Michelle:

Welcome back to We Cultivate the Pod. I am so happy that you are joining us for our special Heritage Speaker of Month. This is really so great because it's the first time that we've actually dedicated ourselves to one particular topic. And so far we've released three mini episodes, on guest episode, and today is our final mini episode of the month. Of course, the problems and the complexities and insights that we could glean from heritage speakers is not ending. We know that this is just going to continue probably for as long as humans are alive. But I am so grateful that we actually did this special month because so many times we know these things are out there in the world. We know these topics matter, but without a special focus we find it very kind of plain and regular. And I think for any other reason, for example, Nay is also in the US officially now Asian American, Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
And I talked about that in the last episode a bit. This was kind of a funny thing for me as a kid because I was like, I don't know why we even need a heritage month. We don't stop being Asian. It's so funny, but it's exactly for the same reason why we do any other kind of zoomed in feature. It's to bring the spotlight just for that time about something really important. And for me, for this work, for what I hope we cultivate will be, I really, really hope that we never stop talking about any of these things. There will be a special tab on wecultivate.world/podcast if you haven't gone already. Any of the material we've done here or on Substack or anywhere else, anything related to heritage speakers, I will make sure that you can find it all in one place. Now maybe again, you don't need to listen to me, for example, in mini episode three yelling at you about how we need to stop judging so many people on their heritage language.
Maybe that information isn't for you because you feel like you already do a good job of understanding that. Okay, fine. But I want to encourage you, please do not take for granted how important it is that we continue to find spaces for dialogue, not just in the digital sphere, but also with each other. Just because you may not judge one person or another or just because you've kind of validated your personal friend circle does not mean this stuff isn't still rampant. And I would say it's a lot stealthier than a lot of us might realize. I think we don't know in what ways our own assumptions and biases can play out when it comes to another person's language, culture, identity combination. I think sometimes we don't know where our blind spots are and when we open ourselves up to the entire world of possibilities, for example, there's infinite combinations that somebody could be a hyphenated identity of some sort.
I think we really need to recognize what our initial reaction was, what our expectations are in that moment and learn also how to just hold them a bit and maybe not engage a hundred percent right away, maybe not jump into stereotypical catchphrase type talk. Maybe instead of saying statements to people like, "Oh, well that's so weird." Or, "Oh, well, you're not really Asian then." Just because someone doesn't follow your definition of what that means, I've touched on this so many times, it's not just Asians though, okay? This is not like an Asian people podcast.
There's so many more things that we need to talk about, but I sacrifice us as an example because I feel that moment where you get to just say, "Oh, okay. Didn't really realize I would act that way or react that way. Please just hold it in your head and allow the other person, make this space for the other person to tell you about themselves without immediately trying to put them somewhere, without boxing them in to boxes that you created with materials that you've known to exist. We all don't know everything and we're learning all the time. When I sit down with each new podcast guest, when I travel, when I go to the grocery store and run into a stranger, I learn with every single interaction and I love that I learn because it means that I have to continue challenging myself on what I actually believe or what I consider is true.
And I love that these big categories or these big disciplines even of study, language and communication, culture and identity, these were not chosen randomly when I created the podcast. They were chosen because any one of these pieces calls in the rest. You can't really be talking about language without talking about communication. Can't really be talking about communication without considering someone's background, i.e. Their cultural influences, not just ethnically but socially. You can't talk about all that stuff without talking about how someone sees it in their own concept of self identity and how someone conceptualizes themselves and how they choose to express. That is where we get right back into language, right? Language is one of the most philosophical things truly that could probably exist because it is like space and it is like, to me, it's a container that has no form really except for whatever we put inside of it.
So if you've been following along, make sure that you are subscribed not only to We Cultivate the Pod on your favorite platform, but also on our Substack, which we are now more committed to, I would say, than last year, I just had no time inherited interrupted is going to be running for the rest of the year. And so if you haven't already read a piece yet, we just had a really great piece from Gemma go out on the impact of her husband's language loss on her life and her choices to raise their kids in a way where they're able to preserve the connection to her family and their grandparents for that matter. I mean, we have so much more coming up. We cultivate.substack.com. It is free. Eventually there will be paid stuff, but there will forever be free stuff. Okay? Let's get one thing clear.
