Mouthy Immigrant Moms: Yes, They Talk Smack In Their Native Languages

My mom has been talking smack about people right in front of them for nearly 50 years.

"Blue claws, how hideous," she'll say to the supermarket cashier, while smiling sweetly, as the woman with long, blue nails hands my mom her change.

Or: "He has no idea how to count. Did he sleep through school?" she'll say to the waiter struggling to tally the bill at the diner.

"Cool. What language is that?" the waiter asks, unwittingly charmed by the 5-2 force of nature who just cut him down.

"Oh, that?" my mother coyly responds. "Czech."

That's the great gift of being one of the tiny minorities in our vast nation with its more than 40 million immigrants. We have our own little code, confident that no one can understand us - and lots of my friends who are children of immigrants confirm that their parents do it, too.

But sometimes it bites us in the behind. Right, mom?

The other day, I brought my mom, who is 69 and moved to the United States in 1968, to a great event at the Czech Embassy.

It was a drumming circle, believe it or not. A couple hundred Czechs, including former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, beat drums to symbolically shame the silence during World War II that allowed 50,000 Jews to be herded into rail cars and transported to concentration camps.

The train station where they boarded was called "Bubny," which means drums in Czech. There are groups raising funds to build a museum and memorial at the now-closed train station. The message was one of speaking out: "We're drumming against silence."

My mother listened too well, I guess.

"Oh, his perfume!" she declared, as a heavily cologned man strode past us.

His head whipped around, and he glared at her.

"Mom, everyone here probably speaks Czech! You can't do that here," I hissed.

"Sorry," she said. But at this point, 50 years in, it's as if she has immigrant Tourette syndrome.
"Oh, that lipstick," she dissed.

Glare.

"What a cute, wrinkled old grandpa!" she exclaimed.

Side-eye.

"Mamko, enough!" I said through clenched teeth.

So is this me talking smack about her? No. She's one of the most amazing women I know. And she's not exceptionally mean. But her language gives her the freedom to say exactly what she's thinking. And often what I'm thinking, too.

I'm not the only one shushing my immigrant mom, even when I secretly agree with her.

"Oh, my mom was caught bitching about the maze of the Cosmos Club in Bengali at my cousin's wedding," a friend of mine said. "The majordomo and doorman were from Bangladesh."

In the United States, where 21 percent of the households speak a language other than English, our moms are megaphones for our own darkest thoughts.

And the odds of getting caught gossiping in some other language, according to the Pew Research Center, are pretty good if you speak Spanish (spoken by 37.6 million Americans), Tagalog (1.7 million speak it) or Korean (1.1 million fluent speakers live in the United States.)

As far as Czech goes, we don't even rank in the Census. It lists the 211,000 people who speak Hmong and the 373,000 Urdu speakers before lumping us Czech speakers in with "Other Slavic Languages" (336,000).

So I guess my mom's math is pretty good on this one.

I checked in with another friend, whose family emigrated from Vietnam. Every time I'm at their home, I'm certain her mom is complaining about the people who forget to take their shoes off when they walk into the house. Does her mom talk smack about others in Vietnamese?

"My mom is guilty," she told me. "But we have so many non-Viet friends who speak Vietnamese that she's really, really careful about it." About 1.4 million Americans, according to Pew, speak Vietnamese at home.

The problem for that family is that the non-Vietnamese mother-in-law certainly worries that she's often being talked about, even when she's not.

Yes. This has tainted many all-family gatherings: When my mom says, "Pass me the salt," in Czech when we're all in the kitchen, my mother-in-law is sure that she actually said, "What an incompetent American."

"But I'm not talking about her," my mom insists, when I confront her about the discord that our "Czechlish" causes. "I wouldn't do that."

Uh-huh.

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