“Where are you from?”

I take in a sharp breath. “I grew up in the Philippines, but I live in Hong Kong now — that’s home.” Exhale.

“Oh?” The other person will leer at me, because I’m always an anomaly. “How did your English get so good then?”

Many people will assume it’s the international school I spent my formative years in, but I learned English in a local all-girls Catholic school in Manila.

“English is my first language. I’ve been speaking it since I was little,” is my usual reply, willing the conversation to be over.

“You don’t have an accent!” the well-meaning woman coos. “I had some exchange kids from Hong Kong stay with me, and their English was not so good.”

“But your accent is so perfect,” goes one of the more egregious responses. In those moments, I wish I could be indignant.

“What does ‘perfect’ even mean?” I would hiss. “That I sound like you?”

“It’s a compliment!” is the all-encompassing defense. I do not feel complimented. I feel like a lab specimen examined for cracks in its skin.

I never realized I had an accent until I moved abroad to Hong Kong at 10, and my tongue stumbled over the British pronunciations of toh-mah-to, vit-ah-min and purr-chased (not per-chased).

My accent has taken on many lives. I use it like snakeskin, shedding it at the right time.

Sometimes I am Bea, said like the Bey-yah my parents gave to me. For many years, I was the Bee-yah my friends in Hong Kong adopted. My British teachers called me Bee, an alter-ego I occasionally slip on.

For Asian and Asian American students like me, the art of the accent is a constant consideration as we learn to switch from one intonation to another. First-generation Asian Americans sometimes discard their accents in order to assimilate, as others subconsciously take them as emblematic of one’s cultural citizenship and race. Some experience microaggressions because of the way they speak, but many also take pride in their unique accent — it’s a lot to juggle.

Blending in

“I’ve never gone a single day here at Northwestern without thinking about my accent and the accent that I put on or put off,” Medill first-year Ashley Wong says.

Wong, an international student, says she’s mastered code-switching — the act of modifying one’s voice in response to certain situations. She describes her accents as a hybrid of American, Singaporean and British.

Code-switching demands a certain degree of mimicry, which can be difficult. Medill and SESP first-year Anavi Prakash, who was born in the U.S. but lived in India from the ages of three to nine, says she “trained” herself to have an American accent as an adolescent because she hated the Indian accent she grew up with.

“Your voice is such a huge part of who you are, but it didn’t match how I saw myself because I saw myself as ‘American first, Indian second,’” Prakash says.

A confidence boost for her third-grade self, while she was still attending school in India, was when a teacher asked her if she was an American after hearing her speak. Prakash was proud to be seen as American first, especially when surrounded by other Indians.

Accents as race

The American entertainment industry has manufactured the non-standard Asian accent, dialects with distinct word stress and pronunciations compared to standard American English, as a means to characterize foreignness. It has used the accent for decades, often for a cheap laugh, University of Virginia Media Studies Professor Shilpa Davé says. An example Davé highlighted is The Simpsons character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, who was voiced by Hank Azaria in accented English for 27 years.

One of the few brown-skinned characters in fictional Springfield, Nahasapeemapetilon is an Indian immigrant. Azaria is a Caucasian man speaking what could be called a stereotypical Indian accent, what Davé calls “brown voice.” The actor stepped down from playing the character following public criticism of racial stereotyping in 2020 and apologized “to every single Indian person” a year later.

“It was separating out the visual aspect from the actual vocal aspect and saying, ‘how do we look at race?’” Davé says. “It can’t just be visual. It’s not only visual, there is a particular sonic element to this.”

These non-standard accents emphasize word stress differently than in standard American English, as influenced by sounds and pronunciation learned in other languages.

For example, I adopt a Filipino accent with family, saying sahl-mon and uncom-fort-able. These words are remnants of my mother tongue, Tagalog, a phonetic language where your mouth appreciates each letter in every word.

Davé notes that accents can be a representation of a person’s position in society, whether through location, race or gender.

“Accent is not limited to sound or the performance of brown voice; it can also be defined as an accessory or cultural characteristic that is designed to highlight a dominant look,” Davé writes in a 2017 article about racial accents in Hollywood.

Regarding South Asian culture, this might mean American TV shows amplify “non-standard” cultural practices like arranged marriage.

“Accent is influenced not just by the way in which we talk, but what we talk about as well,” Davé says.

Cultural citizenship

Davé points out another function of having the standard American accent — acculturation and assimilation.

Davé’s research suggests that fluency in English and having a “standard American English” accent are tied to “cultural citizenship” in the U.S. She writes that speaking standard American English associates someone with class and upward mobility as well as better schools and jobs.

