I am an academic Rapunzel (with no hair to let down the window of my ivory prison)
Last Tuesday, someone I know was lamenting casually over the fact the she struggled to explain a biomedical concept to her parents in Malay, our shared native language. Our conversation morphed from the diglossic difficulty of talking about our highly specialized academic subfields in our own mother tongue – a hurdle born from Mahathir's long-term (and Malaysian government's vacillating) policy in the last two decades in prioritizing English as the language of instruction in Malaysian STEM education – to our seemingly shared chagrin at how this very struggle rears another ugly head (it's getting downright Medusean, I know); that is, we are both first-generation academicians in our respective families who need to code-switch constantly with our parents from blue-collar backgrounds.
Our conversation was cut short, but the cognitive ripples of this realization have been sweeping over me in waves in the last few days. This made me think of my late dad. This made me think of the silence we shared intermittently in the last few years before his sudden death. This made me think of some kind of a communication gap – some kind of real yet unspeakable fissure – slowly yet surely widening between us. I remember the day when he was there attending my bachelor's degree graduation ceremony and asking me to explain to him what the scroll I was holding really meant for me, and how I was struggling to explain to him what being a molecular biologist really entails. I will never forget the time back in Australian summer of 2012 when I brought both Mom and Dad (with my youngest sister tagging along) to Australia from Malaysia to attend my undergraduate degree graduation and feeling a bit guilty because they speak not a lick of English, so the 4-hour graduation ceremony was probably deeply mystifying to them. I know they were happy and grateful, most likely proud of my accomplishment at that time, but I can't help but realize that they stopped understanding what I study long before I received that degree testamur.
Dad passed away from cancer shortly before I was bestowed a full-ride scholarship to pursue PhD in Biology back in Australia, but in the last months before he left all of us, he helped with the down-payment to a bank loan for a small, humble, cheap car for me because I got a temporary job at a local Malaysian university, despite on occasions having verbalized to me how "he doesn't get what exactly my new job as a biological research assistant is about". I received my doctoral degree after seven arduous, grueling years (finishing PhD during COVID was almost insurmountable, to be frank), and since, I have wondered at times what Dad would have thought about my path towards academia (considering I am not exactly making banks and can barely pamper Mother with luxury, like I used to dream of doing), whether he would approve of it or not. Whether he thinks all of these are a form of academic obscurantism, some grandiloquent nonsense – pure esoteric navel-gazing.
The Western education I received widened my intellectual horizon, but at the expense of widening the intellectual gap between me and my parents (and my family members). Though most of my younger siblings ended up more educated than my parents ever did—meaning I do not feel as estranged or far apart from them—a gap is still present, almost palpable sometimes, and it is emotional mostly. With my mother, even more so. I do think she has some vague idea what I do as a cancer bioinformatician now, but I do not want to assume what she thinks about it. I believe she is genuinely happy knowing that I am happy doing what I do as a career, regardless of how much it pays (or rather, how much it doesn't pay).
This wrestling with the ivory tower chasm that divides me as a first-gen PhD from the working-class roots that built and supported me has bothered me insidiously for years. I feel distanced; not by malice, not by abandonment, not out of spite. It's like we are not speaking the same language anymore (sometimes true in the literal sense, because I use English almost exclusively in academic modes, but revert—or rather, code-switch—into Malay for any non-intellectual contexts in my life). This duality eats at me internally because I hate the idea that my Mother-tongue (pun clearly intended) is now mentally relegated by me subconsciously to things unlettered, provincial, or as the Malays say, kampong.
This writing is not meant to be a long-form essay that dissects thoroughly all my feelings regarding this inner turmoil. I do not have a solution nor would I pretend to offer some concluding remarks. I believe the best way forward for me is to keep trying to erase the linguistic dichotomy I apply to my own bilingualism. My English should not just be used for my academic circles, and my Malay should not be boxed in, only taken out to be used for ordering meals at the food courts and talking about the weather with my Mother at her home. And perhaps it is also time for me to learn how to make peace with this cliff made out of ivory and try to build a proverbial bridge or something.