Living Between Two Worlds: Bilingual Bicultural Identity

Introduction: One Person, Two Worlds

Because I speak two languages, I feel I inhabit two different identities. Whether the reasons for this feeling are more complex is difficult to say, but I do know that although I am only one person—inhabiting one body and one mind—in many ways I feel I live in two different worlds, with two different identities. My language is more than a vocabulary, more than the words I use to describe things. Language for me forms a key part of the person I am and the way I see the world. I am bilingual, but I am also bicultural.

The Question of Names

One of the clearest ways I inhabit two languages and two different identities is my name. My real name is my Filipino name. But any American reader of this essay will better know me by the name I use in America—an American nickname I chose for myself. I chose it because when I arrived here, my real name seemed very difficult for everyone to pronounce. The difficulty people had with such a basic part of myself—my name—was one of the first clues I had about how different my life would be when I came from the Philippines to America.

In the Philippines, my name was quite ordinary; it was something I took for granted. I never considered it difficult to pronounce, and no one I knew considered it difficult either. In America, however, whenever I appear on a list and someone is unfamiliar with me, I always know when I am about to be called because I can see a strange, confused expression come over the person's face.

"Rest-res…" they will say.

I must shake my head. "Just call me by my American name," I say.

This scenario never happens to me in the Philippines. There, my name is no more or less common than John or James is here.

For a while, I considered changing my legal name to my American nickname. When I became a naturalized citizen, I thought I should. I told myself: I am leaving so much of my culture and my nation behind—perhaps I should try to shed that old part of myself, that old identity that seemed unpronounceable in America, the identity bound up in my native name. When I tried to explain this to my mother, she disagreed. She explained that she and my father had given me that name lovingly when I was born, and that my name was more than a word. My name was part of my identity, part of my connection to my native heritage and to the history of my family. In cutting myself off from that part of my history, my mother said, I would be cutting myself off from my identity.

I agreed with her, yet I still wondered: what room did the United States have for my native name? In the United States, could I find room only for the identity of an American—was there space only for my American name?

Two Languages, Two Selves

I would like to say that the different parts of myself—my native identity and my American identity—are completely comfortable in both worlds I inhabit. But that would be a lie. The truth is, I live in two very separate worlds, just as I carry two separate names and speak two different languages.

One of those worlds exists within my home. There, although I am physically in America, I become my native self once again. My family is fairly assimilated into American culture, so I am not wholly Filipino within our household, but my family still practices some Filipino ways. More often than not, we speak the native dialect of the Philippines, Tagalog.

When I step through the door and out into the world, however, I must become my American self again and speak English. I am only understood in English when I am my American self, and I am only fully understood as my native self when I speak Tagalog—a language most native-born Americans have never heard of. But the difference goes beyond language and vocabulary. The fact that I am always switching languages inside my head makes me a different person from someone who dwells wholly and completely within one culture, whether American or Filipino. At school, I must not only change my language but also adjust to American customs and ways of relating to others—Americanized modes of communication that would have no place in my home, no place in the world of my native identity.

Conclusion: Strength in Multiplicity

This constant change of names, languages, and lives can seem lonely at times, especially when people find it hard to understand me when I speak English. Yet I would not trade any of these various names, languages, or lives for anyone else's. Within this variety—within both the worlds of my American and native identities—I do form a kind of single, core person: a person who is different, and a person who is strong.

Scholars who study third-culture identity and the psychology of bicultural individuals often note that living between two worlds, while disorienting, can produce a distinctive capacity for empathy, adaptability, and perspective-taking. That resonates with my own experience. The process has not been painless, but it has been formative.

I am a person who will never apologize for who he is, because through trial, error, and hard experience, he has learned to be proud of his identity.