I grew up in so much church: English-speaking church, Korean church.
I think that Mexican-American kids live in a global world. It's not even bi-, it's multi-. You know, for those of us who grew up with different countries on our block, different nationalities, you know, we moved into multiple worlds.
Neither of my parents had English as a first language.
I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.
Language has never been a barrier for me. I grew up learning Telugu, Hindi, and Tamil.
I grew up with a grandmother from another country and having a different language in my house. That gave me an ear for accents.
My dad is Polish. My mom is Moroccan, and I grew up around all kinds of different languages, and I love playing with it, and I love picking up new melodies.
I'm very lucky, because it's a combination of the German, the Hebrew, the Swiss, the French, and that accent helped because as soon as people heard it they knew it was me.
Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.
