I thought that by coming to Chinese speaking countries, I would be freed from my role of translator, communicator, and interlocutor in my Tower of Babel. I thought I found a section of the tower where I could rejoice in being lost among the cacophony of Mandarin spoken and yelled around me and not have to understand or even worse, interpret. I was wrong. I found out that I can translate even if I don’t speak the local tongue. Hence, the princess of the Tower of Babel remained the communicator even outside of her comfort zone.

On my first day in Taiwan, I was taking a walk in the city of Chai-yi with my group. I stopped by a fruit and vegetable seller on the street to buy bananas and cherry tomatoes. I asked Claire, our native Taiwanese group member, to ask the seller if I could buy just half a bag of cherry tomatoes because I didn’t want the whole bag. The woman was speaking to Claire in Taiwanese, a language Claire doesn’t speak well. I understood what the woman was saying just by her gestures. She pointed at me and and said that I was capable of eating the entire bag of cherry tomatoes. Claire was surprised that I knew what the woman was saying. With so much international travel under my belt (Taiwan is country # 46), I’ve learned a lot about reading people’s gestures and facial expressions.

A similar thing occurred to me in a taxi in Berlin in October. I was with two Germans I had met in Berlin. The tall blond German man was speaking to the taxi driver and I understood what their joke was about. (The German guy was too tall to fit comfortably into the front seat of the taxi.) My knowledge of German consists of maybe 20 or so words and I sound even more barbaric than Tarzan when I try to spreche in deutsch. My Chinese is a lot worse. It barely exists.

When I was with S. in the hospital in Taiwan, I was surprised to find myself translating between the doctors’ Chinese-style English to Sergei, who vacillated between Russian and English in his apertures of consciousness. After about five days of being in the hospital, I was tired of translating, communicating with the insurance company, being the go-between with the doctors, S’s mother, and our local hosts. I didn’t want to be the translator anymore. It’s tiring enough to be the communicator in languages that I do maneuver. It’s utterly frustrating to have that role in a language in which one is totally lost.

I called my mom to tell her about how S was doing and told her about my own fatigue and then I realized that I got myself into the situation. I did not have to volunteer to communicate, I just did it because I saw that there was a need and I filled it. Aware of my complicity in my feeling annoyed, I handed over the insurance papers and other communication matters to another team member. Even though I thought I could do a better job handling the documents and negotiations with the insurance companies and other people involved with S’s hospitalization, I needed to lift that responsibility off my shoulders. When S’s Mom came from the US, I was overjoyed to unload all the responsibility and papers on to her. I saw her shock at the complexity of her son’s medical situation and payment problems with the Taiwanese hospital and I felt sorry for her having to handle all the mess. But it wasn’t my problem. That was a great lesson for me. Even if I think I am the most capable person to handle a situation, I can walk away or lessen my load. I am not that important that something can’t happen just if I am not involved.

After freeing myself from hospital duty, I noticed that I retreated even further from being the translator. On one day, a Rotarian was speaking about the big golden Buddha statue we were passing on the freeway and asked Larry if he had seen the big Golden Buddha statue the previous week in another county that we had visited. Larry thought the Rotarian was talking about the Tian Tan Buddha on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. They both continued to talk about the magnificence of the golden Buddha. However, each one of them was talking about different golden statues. I just observed their conversation and didn’t react. I didn’t point out that they were not talking about the same statue. A similar thing happened on another occasion with another team member and our host in Tainan. I was surprised at my own non-reaction. It was funny to observe myself. On previous occasions, I always alerted people to their divergent conversations. I figured that as long as their miscommunication was not super important, I didn’t have to step in.

The source of this retreat from being communicator extraordinaire has its roots. I started my New Year in Paris. One of my first discoveries of 2008 was my noticeable imperfection in French. Compared to my trip to France in October 2007, I could hear a slight accent in my French and I was taking longer to think of words to form sentences. I could hear my own mistakes. Walking in the cold from the Latin Quarter to the Chatelet Les Halles subway station, I was crossing the Seine River and thinking about my French decline. I used to speak almost flawless French and could pass as native. Not having been in France for seven years and having studied Serbo-Croatian and Portuguese in that period of time made my French deteriorate just a little bit. Those morsels of linguistic mistakes were hard to take at first. I am used to jaws dropping and heads turning when I speak the language of Prevert, Maupassant, and Hugo. I’ve been at parties where French speaking people tell their other French friends to listen to how good “this American” can parle. Instead of other people’s heads turning to be awed by my speaking abilities, I was turning my head to myself, wondering what happened. With the aromas of the creperies to my right, I again surprised myself by realizing that this was actually a good thing. Yes, being less than “WOW” was a step in the right direction. A good way to start the New Year.

Imperfection was good, at least in my case.

Over the summer, while I was revising my book, it became clear to me that my language abilities manifested as a sort of survival mechanism to make up for my deficient eye sight and the need for a communicator in my family, where both of my parents are half-deaf and my Dad speaks poor English. I acquired many languages to be able to communicate for my family and to excel in the world. Through the process of writing the book, I saw that I have been a translator all my life and I don’t like it. I don’t want to lose my language abilities but I don’t want them to identify me. I don’t like it when people think of me as the girl who speaks seven languages and ask me tons of questions about how I learned all those tongues. I speak many languages and that’s it. Period. I don’t need my ego to balance upon my linguistic abilities. When one is too attached to one’s talents or attributes, bad things happen. Models get old and get wrinkles and stop being the cover girls. Athletes have injuries and get old and can’t play anymore. Their departure from the spotlight can brutally injure their egos. Some people descend into drugs and depression.

We can be strong in our professions or hobbies without those activities becoming us. I speak languages but the languages are not who I am.

Letting myself relax and not be a pristine behoaving lder of all of the rules of each language is a positive step. So what if I am making mistakes? I am not translating peace treaties at the United Nations, nor would I want to.

When I saw how I didn’t jump to tell Larry and the Rotarian that they were not in fact talking about the same Buddha, I realized that my realization about my imperfect French was having good repercussions in my life. Not only am I comfortable with being weaker in French, my translator function is no longer working on auto-pilot. I can turn it off and on as I please.

Now, that’s a relief. The princess can leave the Tower of Babel and see other pastures. I am reinventing myself. Who am I now? I am still creating that.

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