English has taken me on a 30+ year journey. All thanks to my father who left Hungary after World War II. Otherwise, I would now be speaking a language with just 10 million others. Because he escaped to the UK before the Russians arrived, I can reach over 1.5 billion people with my writing. While this may not be great for the readers, it is absolutely bloody brilliant for me.
Bahrain, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Myanmar have all been my home. I floated through the advertising industries and cultures of these countries comfortably cocooned in a bubble of English. The language has been a magic carpet transporting me across exotic lands to meet interesting people and sell them soap and stuff.
Yes, English has been good to me and I repay her with fidelity and care. Proofreading with trancelike attention. Arranging, rearranging and carefully crafting every sentence until my keyboard weeps. Constantly deleting and editing to say the most with the least. Placing each word with the precision of a jeweler. English demands perfection.
But she absolutely craves freedom. She devours whatever language she comes in contact with and regurgitates it new and improved. If you know her laws, she will let you break them with abandon. Forget right and wrong. Does it work? If so, good enough. She is strict. And yet so forgiving if you understand her ways.
“I could be you and you could be me.” This was said to me by a rickshaw rider in Saigon. I was a highly paid expat while he barely had money for food. And he was right. I was living the good life only by virtue of an accident of heredity and environment. If the stork had got lost on the day of my birth, I might be carrying a gun in an African jungle or shipbreaking on an environmentally devastated Indian beach at this moment.
English has given me the world. I never forget. I am always grateful.
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