Mute In An English-Only World Summary

In Chang Rae Lee's essay “Mute in an English-only world”, Lee discusses his and his mom's journey with English. Lee explains how when he was born in South Korea and grew up in new jersey and talks about the annoyance and anger that many restaurants owned by foreigners had to deal with when the new 50/50 law took place. The 50/50 law required that half of any commercial sign in a language other than English had to be in English. Lee's mom, who is an immigrant to the united states, could only speak a little bit of English and not that well. Lees's perspective of English was mostly making fun of it and being unserious while his mom was humiliated about English and was serious and strict about English. Lee found himself teaching, translating,

Language made me feel imperfect and impacted me when I was pretty much speaking broken Arabic. It was like a person learning a new language. Whenever I would talk to my family back home I would only understand some of the ways and vice versa. Aunties talking to me and most of the time wouldn't understand a word that they were saying. In Libya and most other arab countries, we have a dialect, which means that it's informal Arabic. I would always get confused and say “Didn't that word mean kitchen? Why is there more than one word for it?!” you could imagine how hard it would be for me, who only knew “broken Arabic”, to talk a person who speaks Arabic, let alone another dialect. The hardest part was I wasn't able to understand or say what I wanted to say in my

It was like I knew and understood Arabic but it couldn't understand me. All I wanted to do was have a simple, nice conversation with them without my stuttering and trying to find words and translate to myself everything I was saying. When they started talking to me about food or whatever they were talking about, I completely blanked out and lost all the words I had, all the language I had, in English and Arabic. It was like there was no way for me to explain my favorite food in any language. Sitting there with a blank expression on my face, not knowing what to say. I could feel all of their eyes on me, thinking of what to say to me. My aunt said to me in Arabic “Say whatever you want to say in any language you want.” I thought to myself I might as well speak gibberish at this point. I spoke about my favorite food and also how I felt about my broken Arabic. I also talked about how I sometimes didn't understand them and spoke broken Arabic. After my dad translated my short rant about food and Arabic, I finally felt like they understood me when I saw the expressions on their faces. After all of that, all we could respond with was laughter. The whole thing was light-hearted and funny. I look back and I realized how much I have improved and can actually speak and understand Arabic fast