Episode 5: In this episode of New Narratives, we’re talking about heritage languages. We’re going to discuss why people lose their heritage languages, how that feels, and why language revitalization is so important. This episode is part 2 of a 2-part series on heritage languages.
Guests: Professor Bee Vang-Moua (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Professor Satoko Suzuki (Macalester College), Chanida Phaengdara Potter (The SEAD Project), Oanh Vu, and Ngan Nguyen.
Anya Steinberg: Welcome back, everyone for part two of Heritage Languages of New Narratives: dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. I’m your host, Anya Steinberg. I’m the storyteller intern at Asian American Organizing Project, which is a non-partisan non-profit based out of St. Paul-Minnesota and focused on supporting the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the Twin Cities area.
Last time, I sat down with some multi-lingual folks and talked about their heritage languages. We learned about what heritage languages mean to their speakers, how people became multi-lingual, and briefly touched on how difficult it can be to be a non-native English speaker in the US. Today, we’re going to jump right in talking about why people lose their heritage languages, how that feels, and why language revitalization is so important. If you haven’t listened to part one, you should check it out. Here’s a refresher on our cast of characters for this show. Professor Satoko Suzuki teaches Japanese language and linguistics at Macalester College in St. Paul. She’s a first-generation immigrant from Japanese from Japan but has lived in the US for most of her adult life.
Professor Satoko Suzuki: My name is Satoko Suzuki. I speak Japanese and English.
Anya: Ngan Nguyen is a social studies teacher and a refugee from Vietnam.
Ngan Nguyen: I speak Vietnamese pretty fluently – for the most part I would say.
Anya: Chanida Phaengdora Potter is the founder, executive director, and creative director of The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project, which is a nonprofit that builds strong Southeast Asian communities through language revitalization and community organizing.
Chanida Potter: I speak Lao, Thai, and… that’s it.
Anya: Professor Bee Vang-Moua is the chair of the Hmong department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and spends most of her days teaching Hmong language to all kinds of students.
Professor Bee Vang-Moua: I’m fluent in Hmong – white dialect – and English. Over the years, I’ve taken French. Spanish, and right now, I’m self-teaching Chinese, but I’m not fluent in any of those.
Anya: And last but not least, Oanh Vu is a second-generation Vietnamese American who grew up in rural Minnesota and now lives in the Twin Cities.
Oanh Vu: My name is Oanh Vu. I mean, I grew up speaking Vietnamese, like for the first couple years of my life, and then I spoke — now I mostly speak English.
Anya: One last thing– some exciting news: you’ll be hearing new music during this episode. The music is by Takunobo, a Japanese American artist. I’m really pumped to feature him and his work. Alright, enough messing around. Let’s jump right back in!
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Anya: We left off talking about people’s experiences being non-native English speakers in America. Sometimes these experiences can leave people feeling shamed or ostracized which can affect if people retain their heritage language or not. I wanted to know a bit more on how people end up losing their heritage language so I asked Chanida. Lots of people who engage with her organization, The SEAD Project, are looking to reclaim their heritage language. She explains some reasons why they might have lost it in the first place.
Chanida: My parents were an exception– like a lot of other Laos and other refugee or immigrant parents. Sometimes you have to choose, between– okay, I need you to learn this language for survival purpose– or, I really think that if you lose this language that we speak at home, you may never really know how we came and how I came and how our story matters. So let’s say for example, especially for poor or low-income refugee and immigrant families, they live in rural areas– there is no way that you would survive if you didn’t speak English. Or if you spoke another language, you were vilified or you we’re oppressed or other racist things that would happen to you. So, not to say that it’s the parents’ fault it’s not at all, I think sometimes we don’t have a choice. The other thing is that we don’t have systems of support for our young people to learn these languages. I’m talking about the schools, educational institutions– and we also lack resources to be able to do that.
Anya: Chanida knows that it’s difficult to raise your child bilingual because she also went through it.
Chanida: There’s just so many factors and I emphasize with parents, even with my own children. Like it’s not easy for us to try to choose or if we have to choose. I think we shouldn’t have to choose. And I experimented on my own 8-year-old daughter. When she was younger, she was struggling in pre-school through kindergarten because of the fact that she was trying to code switch. And what was beautiful though, and the studies say this too, is that by the time they hit 5 or 6 years old, they actually automatically catch on, they know how to code switch, and it actually helps them become better learners because their brain is wired to know how to navigate faster. You’re like, you’ve got two game consoles and you’re kind of like going back and forth in two different worlds. And so, a child– a preschooler’s mindset is actually, neurologically so much stronger because they’ve learned another language.