This is a Michelle Passion project. This is not Michelle to become Influencer Superstar Project. If it was, I wouldn't be doing it like this. If it was, I would be doing all the crap that you see online. Let's talk about today's subject. So if you've already seen the title, you get where this is going. What are the consequences of essentially missing the point? I mean, I started this mini series, mini episode series talking about why we should even care. And so today, let me just break down for you why misunderstanding heritage speakers is not harmless and why it's not even about political correctness or like, oh, care about people because it's good to care about people. Yeah, it's good to care about people, but it goes deeper. So why do I say it's a communication problem, especially if you're speaking the same language. Currently I'm recording this in 2026 and if you're with me in this current time period and you understand no matter what part of the world you're in at the moment that we are not going in a direction that is globally speaking, very promising.
No matter your political affiliation, you're probably just like, wow, this is like some crap. There is a new series of different political and emotional fires every single day. And regardless of where we are, it's tough. And it's very, very tough to look at all of these things and think, wow, how are we even going to be able to handle what's to come in the rest of say this century? Not all of us will be here, but it's fine. So when I say that there are communication problems, but there are more areas where we can learn to resolve them, it's weirdly optimistic for somebody who, if you know me personally, I'm not in the top two billion plus people who might even be optimistic. So it might be very surprising for people to hear like, wait, there are things that we can work on? Yes, there are things that you can work on.
My passion and oftentimes frustration comes not from the fact that there are things that seem unresolvable. A lot of things probably will be so long as humans are alive, but from the fact that we're not actually even doing the low hanging fruit, we're really not. Wow. Things are so extreme these days and especially if you're online, no matter if you create material and post it or if you're just reading comments or just anything, it is so combative and it is so lacking in depth. And so what are we not doing? We are not doing that little pause. We're not doing that little moment where we leave a bit more space for the person in front of us. We're just throwing whatever we think the other person is and making them deal with it. And I mean, is it working out? I don't think so. So my pitch for all of you who are listening and don't give any craps about heritage speakers, if you want to communicate better with people in this day and age, you might consider listening to this entire mini episode.
Language is never just grammar and vocabulary. No matter what these wannabe language influencer people online want to tell you, it is never going to be just that. It is a living exercise in a very social world. It is always going to be more than that. And like every other social phenomenon, it is going to also call in the individual person using it. Language is not just words. It can contain everything a person is presumed to have. So belonging, authenticity, especially culturally, cultural belonging to a group, right? I talked about membership intelligence. I mean, how many times have we heard that people are shocked when somebody who cannot speak their second, third, fourth, fifth language like someone who spoke it as their first is actually not dumb and they actually have expertise. It just wasn't being expressed in the way that the other person wanted it to be.
Cultural knowledge gets called into question. Proximity to people, places, history, all of these things get carried into how someone uses and expresses inside of a language. It carries all these things socially when we communicate. So obviously step one is self-awareness. I mean, I think that's clear, but step two is how are these conversations happening? I'm trying to get you to see this idea that there is one correct version or one uniform version of what someone's perception or impression is even of their own first/native language is completely false, is completely dependent on so many other variables where they went to school, their socioeconomic status, who they surrounded themselves with, what their family taught them, everything. Every, every, every one of these other factors come into play. Slang is one of the best examples of this because slang is not just dependent on geographical location. It is also based on your other sociological measures.
Again, class being a massive one, perhaps gender as well. We don't say the same things, right? Depending on whether you identify male or female, these impressions of what language is supposed to look like gets passed on and transposed into the heritage speaker experience as well. So things like, "Oh, you grew up with Mandarin." Again, self-sacrifice of my own situation. "You grew up with Mandarin at home. "Well, insert whatever that person thinks because this varies person to person. We are not talking about anything that is objectifiably fixed. I have had people tell me that they are shocked for so many reasons. Some people are shocked because I speak more Mandarin than they thought I would. I don't even know how you can think of measuring anything when you didn't grow up with me in my home or so. How could you even imagine how much I could speak?
I've had people shocked because they didn't expect that my accent would sound the way that it sounds. I speak it the way that my grandparents taught me to speak it because they themselves, if you listen to my guest episode with Jovanna on her podcast, Real Moms Talking, when you acquire a language, you acquire how that language sounds also based on those who are speaking with you, not all the time, not 100%. It is a spectrum. However, me, like many other immigrant family children, just absorbed what the family generally sounded like. People are surprised that, I don't know, I had a relative tell me that they were surprised I knew medical vocabulary. Yeah. Guess who was translating doctor's appointments? I don't know why any of this should be surprising because what it tells me is that you thought there could have been some expectation to begin with.
