Episode 4: In this episode of New Narratives, we’re talking about heritage languages. We’re going to learn a little bit about the Asian languages people speak, what it means to them to speak their heritage language, and their journey to multilingualism. This episode is part 1 of a 2-part series on heritage languages.
Guests: Sierra Takushi (Colorado College ’21), 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: Hey everyone, welcome to 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 focused on supporting the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the Twin Cities area. In late August, BTS dropped Dynamite, their first ever all-English song. For those of you who don’t know, BTS is arguably the most globally successful KPOP or Korean pop band. They are the best selling artists in South Korean history. So yeah, they’re pretty big. As someone who is ethnically Korean.
I’ve got a complicated relationship with BTS. I’ve got nothing against them. It’s more about some of their fans. All of my life, diehard BTS fans had raved to me about how they got a bad case of yellow fever for the BTS members. I have known lots of big time BTS fans who actually learn a fair amount of Korean by listening to tons of KPOP. I think I feel equal parts fetishized by their devotion or also jealous that they actually know more about my own culture than I do. When I heard that BTS dropped an all-English song, I was not surprised to learn that it was a record shattering release. Dynamite is the first K-pop song to reach number one on the Billboard hot 100 chart. On the surface, it kinda makes sense, since the US is the largest global power in the music industry and if the song isn’t in English, less people in US can sing along.
But isn’t that kinda messed up? There is no official global language, but English is so dominating that despite being the best in South Korea and a huge hit all over Asia, BTS couldn’t shatter US records without recording in English. It’s almost like there is this English glass ceiling that you can only shatter by conforming to our American ways. Which got me thinking about the feverish BTS fans. I have known how unfair this all is that they get to learn Korean for fun while my grandma, my hal-moni, had to learn English to survive in America. They feel a sense of accomplishment of being able to sing along when their favorite song comes out.
When my hal-moni gets ridiculed by real estate agencies, by teachers, and by white family members and by peers for her accent. And the facts of all that had ripple through time to today. So in today’s episode we’re going to talk about heritage languages. I interviewed a lot of really incredible people for this episode and had a hard time thinking about what parts of our conversation to cut out of the podcast. I didn’t want to make any compromises. So this episode is actually split into two parts. Part one, we’re going to learn about the Asian languages people speak, what it means to them to speak their language and their journey to multilingualism. Let’s jump in.
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Anya: The idea for this episode actually started from a conversation with my friend Sierra Takushi, who you have met before from the show. She is originally from Minneapolis but we go to school together at Colorado College. She is Thai and Japanese American. She and I were talking one day about our relationship to Asian languages and how complicated it can be. Her mom is a Thai immigrant whose native language is Thai, and her dad is a third generation Japanese American who actually doesn’t speak Japanese anymore for a very specific reason.
Sierra Takushi: My dad grew up in Japan as a Japanese American person. He was born in the U.S. but his parents are missionaries and then they went to Japan to be missionaries in a missionary community in Tokyo. I just thought that because my dad was growing up in an American community in Tokyo with a ton of white Americans that just because he was in that community, he didn’t learn Japanese. All of my dad’s friends from growing up in Japan, all the white American missionary kids, they all know Japanese and are fluent. My dad does not know Japanese. It’s because when he was there, his parents, especially my Chinese American grandma, was really adamant that her kids spoke English and “acted” American in Japan because she knew that they would return to the U.S. She wanted her kids to be as white and as English-speaking Americans as they could be.
Anya: Sierra’s linguistic journey is difficult for her to talk about. When she was younger, her family spoke Thai in the house together until one day.
Sierra: When I was six, I told my mom that I didn’t want to speak Thai anymore and I just wanted her to speak English to me. And so, from six and onward, I have only spoken English in the house. Growing up, hearing my mom speak Thai, I was like I didn’t want my mom to speak Thai to me. I didn’t like listening to my mom speak Thai on the phone and I remember literally hiding when I knew my mom was on the phone with her relatives. And I don’t know why I could be so young and internalize so much. I don’t know if “xenophobia” is the right word which is prejudice against just simply hearing the language like I didn’t even want to hear it. I would be in my room or somewhere else. And I didn’t realize that I was sad about it until I came to collage really and realize how apart and how separated I felt from my mom’s culture.
