In the previous essay, I wrote about the meeting with my American relatives when I was a small kid. For example, where they were living, what languages they were speaking, my decision to learn English in the future and what I learned from the experience. In this essay, I am going to describe our reunion.
After they moved from here to Okinawa, I couldn’t meet them because Okinawa is far away from here. They returned to the US in the end. We received some letters from Texas. Then, later they moved to California.
They returned to Japan after a long time had passed. We both grew up together. I started learning English, so we mainly talked in English because most of them forgot Japanese except their mother whose mother tongue was Japanese. The sisters explained that they were leaning Japanese in Sunday school but it was not enough to keep their bilingual skills.
They still remember some easy Japanese but it was not enough to communicate. Their mother was talking in Japanese but she sometimes talked in English without notice, especially the first few days after she came back.
We chatted and had dinner together. I asked their mother about her impression of the current life in Japan. She answered how the people’s height has become taller than ever. One of the sisters who met their grandma said that she told her that she cannot speak Japanese anymore. It was a bit sad to me.
The family influenced a lot about my decision to study English. Also, I learned that being a bilingual person is difficult. Language and distance are a problem when it comes to international marriage. However, that is how people spread throughout the world originally.
