“We thought you have autism.”
When I was little, my parents told me that I had difficulty speaking. They sent me to a child psychologist for therapy so that I could talk like other children my age. But somehow, that wasn’t the case with English.
I remember a time I had a lovely conversation with two Americans on a train from Nagano to Tokyo — two best friends from Massachusetts and Hawaii, both around their fifties, traveling together in Japan on holiday.
“Have you been living in America?” one of them asked.
“No,” I said.
“How about another English-speaking country?”
“I wish (haha), but unfortunately I haven’t,” I replied.
They gasped in disbelief.
“Then how could you have such a great English accent?”
As I was waiting for my departure in the airport lobby, I saw a familiar face sitting not far from me. It was Sacha Stevenson, a Canadian who had inspired me to work on my English accent.
Sacha had been living in Indonesia, married to an Indonesian man from Bandung, and often appeared on television during my teenage years. Back then, she liked to make commentary videos on YouTube about Indonesian public figures and their English-speaking skills, and her videos helped me learn how to spot accent differences, improve my pronunciation, and sound more like a native speaker.
I walked over to her and asked for a picture. I told her I was a big fan of her work and had grown up watching her videos. She was my childhood inspiration, and I never expected to meet her in person. After the picture, we ended up talking for almost two hours, from casual small talk (like how are you, what do you do, and so on) to advanced topics like economics and politics. We kept talking until it was time for our plane to leave Haneda Airport.
“Who is that? Is that your friend?” my mom asked me.
“No, she is Sacha Stevenson. A famous YouTuber!”
“She is? I didn’t know. I thought she was your friend. You seemed like you were having so much fun talking with her, but I couldn’t understand any of it — your English was too advanced for me to follow!”
Back home, during dinner, my mom told my father about our trip to Japan and the long conversation I’d had with Sacha Stevenson at the airport. Then my father started to tell me a story I had never heard before.
“When you were around 2-3 years old, most of your friends your age had already started talking. But you hadn’t said a word. We were so worried,” my father said.
“We thought something was wrong, so we sent you to a child psychologist and moved you to another preschool that could help you speak,” my mom followed up.
“But now, well, you still don’t speak that much in Indonesian.” They both laughed. “But when you talk in English, you talk a lot! We don’t understand it!” they confessed. “It’s so strange since neither of us could speak English that fluently.”
Then a question popped into my head. “Mom, Dad, I wonder what my first preschool looked like?”
“Well, we sent you to one of the best preschools in town. It was an international preschool. But it turned out to be not as good as we expected, so we transferred you to another one, a local one.”
I opened my phone and looked up the preschool’s website on the internet. English was the main language in class.
“You signed me up for this?”
“Yes,” my parents nodded.
“Ah, so maybe that’s why. I just didn’t understand Indonesian yet!”
Turns out, I learned English at preschool before I could speak Indonesian. That’s why I didn’t speak a word and confused my parents during those early years.
But it made me realize that those early years turns out also played an important role in shaping who I am today, more than I ever realized.