The first few years, there was a lot of pushback from teachers– not pushback in terms of learning another language, but pushback in terms of she needs to study more English. She needs to get better with her English speech. And I said, oh she will. I think that’s something my parents didn’t have a choice to say– okay, okay, I will. I’m sorry. And so it’s almost shaming them that they didn’t know English well enough or that I didn’t, that I was resistant about it. So I would encourage parents to fight that urge to say that– I mean, look at me, look at others who came to this country. We’re doing just fine. And so, I think we tend to think that we need to just erase everything that has to do with our language and our identity in order to survive, but it actually makes us smarter. It makes us more able to navigate any challenge, any system. When they grow into adulthood, that’s when they’ve realized what they lost. And a lot of them actually take our class because they’re trying to reclaim that loss. It’s like a grieving process. When something dies from you or is taken from you, and then you’re trying to restore it. It’s one of the most beautiful but also very heartbreaking thing to see.
Anya: Chanida expressed something that a lot of people I talked to spoke about. The dominating force of English. I know we’ve talked about this, but I can’t stress how much of a big deal it is. English is like this superhuman force in the U.S. – without it, you can’t access American society. The pressure refugee and immigrant parents are under to make their kids fluent in English is immense because unfortunately, English is a thick glass ceiling to success in America. Professor Vang-Moua sees English isolating her community. It’s hard to carve out a space for Hmong in an English world.
Professor Vang-Moua: I think the one thing that’s hard is there’s just not enough spaces in mainstream society to utilize Hmong because everything is just English. And so if the Hmong community does not create that space, then it’s nonexistent.
Anya: Hmong kids are living in an English-dominated world and sometimes it’s just easier to succumb to that. Professor Vang-Moua told me about some of the challenges parents face in trying to communicate to their kids when they themselves aren’t fluent in English.
Professor Vang-Moua: Very often people will go the easy route, which is utilizing English, and when we do things like this, even parents who might not be as fluent in English they would prefer to speak Hmong-English, so we call that “Hmonglish” to their children versus speaking fluent Hmong. For them, it’s faster to communicate that way with their children because their children speak fluent English. They end up doing that which is actually a disservice to our children. Because then they hear “broken English” which I don’t believe that there is such a thing as broken English, I just call it Hmong-English because parents speak English in Hmong grammar, so it sounds like broken English but its Hmong grammar on English. So what happens there is then younger Hmong kids grow up speaking non-fluent English because they hear English in that way.
Anya: When you are just trying to tell your kid to do some chores. You are not always thinking about the consequences of what you’re saying. You are just thinking about how tired you are from work and how you like them to help out around the house and what you’re gonna say if they complain. Kids are already using English all the time, so it can seem like too much effort for parents to speak only Hmong everyday with their kids. But the consequences of small decisions like that are profound. Professor Suzuki knows how easy it is to forget pieces of your heritage language. Even if her career centers around teaching and using her language, she still struggles to hold on to some aspects of Japanese.
Professor Suzuki: Ok, so Japanese has three orthographic systems. The two are alphabet, they represent sounds, but the third one ideograms which is characters. Japanese use Chinese characters or sometimes simplified Chinese characters. They are vast, you need at least 2000 to read you know newspaper and I can read them but I’m not writing them by hand, hardly right? Cause I don’t need to. I am typing everything and when you’re using a computer, it just comes up for you. So, I’m losing the knowledge of that writing and so when I’m teaching 4th year Japanese, which is high level Japanese. I sometimes write on the white board, and then I am like how to write the characters I can’t remember. So that’s kinda not so good. But that’s something you have to really keep doing it and I should probably be more intentional.
Anya: There was once of time when Oanh was fluent in Vietnamese. For her losing Vietnamese was kinda of a conscious choice but also a product of circumstances.
Oanh: Yeah I think it was like a slow process. I remember that there was specific moment where you know my mom would always say things like you know back in Vietnam you would not speak to your parents like this. You cannot speak to me like this, and I was like well, we’re not in Vietnam anymore and definitely really hating that part of identify because it felt really oppressive in that way and really hurtful. It definitely was in an association of speaking Vietnamese with all these things I hated. Just being lazy probably like it’s easier for me to respond in English and I kinda wonder if my family have been around in Vietnamese community there would have been more encouragement for them because after a while, we didn’t celebrate a lot of the Vietnamese holidays. We stopped celebrate Vietnamese new year. There is like death date when somebody die you honor them on the date they die and like I don’t ever remember doing that growing up. So yeah, it’s hard to keep your culture alive I think I mourn the loss of that. If I had grown up in places with more Vietnamese people or Asian people, I would have had that.
