bicultural but not totally bilingual kids will understand the sheer embarrassment of having to copy-paste what your parents text you in their native language into Google Translate detect language yes, to English, because it's the only thing I truly understand because I don't actually really know what Mom's saying at the end Do I really get the weight of each word she crafts lovingly into characters I've learned but words I don't quite string together or meanings I don't quite grasp I swear I do it's just I don't understand one hundred percent and if I could just g e t those last few phrases sometimes the entire paragraph she sends me rather than rely on a gray text editor that spits back in solid, black, unfeeling English alphabet "Coming home is always welcome" that's not my Mom's voice, with her smiling, sympathetic expression and steaming rice and kimchi stew, warm laundry, and squeaky slippers that's the translator mincing her words, chopping and scrambling them into something familiar to the brain but foreign to the heart I know she means "I'm always welcome to come home" but why couldn't I have gotten that immediately "I eat food well and I have to buy spring clothes." No, Google, I'm sure she means that I will eat her food well and buy spring clothes with her but machine learning algorithms aren't perfect not my mom so how would I really know I wish language could be copy-pasted into English in my mind so that I didn't have to go through this bland, unwilling, frugal third-party that knows nothing about my culture I am a copy-paste of my parents' DNA in flesh and blood so why is it that physically I am connected but mentally, intangibly, I've lost connection to the internet, and some features of Google Translate may be lost. Try again?
not quite fluent, not quite bilingual, so does that mean that somehow i'm not quite bicultural?