Free Happy Birthday or Whatever by Annie Choi Page A

though it was clear that I didn’t understand the language, I still had to take the test to prove that I didn’t understand the language. I don’t remember many specifics of the test, but I do remember one particular question the tester asked me.
    â€œWhich picture is a steeple?”
    He held up three pictures and motioned for me to point, repeating the word steeple rather loudly, the way some people do when they talk to a non-English speaker, as if increasing volume will somehow increase comprehension. My choices were an American flag, a group of stars, the top of a church, and a tree. I chose the flag. Even if they had asked the question in Korean, I’m pretty sure I would’ve gotten it wrong. I wasn’t going to church yet and I had never seen a steeple before, at least not the kind white people put on their IQ tests.
    If one could fail an IQ test, I suppose I did. School administrators labeled me “special,” and every morning my mother sent me to Mrs. Smith, who then ushered me into a “special” class just for kids who didn’t know what a steeple was. I was in a remedial learning class because the school didn’t have an English as a Second Language specialist. My brother and I were the only two non-English speakers in the school. We were also the only two “Orientals.” (Actually, I’m wrong, there was also Otto Ho, but he was fluent in American things like Mexican food and Three’s Company , so he didn’t count.) I joined the remedial learning class half of each day, along with a mentally challenged girl with enormous glasses that made her eyes look like gigantic russet potatoes. We didn’t really belong together, since she spoke English and I didn’t, and I could button my own clothes and she couldn’t, but this is where I learned how to speak, read, and write.
    Despite the language barrier, I still managed to make friends. The nice thing about kindergarten is that you can play with other kids and don’t really have to talk. You can just jump rope, swing, and get sand in your pockets. Occasionally you throw a fit or whine when you want something. But no kindergartner ever asks if you have a gong or came over in a boat or eat dog—all of thatcomes later. But as I made friends, my mouth began shaping English words into mostly coherent phrases. And that was the beginning of the end, as it were.
    Children learn languages quickly, and English began replacing my Korean. By first grade, I spoke in Korean and any word I didn’t know, I just replaced it with the English word. Whenever my mother asked me, in Korean, what I did in school, I would answer something like this: Korean, Korean, merry-go-round, Korean, slide, Korean, Korean, fingerpaint, Korean, Korean, sandcastle. My parents would teach me the Korean word, but I ignored it. There was no sense in learning the same word in two languages, right? I figured as long as my family knew what I was talking about, it didn’t really matter which words I used from what language.
    My brother and I attended a mostly white school in a mostly white suburb far removed from Los Angeles’s Korean community, which was downtown and afflicted with downtown problems like crime, homelessness, and substance abuse. Our neighborhood had parks, crossing guards, and mountain trails afflicted with mountain problems like cacti, ticks, and poison oak. Everything around me was in English—classes, books, television programs, menus, signs, labels, voices. By second grade, I had absorbed all that English and spoke mostly in English to my family. I did, however, sprinkle sentences with a few Korean words. When my mother asked me what I did in school, I would answer something like this: I sang a noleh, played handball with my chingoo, and drew a geleem of our house . I had a lot of jehmee.
    My parents still spoke to me in Korean, and I understood them perfectly, but I answered in English because it