Anya: So what does it feel like when you lose your heritage language especially when you can remember time when you knew it. Oanh talked to me about how it feels to visit her family in Vietnam now that she can’t speak Vietnamese
Oanh: So most of my family is still back in Vietnam, like my extended family. So when we go back, I definitely have to rely on them to translate and to speak and I think that’s what it feels like crappy is because I wanna speak to my family members and I don’t want the interaction to feel translational. There is definitely a lot of guilt there when I can’t speak to the member of my family. I went back when I was 11 years old and I was still fluent then especially we spend 3 weeks there so I was like completely talking with all of my relatives and I know we used to have phone conversations and couple of years after that and I would still talk to them but when I got older, replying back in English. There was like complicated relationship with family members so you associate American assimilation and all of that baggage so I just like stop speaking in Vietnamese to my folks.
Anya: Even if she can no longer speaking the language, Oanh still sees it as huge part of her identity.
Oanh: I mean it’s absolutely connected to my identity. When I go home and when my parents speak to me, its like a feeling of like nostalgia and lost and deep connection with my folks when they start speaking in Vietnamese and the fact that I just like in high school you know as my second language I choose French because my dad was like, “Well I grow up learning French,” And I was like cool, “You can help me learn this language, right?” And it’s like French occupation of Vietnam so it’s like an extension of colonization so I didn’t get a chance to learn Vietnamese when I was older and again I shouldn’t have to take a second language if my language at home would have been embraced.
Anya: Ngan still speaks Vietnamese but there are times when she can’t remember words of spelling, she told me a bit about what that’s like.
Ngan: Right now, when I can’t think of a word in Vietnamese to talk to my parents or to speak to my siblings. It hurts me because I actually take it personally and I feel like I never reflect on this before but it’s like why I can’t think of this word in Vietnamese. Part of me feel like it’s being erased because I couldn’t think of that specific words. Then I can’t communicate with my family fully or even when I’m trying to explain certain processes in Vietnamese, I just lose the grammar and also the word and it just makes me feel very disconnected. And it makes me feel like I’ve lost part of myself and it makes me feel like it’s my fault that this happens because I learned English. Now I can’t go back to Vietnamese. That feeling of shame of not being able to speak English it now translates to the feeling of shame of not remembering certain words or being able to say certain things in Vietnamese.
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Anya: Imagine that sinking feeling when you are in the middle of a math test and the symbol on the page looks absolutely foreign to you or you can’t quite recall how all the numbers are supposed to work together. Now imagine that feeling but it’s not just about your algebra grade. The stakes are so much higher, it’s wraped up in your family history the home country you left for the US. Without know thing this language you won’t be able to speak with your family in the same way again. Practically speaking not knowing your heritage language can bring up lots of challenges. Here is Oanh speaking about how it affects her relationship with family members
Oanh: My dad would speak to me in English because he knows that I don’t have fully comprehension of Vietnamese, but his English is also not good. I know my dad is a lot more funny when he’s talking to his friends in Vietnamese. He is like cracking jokes and stuff like that.
Anya: Oanh wants to relearn Vietnamese to strengthen relationships with her family members today. She feels like there are parts of her family she can’t understand without knowing Vietnamese.
Oanh: Hopefully it’ll help me strengthen the relationship. Like my relationship with my dad. Especially relationships with my extended relatives too. And especially like there is so much history too. I understand a lot of my family history, but I wish I can be talking to my relatives and like– ok mom says this happened to her and what was going on for you all. And my dad wants to say I really want to capture my story and what happened to me when I came to the States or what was it like to escape or what it was like living under a communist Vietnam. He was like would you write that for me. I don’t want to transcribe for you. But if you could write it in Vietnamese, then I can transcribe it in English like that would be easier, then it would be your own words too. So, there is like history too as an aspect of it or I would love to go back and I’m just curious to do more like genealogy research if I can go back to Vietnam and look at how far generations, I know my mom side of the family came from northern Vietnam but beyond that generation, beyond that.