I think I realized how much pain I caused my mom by telling her that I didn’t want to speak Thai with her. I realized how much pain I caused when I hear her on the phone with her sisters in Bangkok and she is like facetiming them and they’re speaking so fast and loud and they’re laughing and they are gossiping and they’re sharing all these things that I think that my mom in some way holds back because it’s not even in the medium that she would want to deliver to me and this is really sad but I only realized certain aspects and like that characterizes and personality with my mom when I hear her talking with her sister even though my mom and I can communicate with each other, we’re not communicating in her tongue or like in her most comfortable space and through the most comfortable medium that she isn’t even fully revealing herself to me.
Anya: There is so much tied up with language. There is the pressure to assimilate, to stop speaking your language and work on your English. There is also the shame of losing your heritage language and your connection to the culture. Kids with parents who are non-native English speakers have to grapple with racism from teachers and peers from a young age. Or they take on the burden of translating the world for their family. But on the brighter side, language can be so beautiful. That’s what where we’re gonna start with today. I talked to a bunch of people who are bilingual to various degrees.
Professor Satoko Suzuki: My name is Satoko Suzuki. I am a professor at Macalester College. I speak Japanese and English.
Oanh Vu: My name is Oanh Vu. I grew up speaking Vietnamese, like for the first couple years of my life and now I mostly, I speak English. So, I speak Vietnamese pretty fluently and for the most part, I would say.
Chanida Phaengdara-Potter: Yeah, so my name is Chanida Phaengdara-Potter. I speak Lao, Thai, and that’s it.
Professor Bee Vang-Moua: You know I speak, I’m fluent in Hmong, white dialect, and English. I have taken, over the years, I have taken French, Spanish, and then right now I am self-teaching Chinese, but I am not fluent in any of those.
Anya: I asked everyone to share with me different things about their heritage language that are unique. Professor Suzuki is a first-generation Japanese immigrant who teaches Japanese language and linguistics at Macalester College. She shares with me some cultural differences that are built into Japanese.
Professor Satoko Suzuki: I told you earlier that Japan is a more formal country so a lot of politeness is already coded well into the language so something like good morning, if you say it to a good friend, you would say “おはよう ” but if you say it to your professor you would say “おはようございます” which is a much longer one so that kind of difference is already included in the language.
You know in English you can of course speak differential to your, I don’t know, supervisor by saying good morning in a certain way. You may stop and your intuition, your body language might express politeness but the language itself does not do that, right? English has– at least you are supposed to write very directly. You should you know in your college writing class I’m sure you learn like you have to say your thesis right away and then you have to build your thesis. The rest of the paper should support the thesis so that’s a very direct way of writing right? That’s not necessarily encouraged in Japan. You don’t know what’s going on until the very end sometimes and that’s okay in Japanese so it’s a very different way of thinking.
Anya: Chanida is the Executive Director and Creative Director at Southeast Asian Diaspora Project (SEAD Project). She told me about the ways in which the Lao language is also tied to Lao culture.
Chanida: We have a very beautiful, deeply soulful way of how we describe certain feelings and emotions. So for example, Lao language, the words for like how we say depression or sad or happy actually start from the word heart. So the translation for like depression is my heart is heavy as hanging low. Or when you are happy, my heart is beating fast and heavy. Or the word for angry is like my heart is really heated, it’s hot. So, it’s actually a very beautiful way of describing that because it differs about the Lao culture so Lao people are very much known and characterized as being very wholesome and whole hearted people, so we speak from the heart everything we say. How we also say hello, so that the greeting is not hello you know, we don’t say hello, we say are you well [Chanida speaking in Lao] which is literally a lot of languages, Asian language actually agree, and I think that’s something how we need actually interact and build relationship, is very warm, is very welcoming and that people are saying hello, it’s how are you doing? Are you well? And I think that’s something that English language learners can learn from that too.
Anya: Ngan is a 1.5 generation Vietnamese American and middle school teacher who is fluent in Vietnamese and English. She shared with me a little bit of interesting history about written Vietnamese.
Ngan Nguyen: Some of the pronunciation, even when it’s in the Latin alphabet, some of the pronunciation of the words are derived from Chinese words or Chinese characters so there is a lot of influence. From what I’ve seen and what I heard my dad talk about, we used to use the Chinese characters so that old-old Vietnamese documents still have Chinese characters. But they switched to Latin alphabet around times when it was colonized.
