Identity, Accentuated

Art by Olivia Kelliher

“You don’t speak with an accent,” a friend from Emerson said to me while we waited for our coffee one afternoon. I had been feeling particularly self-conscious about the way I sounded that day, having made a clumsy attempt earlier at contributing to the class discussion. She meant well, but her comments did little to reassure me. 

Second to the clothes they wear, a person’s accent is usually the first thing we notice about them, and yet I’m often told I don’t have one. Linguists and language enthusiasts will tell you that’s not true, that if you can articulate words then you have an accent. Generally, I’ve found that what people mean to say is that I have a native accent, or to put in worse terms, speak English so well for someone that grew up in Hong Kong.   

I’ve never not had to defend the way I speak. Some of this came from my parents’ decision to put me in an international school. In addition, my sister and I found studying SAT vocabulary flashcards fun and held debates over dinner. Coupled with the fact that I spoke relatively little Cantonese, to the untrained ear, I was American or a gwailo, the Cantonese epithet Hong Kongers use to describe westerners. But the accent wasn’t the only thing that set me apart; I felt lost. I’d worn the foreign label for virtually my entire life, so much that I felt out of place in my own city. 

It wasn’t until I moved to Emerson this fall that I reached the peak of my identity crisis. 

My accent might have masked that I wasn’t from America, but I was still a girl from Asia coming to live in the States for the first time. Like my friend who told me I didn’t speak with an accent, very few people could point out that I wasn’t from America. I found myself wishing my accent would reflect that. It was strange not having a foreign label stuck on me. I’d worn it my whole life in Hong Kong, but in America, I am foreign. Even though language wasn’t an issue, I was still unaccustomed to how different America was from Hong Kong. 

My roommate Maddie, a Northeastern student, was one of the many people surprised to find out I wasn’t actually American. When I met her, her accent instantly let on that she wasn’t either. Her Melbourne roots appear in the way she speaks. We spent the past month navigating the new city and the cultural differences that came with it. I’d never been to Melbourne before, but I had more in common with Maddie than I did with my American friends. We both had a disdain for the lack of good coffee in Boston, and while her use of words like “keen” and “heaps” left Americans puzzled, I had no problem understanding her Australian colloquialisms. 

But unlike my accent, Maddie says hers makes her stick out. “I didn’t think people would have trouble understanding me,” Maddie says. “It made me not want to speak up in class because I know I’m going to be seen as the token Australian.”  I related to the way Maddie felt about speaking up in class. Even if my accent didn’t necessarily single me out, I still became extremely conscious of the way I spoke. 

In Hong Kong, I’d always been viewed as different, even if I necessarily wasn’t. In America, I am different, but my accent doesn’t allude to this. I’d spent the majority of my life flitting from one label to another, sounding American to some, never a gwailo, but not quite a local either. My identity has, for the most part, been shaped by how others perceive me. But labels can be wrong, especially when they’re given by people who judge you on something as superficial as how you sound. I let my accent label me when there’s so much more to identity. Hong Kong’s been on my mind more than ever in light of the recent protests. I think of the city every day, even here in Boston, realizing all the ways it has made me who I am. My accent is just the first layer of my identity. Peel past it and get to know the Hong Kong in me.