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Within seconds of speaking to a friend in Chile, I was told I had an Argentine accent. At first this bewildered me, because there is still a vast stretch between the Spanish that Argentinians speak and the Spanish that I speak. Then I realized that in those seconds, I had said one word with double “ll” and pronounced “sh” instead of “y,” as Argentinians are known to do.
While a month studying abroad wasn’t enough to make me sound like a native Spanish speaker, I’ve left with certain combinations of syllables beginning to roll off my tongue more easily, without clinging to every vowel and consonant. Expressions begin piecing themselves together and entering the air without the construction work I was used to doing. Not that sounding less estadounidense makes me any less so, but it’s nice to hear improvement in my speaking.
Already, though, I'm sensing it slip away from me. Now that I’ve been back in the US for four days, I haven’t spoken Spanish since leaving the airport. Although I’ll be taking classes in Spanish at CMU, the language we use to discuss course topics isn’t entirely the same as the language produced on the street, or in between classes, to carve utterance for the things you breathe in or feel, the myriad things you never discuss in a classroom. This is the Spanish I’ll miss: the peculiar phrases and accents of the people I met in Argentina and Chile; the language that is more closely bound to the air between people’s lips and ears than to books and screens.
However, with the many Latino communities in the Bay Area, I encounter this kind of Spanish here as well. But I hear it and am unable to step in, as opposed to in Argentina and Chile, where I can participate in this language by virtue of being in the country.
The view from San Cristóbal, one of six hills in Parque Metropolitano in Santiago.
Having five days in Chile was an effective segue into leaving South America. In the midst of adjusting to Chilean currency and Chilean Spanish, I was reminded I was an outsider, jerked out of the stability of my study abroad community in Córdoba, Argentina.
During my first night in Santiago, while heading into the city from the airport, it already seemed painstakingly clear I was in a country with a different economic situation. For one, all the cars are imported, so they're newer and smoother than what I'd gotten used to in Argentina (where everyone is also an aggressive driver). So it was nice to be able to stand in a bus without the turbulence to keep me imagining what it would be like to fly out the window.
More often, I took the metro through Santiago, which I got surprisingly well-acquainted with over five days. One memorable moment was when I left too late for a symphony concert and it was rush hour. Everything was going smoothly until I had to change lines, and I noticed everyone beginning to run or walk faster. Along with a few other people, we made the first wave of cars that came, but it was only by squeezing ourselves in so tightly — too tightly, it gave me flashbacks to leaving the dance floor of a club in Argentina.
In addition to the motors, the streets and sidewalks are so... unbroken, and there's so much more space and stretches of green grass. Part of this has to do with my staying in a particularly nice neighborhood, Providencia. Once my professor's nephew took me downtown, the older buildings and battered sidewalks quickly reminded me that not all of Santiago is a world apart from the poverty I saw in Argentina. Still, while wandering around mostly within Providencia, I couldn't help marveling at what has to happen in a country to make the economy and lifestyle so different from those of a neighboring country.
Some more pictures from San Cristóbal, since I spent the whole afternoon and evening walking up and down the hill
By the third day, I started getting headaches and losing my appetite. In the bus to Valparaiso for a day trip, I began to miss home, this time without any mixed feelings. It’s funny how all my adventurousness vanishes once I’m sick; unsurprisingly, my willingness to cope with the uncertainty and discomfort of being a foreigner is conditional upon having perfect health.
In Santiago, I took a flute lesson with Marcela Bianchi, who studied with my own flute professor a while back. We worked on the Sonata in A Major by Cesar Franck. Its opening movement is characterized by the challenge of moving phrases across seemingly static lines. We talked about areas of technique I’ve worked on before, but to hear new perspectives on these issues is invaluable to honing my practice strategies. We'd also find that, when she would ask me a question about technique, such as which vowel to use for a particular section, or from where to engage the airstream in the body, I would know the answer, but I wasn't conscious of these details while playing.
This also happened in a flute lesson in Córdoba the week before, studying with another alumna of the flute studio of Carnegie Mellon, Cecilia Ulloque. For this lesson, due to a slight misunderstanding, we worked on an Argentine piece that I’d learned the week before (she had sent me the sheet music beforehand, so I’d assumed she wanted me to learn it for our lesson, even though it was only five days away. Luckily, it wasn’t too demanding of a piece!). We worked on posture. Excess tension tends to build up in my shoulders and throat when I play, affecting the angle of my flute and my airstream. I'd heard this before, but that doesn't stop my body tensing up anyway after years of playing like this. Nevertheless, following her specific feedback suddenly opened a door in the sonority of my playing. So while I sometimes wish the fundamentals of my playing never needed comment, I will always welcome advice on continuing to refine my sound!