Anya: And last but not least, Professor Vang-Moua teaches at the U of M Twin Cities and is the director of the Hmong department. Between the college and the community classes she offers, she teaches Hmong six days a week. She was eager to tell me about the complexity that separate Hmong grammar from English
Professor Bee Vang-Moua: So for example in Hmong, I teach about the classifiers and so Hmong is one of the languages, along with a number of Asian-based languages and then some non-Asian based languages, to have classifiers. So, our classifiers work like English articles, for example like “the” and “a,” so you will say like the dog, the teacher, the husband, the father. So, for Hmong, the classifiers do not have masculine or feminine, they are not just the straight article but they classify. They tell you what a noun looks, feels li,e is used for, and the quantity of that noun.. And so, for example the noun “txiv” can mean a number of things it can mean a fruit, a husband, a dad, and so if you use the wrong classifier you are saying a completely different word. So “lub” is a classifier for a round object “lub txiv” is a fruit. “Tus txiv” is a husband, “leej txiv” is a father.
And many times Hmong youth, they don’t know the differences between these classifiers so they will say “kuv lub txiv” and they mean my dad but they come off saying my fruit. And then also Hmong is tonal so every single tone will give you a completely different word. We have seven distinct tones and then we have like eight grammatical tones. And so if I use the consonant p which is “p” and vowel “a” which is a letter a, so I can say [Vang-Moua pronouncing “pa” with different tones]. Those are all the different tones and that means to help, linking, a flower, too tie up something, breath, a stick or a paddle in that order. So if you hit the wrong tone you are saying something completely different.
Anya: I also want to hear that something everyone love about their language. Like a favorite word of phrase. For Professor Suzuki, there is one word that immediately jumped to mind.
Professor Satoko Suzuki: “懐かしい” is one of those words that are hard to translate. It feel nostalgic I guess. Like, if I hear a song that I used to hear from childhood, I would say “懐かしい” or if I see food that I haven’t seen for a long time that I used to eat as child or something I would say “懐かしい”. So, it could be about things, people, food, etc. that I have missed. I guess that’s the meaning, I guess.
Anya: Ngan told me that she didn’t really have a specific word she loved.
Ngan: I just love hearing Viet names and I don’t have like a specific Viet names that I love, but I think like Viet names are really meaningful because it’s like a middle name combine with a first name, so your name is never just like a first name. Like my name is [Ngan speaking Vietnamese] which means like mercury. It translates to like a meaning but when it’s in English, it’s just like Ngan or like people can’t pronounce Ngan so they pronounce it “nan.” So it lost that meaning for what it means to me for be like equate to like silver and water.
I think I have a lot easier pronunciation of my life to be honest because Ngan is… I don’t know how it is so difficult I don’t know the G is not silent but I just go by “Nan” and became part of my identify part of my story too so I am trying to make it I guess so that like I feel better about myself for letting people use the lazy pronunciation but I’d rather them do that I guess for me than like trying to pronounce it and pronounce it wrong.
Anya: Oh interesting. Why? Is it horrible to hear?
Ngan: Like that’s just too much words. And I think like the point is for them to put in that much work to pronounce my name, but I think it’s just makes me so cringe just being that. So for my own personal preference its “Nan” and I made it as part of my identify and I made it a point to tell that story of my name just so that people understand that it’s not just me letting them be lazy but it’s like these are good systemic things that prevent you from even pronouncing my name. So, I just need you to know that before you just continue to like to pronounce my name as how it is.
Anya: Chanida’s favorite Lao word was common but sweet. It was a saying that remain her of her childhood.
Chanida: So there is the saying in Lao called [Chanida speaking Lao] it’s very easy to say. So it just means “come come” so you say for. It’s one of my favorite words because it’s something that I always hear as a child. One was like “come come get away from that boy” to “come come and eat right now I told you already 20 min ago”. You know so I just wish there was like you know more restaurant call which is like “come come”. But yeah, that I would say that’s one of my favorite phrases.
Anya: Despite their different path bilingualism everyone agrees their heritage language were rooted in the very definition of themselves. Professor Suzuki saw Japanese as not only necessary for communicating with her family but for broadening her world view.
Professor Satoko Suzuki: I can speak with so many different people, I guess. By speaking Japanese, I am able to talk with my parents with my family but also different scholars of Japanese in the world. I am able to communicate with them right. I read both English and Japanese books and that’s really important to me that I am able to do that. I feel like being able to read in both languages have really broaden my perspective, my horizon. A lot of Japanese books are not translated into English. You know that ratio is much less. So, lot of literature as well as you know non-fiction books are not translated into English. So knowing Japanese is the only really to have that access to that.
Anya: Japanese isn’t just a language for Professor Suzuki Its integral to understanding and expressing her personality.
