Free Happy Birthday or Whatever by Annie Choi

English because they only had a small working knowledge of the language—hello, excuse me, thank you, how do I get to the 101-freeway? By the time I was born, my parents had been living in the States for five years, and they had found ways to work around their limited English. As a chemist, my father spoke and wrote in the international language of elements, compounds,and formulas. My mother had taken English classes at a community college, but she didn’t practice her skills much because she sought out other Korean immigrants. She didn’t need English to buy groceries or drop off dry cleaning or get a haircut—merchants in Los Angeles’s growing Korean community offered goods and services at prices lower than their English-speaking counterparts with none of the embarrassing hassle of staring blankly at labels and faces. Though their English has improved considerably since immigrating thirty-five years ago, my parents still struggle with the language today. Whenever I watch a movie with my mother, she tugs on my sleeve every ten minutes and asks me to translate, not into Korean, since I’m incapable of that, but into a simpler version of English.
    â€œWhat happen?”
    â€œLeonardo DiCaprio is in love with the girl, and other guy doesn’t like it.”
    â€œWhich one Leno Decrap?”
    â€œThe short, blond one—yellow hair—with the big head.”
    â€œWhy that man tie Big Head to table? Why they fight?”
    â€œBecause he’s in love with the girl, too.”
    â€œI not understand—why they fight now ? Boat sink, who care? Everyone drown and they fight? This movie so silly.”
    â€œMom, shh, there’s still another hour.”
    â€œHour? Oh my gosh, how? Boat sink in ten, fifteen minute!”
    Befuddled by the rules of English and all of its illogical exceptions, my parents figured that English should be something that my brother and I learned in elementary school from trained professionals. The rest of the family shared this sentiment as well. My cousins, who knew only a mouthful of English words when they immigrated, were dropped into the American school system, and they figured it all out eventually,
    My mother tells me that as I child I was shy at first, but after I warmed up I was quite chatty. I talked to my relatives in Korean, played Korean games, and sang Korean songs. Even my stuffed animals spoke Korean to each other. My first word was ohm-ma, or “mommy.” Korean was what I knew. But then I entered elementary school and suddenly what I knew was not what everyone else knew.
    On the first day of kindergarten, my mother took me to my classroom and handed me my lunch. I sat down, ate it, and in five minutes I was ready to go home. When Mrs. Smith began talking, I realized that not only was my mother nowhere to be found, but also I had no idea what this stranger was saying. Just like a few other children, I started wailing, “Where’s my mommy?” but I cried it in Korean. Of course, no one understood, but Mrs. Smith figured out quickly that I didn’t want to be there. I wept, sputtered, and sniffed and I kept on looking at the door, expecting my mother to rescue me like she always did whenever I had a major freak-out. When Mrs. Smith bent over and put her arm around me, I screamed. Mrs. Smith was shaped like a pear and had tight dark curls that set off her pale, ghostly face. She wore a large silver stopwatch around her neck and had long purple fingernails that curled menacingly. This was not someone I wanted comfort from; I wanted someone who smelled like garlic and sesame oil and had delicate, thin fingers with trimmed nails.
    Mrs. Smith took me to a room with long tables where young children squirmed on one side and adults sat patiently on the other. There were pictures, blocks, and spiral notebooks littered between them. The school administrators gave an IQ test to every incoming kindergartener—in English. Even