Anya: Oanh can no longer understand Vietnamese at the level she needs to be able to sift through her family history. The reasons for why her family came to the US, the lives they used to lead in Vietnam, all the family secret hidden in the language she doesn’t know. This is why professor Vang-Moua told Hmong to her kids she wanted them to understand where they came from.
Professor Vang-Moua: My passion with learning Hmong and my understanding any heritage language and the loss of the heritage language is you lose all of that, you lose that core part of yourself. So, I imagine my own children, I have five kids, and so my own children, if they no longer speak their heritage language then they become a face in the masks of the Asian faces. So then how would you define yourselves that you are Hmong beside utilizing English to explain that here is where my family was from or these are the location of the places. These are the traditions that we practice. You lost so much more, things can only pass down through the language spoken in the language. No other language can ever host the true depth or the meaning of what you practice and what the history of your people. Because there are things that cannot be said or spoken in another language. So sometimes when you explain something, you can’t always utilize English, you have to utilize the Hmong terms to really capture the keys piece of your culture or your people. The loss of heritage language is the loss of a people’s cultures, traditions, history, the true core of it anyhow.
Anya: Like Professor Vang-Moua, Chanida believes that there is something that just can’t be translated. She sees challenges and keeping a community’s history alive if people don’t know the language.
Chanida: A lot of stories that we collect in our work, we have young person who is bilingual works with and elder usually they capture and document their stories. Usually young folks are those who are bilingual. The differences between that and anybody else documenting who doesn’t know language is that the way elder might respond in English is how they responded in their language, their native tongue. Because the meaning of it is actually completely different. They also may not be able to say certain things that you think you’re understanding. So there’s always some sort of gap or missing translation in those instances that people don’t realize. So unless you know that language, you’re always going to come from a length of where everything that may be translated into English or everything that may not be in language is just another way White people have told us how we need to understand it. Right now I’m in the space where I am trying to find ways to decolonize the way you work because I think too often that best practices is actually another way of saying White practices. So I think that’s what been very transformative about language justice work that people don’t realize.
Anya: What Chanida is saying is that whenever you have to translate something from Lao to English, there is so much lost in that translation. As soon as it is transformed from Lao to English, the culture significant attached to Lao words can be lost. And even more so, when elders are trying to tell their stories in English, they might tell it in a completely different way because the emotion they are trying to express belong in Lao. When cultural knowledge stories can’t be held and preserved in Lao there is so much left behind. All of these leads us to why language vitalization is so important for creating a strong community and strong connection to yourself. Ngan spoke to me why people should relearn or learn their heritage language if they don’t know it.
Ngan: Yeah, I think language revitalization is really important. I also feel like sometimes folks never had a chance or choice whether or not they can speak Vietnamese or they can speak English. It’s important to revitalize it so that people who– once they grow up and want to be able to speak that language or to recover what was taken away from them at a younger age. It is important for folks to be able to do that. For folks who feel like they lost their language by choice or whatever to also have the opportunity to relearn something at one point in their life.
Anya: When she can’t remember something in Vietnamese, it motivates her to keep working to maintain it.
Ngan: I think it just gives me a sense of defeat. But also– initially it is defeated but after that it’s more important than ever that I need to maintain this language and for myself and then encourage nieces and nephews to do the same even when their parents say you should just learn English. Because I think it’s really important that they know because if they don’t then the generation after them would lose this language and then lose a part of themselves. I try my best to speak to them in Vietnamese. And yeah, I just try my best to insert Vietnamese whenever I can. So its sense of defeat at first, but it’s also motivation to make sure that the language is continuous thoughout lineage. But also, in the Vietnamese community.
Anya: Language revitalization is one of the central projects at Chanida’s organization, The SEAD project. She believes using language for revitalization to build stronger Southeast Asian communities in Minnesota.
Chanida: What I do social justice work or organizing my communities. I use it as a tool, it’s an armor, it’s a way which I know how to communicate with my elders, know how to speak in a way that helps me understand my connection and relationship to my community. So that to me is much more deeper way how the power of language crucial to this work and especially during the time that this where we’re in crisis and we’re in chaos all of our rights and things are being threatened. And one of the ways to resist is through language justice work. Our most popular program is the language program. So it’s a 8 week intensive program in Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese. I see language in this way as an entry point in how we talk and how we frame issues we care about and also how we actually grow relationships and cultivate relationships with community members. A lot of times people think I’m not gonna use it, why should I learn it. But I think what they are not seeing is that this is how your language is the best to know how the community drives and how or what a community pulse is.