Professor Satoko Suzuki: It means a lot to me, it’s part of who I am. You know I think in Japanese usually, not when I am speaking in English, but so it’s– you know I grew up in Japan until I was 22 so I was already formed as a person basically. I have changed a lot since then but the basis of my character was built by then so it’s a huge part of me. And also, I love writing both in English and Japanese but when you are a native speaker you can be creative, and you can be ungrammatical, but you know how to be ungrammatical and still sound okay if you’re a native speaker.
As a non-native speaker of English, I don’t have that luxury so like I don’t want to always write you know, I don’t know, serious English, kind of a straightforward English. I want to sometimes want to play with the language but it’s hard to do as a non-native speaker. Because I don’t know where the limits are in order to be creative. But I can do that in Japanese. So I can express my creative side in Japanese I don’t do creative writing or anything like that, but I can with my friend, just writing texts or whatever, I can be creative without breaking the fundamental of the language.
Anya: Vietnamese connects Ngan to her homeland and her culture.
Ngan: So Vietnamese is really important to me because it’s just a way for me to preserve my own identity and as a Vietnamese American and my own culture. I think being able to speak Vietnamese means that I feel like I still am connected to my home country in some way. That is a place that I can go back to without feeling like too much of a foreigner just because I can still speak and understand the language. You know Vietnamese culture also needs the Vietnamese language. There are certain stories that are told in Vietnamese and like origin and how we became the people that are connected to the language because it told in Vietnamese and I can’t really find like English version of those folk tales or story or whatever that exemplify like how Viet culture and Viet people were born.
Anya: Chanida saw language as a vessel for resistance, Lao is one way in which she can honor her ancestors and simultaneously resist against English’s dominance in America.
Chanida: The thing about languages, it’s always been a part of my life it’s part of who I am, my history, my peoplehood, it’s also how I resist. If you travel around all over the world everywhere else, everyone is bilingual or multilingual. So that’s not something as value here in America. It’s either just one way or the highway with English you know and so it’s been shamed, it’s been erased from our tongue, it’s been told that we are not going to survive or fit in unless we have English.
So I think it’s a very supremacist way to push and press people from being anything but themselves, especially refugee and immigrant communities. Especially for those who only speak one language, they actually don’t realize how much– once you learn another language or more you are actually bringing multiple identities and multiple histories and multiple cultures into your worldview and into your perspective. For me, speaking Lao means that I am whole, that I am not forgetting my ancestors, it also means that I’m honoring my mother and my native tongue in ways that isn’t forgetting the past, the present, and the future.
Anya: Professor Vang Moua also feels like Hmong links to her heritage and her ancestors. Without knowing Hmong, she doesn’t think she fully understands what it means to be Hmong.
Professor Bee Vang-Moua: To feel kind of like you know a word that describes you but you don’t have the context of it, you don’t have the content of it. You know that you are proud of who you are as a human being, but you’ve lost you know the definition of what that is, right? Because we’re all people we’re all human beings but we each– each individual carry a concrete definition of how they feel of who they are. And to not have that heritage language today would mean that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with the others that I have talked with, I wouldn’t be able to you know I traveled to Thailand, to Vietnam, to China and number of occasions that would mean that when I travel to these places and space of which my ancestors came from or different individuals of my community went to or came from, where they are still located, that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them and truly understand their experiences. Which builds up my foundation of who I am as well because we are just one small part of our whole community right and so definitely, I would still know who I am as a person as an American, but I would really truly lose that core piece of myself of understanding who a Hmong person is and how can I give a part to my kids when I myself can’t truly understand that part of myself. So yeah, I just feel like language just kinda adds on to the foundation of who you truly are.
Anya: Yes, all the people you just heard from are either bilingual or multilingual but the journey to get there was different for each of them. Ngan was born in Vietnam and attended school there through second grade.
Ngan Nguyen: And then when I came to the US. Most of the time when I am at home, I speak Vietnamese to my parents and my siblings and my oldest brother is the first one who came here as refugee and he was really adamant when I was a younger kid, he was like “You need to speak Vietnamese at home to our parents,” because he didn’t want that aspect to get lost.
Anya Steinberg: When she came to the US, she has faced with an obvious challenge she barely knew any English, so she cracked open some books.
