HOJESWINEE: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Hojeswinee Kanagarajah and I’m from Malaysia. So if you don’t know much about Malaysia, it is a very multicultural country. There’s people from various different races and religions who live there, and naturally that also means it is a very multilingual country. So that was how I grew up, you know, surrounded by a variety of different languages. And I never really had any moment in my childhood where I felt like I was berated or stressed about my accent in any way until I came here. So I came here [to Australia] when I was about 17 years old, and I remember feeling very excited, you know, new year, new me, new country, and I didn’t realize how different my experience with language was going to be when I got here. You know, I grew up speaking in English and I was always pretty confident in my English abilities.

So I went to school, I went to uni here, and then I realized that boy, I was in for a ride. Because people tend to think that, you know, if you speak in a different way or if you have a different accent somehow that gives them the right or the pass to kind of push on their preconceived notions about you onto yourself, and they kind of think that it gives them the space to be judgmental of you and assume things about yourself.

So for example, I was in a uni class a few years ago and I was working on a script and you know, there’s a good script. I was feeling pretty happy about it, and I just didn’t realize that I made a minor grammatical mistake. I think I wrote ‘is’ instead of ‘are’ or had ‘instead’ of ‘half’ – something really small to be honest.

But when the teacher read the script, she spotted the mistake and her first reaction was, she turned to me and said, is English your second language? And I remember being very shocked, you know, I was very taken aback because mind you, I’ve had this teacher for a few weeks now and she’s praised me on my scripts previously. So I didn’t expect to hear that very confronting statement from anyone, and especially not from her. And I remember feeling very hurt and quite shocked, and I felt very defensive. Like I had to defend myself to her and say, you know, no, I’m good at English. This was just one small mistake. And when I think about that now I think whether, you know, did she ask me that question because she says that to every single person in class who makes a grammatical mistake or did she tell that to me because I was the only brown one in class who didn’t speak in an Australian accent?

So yeah, language, when you know, thinking about experiences like these, it makes me kind of really realize the very big difference of language that I’m used to growing up, versus here, you know, when I grew up, language is a very fluid thing. You know, you could speak this and this and this, and you, it didn’t matter if you weren’t a hundred percent fluent in either of them. Like I knew two sentences in Mandarin. And up to this day, when I tell my friend about it, she still turns to me and says, wow, you’re basically fluent!

But here, everything is very like binary and rigid. Like even if you have a full understanding of English, like many of us in this room do, even if you’re fluent, the fact that you look like this means that people expect you to maintain a certain standard. And it seems kind of like they’re just waiting for you to make a mistake so they can challenge your fluency. When I think of language, the one person that comes to mind is my grandmother. So you know, when she came to Malaysia, she was only fluent in Tamil, her mother tongue. But that didn’t stop her from, you know, doing anything. She raised her kids here, she led a full life and she was able to do the things that she wanted to do. There is a specific memory then that comes to mind about my grandma that kind of encompasses her relationship with language, I think.

So we were both watching a Bollywood movie. Picture this, we are seated in a dim living room. I was stretched out on the three-seater couch. My grandma was sitting on her special chair, Bajirao Mastani was playing on TV. And you know, Deepika was in her regal attire, dripping in gold, and Ranveer with his big mustache. And my grandma was leaning as close to the TV as she could. At some point she just started looking like she was part of the movie. And I remember, I think I lost the plot somewhere, and I turned to her and asked her to explain what happened. Without hesitation, she said, he said this and she said that. And that’s why he’s mad and that’s why she’s crying. And she explained everything to me and I was able to, you know, get on with the plot and follow through until the end of the movie. The funny thing about that is if you know Bajirao Mastani, you would know it is a Hindi movie. My grandmother did not speak any Hindi! And the subtitles for the movie was entirely in English.

And again, that lady did not know how to read English, but somehow, she was able to like pick up the missing pieces. And that that just describes her perfectly, what she didn’t understand in words, she would make it up in what she knew. And that was kind of how she treated us as well. My siblings and I, we didn’t speak Tamil as good as she did, but she never once, you know, put any judgment onto us. Or even, I don’t think there was ever once where she turned to my parents and say, you know, it’s embarrassing that your kids don’t speak Tamil fluently. She was always, she accepted me as I was. I would speak to her in my broken and grammatically incorrect Tamil. And as long as she understood, that was good enough for her, we would laugh together, we would make jokes together, we would fight together.

And that was completely fine. So when I think about that, I think about how, you know, the ease and comfort of language that I’ve been really missing since I’ve been here. And it’s really hard that I feel like I always have to be on edge here. Like when I speak, I have to hesitate or think twice because I don’t wanna accidentally say a Malaysian slang like ‘la’ at the end of my sentence, which I do very often. Or I don’t want to, you know, say a sentence that’s structured grammatically incorrect because then that would just give people room to judge me or push on their thoughts and perceptions about me. And it’s really hard because when that conflict is not coming from within you, at least you can, you know, pull it apart and address it. But I’m pretty comfortable in myself and I’m comfortable in the way I speak and in my accent, it’s just that this is coming from people on the outside. And when it’s coming from the outside, you don’t really have control over what people think or what they say. So, I’m trying to not let it bother me as much. And I think for now that’s okay. And I hope that one day that I can get that same sense of comfort and ease with language that I once had when I was growing up. And I hope that one day I can speak without hesitating and just be. Thank you.