Notes From Labor of Love: Suzanne Kamata
Bedtime Stories for the Bilingual Boy
My Japanese husband and I live off the beaten track in Shikoku, where few people are fluent in English. I can speak Japanese, but even before our twins were born, I was planning to raise our children bilingually. I wanted to be able to converse with them in my native language, and I knew that learning a second language at a young age would give them a leg up in the world. My own horizons had been broadened by learning French and Japanese. Our kids would have more opportunities if they could function in two or more languages.
I had read that having a lot of books in the house was a precursor to academic success. My son loved having books read to him. I brought him to the local library, which had a sizable collection of picture books in English. He loved Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Katy and the Big Snow, and If I Ran the Zoo. Later, we moved on to the Magic Treehouse series, and even later, the Harry Potter books. I read him the entire draft of my middle grade novel Pop Flies, Robo-pets and Other Disasters, and he gave me solid feedback. He sometimes asked me to stop and define a word or phrase, and we talked about the books, but he didn’t learn to read English.
When he started attending a Japanese preschool, he began to speak only in Japanese to his dad. He learned to read the Japanese syllabary from the names on the back of his classmates’ jerseys. I supplied him with Japanese manga, which he devoured. Meanwhile, I was afraid he would never learn to read and write in English. I worried that he would be like the college students I taught who after even six years of studying English in junior and senior high school, could not write a single grammatical sentence or read a newspaper article in the language. Worse, he asked me not to speak to him in English in front of other people.
Ultimately, I enrolled him in a private elementary school near our house with an English immersion program. There, everyone had to study the language. Since I had not sent him to cram schools for math and Japanese, it was the only subject that he was better at than anyone else. He made it through junior and public senior high school, where he spent a lot of time playing baseball, and then he went to college where all of his classes were in English. That is where he learned to love writing. Now, I am proud to say that his idea of a good time is to drop by a bookstore, and increasingly, the books that he chooses are in English. He has even started writing and publishing his work in both Japanese and English. Not too long ago, he wrote this in an essay for his university’s blog:
Books help me relax because they are closely connected to a sense of safety and security that I remember from childhood. I grew up surrounded by books because of the influence of my mother, who is a writer. I also remember that my mother used to read picture books to me before bedtime even before I could read by myself. The experience of enjoying books in the space where I feel most at home, has instilled in me the idea that reading is “security” itself.
I realized that my efforts to raise him in English in a house full of books had indeed had an effect. Maybe I had done something right, after all.
~~~
Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology was released on January 26th, 2024. Edited by Amanda Jaros, this collaboration with Small Harbor Publishing celebrates Literary Mama‘s twenty years of publishing the best writing for and by mothers. We asked the contributors, all Literary Mama staffers from across the years, to share thoughts about their writing process, their inspiration, or their work in the book. We’ll share those musings here on the Literary Mama blog.
Read Suzanne’s essay by purchasing Labor of Love, now available on Amazon.