In today’s bonus episode, we bring you two stories on the theme of migration.
Part 1: Ornithologist Dai Shizuka finds himself relating to an unusual bird that sings in more than one dialect.
Dai Shizuka is a first-generation immigrant from Japan. He grew up in Tokyo, Houston and Chicago. Dai is an ornithologist and behavioral ecologist who likes to study how social lives of animals shape their ecology and evolution. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is a husband and a proud father of two kiddos. As a city kid, his passion for field biology and behavioral ecology grew out of books and exploring urban parks and zoos. It was not until college that he learned how to camp and hike, or to identify species of birds. But now he feel as much at home in the wilderness of Alaska just as the streets of Tokyo and Chicago. He can be found on the web at www.shizukalab.com or on twitter @shizukalab.
Part 2: When Nestor Gomez takes his child to be vaccinated, it brings up fearful memories from his own childhood.
Nestor “the Boss” Gomez was born in Guatemala and came to Chicago Undocumented in the mid 80’s. He told his first story at a Moth story slam to get over the stuttering that plagued his childhood, since then he has won 58 Moth Slams and 3 Grand slams. Nestor also created, hosts, produces and curates his own storytelling show, 80 Minutes Around the World, a show that features the stories of Immigrants and refugees from different parts of the world, their descendant and allies in hopes to provide a better understanding of the realities, struggles and dreams related to the Immigrant experience. 80 Minutes Around the World is also available as a Podcast. Nestor also published a collection of stories detailing his experiences driving for ride sharing title “Your Driver Has Arrived” To listen and subscribe to the podcast, to buy his book and to learn more about Nestor visit his website: Nestorgomezstoryteller.com
Transcripts
Story 1: Dai Shizuka
So it’s the mid-1980s when my family moved from Tokyo to Houston. I was about seven years old, which put me towards the tail end of what we call the sensitive period for language acquisition. It's when your brain is primed to absorb and learn languages.
Dai Shizuka is an ornithologist and behavioral ecologist who likes to study how social lives of animals shape their ecology and evolution.
So I got to learn English the magical way where the first day I walked into that first grade classroom I knew how to count. I knew the alphabet and I knew some colors and that was it. About a year later, I was speaking English just like this as a native speaker.
My brothers, five and six years older than me had a little bit different relationship with English. They became fluent just as fast as I did but they always retained a little bit of an accent and they never completely got comfortable with things like sarcasm and irony.
I think those little differences in our comfort level with English nudged us towards different lives. Both of my brothers elected to go back to Japan for college, back in Tokyo, and eventually got jobs there, started families and settled down.
I elected to stay in the U.S. for college and then I went on to grad school and I started a family, settled down, now have a permanent job as a professor and an ornithologist in Nebraska. So now I spend my days teaching in English and studying birds and writing about birds in English, my chosen language.
It's always been fascinating to me how those differences of a few years and the vagaries of the developmental program of our brain can lead to a family straddling two continents, me over here and my brothers over there. That's something that they don't tell you about being bilingual. It's incredibly freeing and gives you all these choices. But it can unmoor you, in a way, and it can set you adrift sometimes.
Because I'm an ornithologist, I think about this every spring when the birds start singing. You see, decades of research shows that songbirds learn songs in the same way that we learn our languages. They have a sensitive period for song learning early in their lives and they memorized these songs that they hear from their parents and their neighbors. They practice them and eventually they crystallize onto one song, one dialect that they'll sing for the rest of their lives. And yet because the process is very much the same, they have these regional dialects where the songs differ a little bit between different parts of their range.
So I studied this phenomenon at a bird called the golden-crowned sparrow. It's a little brown, really beautiful bird, really common in the western North America. They're well known among birdwatchers for their simple and beautiful song.
And because birdwatchers love to put mnemonics on bird songs, the one for golden‑crowned sparrows goes like this.
[sings] “Oh, dear me.”
It's this kind of sad but beautiful song and I associate it with a long hike up a mountain in Alaska or Canada and reaching an alpine meadow where they tend to live, so it's a really beautiful song for me.
In 2016, my students and I were studying golden-crowned sparrows in what we call a mixed‑dialect population. Here, different birds are singing different dialects and you can hear a mix of different dialects, different languages, and so it's a really fun place if you can really recognize these songs.
So we were out there outside the town of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory in Canada and we would spend our days catching these birds in special nets called mist nets and then putting color‑coded bands on their legs like bracelets so we can tell them apart. That's how we’d come to learn that each bird can only sing one dialect.
Except this one bird that we met in 2016. This bird had an unusually large territory and it would wander around singing and we would follow him every day trying to see if he had a mate, where his nest was. Honestly, I thought we were following two different birds because I would hear two different dialects from this area.
One day, we were following this bird which we had color banded, so we knew he was green-green-metal green, and he was singing, “Oh, dear me. Oh, dear me,” and then he would fly off. This time we could follow him. He flew off about 100 meters away, landed in this other tree and we followed him over there. Never lost sight of him.
And he started singing again, but this time it was a different dialect. It was it was this Canadian dialect that goes, “Oh, dear me. Oh, dear me,” and such a simple thing and subtle thing but it just blew my mind. I've never heard a bilingual sparrow before.
I kind of got a little bit obsessed with this bird. I followed him around every day, counting his songs, scribbling into my notes, just fascinated. And as I was scribbling in my notes, my mind would wander off every once in a while to my son who had been a three-year-old at the time.