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Chanida: You know things like how to say: hey come eat to, hello, are you well, are all ways to build the relationships in which people actually learn about the culture. So words and phrases and stories and folktales, that are in languages, are actually all parts of how people in our community actually learn how a community works.
Anya: The SEAD project language classes are more than just to transfer people to learn a new language but it’s also a chance to connect with your community, and build relationship center around language culture. Community is an important piece of anyone’s journey to relearn their heritage language. Oanh spoke to me about some Vietnamese friends she knows in California who have built a really strong community around keeping knowledge of Vietnamese alive.
Oanh: There’re so much more Vietnamese people out there and a lot of younger Vietnamese people who are trying to hold on to the culture but knowing that culture is not stagnant. Culture can advance and it still advances today in Vietnam. But language is like an identity they want to hold on to so they would have like meals where people just come and they only speak Vietnamese. They’ll support people learning that. I just had this beautiful moment with a friend of mine when I was out there. We were just sitting down on the coach. We are reading the book together and they are supporting me learning it. It so deeply connects you to your identity. It hits the emotional part of you. Everyone should learn Viet, who wants to learn Viet?
Anya: Language revitalization while making an Asian American community stronger also helps decenter English in our lives, which is an important motor resistance. Chanida talked to me about how her work at the SEAD project is informed by this idea.
Chanida: I started SEAD during the time when there weren’t enough spaces where collected experiences and history and education around Southeast Asian Americans and stories that actually centered. That’s kinda of where I started my role and feeling that there was not a space that was decolonized non-western and centered around the community that I identify with and I work with that actually used our culture assets and respect our knowledge, ancestral knowledge, community knowledge enough to do this work. So that became a light blub moment in in which I said I have work too long in this non-profit industrial complex in this westernized way thinking and breathing and living that we forgot how to be ourselves in terms of our cultural identity and the community we actually came from. And so the idea was lets create spaces for Southeast Asian to actually come together, learn a language. The language might through the process of developing the curriculum contents in the language process people actually learn how to talk about– they will do certain activity around certain social justice themes so that people are reclaiming and restoring the language that family not know. At the same time using a very applicable realistic way they. They all create a project at the end the eight weeks and go back to the community. So, they get to see how language actually becomes an asset and how important it is for them to use language to advocate for and with communities.
Anya: Oanh actually thinks that we need to decenter English not only to build stronger Asian American communities but just stronger community in general.
Oanh: People are claiming their identities it’s like political act, right? I’m incredibly excited to do it. It’s like all the anx of being upset that you never got to learn this language as part of you. We know the history of that even with indigenous people and how their culture is taken away from them purposely. I wish I knew Spanish. I wish I knew Arabic or like Somali. In my neighborhood we have a lot of different folks who speak different languages. And when I’m door knocking or when I have to translate the flyers. We’re trying to get our neighbor to come together and get to know each other. Like I can’t communicate with them. I’m like damn it, why didn’t I take Spanish as my language. Because I want to be able to reach out to those folks and make sure they feel like they’re part of the community. When English is the dominant language, people don’t feel like I can’t be part of that community whether its like a cultural barrier. Especially like language barriers.
Anya: There’s a lot of hope to be found in language vitalization work. Especially in the process of teaching heritage languages. There is evidence that Hmong has been a written language before. Hmong has been primarily a language passed down orally. The written Hmong language people used today was created in the 1950s which means its pretty new. There are fears in the Hmong community that Hmong is going to become a dying language because fewer people are fluent in it. However, Professor Vang-Moua doesn’t see that way. She thinks language is growing and changing to fit the times.
Professor Vang-Moua: It’s such a strange or weird dynamic that’s happening. In a sense its fading more because fewer and fewer people are utilizing it. There are fewer and fewer people truly fluent in the language. But then, you also have more and more people studying it as language versus everyday speaking of it. Because for example, my parents who are very fluent in everyday Hmong, they probably couldn’t explain to me the construction of a Hmong sentence. Or the meaning of what’s a verb, what’s a noun, which one is our proposition, why do we say certain things the way we say, why are certain expressions express in that way. So even though there are fewer people fluent in it and speaking it there are more people studying it now. So there is a different revitalization of the language, so I’m not so much afraid of the language dying off or that we’re going to completely lose it. I always talk to my students about that the language is definitely changing and the change can be positive, or it can become negative. It could become just sort of an almost extinct that we just study for the sake of learning linguistics. The language itself has changed over many generations and that’s ok. What’s not ok is to completely lose it by not caring about it, not utilizing it, not studying it. So, it really depends on how our current generation of Hmong speakers are going to take it and move forward.