McCormick second-year Emily Ye grew up translating for her father,who immigrated from China about two decades ago and whose English speaking skills are limited. Ye, who grew up in a predominantly white area, served as a translator in everyday locations like the doctor’s office or the grocery store.

Ye’s father failed the written exam twice when trying to renew his driver’s license because he couldn’t read in English, she says.

“I remember he was talking to me and my siblings and just telling us how difficult it was for him,” she says. “Even though he had all this experience driving, he had to prove himself through this exam. And there’s that block of not being able to read the exam and not having any other options like a translator.”

Ye says even when her father might try to interact with someone in English, the other person may defer to her for a response.

“They’ll talk to him like a child, talking loud or talking slower, talking simply,” she says. “If they were talking to me, they wouldn’t be talking that way.”

Ye says she does not think that this was intentional, but having these attitudes can appear as if the other person is looking down at her father. She says seeing these interactions happening within her communities can be difficult.

“Because I know these people personally, I know there’s so much more than how they’re being perceived,” she says. “That’s something really important. The way that you speak or if you have an accent does not say anything about you.”

Wong says she will adopt an American accent with strangers, like when she’s ordering food at a restaurant or visiting the Social Security office.

“I use it because I know it gets me places sometimes, and sometimes it gets a foot in the door when I need it to be,” she says.

In her work, Davé says there is a key difference between accent proficiency and performance. Minimizing the role of performance in accent perception would mean renegotiating how we gain regional or cultural markers from the way we pronounce words.

Pui Tak Center program administrator Sarah Swetz Huang has been teaching English as a second language to new immigrants in Chicago’s Chinatown for a decade. She specializes in teaching students who have little to no experience in English, so she says accent reduction has not been the Center’s priority for their students.

“Fluency over accuracy is more important,” Swetz Huang says. “As long as you’re able to successfully communicate your meaning then, I think, especially for the lower level learners, that’s the most important thing.”

For example, Swetz Huang corrects speakers if they cannot pronounce the letter Z in zero, because saying ee-ro changes meaning. However, she says she would not correct “some-sing” into “some-thing”.

Swetz Huang says learning English has helped her students improve career prospects and gain greater independence — affording them that “cultural citizenship” that Davé writes about.

Reclaiming the accent

While a lot has been done in the last few decades to improve representation for accents in the media, Davé says some accents are still not considered race-neutral.

As the country becomes more multilingual, it’s necessary to consider our personal biases and what it means for an accent to carry “authenticity,” she says.

“We do see many more different types of accents now and not just among Indian Americans, but also among Asian Americans,” Davé says. “It’s not just one accent that’s associated with a particular group, but multiple accents.”

An international student whose first time visiting the U.S. was last fall, Wong acknowledges that being able to mask her accent to her advantage is a privilege.

Still, she says it isn’t her authentic voice: changing her accent erases the traces of her Singaporean identity.

“I understand that this is not the reality for a lot of my international friends who can never get around the accent because they simply cannot,” Wong says. “They lack the ability to camouflage the accent, and sometimes I wonder whether they’re better off than me.”

Wong says she doesn’t want others to misunderstand her intentions — her American accent is not part of her identity. While she’s proud of her native accent, she says it’s easier for those at a café or a train station to understand a more standardized sound.

At NU, Wong says she uses a full Singaporean accent when she’s around other people from Singapore on campus. In her year, that’s only a few others.

“Whenever I use my [Singaporean] accent, I feel so much more connected to home, especially when Chicago isn’t exactly a good home hub for Southeast Asians or Singaporeans,” Wong says. “I take every chance I can get to be in touch with fellow Singaporeans.”

Similarly, Prakash says she’s realized how important her Indian heritage is after reconnecting with parts of her culture through visiting loved ones in India. Because her American accent slips into her Hindi, she’s pointed out as the “American girl” when she travels to India. Now, she says her Indian identity has “priority” over being “American.”

“What I like to say is: No matter where, sometimes I’ll be in a place and I’ll stand out because of the color of my skin — that’s in America,” she says. “And sometimes I’ll stand out because of the way I sound — my accent — which is in India.”

For many first-generation Asian Americans, reclaiming the accent has inadvertently become a vital part of their identity. Now, my friends say my everyday accent is some curious mixture of standard American with British inflections. NU friends say my voice becomes more English in the classroom — echoes of my time at a British international school.

For a long time, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to be called. What does it matter if it’s Bey-yah, Bee-yah or Bee?

Going by Bey-yah, the way it’s pronounced in Tagalog, has felt like a homecoming.

Even if it gets pointed out often, I love my accent. How could I not?

It was formed in the standstill traffic of Manila, challenged in the tall towers of Hong Kong and rests in the waves along Lake Michigan. It’s the sound of an accented, immigrant tongue: a true amalgamation that intermingles where I used to be and where I am now.