lingua franca
Our team manager departed from our team yesterday, triggering everyone's sorrow and sense of loss, for the semi-annual personnel change. Her career at New York for 7 years, as well as her personal beliefs based on liberalism, our team enjoyed the world where idealism was practiced, thanks to her personality and virtues.
Even before or after her leadership, our team is an isolated haven of bilingualism and cosmopolitanism in terms of language and ethnic diversity, inside the domestic company with omnipresent peer-pressure. I firmly believe that her talent as a manager can appear most brightly in our team, if we overlook the hierarchy of departments in the whole company. It might be that our haven can survive because it is underestimated and ignored by the centrists in the high position.
Having stayed in this team for two years, it is not my first time to say goodbye to my beloved colleagues. A half year ago, ****-san left our team. She was admired both for her talent and for personality among all the members. The workplace environment was ideal, and she was undoubtedly one of the core members, so everyone was supportive about her choice for the career.
I remember even today the words the deputy manager addressed in his farewell speech: "you're a good student." This phrase brought me a sort of euphoria.
Few months priot to leaving, she was promoted and obtained a new title: manager. Though it didn't mean she'd be a boss of someone, but it implied that her age was enough for beginning to consider the position of management.
However, she was able to remain an apprentice before the deputy manager. It was enabled thanks to the stable and successing outcome of our team's operations. She didn't need to be an adult. Under the pressure for maturity in capitalist competition, our days with her was a sweat dream both for herself and for us all.
Before the expected personnel change in the near future, now I fear to leave the small haven of bilingualism in our company and go into a workplace where Japanese is exclusively used. Actually it is not the first time to feel a sense like this. When I was senior in the uni, I was afraid of losing the world and the way to connect the world of Mandarin, as a member of the Chinese language association. In recense, I frequently recall the days and emotions I spent and felt two years ago.
The environment and the language are two different things. Yet in my experience they are closely related. Losing a language is losing a world, and loving the world is loving a language. Languages always connect us. They are in the center of our community and actions.