Archipelago

By Christine Kindberg

The other day I was trying to put up a notice on a community bulletin board in a café. I asked a café employee who was standing by the drink machine if my poster needed to be approved before I put it up. Just before I’d walked up to her, the woman was speaking to her coworker in Spanish, dishrag on her hip, but then she switched to English to ask me how she could help. My question was out of the ordinary enough that she was stumped for how to answer. She turned to her coworker and switched back to Spanish to ask her if she knew. “Para colgar un anuncio…” I said in Spanish, hoping it might help their confusion if I used the language they seemed most comfortable with. The looks they gave me were even more blank than before, as if my words wouldn’t compute—not when they were coming from me: a pale, blue-eyed American in an American suburb.

What those women didn’t know—what no one can tell just by looking at me—is that I’ve been fluent in Spanish since I went to kindergarten. How would they know I was born in Peru and was raised in Chile and in Panama? Even if I carried my passport on my sleeve, one glance at the US passport cover wouldn’t tell them anything.

When I was in sixth grade, our classroom held a history and geography bee to review the unit we’d just learned. I was in Kentucky, a year of transition for our family, sandwiched between Chile and Panama. I think the question was, “What is the geographic term for a group of islands?” I stepped forward, eager to gain points for my team. I knew this one. But the word that dropped from my brain onto my tongue was archipiélago—in Spanish. Even though we’d studied the unit in English, I was in a classroom where Midwestern English would have been foreign enough. Archipiélago. I associated it with the islands around the Straits of Magellan, where we’d visited fuzzy baby penguins on our family road trip a few months before we left Chile. The whole class was staring at me, wondering why I was silent if I knew the answer. I knew the word in English was close, but was it the same? And how was it pronounced in English: AR-chie-pe-la-go? A r-KEY-pe-la-go? Ark-ah-PE-la-go?

Spanish spelling doesn’t lie like words in English. In Spanish I didn’t need to be afraid of sinkholes of fossilized spelling that has nothing to do with the pronunciation of the word. I debated stepping back, pretending I didn’t know, sitting down and disappointing my team. If I said what I knew, they might laugh at me for pronouncing the word incorrectly. Or the teacher might consider the answer incorrect anyway, if I answered in the wrong language. But I wanted to prove I knew the answer, even if I didn’t know the word. “Archipiélago,” I said, rushing through the slight curl of the r, the marked stress on the e, the almost swallowed g. The teacher blinked and nodded. The answer was right. No one noticed I’d said it in a different language.

Being bilingual feels to me like my brain has two tracks. I can usually communicate something just as easily in Spanish as in English—can jump tracks without thinking about it, depending on the circumstances. Whether the conversation I overheard on the train is in Spanish or English, or whether a poster on the side of a building has an ñ or not, my brain unconsciously selects the track that I need to process the words without me having to think about what language it is. More often than I’d like, I’ll try to say something in Spanish and the words will catch like the track got rusty. Sometimes, after a full day of editing and speaking and writing emails in Spanish at work, I’ll have trouble switching back to wish an English-speaking coworker good night. I get stuck in the no man’s land between languages, unable to think of the word I need in English or in Spanish. My brain—and the conversation— grind to a mid-sentence halt. I’m left beating my way through the bushes back to one track or the other, grasping at air with nothing but wordless images and emotions that I can’t convey.

A friend from college who was curious about my upbringing once asked me what my heart language is. I had to think about it. English is what we spoke at home, the language my parents insisted we use when speaking to them, the language they wanted us to read in for fun, so we wouldn’t lose it even though we used Spanish everywhere else. Spanish was the language in which I memorized verses for Sunday school and in which I learned poems for school presentations, the language in which I learned to play and fight with friends on the playground. When my brother and I were growing up, we settled everything via “cachipún,” and only later learned it’s called “Rock, Paper, Scissors” in English.

How to answer this friend? Does picking one language deny the significance of the other language in my life? When I go to a church that sings in Spanish, my soul feels like it’s crossed a desert and reached an oasis. But I’ve chosen to attend an English-speaking church instead of the Spanish-speaking alternatives around me.

“Both,” I ended up telling my friend.

Now I’d say my heart language is Spanglish. There’s a part of me that relaxes and expands when I can switch language tracks at will, grabbing whatever word is closest to mind at that moment. It’s something that I can only really do when I’m around other people who, like me, are bilingual.

There are times when it’s easy for me to think of all the hard things I’ve lived through because I grew up as a TCK. It was rough on me that I had to be the new kid so many times, surrounded by strangers and by a completely foreign environment, especially in fifth grade…and seventh grade…and eighth grade…and twelth grade. But then I think about all the people I never would have met, the conversations I never would have had, if I hadn’t grown up speaking two languages. I think of my monolingual friends here in the US, people I most likely wouldn’t have been able to joke around with over a table with halffilled beer glasses, unless I spoke English. I think of my recent trip to Argentina, and the people who invited me into their homes and shared a mate with me, welcoming me as a foreigner in a way they wouldn’t have been able to if I hadn’t been able to speak Spanish. And I think of the conversation I had today with one of my coworkers, switching into Spanish and into English and then back again, little caring what the “correct” word was, because we were communicating just fine. It was like language was building a bridge from island to island.

Christine Kindberg was born in Peru and grew up in Chile, Panama, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Now she lives in the Chicago area and works as a Spanish-language editor for Tyndale House Publishers. She recently published her first novel, a young adult historical fiction titled The Means That Make Us Strangers. You can find her on Instagram @Christine.Kindberg.