May/June 2017

Strange, lucky, unique, divided, foreign, difficult… All are good descriptions of my life, but I couldn’t imagine myself living any other way. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t live in Mexico, if I wasn’t bilingual, if I didn’t clamp my mouth shut whenever my friends pleaded for me to speak English. My blond hair and blue eyes made me stand out in a crowd, but when people learned I could speak English, and for some reason it never took them that long to find out, all hope of being overlooked vanished. “Where are you from?” was the same question they would always ask me. “I was born in Guadalajara, but I live in Puerto Escondido,” I would say. It wasn’t a lie but I knew it wasn’t what they were looking for. They would look at each other and then back at me, a skeptical look in their eyes. “But where are your parents from?” they would prod, guessing the answer before I had to say it. “Well, they’re from the United States,” I always admitted reluctantly, more than anything because I knew exactly what they were going to say next. “Ah,” they would say, nodding to each other, “so you speak English?” “Yeah.” Inwardly, I would sigh. I’m not sure I really minded this treatment anymore. I’d learned to accept it and deal with it, mostly by pretending that it didn’t exist. When I went to school in first grade, I started to realize how different I was from other kids. My wispy blond hair, always escaping from its ponytail, stood out against the sea of perfectly combed dark hair, like a drop of yellow paint would against a perfectly painted black background. I got to leave school an entire hour early because everyone had agreed that English class would be a complete waste of time for me. Back then I did want to fit in. I wanted to have brown hair and dark eyes and not a single word of English vocabulary. I would have done anything for these things back then. “Where are you from?” was the same question they would always ask me I was so determined that I decided I would never speak English again with my friends. I turned a deaf ear to my friends’ pleadings. “Heather, please speak English.” I refused. “No.” I would not speak English, and someday I would dye my hair black. I’d be just like everyone else one day, I thought stubbornly. “ Se forman al fondo. Correle!” (Form a line at the back. Hurry!), the teacher yelled, spacing the final word into separate syllables for emphasis. New Year’s was a recent memory and very few kids had made it to class. There was a loud chorus of pat, pat, pat as the small group of nine hurried to the last row of blue and yellow foam squares that covered the Tae Kwon Do school’s floor, the usual commotion occurring as children shuffled to be next to friends. “Uno!” the teacher says, pointing at Angeles, a girl with short black hair who’s standing next to me in line. She repeats it. “Dos!” I say when it’s my turn. He continues until reaching the final girl who yells out, “Nueve!” “Ahora todos me lo van a decir en inglés” (Now everyone will say it in English), he says, picking up a stack of neon orange cones and placing them in a line across the room. He smiles when he sees my scowl. “One,” Angeles says, pronouncing with a Mexican accent so that it sounds more like wan. The entire class looked at me expectantly. Maria, a tall girl on my other side, with jet-black hair tied back in a high ponytail, was nodding at me as if for moral support. I looked around helplessly. I doubted it would matter if I said it with a Mexican accent as I did the rare times that I spoke in English with my friends. It took me little more than a fraction of a second to realize, no, I would not speak in English. I’d always listened well at Tae Kwon Do. It wasn’t just expected; it was taken for granted. Everyone did exactly what the teacher said, no exceptions, so it surprised me to find myself thinking, I don’t care. I won’t do it. “Dos!” I said after hardly any hesitation, looking stubbornly back at the staring eyes. The teacher rolled his eyes and the whole class cried in unison, “Heather!” “A ver, de nuevo” (Let’s see, again), the teacher said, pointing at Angeles. I made a pitiful face. Sometimes people would just give up once they realized they would be better off asking a rock to speak English, and then there were other times… “One,” Angeles said between laughs. “Dos,” I said. I wasn’t about to back down now. “Heather!” the kids around me grumbled. Now the teacher had joined in. “Engleesh,” Maria said in a Mexican accent. “One, two, three,” she continued, until I gave her an exasperated “Ay Maria!” “Pero es que yo no quiero hablar en inglés!” I said, making a face and throwing my hands up in the air. No way was I speaking English! “But Heather…” my friends pleaded in Spanish. “Your mom’s looking at you,” Angeles said in Spanish, pointing at my mom. I turned around. She was right. Mom was staring at me with a cross between bewilderment and laughter. “All this time and she hasn’t learned to speak English. You’re an embarrassment to your family,” Angeles continued with mock disapproval, shaking her head at me, and then laughed. I was laughing along with everyone else. Though many of them were staring too, as though they didn’t quite know what to make of me. For a second I imagined what they must be thinking now: Heather, the only girl in the class who really could speak English, and she was refusing to do so. “Heather,” the teacher finally said in Spanish, “if