with my gay friends I always joke: "You may be gay, but I am GE-er!"