The Pacific Ocean, from a day trip to Valparaiso
Jumping around: in regards to the title of this entry, "la filipina" reminds me of the single time I heard someone call me that, a friend of my host-mom in Córdoba. While people probably wouldn't have guessed I'm Filipino (one person thought I was Japanese), I think most people could tell I was Asian; eyes like these don't leave much room for doubt.
Only a handful commented on my being Asian, for example an artisan from the fair where I played and a Japanese traveler from Brazil (who told me Brazil has the largest Japanese diaspora — I never would have guessed). Neither were blunt or offensive — they simply remarked that I seemed to be at least part-Asian. Often, if introduced as estadounidense (being from the US), the label felt inadequate, and I found myself wanting to add that my parents were from the Philippines. It's the reverse of when I'm in the US, where upon being asked where I'm from (which happens often in Pittsburgh), I say "California." If it doesn't sound exotic enough to the person asking, it feels authentic to me. Still, often I'm often pressed until I say I'm Filipino.
How to explain this discrepancy? When I'm in the US and someone asks me where I'm from, I answer "California" as a way to insist that I belong within their concept of American identity. But when I'm outside the US, I assume that to those I meet, that concept is too narrow to include me, so I create another space by adding the label "filipina." I also think I do this because I assume South Americans don't like the US, so I want to put more distance between me and the US.
At any rate, for the most part, my race hardly ever came up. I found myself feeling grateful for my dark skin because it was my pathway to blending in. If I were a pale-skinned Asian, I would have stood out everywhere in South America.
Still, my being one of countless dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed girls didn't keep some strangers from recognizing me. In particular, my last weekend in Córdoba, I was in the bathroom of a club when two girls asked me if I was the girl who played flute at the welcome event for international students at UNC. This genuinely surprised me, because I didn't have my glasses and I suppose I'd thought that made enough of a difference.
One last anecdote about being Asian in South America: I remember walking into a store in Buenos Aires, six weeks ago when I had far less confidence in my Spanish speaking skills, and asking for a fork (I'd forgotten to grab one where I bought my lunch). The woman whom I asked looked Chinese. She couldn't understand what I was asking for, until another one of the workers told her in what sounded like Mandarin what "tenedor" meant. As they were speaking, I wondered if I ought to have insisted on asking her in Spanish, or if she would have understood me better in English. Still, I walked out of the store feeling less alienated; I wasn't the only Asian in this city struggling with the language.
To close, here is a short blurb I wrote in Argentina, which synthesizes well a few thoughts scattered across these entries:
To be in Argentina has meant to spend as much time as I can wandering the streets, being outside breathing the air, but I think it is more about being generous of myself with the people around and listening to them with an open mind and heart.
As to speaking the language, I wish that I could stay a very long time and leave speaking fluently, so that my personality took on a foreign character (foreign to those I know in the US), but since that will not happen, I am content to be able to experience the language, to catch onto whatever phrases and cadences I can that I never would have heard living anywhere else.
If I were to add anything to this, now that I'm back in the US, it would be that I hope to keep listening. Even though there's so much that flew past my ears, even though I spent more time speaking English to other estadounidenses than I would have liked (being in a study abroad program tends to mean you're sheltered within a community of US students), and even though in the end I had so little time, there are many words, tones of voice, phrases, and sounds that I remember; and of course, there's the many audio recordings I took of street musicians that I need to sort through.
(The photo above is from Jesuit Block in Córdoba)
Speaking of street musicians! I'm just about to close this too-long, rambly entry, but the topic of street musicians is a regretfully acute example of how short-sighted I can be. One of the things I found most delightful in Santiago is that it's common for musicians to step onto the metro, or the bus, and begin to sing, often accompanying themselves on guitar, before stepping off ten minutes later. I only heard three, but they were all such amazing performers and musicians. Their music was the one thing that could make me forget I was sick. When I mentioned seeing them to my professor's nephew, he told me that musicians on public transport have become increasingly common, likely because of increased unemployment.
Instantly I felt ashamed of my attitude towards playing in the streets in Argentina, where to me it seemed nothing more than a vibrant part of the culture, something I could participate in since I, too, am a performer. But in reality it's also an expression of economic distress — and this is was something I could not see. It's a list without end, the things that have passed before my eyes that I failed to understand, but then I suppose this list doesn't vanish even when you move from North to South, and back.