I Speak Perfect Engrish

            F.O.B. is an acronym for Fresh Off the Boat, that first generation children like to use (I like to think of it as a term of endearment) for their parents. My Dad really didn’t really arrive via boat, he came via plane. Back in the 60s they didn’t have direct flights from Tokyo to Chicago, so they came via Hawaii. This always made me want to visit Japan for all the wrong reasons.

            When my Dad’s family moved to the US, more specifically Chicago, they decided on the Lakeview neighborhood, where he attended Lakeview High School while he was extremely F.O.B, as opposed to now where he has had forty plus years to ripen and lose most of the accent. Like any other performing arts geek (woo hoo! I got the gene on both sides!) He auditioned for the school musical, and he was given the part of Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.  Damn the lack of technology! I would pay good money to see my father in his heavily accented Engrish try to teach the cockney Eliza Doolittle to properly say “the lain in Spain farrs mainry in the prain.”  Or even better hold conversations with other uppity Brits stating “Why can’t the Engrish teach their children how to speak?” Oh someone at Lakeview High had a sense of humor.

            The longer he has lived in the US the less pronounced his accent has become, although it never escapes my attention. When I was about eleven years old my brother, Miki, and I were making fun of my dad for his inability to say the word “yes.” What he says is more of a guttural grunt that sounds like “yuh” which is extremely staccato (there is a reason for this; in Japanese “yes” is “hei” or “eh” or a low grunting “ungh” but this last one is really only for men, as I have NEVER heard a Japanese woman make this noise.) For some reason my dad became annoyed as Miki and I ran around the house grunting and he yelled out “I SPEAK PERFECT ENGRISH!”

            Yes Daddy, yes you do.

            As time has passed his accent has faded, but occasionally he still graces us with a few gems. Over the past summer he and my brother were golfing, and while on the green he sank a long putt with such ease that he turned to Miki and the other two members of the foursome (who were paired with them at the clubhouse, were strangers, and therefore didn’t really think my father had an accent) and said “that was so smooth it was like putting on grass!” Since every putting green is grass, and they were unaware that my father is actually an Engrish speaker, they looked at him as though he were about to receive the award for “Captain Obvious of the Year”, which is something that he normally deserves, but in this case Miki was trying not to wet his pants he was laughing at our father’s “perfect Engrish.”

            Just over a year ago my brother and I were at Dad’s house, and in an attempt to make me jealous about his new phone (which didn’t work since I had had one o’ them a year before him) he pulled it out to show me. My Dad, however, walked in and said “Oh! You got the new LAZR phone!” R’s and L’s will always be a mystery to the people of the Rand of the Lising Sun.