Now, I'm a father of two kids. My older son being seven years old now and a two-year-old daughter. We raised them with my Korean-American wife out in Nebraska.
The sensitive period will close soon for my son in a few years. Ever since I became a father, I'd often fall into this conversation. “So, is your son learning Japanese? Do you talk to him in Japanese? It's really great for him to grow up bilingual, you know.”
And you don't have to tell me about the benefits of being bilingual. There's not a moment that I'm not thankful for the life I've had. And honestly, I feel guilty because I haven't been teaching my son as much Japanese as I could. He knows the letters, he can count, he knows some of these colors.
Thinking about this always gives me flashbacks to those magical years when I first moved to the States. But then I also remember some of the struggles growing up. I also think about me being over here and the rest of my family back in Japan over there.
You know, that bird never found a mate that year. He roamed around in his really big territory singing his extraordinary songs, but by the time everyone else had paired up and started raising families that bird was still singing, roaming around, looking for a mate. Then eventually, we found him on the other side of the mountain singing and then eventually he disappeared off the mountain.
I think about him often. I still hold out hope that he was just looking for a place where he could fit in and settle down.
Story 2: Nestor Gomez
My wife and I went to the hospital with our two-year-old daughter and our one-year-old son. There was nothing wrong with our daughter besides the fact that, at that age, she wanted to be in her mother's arms at all times and she cried whenever my wife wasn't carrying her.
Nestor Gomez is the creator of 80 Minutes Around the World, a show that features the stories of Immigrants and refugees.
Our son, on the other hand, was sick. He had asthma and he had already suffered several severe, almost fatal, asthma attacks.
“We have to perform an allergy test,” the doctors informed me and my wife. “We will expose your son to several substances to see what triggers his asthma.”
They needed one of us to come into the room with our son and since I didn't want to deal with a crying daughter, I volunteered to go into the room while my wife stayed outside with our daughter.
“You need to hold your son while we inject him,” the doctor said, placing my son on the bed. I thought they were going to give him some sugar candy, chocolate substances to see what he was allergic to and maybe I could get some treats too. I wasn't expecting this.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch,” came the scream as soon as the doctor got the needle close to my son.
The doctor paused for a moment. “Let's try this again,” he said.
“No, no, no!” Another scream as the doctor tried injecting my son.
“Let's try it again,” he repeated.
[muffled screams] Again, the scream.
The doctor glared at me. “Why are you screaming,” he asked.
“Sorry,” I responded, “I'm afraid of needles.”
“Go get your wife,” he ordered.
I got out of the room. My wife handed me our daughter who started crying immediately.
“Waah,” my daughter cried outside the room in my arms.
“Waah,” my son cried inside the room.
“My babies!” I cried, unable to keep my daughter from crying and thinking about all the pain our son was going through with all those needles all over his tiny body.
My wife came out of the room five minutes later. She wasn't crying. She was mad.
“Are you guys all done,” I asked her.
“No,” responded the doctor who was walking right behind her. “There is too much crying going on. We can’t do our job like this.”
“My wife took our daughter in her arms. My daughter stopped crying immediately.
“If you can't keep our daughter from crying then you need to go into the room and help our son,” my wife said looking at me.
Just thinking about the needles made me close my eyes in fear. I knew that fear.
When I was a kid living in Guatemala, my family was extremely poor but my mother always made sure that my siblings and I got all our vaccinations up-to-date. Since our family didn't have insurance because we were poor, we have to rely on a lady from the neighborhood who came to our house to give us the vaccinations. This was a lady with minimum medical training. The vaccinations were extremely painful.
Whenever I saw the lady coming near the house, I would take off running. And my mother will have to run behind me until she could catch me. Then she will have to drag me back into the house to her bedroom, put me down in the bed, sometimes she will have to sit on top of me to get me to get my vaccinations.
One day, I heard my mother saying that the lady was coming in only a few minutes to give me a vaccination. So I decided that instead of running around like crazy, I was going to hide in the one place where they would not look for me, underneath my mother's bed.
I hid so well that for a long time my mother couldn't find me.
“I'm sorry,” that lady was telling my mom, “It's getting late. I have to go.”
My mother started crying. “I'm afraid my son is going to get sick.”
“All kids get sick,” the lady responded.
“But I lost two kids already,” my mother said, crying. “My baby daughter got sick in the middle of the night and died next to me in the bed. And then my other son died in my arms while I was carrying him to the hospital. I keep thinking that they could be alive if only back then I have money to pay for the vaccinations.”
I knew that my siblings had had died when I was young, but I never imagined that my mom had suffered so much and that she blamed herself for it.
“Don't cry, Mom,” I heard myself saying as I came out of my hiding spot. I tried to dry the tears from her eyes.
“It's okay to be afraid,” my mother said. “I'm afraid too. Just close your eyes. Don't look at the needle.”
“Hey,” the doctor was screaming at me, bringing me back to the present. “Are you going to faint,” the doctor asked.
“No. I got this,” I responded.
I went into the room, took my son from the nurse and I placed my son in the bed. And I hugged him while the doctor got the needles ready. I looked away from the needle so I wouldn't start freaking out. I bent down and instead looked into my kid's eyes.
“It's okay to be afraid,” I told my son. “I'm afraid too. Just close your eyes. Don't look at the needle.”
But I wasn't really talking to my son. He was one year old. He couldn't understand me. I was talking to myself because I’m still afraid of needles.