I have a rather strange problem: I don’t know my own kids. Or rather, I know the half that speaks Japanese, that works diligently on homework and reads books or plays video games in Japanese. The English-speaking side of my children is something I’m less familiar with, for the main reason that my kids are unable to function naturally in English when my Japanese wife or I am around. One thing I’ve learned from becoming bilingual is that once you have a certain “language relationship” with someone, it’s almost impossible to change later on. I speak Japanese to my wife but English to my kids, however everyone speaks Japanese back to me, and no amount of pretending to not understand will get my kids to switch to English — kind of like Han Solo and Chewbacca, conversing in two different languages at once. That’s why we send our kids to the U.S. every summer, so they can get a good dose of fun American culture and speak lots of English. I hear reports from my family about how open and outgoing my kids are, using English just as naturally as if they’d been born in the States, but I never get to see it for myself since if I am around, everything reverts to Japanese. Since a person’s personality in one language can be quite different in another, I feel as if there’s a big part of my own children I’m unable to know.
