STUFFED SQUID, learning English

New home, new country, new Christmas. I was determined to make a good first impression. Christmas Eve dinner should be based on fish dishes, in the Italian tradition. This tradition made it across the water so it was also a tradition among some families in the US. Therefore I was a bit taken aback to discover that this part of Italy, didn’t go for fish on Christmas eve. Later, I realized I could have gotten away with smoked herring that is sold in convenient plastic packages without fish bones or skin. In the North, where I happened to be this delight is served with boiled potatoes, Nice and easy, especially during flu season.

Having just arrived, I was not aware of this yet. Therefore I went for stuffed squid, which seemed most appropriate for Christmas since it is not something one fixes every day. Certainly it is used here, especially in towns close to the sea, the case for most of Italy, but not here in the north.

Here I am, going to the fish store, acquiring squid, fortunately, they offer to clean it. something I didn’t realize was necessary. Squid have an ink sac of black ink that you don’t want in your stuffed squid, therefore it has to be removed. Squid also have a big piece of calcium that is used by birds to sharpen the beak. This also has to be removed.

Squid turned out to be more complicated than I thought originally. In addition, I began to have flu symptoms. Of course I ignored them at first. I was about to stuff squid.

First one must prepare the squid sacs, by rinsing and making sure that they are empty. Now for the stuffing Making the stuffing requires few ingredients, but it does require some preparation. First, one must cut off the little tentacles. Yes, after catching and cleaning, there are still little tentacles to cut up and put in the pan with garlic and parsley, cook in olive oil briefly, and then mix with bread crumbs. Sounds quite simple, no? It is simple enough, but when the flu is coming and you have a small child to care for at the same time, it becomes more difficult. If one has lived in the house for years, then you have probably accumulated plenty of dried bread with which to make crumbs. I was at my in-laws. mother-in-law didn’t like to cook, so I had to scare up some crumbs. I finally had to buy some at the super market. This was beginning to look more difficult than I thought.

Finally, I had it all together. so I could mix it up. So I did. Then it was time to stuff the clean little sac. Here again I ran into some trouble. The difficulty was how to close the sac. Toothpicks weren’t long enough. So I ended up sewing with a needle and cooking string that had to be removed before eating

I finally put the stuffed squid in the tomato sauce in the oven..

Now it would be ready to eat in 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, my flu symptoms also came to full force.

So for my first Christmas in this new place I got the flu. My father in law complemented me for the stuffed squid. I wasn’t even able to taste it.

My mother in law made the usual dinner for guests of polenta and beef chunks, called spezzatino. No fish dishes. Unexpected, but I had a lot to learn. This was the far north nowhere near the sea.

My next visit was a few years latter. This first Christmas visit was a test. I had apparently passed the test because I had married and I also had a baby. I knew I would have to lean the Italian that is not taught in school. Spoken Italian is not exactly the same as that studied in a class. My mastery of a second language is due to my mother in law, who spoke no English, unlike my husband, who did.

Since English had become the universal language, everyone in Italy wanted to learn English. So I had to teach my child English among all the other the other stuff I had to teach her. To confront this challenge I started reading everything I could find.

The experts said that one learns a language during infancy until about three years old. This is the age at which one can learn the sounds particular to a language, the older I got, the more I realized how true this probably was. Dutch has a guttural sound not easy to reproduce. Tuscans aspirate the letter C, also not easy to learn, but a real indication of your origins.

We were beginning to think of marigage. At the same time a Chinese delegation came to visit my professor husband at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. A compliment one thinks at first. At the time we were beginning to consider moving to Italy. This Chinese delegation was visiting several universities. Having grown up in California, across the Pacific from China, I thought this would be an opportunity you could not refuse. At the time, the Chinese were riding bicycles, definitely a third world country, not the best place to take a baby. There was fascination for Chinese culture in California, but not as much in Italy. My new relatives thought I was nuts, most likely. But not having immediate translation makes it necessary to learn the new language, so I learned a bit more without my husband probably. Grocery shopping is another way to learn a language.

The situation in China was changing. The cultural revolution led by Mao Tse Tung was over. Now a Chinese delegation was offering a newly installed professor of computer science to teach a course in computer graphics for 6 weeks at an unknown university (unknown to westerners) in a place called Heifei, quite a bit north of Shanghai. This city is known in China as the leader for new technology, according to a documentary on You Tube.

Ignoring the geopolitics this implied, I was thinking only of an opportunity. It isn’t every day that such an opportunity arrives. There was mostly positive thinking about computers at the time. Of all the new professors the Chinese visited, my husband was offered to teach a course. This required going to Heifei for six weeks. The course would be taught in English He already taught in English at Stony Brook.

This brings us to consider the English language.

Another thought was that everyone wants to learn to speak English. All of my husbands relatives and many others. This led to me studying how best to have my daughter speak two languages. It is possible but not automatic.

So I let my husband go teach a course in China if I could then take my daughter for the month of February to visit my mother and learn to speak English where I did. English was now the universal language!

But I would learn that there are many kinds of English. First I found a job correcting the English used in scientific papers. Since there are a lot of non native English speakers working in the sciences, I got to see many different kinds of English and to understand that American English is the poor cousin to the British English.

I realized that I should probably have been spending my vacations in London rather than in Southern California. But my relatives were in California, not London. My daughter was just starting to speak when we took our first vacation for three weeks in Southern California. She was just starting to speak, so she spoke what she heard everyone else speak. So when she got tired of asking me to translate for my mother, who spoke only English, she started speaking perfect Californian. Those books I had read turned out to be right. Children learn to speak what they hear being spoken.

When we went home to Italy, however, she continued speaking English at her nursery school. It took her a week or two until she spoke Italian again. Well, I had accomplished my goal. My daughter spoke two languages. We went on vacation in California a few more times. When she got to high school, some of her friends started wanting to learn English. They asked to go on vacation with her to California. It turned out that the books were right, at high school age you don’’t learn a second language so easily. After this vacation the student didn’t speak English. Another effort was made by a family hosting an exchange student from Leeds, England. After the student returned home, they complained to my daughter that the exchange student spent too much time speaking to my daughter, who knew some English, rather than teaching English to the Italian students.

I don’t know if I did the right thing or not. Learning another language is not very simple. The earlier you start, the easier it is. At the same time we are acquainted with people who know three or four languages. It probably depends on how much it is needed.

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