(In Part 1 of this series, Pauline Yeghnazar Peck spoke about how therapy helped her cope with her mother’s death as well as lead her into a career as a licensed psychologist helping adult children of immigrants. In this part, she talks about being a “social translator” for her parents.)
Even though Iranian Armenian American Pauline Yeghnazar Peck’s parents both spoke English when they emigrated with her from Iran to the United States, she still had to act as a form of “social translator” while growing up.
Her mother had a master’s degree in English and her father also spoke English and had served in the Iranian military. That fluency helped him get promoted up until the country’s revolution and the ascendency of the mullahs.
ALWAYS BEING ‘ON’
But once the family arrived in the United States, “I felt like I was a social translator more than literally, my parents did read English and didn’t ask, ‘OK, what does this document say?’ But I was very much socially moderating and mediating difficult moments, social interactions, especially with customer service people, retail people, just people out in the world,” Yeghnazar Peck, a licensed psychologist, says. “I always was ‘on’ in a certain way.”
At the same time, when she found herself interacting with Armenian or Persian relatives or acquaintances, she wound up mixing words from both languages.
“I had to work so hard at the literal translation for that of, oh, this is an Armenian person from Russia or Armenia, where I can’t just throw in those Persian words and they’re not going to get it or vice versa,” she says.
“I’d like to think of it as it’s not just that you’re literally speaking different languages — there are different ways of being,” Yeghnazar Peck adds. “Even what’s funny, the delivery, the words not just that you use, but the tone, the way you hold your body, there’s certain things that are just taken for granted as known in a certain culture.”
As a perceptive kid that was aware of those social pieces and social dynamics as well as being the eldest daughter, she felt very protective of her family while at the same time “trying to do my best not to humiliate myself.
I’d like to think of it as it’s not just that you’re literally speaking different languages — there are different ways of being.
“I remember feeling a lot of humiliation when I would make those understandable mistakes, learning a third language, but I always felt so bad, like, ‘Ah, shoot, I didn’t think about this audience and I can’t use that word,'” she continues.
Yeghnazar Peck recalls some favorite family stories where she would be trying to sound proper and using the correct language versus just casual language “and messing up royally.”
While she can laugh recalling those instances nowadays, “I remember feeling such immense shame or like, ‘Damn, I’m not doing it well enough,'” resulting in her having a strong, “invisible motivation to get it very right.”
BEING THE ‘FOREIGN KID’
She also talks about experiencing a “shift” that happened between elementary and junior high school “where I feel like elementary school was where I really struggled being the other, being the immigrant.”
Yeghnazar Peck remembers getting picked on by a little group of what she calls ‘Kelly’s and Katies,” who would pull and rip her overalls and made fun of her.
“I was the foreign kid,” she says. “But something happened where I had internalized that that was bad and wrong and knew the more I could assimilate, the more goodies I was going to get, including popularity, acceptance, validation, belonging and something shifted later in junior high — it’s like I let go of all of those markers of difference.”
Other than the silent “H” and the “Z” and the “Y” in her last name, she found that her first name, Pauline, didn’t give her away. Nor did how she looked.
“I was white-perceived,” she says. “I really had learned those nuances of things like the language, the lingo, the jokes, the way you express and hold yourself, things you talk about.
“I’d learned that which was a sort of an internalized and self-imposed cultural erasure” by junior high, which helped her fit in.
Consequently, part of Yeghnazar Peck’s adulthood was reclaiming some of those Iranian and Armenian pieces.
“I definitely felt very aware of living in between these various worlds and was very eager and aware of which worlds give you more privilege, more access, more goodies, and the work of shapeshifting, accordingly,” she says.
I really had learned those nuances of things like the language, the lingo, the jokes, the way you express and hold yourself, things you talk about.
Even though she speaks with a U.S. accent, “t’s not just what you choose for yourself, but it’s where you can’t fit in, where you’re pushed into, like all of those things can have such a powerful influence on who you end up becoming that isn’t essentially who you really are or who you want to be,” she adds.
Yeghnazar Peck contends that “you have to know what shaped you in order to be able to then choose what you want for your future, like what you want to be, even something as simple or very concrete as what name do I want to go by? That in and of itself can be an act of cultural reclamation and identity development.”
(Stay tuned for Part 3, where Yeghnazar Peck talks about growing up speaking Farsi and Armenian at home, yet English outside the home.)
