Here's how. I grew up in America, but my parents refused to speak English to me.

Even though my dad's American, we only communicated in Japanese 24/7, even in front of other Americans. For reference, here's a little taste of his Japanese.

My dad's never lived in Japan but was able to pick up fluent Japanese from college classes and self-study.

To this day, he and my Japanese immigrant mom are the only interracial couple I know of who've never communicated in English. This was obviously awesome for my Japanese growing up, but it means I lost out on thousands of hours of English exposure compared to my peers.

And this English deficiency snowballed into one of my biggest insecurities. Throughout my childhood, I was always one of the slow kids.

In elementary school, I got thrown into time out multiple times because my teacher thought I was ignoring her instructions when really I just didn't understand them.

Another teacher recommended enrolling me in an alternative learning school because I wasn't academically inclined. It escalated to a point where my parents had to take me to a speech pathology lab to make sure I didn't have a communication disorder.

Despite being so young at the time, I started questioning my own intelligence and wondering if something might be wrong with me. And it got even worse in middle school when my peers started making fun of me for gaps in my English, like even the smallest things.

For example, they found it weird that I would call Louis Vuitton "Louis Vuitton" the way you would stress it in Japanese.

One time, even a teacher picked on me because I said "lumber man" instead of "lumberjack" and joked that I must not have grown up in America.

I mean, how would you not internalize that as a kid? The last straw was when my dad noticed I didn't know what the word "intersection" meant when we stopped at a traffic light.

I still remember that moment super vividly because it was the first time in my life that my dad ever spoke a word of English with me.

He was like, "You're 12 years old.

You don't know what the word 'intersection' means.

We got to fix this.

Let's start speaking English with each other from now on." So from that point forward, we started using English with each other whenever my mom wasn't with us.

Within a year, this increased my English exposure outside of school from zero hours to several hundred hours.

This was still not nearly as many hours as my peers who speak English with both of their parents, but definitely enough to begin making a difference in my academic performance. For example, my score on the reading section of standardized tests shot up from the 41st percentile in sixth grade to the 99th percentile in 11th grade.

Now as an adult, my English is up to speed, I think, and I'm beginning to take a little more pride in my language background. But would I want to put my future children through my childhood struggles even if it works out in the end?

Or should society just be more accommodating towards people with multilingual upbringings?

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