Boba Talk by Andy Lopez
A story that explores how language can alienate people who share a colonial past.
First published in Longleaf Review on 30 August 2020.
From the author:
With thanks to editor Lillian Schneider, this story was later anthologized in Best of Small Fictions 2021 by Sonder Press. I wanted to capture the fraught relationship I’ve had with English as a language. Growing up, I remember the strict rules we had at home and at school about speaking in English only. We even had a “swear jar” version for being caught speaking in Filipino. I was taught early on that proficiency in English was key to success. If you were good at it, you could wield it like a knife; I know I have. Not my proudest moment.
Looking back, I realized it was never about “learning” English either. One had to kill the Filipino accent too. You had to accommodate a very specific way of enunciation so people did a double-take, wondered if you lived abroad, and never if you went to a good school, because it was obvious with the way you spoke. Speak well enough, and maybe you could escape reality.
This is all myth, of course. The speaker in the story has this revelation when she bumps into a foreigner who sees her country as a mere vacation spot, dipping in and out without consequence. Poverty becomes chic. I wanted to use a fun play on words on “Boba” to exacerbate the vast divide language can create, in sometimes invisible, hurtful ways. More than anything, I wanted to show a sense of shared pain—both of our colonial past and future—and the pain of self-awareness, the latter of which is critical if we want to move forward.
Read “Boba Talk” here.
Andy Lopez lives and writes in the Philippines. She was a 2021 fellow from the GrubStreet Emerging Writer Fellowship and the UST National Writers Workshop. Her work has been anthologized in Best of Small Fictions 2021 and can be found in Longleaf Review, CHEAP POP, Underblong, and others. Find her everywhere at @andylopezwrites.
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