And without truly knowing me, who I am, what my life has been like, and even if you did, I don't know how you can have expectations of my language use at all at all. We're having difficulty communicating because we are placing expectations on other people that are essentially our own creation. We didn't necessarily create them from nothing, but without the work of learning about other people, what they've gone through, what we might think, going through that exercise, learning, unlearning and relearning, we're not going to actually communicate better until we learn how to do this better. This whole thing of trying to work with the constant pressure of being interpreted through standards that are invisible, first of all, inconsistent because they shift depending on who's standing in front of you. So one person thinks you're too foreign, another person thinks you're too assimilated or someone thinks you're not in out whatever it is, right?
People keep treating those who don't fit their box as complicated and complex. Complexity is just a part of life. Is it not complex when you have to figure out how health insurance works? Is it not complex when you're deciding what type of school to put your kid in? Is it not complex when you're comparing different prices of cat food because you want to make sure that you're not poisoning your animal? Is it not complex that your paycheck has little lines in it with money going out to different types of acronyms that you later find out or federal programs and you didn't know that what percentage went there because no one taught you this in school? Yes, of course. Life is complex. Adult life is complex. Human life is complex. The end, expectation that this is supposed to be simple or the expectation that complexity is to be vilified, a signal that something is wrong.
This is just going to be the way that things are the special case that I will make for why heritage language is so different in its nature than just regular foreign language, unlike other foreign languages, which can come into your life for so many reasons. It does not always have to be because it was your choice. But heritage language, no matter what your choice is on the matter, no matter how you choose to handle it, it is somehow always tied to your family, even if you don't identify with them. Your family line, your ancestry, something about this. This hits in a way, not just emotionally, but there's a longevity to it that doesn't exist when it's simply just a foreign language. You can cut yourself off from your family, but this language thing will always remain as a tie. Whether or not you speak it fluently, whether or not you even like it, you cannot get around it either because you were born into it.
We don't get a choice in terms of what heritage language exists, not even whether or not parents or whoever decided to pass it on to you. We don't get that choice. It is just that reality and each one of us had a very different reality. And when we treat heritage language speakers like they're supposed to be measured in some aspiring to be native, non-existent ascension model I also remind you that we are not just talking about someone's language use. We are talking about how they conceptualize themselves. We are talking also about certain measures that might have been placed on by cultural or ethnic community. There are factors and variables at play that are once again, complex and complicated, yet a simple fact of life. I think another thing that people often do is treat heritage language like it only existed in childhood years because again, even if you understand that it was inherited and perhaps even interrupted, that you don't continue in your identity as a heritage language speaker.
And I really wonder where this comes from. Maybe it comes from the whole how we conceptualize self in relation to cultural identity and community. Guys, we're still living so long as we are in this world, this timeline, like I don't know, however you want to frame it, so long as this is our path, we are still continuing in our life journey. Therefore, the choices that we make in terms of how we see our relationship to our heritage language can evolve also with time. This is a personal decision and I think especially when you're making it from a place of deep personal worth and understanding and not from a place of lack like, "Oh, I'm not good enough so I have to be better because I'm trying to cover up or something." A lot of people will talk about, and I think it's amazing how they've come to terms with learning other aspects of their heritage language because maybe they were restricted from it.
For example, Andrea, episode 12 talked about that. I think it can be so powerful when you realize that it's your own personal decision to make. So the counter example, I've chosen to use my heritage language less in recent years. Why? Why wouldn't I want to keep being like, "Wow, amazing. Michelle, you're so great." Because I realized for myself that a lot of my early life experiences taught me that it was always my role to step in and rescue people, even if they didn't even necessarily need me. I mean, I'm not saying I'm not helping people. I absolutely love helping people. I think it's really important in the world to be compassionate and kind. I feel though what I learned as a kid is that it was my job and therefore my role and I didn't really get to have my own role development inside of Mandarin for a long time because everything was being siphoned through whatever family or community needed.
