by Yanichka Ariunbold, assistant editor

Recently, my parents asked me to edit their research paper on Raman spectroscopy — some complicated concept I still only have a laughably basic idea of, even after proofreading their whole paper 3 times. Something to do with…lasers…? Also, yes, it is, in fact, super adorable that they do experiments together and co-author smarticle particle lab reports that only fellow science Nerds can decipher. Like, Coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy? What’s more romantic than that? (At this point, I’m just saying words.)

Contrary to my expectations, I found barely any actually important things to correct in the paper, just some tiny technical mistakes, mostly  involving indefinite articles, that didn’t impede its overall comprehensibility in any way. I never really thought that my parents’ English was this good, or their writing so mature and developed. They often speak broken English at home, if at all, preferring instead to speak Mongolian, our native language. And in public, usually my brother or I do the talking for them — ordering food, talking to school counselors, phone calls to mechanics, etc.

So somehow along the way, I guess I had begun to think that just because my parents’ English isn’t on par with, like, Richard Burton (understandable, considering that they spoke their first word of English when they were ~33), that meant they weren’t capable of being masterful with their expression and eloquent in their explanation? I mean, I was always aware they did physics-y stuff that I’ll probably never understand in my lifetime (future not-science major here), but I seemed to have underestimated them — inexcusably, I might add. Like these are people that support me unconditionally in anything I do, and I had made the fatal mistake of assuming in my isolated bubble of privilege that language proficiency ultimately means intelligence.

It doesn’t. Every mistake my parents made in their paper was a symbol of their struggle, every technical flourish of words a symbol of their perseverance…

There’s this poetry book, translated from Mongolian to English, in our study library. Upon initial reading, it made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Not even in the quaintly metaphorical “crimson leaves falling” way. Every poem was incoherent, an atrocious mixture of random words stringed together by a translator who too obviously didn’t have a thorough understanding of the English language. 

But one verse made me pause mid-criticism:

I stopped summing

one into two and started looking

For ten thousand meanings from one word.

And so I looked.