Ngan: I didn’t understand what my classmates and my teachers were saying fully. When I was in Vietnam I went to school and our school there already teach English, but you know all I learn really was like “Hi. How are you? I’m fine and thank you and you?” That was what I used when I first came to the state like basically, I am like “Ph hi how are you” the same things. And my oldest brother played a really big role in this too. Because he is a pretty active reader, he was like if you want to learn English that was something you just have to do, just read more and then you can learn more words from there. And I guess I just took the matters into my own hands and just like read a little more just any books I can find and back then I was really into like series like the Magic tree house and whatnot so as I read, I picked up like words from there or sentences from there and then I used it in my conversation with friends and classmates.
Anya: Chanida was born in Laos but came to American as child refugee in 1986. Her parents saw maintaining Lao as central to Chanida identity even if Chanida didn’t always agree.
Chanida: Even I didn’t have home education, my parents were very very good about making sure that I was bilingual. And anytime I was in the house I was speaking Lao and when I’m outside and then I am allowed to speak English but never inside the house. You know, you try to resist, and you know that idea that your parent are forcing you to learn something you don’t even use anywhere else, as a young new American, who was just trying to fit in right? So, one of the things that I think that I have value now is how important that was my parents never erase that language from me.
Anya: Professor Vang Moua wasn’t always as fluent in Hmong as she is now. She lived in rural Wisconsin where they are the only Hmong family. They spoke mainly English, but her dad was a Hmong language teacher in love with languages.
Professor Bee Vang-Moua: He spoke French, English, Chinese, Hmong, Lao, Thai. And could read and write in majority of those languages.
Anya: Hmong start to become more important to professor Vang Moua, Because of two things. One her family moved to the Twin Cities where there is a huge Hmong population.
Professor Bee Vang-Moua: I was in for culture shook. I went to a local high school here in the Twin Cities and where I used to be the only Bee Vang with a super unique name in my school and every substitute remembered me because my name was so unique. To being like one of, I don’t know, like the 50 Bee Vang in the highschool.
Anya: And to she started dating a Hmong guy.
Professor Bee Vang-Moua: And my boyfriend at the time, who is my husband now. You know, he is Hmong they came to the U.S. in the like mid 90s whereas my family came in the mid 80s. And so, he was like “you know, my parents don’t understand what you are saying or like when you are speaking to me it is always in English and I think my parents also want to know like what we’re saying too especially if they’re there.” I started paying more attention to Hmong language and then my dad had taught the reading and writing system when we were younger, so it came back easily to me and then I love just listening elders speak and following them around and asking them question and kind of up pick it up that way and did my research through online, through reading text, through interviews, asking question, just being quizzed. And also, through tutoring people.
Anya: But of course, becoming multilingual is not without it’s challenges especially when you arrive in the U.S. with little to no knowledge of English. America is not kind to non-native English speaker. And that showes to my conversation with people. Many people see acquiring English as something they have to do to survive in America. Navigating in the us as a non-native English speaker could be a traumatized difficult experience. I talked to Oanh about this; she is a second generation Vietnamese American. Oanh grew up speaking Vietnamese but now can only understand Vietnamese and mostly speaking English. Her parents though were non-native English speaker live in rural Minnesota. She told me about what that was like.
Oanh: So when my folks first came to this town called Fairmount. There was other– like 5 other Vietnamese family who lived there and there was like a factory that created like frozen foods and I think the frozen food factory shut down, and so they all moved out to Cali. And my family did not follow so there was like no Vietnamese family, there was one other Vietnamese family. But there was like no folks of color so it was like rural, pretty conservative. I remember getting a phone call when I was a kid asking if my dad was home and then saying something like all your Chinese folks gotta get out of the town.
I mean I remember one time going through like Burger King. My parents don’t really go to fast food restaurant. But I specially wanted, I was obsessed with Lord of The Rings and they had this Lord of The Rings cups. I really wanted one so I made them to go to Burger King when we were at a road trip so I could go buy one and my mom was ordering food and they messed up her order. My mom was like, “you messed up my order like I need you to fix this problem,” and something transpired, and the woman was definitely like “Well you know like maybe if you spoke better English that I can understand you and I will get your order right.” I was like I don’t think that’s not quite the situation also that’s pretty like racist. And I just remember the Manager coming out and my mom at that point was pissed. He was like “Ma’am, ma’am, can you please just shut up so that I can apologize?” And I think we got some coupons but that was about it. I don’t know. I was like– and my sister was so pissed at me because they caused a huge commotion, and she is like did you get the cup and I just like looked in the back and I think they were like out of the Lord of The Rings cups and like they gave me some other like crappy toy or something.