It was kind of a complicated decision for me because it wasn't overnight. It wasn't like one day I woke up and I was like, "Screw Mandarin. No more. I'm fed up with this language." It was just very subtle. I think it came with my moves abroad and working and living in other countries and kind of just realizing it takes a toll on me as well. I learned to be more discerning also of who to help, not every person just because it's a language thing. And we talked about this in the holiday episode and Jonathan's piece, he talked about the invisible burden of being a translator and literally just being ignored because you're essentially invisible and the work you're doing is invisible. That is how it's felt for a lot of my life. And I decided to roll it back, especially when I started speaking more in other languages.
I just kind of decided that I didn't always need to show the Mandarin speaking side and that was a personal choice. That is it. That is just my relationship to it. I learned boundaries.That's all. I learned some boundaries in terms of how I use my Mandarin and I'm not ashamed even let's say the regression that I've experienced as a result. So life's just gotten busy. I don't get to consume as much in terms of material in the Chinese language. I just, my reading and writing these days is nothing like how I had it after my concerted efforts to have some level of functional literacy. And this last time being back in China, episode 34, I didn't mention this part in the episode. I was not as able to read everything. And I think past me would've been like, "Oh my God, I can't believe you.
You suck. Are you even Chinese? Are you even Mandarin speaking?" Oh my God. No, zero voices like that anymore because those voices didn't belong to me. Those voices are just little echoes from judgy people around me and current me, true current me is just so aware that I don't have the bandwidth that I used to, especially when I was in China as a university student. You don't have that amount of time anymore. And I know this is not what people want to hear. People want to hear like, "Oh no, just work harder because hard work is going to get us into language heaven." Really, really, please just consider how broken that model is. We will talk about the fallacy of being Native in a future episode, but this messaging that being contradictory or having dynamic ebbs and flows with your language or not meeting the criteria of other people, all this stuff, this messaging is everywhere.
The question is not how do we stop this from happening? The question is how will you handle your own personal decisions and how you show up in your interactions and how you choose to claim or reclaim your heritage language on your own terms? That's the better question to be asking. Concern yourself truly with your own experience of this. So I want to encourage all the people who are heritage speakers who might have that very complicated relationship because they're related to family, they're related to identity, they're related to so many things, this emotional psychosocial weight that can continue to exist. I would like to encourage all of you to remember that it is not a fixed status and you do not have to put yourself inside of the game if you don't want to. You don't have to play for cultural icon of the year for these 10 people if you don't want to.
You can decide how you handle it. You can decide whether or not you want to put extra time in it, or maybe you want to just focus on other things. There's no right or wrong way to decide how to continue in this path and in this relationship, cultivating this relationship with this language can look very different depending on what stage you feel you might be in. And for people who again, don't really think that other people's experiences are important, I can't make you care. I can only say that by not expanding your worldview and by trying to flatten everybody into the definition of what you are, interpersonal communication is going to continue to be challenging. It is going to continue being confusing and that friction and tension and combativeness and aggression that we all see happening all the time because of this unnecessary flattening and pigeonholing.
This doesn't have to happen in an everyday way to the extent that it's happening now. What is the world's population right now? Okay, I just pulled it up. 8.3 billion people. If you're trying to put 8.3 billion people into the definition of on person, i.e. You, is that not more work? Is that not more difficult? It is not that hard truly to learn this and apply this. What's hard I think is seeing how many places we've been told we shouldn't on learning a lot of the stuff that was passed on to us unfortunately as humans of this time. Sorry, it's getting really philosophical because we're at the end of this and I've had just 20 some days of just conversations nonstop about this. We are at a point in our history where we get to have better conversations. Why not take that opportunity? So this closes our heritage language Spotlight Month.
I will be taking a small break before coming back in June, but thank you very much to all of you who have been following, who have been supporting, who have been also getting on Substack because you see that we are also expanding our work there. Thank you for your participation. And even if you're not listening to this in this current calendar year, podcast episodes live for as long as they are alive. So please, please, please let me know what you think. I'm on Instagram @wecultivate.world, which is also how you can find our site, we cultivate.world. Have a feature on the site where you can actually leave a voice note if you want. Haven't really promoted it yet. If you want to be one of the first people to test it out, do record a message and I would love to hear people's real voices the way we used to leave voicemails and messages on answering machines.
So thank you for joining me. And if you haven't yet, go back and listen to all of the previous episodes and you'll be all caught up.