Last week, riding home on the Blue Line L from O’Hare, somewhere between the Cumberland and Harlem stops (it was late, I was tired), an inebriated Hispanic man in his 60s stumbled onto the train. Once he was seated, he looked across the aisle at two young women who were talking quietly in front of me.
“Where you go?” he shouted at them.
The women gave him a once-over and one of them said, “No English,” and they giggled.
The man said, “Polish!” and they giggled more, but did not say anything back. He continued to torment them, which is to say, he continued to stare at them and continually ask them questions and tell them how beatiful they were.
He raised his voice when he had had enough of their ignoring him, and he said, “You have to speak Spanish, or you are not American!”
The women giggled more, and whispered to each other, presumably in Polish, and he said, “Spanish is the language of America!”
A few days later I was in Uptown enjoying a lunch of pho, the fragrant cold-beating soup native to Vietnam, in a small restaurant on Argyle Street, which could easily be called “Little Saigon.”
In the restaurant, which is owned by Vietnamese immigrants and was full of Vietnamese people–born either there or here (I did not take a poll)–I heard an older Vietnamese man say to another: “I call you. We talk.”
He could have easily said that in his native language but he chose to use Engish for his own reasons (doesn’t matter what they are). He probably lives here, but I know that when I travel to foreign lands I never even attempt to use a single word, let alone a phrase, in the language of the land. I expect everyone to converse with me in English–even in non-English speaking countries. And I have never had a problem, except for once in Venezuela, where no one appears to speak English. There, I drew on my elementary understanding of the language to communicate very basic ideas. I also drew on my notebook to convey ideas I could not recall the words for.
In the Near North neighborhoods where I spend most of my Chicago time, I hear foreign languages being spoken all day and all night every day, and it does not bother my in the least. In fact, I like it. So I began to wonder what the fuss was with that fellow on the train, besides the fact that he was drunk and shunned by two women one-third his age. If he can speak English enough for me to understand, why is he stumping for Spanish? I understand his Latin pride, but is he not pushing the issue, despite the (ridiculous) national debate on Spanish vs. English? He was on the right train in the right neighborhood to be doing his stumping (you don’t get much whiter or more English-speaking than Jefferson Park), but I think we should file the Spanish v. English issue in the same folder with “Foie Gras Ban”–both a tremendous waste of time and energy, no?