Sophie, Week #3 - Em Tiếng Việt Không?
I spend a good portion of my childhood being very confused. You see, my bà would pick me up on the weekends and take me to various gatherings, church, festivals, or whatever other fun little recreational activity was happening at the time. This, of course, wasn’t the issue, I actually tended to have fun! My main problem was that I never had any idea what anyone was saying. Eventually I picked up a phrase on my own, something I heard so much growing up that it’s practically ingrained in my head.
Em tiếng Việt không? Do you speak Vietnamese?
You’ve probably picked up by now that the answer to this question is, unfortunatly, no. My dad doesn’t speak it, so it was never really used in my house while I was growing up. To top this off, most people, when just looking at me, can’t really tell that I’m half Vietnamese. However, I did grow up pretty deeply immersed in Vietnamese culture, which created sort of a weird situation regarding other people’s perception of me. What I wanted to talk about with this blog is just how deeply language and appearance impacts people’s perception of your identity, and how much that in turn, affects your own perception of your identity.
Me and my sister in our áo dàis.
When I was around 8-10 years old, my mom enrolled me in Vietnamese Saturday school, in the hopes that it would help me pick up the language. What I didn’t expect was that every single other kid in that school was fluent already. They would teach the lessons in Vietnamese, and then have the tests in Vietnamese, and I would just absolutely flunk all of them. But the oddest thing about my experiences there were my relationships with the other kids. I grew up with nearly the same experiences as them, but I wasn’t considered one of them, mainly just because I couldn’t speak Vietnamese.
In a larger sense, the fact that people typically don’t see my identity/ethnicity when they look at me has always given me such a weird feeling. I grew up much more connected to Vietnamese culture, but nearly no one perceives me as Vietnamese. I have always sort of envied people whose ethnic identity matches their appearance. This may be super weird, but it seems so cool to be able to look back at pictures of your family and see yourself in them. I’ve always lamented the fact that I don’t look that much like my mom!
Not that I don’t think being mixed race is super cool of course! I’m super grateful that I’ve been able to have so many different experiences in just one life, and that I can say that I come from so many different places. Overall though, I’m curious if anyone else has felt similar to me on these topics, or if anyone has any interesting thoughts on it! I feel like everyone’s experiences with their own personal identities are so different.
Those who grow up with two parents sharing the same foreign culture compared to the environment where their child(ren) are raised are fortunate, for example, a Scandinavian couple teaching their Scandinavian language to their American children they raise in Montana in conjunction with English. Being a polyglot is cool, and while some people have to do extensive studies in school to learn a second language, others already know one because their parents have been teaching it to them since birth!
ReplyDeleteThe Fremont community is so incredibly interesting in the context of American cities because the vast majority of households here have the ability to speak more than one language. However, the fluency of those languages for the offspring of the household also vary a lot! I can't read or write in my parents' native language, but I can speak and listen well enough. The ability of children to use their parents' language(s) is determined completely by how much the parents want to teach.
Different languages, for American-raised children, also vary in their difficulty to pick up. A language with more similarities to English, especially its alphabet, will be less hard to learn.
It's never too late to start learning a language. Little by little, you can amass some Vietnamese vocabulary, Sophie!
Sophie, I actually feel incredibly similar! Coming from someone who is also white and Asian, the experience of just looking 100% white is insanely true. While I’m only a quarter Asian and I never went to a Korean school, I too have pictures where I look like a stranger my family found randomly. It’s so odd how dominant the European genes are compared to Asian genes, right? For me, my identity changed through just simply saying I’m full white until someone asked any further and highlighting my white ancestry instead because I was sick of people telling me I was lying. I wonder how universal it is for people like us to constantly be told that we’re making up our own race, or for them to completely disregard it altogether. Especially for Korea, I felt like a lot of kids pre-2020 didn’t even know about the country at all for some reason, and I wonder if it was like that for Vietnam too. This is very inspiring for my next blog, and a super interesting flashback of myself I had completely forgotten!
ReplyDeleteI really liked your idea about how language can become a cultural gatekeeper. What really stood out to me was how even though you grew up with really similar experiences as the kids at Vietnamese School, you weren’t considered “one of them” because you couldn’t speak the language. And it draws me to this idea of in-grouping and out-grouping. Socially we tend to in-group people we find a similar identity with—the “us”—and out-group everyone else—the “them”. Historically this idea has been explored in the context of cultural solidarity and the stereotyping of a homogenous “other”. Yet with globalization and diaspora, we’re forced to reassess how in-grouping can happen within one culture or ethnic group itself. So in your case (and mine quite frankly), language can be weaponized to deny people of their cultural belonging. But what makes your experience really interesting is that language is not the only marker others use to judge your belonging. You also mention that people can’t often tell you’re Vietnamese just by looking at you, which I imagine can be really frustrating. I had a question though, did this make you feel like you had to constantly correct individuals when they incorrectly assumed your cultural heritage? Or was it something that didn’t bother you too much? So I would like to hear your perspective: How much of our cultural identity is shaped by our own experiences, and how much of it relies on people acknowledging our experiences as “legitimate”.
ReplyDeleteI can speak my mother tongue, Telugu, pretty much fluently now, but for the majority of life I could barely speak it. I would either mix in English to create a weird combination of mainly English with one or two Telugu words sprinkled into sentences, or I would use the most basic of phrases when not using any English to supplement my speaking. For example, asking for water or saying that I am hungry would only require two words, so I was fine with things like that, but anything more complex would make me sound like I was just starting to learn the language, even though I was supposed to have been speaking with my whole life. My parents only speak Telugu at home so I should have been more fluent than I really was. This all changed when I visited India during a summer vacation. Every day, my relatives, their friends, and even people they randomly introduced me to would make fun of the way I spoke. This upset me a lot, since I could tell they were making fun of me, but I couldn’t even formulate a response that they would understand since nobody knew any English. I could live with the ridicule, however, one particular experience traumatized me and basically forced me to “speedrun” the language. My grandfather held me up by the collar of my shirt, yelling at me because I couldn’t respond back to his questioning. Let’s just say I started speaking in complete sentences in Telugu shortly after that. I have to admit though, while I was embarrassed by my lack of fluency, I still made fun of others for not being as fluent as me as I grew up. I would make jokes about knowing more Telugu than one of my close friends, saying the way he spoke sounded horrible. Both of us would make fun of our other friend who couldn’t speak any of his parents’ native language. I have realized that it's a pretty dumb joke to make and all of us have toned down the ridicule regarding language, but it’s easy to see how language was able to divide us and make us compare ourselves. All three of us were Indian, had Indian families, visited India, and immersed ourselves in Indian culture, yet we still chose to make fun of each other and see people who did not fit in as “less than” or not “Indian enough” for our standards.
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