Anya: I think Professor Vang-Moua brought up a really interesting point. Languages aren’t static. They are always changing. There is a reason “yeet” and “lit” instead of “dying” and “tha”. Because we don’t live in the 60th century anymore. Even if there are terms that don’t yet exist in some heritage languages. That doesn’t mean they can’t be created. Professor Vang-Moua sees a lot of ways that Hmong has changed with the Hmong diaspora. As Hmong people have spread around the global the language has morphed.
Professor Vang-Moua: Here in the U.S., we picked up terms “pesi” for pop and “pesi” comes from Pepsi. When we say “pesi”, we don’t mean Pepsi we mean like any pop. The “pesi” called mountain dew. I need you to grab me some “pesi” but I want the mountain dew brand. Or like we say “cabei” for coffee, for example. So loan words have definitely changed how we communicate, the vocabulary that we use. What’s also amazing about that it also track back the journey of where we’ve gone to, which areas we experienced all the way tracking here to the U.S. And of course, into all the many different countries that Hmong people have spread out to French, Argentina, Germany, Australia. Over the years a good chunk of Hmong vocabularies have– we don’t have enough opportunities to utilize it because for example, we have rich vocabularies when it deals with the art, deeper culture topics. When it deals with agriculture. And here in the US, we don’t farm how we used to.
For example, Hmong we have three or four different terminologies just for rice itself. It’s a staple of Hmong community. And I’ve heard a number of Hmong utilize one word for rice, whether it’s cooked or uncooked, or any forms of rice they’ll use one word. They would come off sounding funny to the elders, but they don’t correct those who make the mistake they just laugh it off. So vocabulary gets dropped, vocabulary disappears because you just don’t have that context to speak about anymore. In English, we have there, here, over there. In Hmong, we’ve got like, don’t quote me on this, we have like seven or nine words that means here, there, over there. Because we lived in many mountain regions and so we would have all of these as there. But it means “up and over there” because it up and over the mountain or the hill. And a word that means “there” means horizontal over there and at that surface and another word that means “there” means out there far. But in English there is just there, and we describe with out there, up there, over there. We have like 1 word “there”. But Hmong have got a number of words that means there. But then you live in regions like here in the US and we don’t get to utilize all these vocabulary. So, regions that you live in have new experience, the lack of having those cultural practices anymore or these cultural spaces, and places anymore will influence how language changes. And how we no longer utilize certain things.
Anya: When Professor Vang Moua found a concept to the words that doesn’t yet exist in Hmong. She encourages the students not to see it as a limitation but as an opportunity.
Professor Vang-Moua: They start to feel like, in Hmong we don’t have enough vocabulary. That’s why we keep switching to just utilize English. What they don’t understand is you got all these brand new things we never had before in our language. You’ve got technology, we’re talking science, we’re talking about legal terminology, medical terminology that in Hmong we never look at before, we never discussed about before. It never was important before. Or we never discovered it or we just didn’t have it, it was non-existence. Like in Hmong, we don’t have a word for number zero. Because We just don’t talk about non-existence quantities. When I teach my students, I am like be proud of the fact that we don’t talk about non-existent quantities. Don’t feel bad we don’t have that words, instead understand why we didn’t have that word. And that it made sense to us at that time. Now if we needed, well, you guys are the current generation, hey! Make one up. That’s how words came, it wasn’t given from the lord all mighty above. Humans create it through social content, social dynamic, social experiences with one another. Comprehension of the words around us and then how we communicate that with each other.
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Professor Vang-Moua: And so very much you have this huge field that you can fill with new words that’s up to your generation’s creation because these are new things to you so that’s open. It’s an invite to explore that.
Anya: And that’s a wrap for this episode of New Narratives. Special thanks for those featured in today’s story: Professor Bee Vang-Moua, Professor Satoko Suzuki, Sierra Takushi, Ngan Nguyen, Oanh Vu, and Chanida Phaengdara Potter. Music featured in this is by Takenobu. This episode was written, edited, and produced by your host Anya Steinberg, Storyteller Intern at Asian American Organizing Project. More information about AAOP can be found at our website aaopmn.org. Thanks for listening.