Lowering Your Voice to Strengthen Your Argument

OR HOW I LOSE MY VOICE DAY IN AND DAY OUT -- AND I'M NOT SURE I LIKE THAT

I have heard it said that "lowering your voice strengthens your argument" (Lebanese proverb). So losing your voice must be even better, right? Well, I'm going to have to agree with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when he said, "The human voice is the organ of the soul". I need my voice to project myself into the world. No voice, no soul.

Problem is, I seem to keep losing this precious tool. It happens in small ways. Like last night, when I spent over 2 hours talking to one of my best friends in America. It happens in large ways too. The English slang I use now is not the slang I came to China with, the enunciation I love in my voice is fraying at the edges, and to top it all off, my English spelling has become a daily blackboard embarrassment.

Whenever I enter a new language community, the presentation of my voice shifts very quickly, and very unconsciously. I can never hang on to words or gestures for too long -- whatever is most commonly used, I, without fail, begin to imitate. The worst part, or funniest, is that I don't seem to notice the shift until someone points it out or it gets me into trouble. After spending part of every high school summer in upstate New York, I always came back home to Maryland with slang nobody understood. After living with a British family for a few weeks, I tried, in broken English and rusty French, to ask a Brussels waiter for a table for one for dinner. I ended up at the bar, very hungry, with a piping hot cup of black tea. Most recently in China, I now end many of my informal sentences with the word "hotness", a Dan-ism.

Not only must I lose my slang, I seem to be losing my enunciation skills too. Singing and acting have made me very aware of how I can play with the pitch, intensity, volume, and speed of my voice. Now I have trouble maintaining general pitch arcs in my spoken English (i.e. at the end of a sentence, raising your voice for a question or lowering it for a complete thought). All my students speak in complete monotone. Plus, Chinese cares more about word pitch (i.e. tones) than sentence arc pitch. Both of these trends are rubbing off on me. Lastly, all the fellow American here, including me, speak "ESL-teacher English" which is slow, simple, and rhythmically jarring. Goodbye theatre voice.

Did you know that it is possible to lose your ability to spell? Pinyin, the spelling system which puts roman letters to Chinese sounds, has messed with all my use of vowels in English. Did you know that English and Chinese have cognates (words that sound similar or the same across languages, but may or may have the same meaning)? Take for example the sound "joe". Joe is a name, right? In Chinese, the "joe" sound is spelled zhou, and one of its meanings is wheat/grain porridge. Or let's take a more controversial sound, the "n-word". A sound no one should ever make, right? In Chinese, the "n-word" sound is spelled nei ge, and its meaning is that one (as opposed to this one).

When I came to China, I also lost something even more dear, my ability to speak the hegemonic language of the community. I know speaking it is a gift. Many people in the States struggle with our low tolerance of non-English speaking in schools and on the job. My privilege in one place is my oppression in another. But I'd take China any day. In America, people pick on others simply because of their non-native accents. In China, people go out of their way to help me speak. They don't make fun of my wrong tones or absurdly small vocabulary. They make sure to prompt me with words or gestures so that I can answer affirmatively or negatively, and not have to remember the difficult vocabulary myself. Would these small kindnesses happen in America? Would a MacDonald's or Starbucks worker let me take three times as long to order my food as everyone else? Would the other people in line? In America, would people treat me with respect and dignity if all I could do in English was count and say "this one" or "that one"?

Before China, I took pride in my academic writing and verbal stage presence. Today, if I can buy a few items at a store without help, I feel like a rock star. Every day that I feel positive -- it is simply amazing how much your mental attitude and current emotions make or break your ability to speak a second language -- I can say a little more, with a bit more confidence and clarity. But I know I will never bring myself up to speed in Chinese. This is the plight of the second language learner, especially those of us who start late in life -- Chinese (almost definitely) will never be my mother tongue, will never be the sounds I make to make meaning our of all of life's (potential) meaninglessness. Chinese is the sound I make to get by, and maybe one day to express myself, not to understand every and all micro- and macro- trends and details life has and will throw at me.

This "lowering" of my voice, I pray, will help me strength my "argument" -- though what this argument is I'm still in the dark about. I can't say I won't miss my strong, loud voice, but I hope that it meets me on the other side of this fellowship, unscathed and perhaps all the better for having a two-year vacation.