Anya: Ngan on other hand had to learn English herself. If you remember, she is the one who reading magic tree house to catch up in fourth grade. She talked about being placed in ESL class which stands for English as Second Language. Today the program is called ELL or English Language Learner.
Ngan: What motivated me to really want to learn English was because back then for ESL classes I had my own classes. So when people were doing like language art and reading section in elementary school, we– like the ESL kids– had to go to different room to learn English so to learn like a different thing and I think back then I was just like I wanted to be in the general classroom where everyone else are, like I don’t want to be seen as someone who doesn’t know how to speak English or who doesn’t or you can’t speak it well that I had to take like supplemented classes. Part of the that motivation was also the shame of not being able to speak English like everybody else in the classroom. I think it was just a sense of how I was made to feel excluded when I don’t know how to speak English at a young age. And looking back at it, that’s how schools make students who speak another language feel in general and hasn’t change much I would say from when I was a student to now.
Anya: For her, learning English was not only about being able to help herself in school but also about being able to help her parents.
Ngan: I would say like survival is probably like the main reason that I learn English because I also know what that feel like to have to translate important document or things your teacher say about you to your family. And that was one of the most difficult things for me when I grew up too. So, most of the time we also don’t want to put that burden of having to translate on students. What was difficult for me is that I felt like when I was younger, I felt like the adults should be the one taking care of me instead of me translating and part of that is like that dynamic was shifted so I felt like it’s unfair that I have to do this. Now that I look back it’s a learning thing, like I was able to be more strong because of it but at the time that wasn’t how like I viewed it and another part is my insecurity of not being able to understand English enough to translate well enough for my family and I was afraid that I would give them misinformation especially on important documents if I don’t understand something fully. So, it just reminded me that ok you are not you still not as adequet as you think you are and these are also things you need to learn and words more words that you need to learn. It made me feel back then when I wasn’t, like I just wasn’t good enough to be able to translate and to provide and to help with my family.
Anya: Professor Suzuki learned English in school in Japan but what she wasn’t prepare for was using English the right way in America. She had to get comfortable with the culture norms of the language.
Professor Satoko Suzuki: You have to really always assert to yourself, you have to always speak on your behalf, you have to speak for yourself so that was not so easy at first for me. I was already able to speak English because I learned how to speak it in college. So, I didn’t have problem with that but that the attitude that goes with it was something I that learn because I lived in a all girl’s dorm at the University of Minnesota my first year and I would eat lunch or dinner with my floormates. And sometimes they are all white American kids they would talk about you know their mother’s cookie or something and my mom doesn’t bake cookies and my mom doesn’t even have an oven, my family didn’t even have an oven in Japan. So, all I do was just silent because there was nothing, I could contribute to that conversation but after that I was one of the girls said, “why didn’t you say anything were you mad about something?” I was not mad at all but just nothing to contribute. But I learn early on I have to always say something at least in order to for people to not think I am mad, or uninteresting so that attitude was something that I had to learn.
Anya: As a nonnative speaker it’s difficult to feel as comfortable expressing yourself as second language. Here is Professor Suzuki again.
Satoko: But even now, I’m a professor at Macalester but I sometimes feel like I don’t have a very good sense of entitlement at Macalester because I am foreigner still. And in my small groups meetings or in my department meetings I don’t have any ambition but if it’s a large room faculty meeting for example. Because English is not my language and then also public speaking is not something that’s so encouraged in Japan so much. So, for those two reasons, and then also I feel like I don’t have the sense of– It’s not true if I say I don’t have a sense of belonging which is not true– but I don’t have the sense of entitlement or the sense of that I own this place. I often don’t have that so that sort of keeps me from speaking at faculty meeting for example so that has a lot to do with my non-native speaker status. So in that way I sometimes wish I could speak better. I could speak ok if I prepare something and I can stand up and speak. I can’t talk off the top of my head beautifully.
Anya: Like I said America is not kind to non-native English speakers. These experiences being shamed or ostracized can really have a bearing on how or if people retain their heritage language. Losing your heritage language is a systemic process influenced by the sheer overwhelming, monolingual nature of the US, it’s also a painful process too, but we will have to dive into that next time.
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Anya: And that’s a wrap for this episode of New Narrative. Special thanks to 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 Alone by Small Million. This episode was written, edited and produced by your host Anya Steinberg, storyteller intern at the Asian American organizing project. More info about AAOP can be found at our website aaopmn.org. Stay tuned for part two. Coming soon.