Holly Kong

When I speak, I speak with a distinct lack of twang. I pronounce my r’s with full rhoticity, my vowels are never lengthened, my cadence is not melodic. When I speak, I speak with a plain American rhythm, the likes of which you might have found on Disney Channel or Nickelodeon in the early 2010s.

Growing up, my parents had no distinct accent either—both raised in Mississippi but transplanted across the world, always hopping from place to place as a result of both of my grandfathers’ military statuses. Nevertheless, they always ended up back on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Having been rooted in the South for decades now, though, I find that their voices have somehow shifted.

My grandparents, though, noticeably slur their words when they speak, they mumble, they guffaw, they drawl, slow and smooth as syrup, like boots dragging through the swamp’s black mud. As a child, I found their accents entertaining and endearing, but I never once felt the desire to mimic it. In fact, I felt what might be considered a sense of pride at my distinctly generic accent. It was like I had successfully resisted absorption by the South, or that it was some kind of indicator of my better education, having surpassed my father’s simply by making it to the tenth grade.

At Bowdoin and elsewhere, when I tell someone where I am from, their first reaction is almost always to say, “but you don’t have an accent!” Then I enter an awkward moment of trying to prove myself, explaining the truth of my vanilla accent as best as I can, assuring them that “yes, I spent my whole life there,” and “no, I really never left until I came to Maine.”

When I call my best friend from high school and listen to her talk about her day, honey dripping from her drawl, or when I hear my grandmother in the background while I’m on the phone with my stepmom, shouting, “sistah, where y’at?” a strange part of me wishes that I, too, had a voice like that: like Spanish moss hanging from a live oak, drifting leisurely in the wind.

And yet, just a few weeks ago, someone told me that their first impression of me was that I must have been from the North, and I couldn’t help but feel pride, and then a resounding sense of shame because of that pride.

In class, I would rather not harp too much on my identity as a Southerner once removed. I try to pretend that I, too, understand all of the theoretical texts we are reading. That I, too, can string together long, fancy words, proving that I did the homework, proving that I, too, was prepped to attend a college just like Bowdoin. But that facade crumbles when I begin to feel that frustration with myself for just not getting it—the hot burning of tears welling in my eyes—and a selfish yearning for a time when I was the top of my class, when what I had to say was unique, when my generic accent wasn’t so generic. I find myself wondering whether or not I truly do belong at Bowdoin, whether I had to work as hard as my peers to get here or whether I was given a spot just because I come from a place as far removed as Pass Christian, Miss.

I have felt grateful that, at the very least, my accent doesn’t give away how strongly I feel like I’m faking it. And then I just feel guilty. What is it about a Southern accent that says, “uneducated?” It is often the go-to voice to adopt when mimicking ignorance, and even to me, it is an accent that symbolizes more than just a region. I often deemed it to be representative of an entire way of thinking, one that was opposite to everything I believe in, and one that clearly pegs its speaker as lacking education.

But an accent means absolutely nothing about intelligence. Whether I speak with a drawl or not changes nothing about my feelings of inadequacy at an institution like Bowdoin—they exist regardless. The imposter syndrome that I have tried my hardest to shake was borne from the version of myself that I constructed to exist here, a version that was unsustainable, constantly trying to prove her worth by enacting some conscious performance.

The accent, or lack thereof, had nothing to do with it. When I think about it now, I realize that my prejudices against the voice emblematic of my homeland were built out of classism and internalized stigma. A voice does not dictate who a person can become, and neither does a past. In embracing myself wholly, I have begun trying to accept that all of the experiences that brought me to Bowdoin are as valid as anyone else’s. I hope that you, whoever might be reading this, might walk alongside me towards reaching a similar realization.