Transcript:

Welcome, welcome back. We are in episode 38, which is also our third mini episode of this Heritage Language Spotlight Month. It is already more than midway into May. I don't know how we got here, but here we are. It has been quite an eventful month for those who are just joining us. We are focusing on heritage language all this month. We have launched our very first Substack series and we are heading into much more for the second half of this month. This week is actually a double podcast release triple We Cultivate Platform Release Week. I am not meaning to sound so tired, but it's actually a huge pull. I am going to have to consider whether I want to do this every single year. I'm not totally sure if we're going to have the bandwidth to do this again. Fingers crossed the project grows. You can help us get there by subscribing and following on all platforms.
Right now we are still in the early stages of laying the foundation. So this is the biggest help if you can tell your friends, family, anyone that you know about We Cultivate. This will actually help set us on the right path to get in front of the right people and start to build the type of network that we've been hoping to from the beginning. I am so grateful for everyone who keeps joining us, keeps tuning in every single time that we put out a new episode, especially since these last episodes have been more me talking. I feel extremely exposed and in the spotlight all the time. And I just have to say thank you everyone for not getting sick of my voice, for being here. You keep me basically motivated to continue and I'm so grateful. Today we are talking about labels. God, I have too much to say on this topic, but we are in many episodes.
The reason I'm choosing to do audio only for this is actually to get it out and live faster. So these are short, snappy, to the point more or less. If you want to get deeper on any of these subjects, do check out our substack, we cultivate.substack.com, where we're going way more in depth there to talk about heritage language, culture, identity, and the really rich and complex ways these three things show up for so many different people. Now it's my belief personally that when you hold multiple identities, you are less likely to see the world, doesn't mean you won't, but less likely to see the world in simplified boxes. And this is what we're going to hone in on today. I personally feel like being a multicultural and multilingual kid and I have heard the same from so many people around me that these early life experiences knowing how to go between languages, between cultures, between worlds helped cultivate a deep sense of nuance early on.
Now we know that this is not a guarantee and it also is not a requirement. It's not like, "Oh, if you didn't grow up multicultural, you suck. Ugh, no, no." But what I'm trying to say is you might have to confront it a little earlier simply because people will try to put you in boxes and boxes that you do not belong in, but then the question becomes, well, is there one that's made for you? This is actually a part I have been toying around with. I actually cut it from another piece of a future Substack post, but it sometimes feels like we learn early on that we have to create our own box, but that box can feel so extremely isolating. I feel there is something really bittersweet maybe. It's a fairly common experience that we want to feel a sense of belonging and community and camaraderie and rapport across the board with people that we identify with.
But it's almost like when we're told early on that we have to create our own box, that we just kind of go and recede into that sort of outcast space. I think that can be so tough. I know it was tough for me. I know that it was tough for everybody who has gone through this, but I kind of want to shift the dialogue. A lot of what we hear most times around identity and culture is what you might find labeled as an identity crisis.
I have had such an issue with this word with this term because I have long known that I did not give myself an identity crisis. I am merely just like everybody, subject to the evaluations and appraisals of others around me. And when the voices around me from people, family, friends, peers, whatever, teachers even became so loud I personally felt like it started to drown out my sense of better judgment and clarity. I would, I think during my adolescence say that I had an identity crisis, but the crazy part looking at that now is the responsibility of that identity crisis.That is not something I randomly came up with one day. It's not something I just woke up and was like, "Oh goodness, I will have a crisis today." I feel there's something so wrong about the way it's framed in larger society. And I hear it a lot from friends who also grew up in immigrant families and they'll be like, "Yeah, I have still this identity crisis." But it's like the onus of the crisis does not actually belong to us.
I feel like we need to start at the very, very beginning and unpack it step by step. Today's episode is not on identity in that way. There is a future piece coming out on this. Today's episode is more about labels and about why heritage and foreign language are not the same thing. But like with most things, language is our angle and our perspective into so much more. And I really think this is why I enjoy using the language vector so much. And to do this work, I feel like people don't realize how under the surface this stuff is in all of our everyday interactions. Because it's above the surface for me, because I've created a podcast for it, I feel like I'm like, "Oh, we can talk about this anytime." But I do think it can be very, very, very difficult. And so I hope that as you're listening, you know that these are spaces to talk about what's been under the surface and that you're not wrong for not being able to find the place.
It is extremely challenging when so much of the everyday just blows right past that deeper level. So if you heard our episode last week, we basically talked about how even if you grow up in the same household, you do not necessarily have the same relationship to a language. I mean, that could just be said about anything. You may not have the same relationship to food, to exercise, to quote unquote family values, to quote unquote cultural value, to pets, to anything. Nothing can be taken for granted. And many times these days, people enjoy treating categories as the standard and expecting everybody who fits inside of that category to act according to whatever script has been laid out, like whatever rules apply. It's very production line. It's kind of like y'all go in this box and you all must like the color blue. And if you don't like the color blue, you can't be in this box.
And it's like, well, I kind of like blue, but I also kind of like red. And it's like, no, no red ligers here. You must blah, blah, blah. So I feel that we need to just take it back, zoom out a little and ask ourselves if we are mistaking community, those feelings of closeness and camaraderie with a group with membership conditions. So I will give a very egregious example, but unfortunately on that I have seen play out in real life. I have literally seen this in a non-joking way, but I have had more recently conversations with people who have told other people that they are not Asian enough because they don't like bubble tea or they are not Asian enough because they don't karaoke in their heritage language or they're not Asian enough because they don't know how to read or write in their heritage language.
They're not Asian enough because they don't necessarily eat certain traditional foods because they just don't like the taste. I mean, the list goes on and I really have to not make this episode three hours long, but there is the joking around about it kind of rhetoric that we all know like, "Oh, ha ha ha." I will say things myself as well like, "Oh my God, Jan learned how to eat spicy food and I told him that he got an additional punch on the Asian card. This is just at home. I have literally said crazy because they are that exaggerated. They are hyperbolic. They are not meant to represent actual nuanced reality. And I find that some people don't know the difference and this is incredibly concerning given how many people we have in the world who come, whose families come from all sorts of backgrounds for people to be taking it so seriously.
And then let's say if I bring it up to tell me, oh Michelle, it's not that deep. It's not that serious. The dude needs to work on his Asianness because he's not from the mainland so he needs to work harder. What? Are you kidding me? I don't have enough life credits to sustain every single interaction like this. Maybe to some people listening, this sounds like, my God, so deep, so serious. Don't want to deal with that. Better to keep it in superficial land. Okay, then stay in superficial land, but don't take the rest of us there. Don't take those of us who are trying to figure out how to create space for deep understanding, for better communication, for interpersonal and emotional intelligence work. Don't take the rest of us who are trying so desperately hard to hit the areas that you'd prefer to sweep under the rug.
I've sort of realized that to even make the jump from I should be the standard and I should be the norm and everyone should follow what I believe equates membership to this group is actually a very self-centric view of the world of humans. It's very interesting for me to sit back and recognize when someone refuses to open up their aperture, their viewpoint beyond themselves. And we see this with accentism, we see this with cultural gatekeeping heritage language, unfortunately is one of those areas that gets into that very uncomfortable value judgment-based territory. It is one of the most sensitive pieces topics for people because we know that it calls in so much more and that is why heritage language is not the same as foreign language. I know many people know this. Heritage language not only comes from whatever background you also hold, but it's also about what you do with this in your day-to-day life and whether that be total avoidance because you are sick and tired of being hounded by family to speak a certain language or total integration and acceptance like, "You know what?
This is who I am. I want to have this language be a part of me. " And I'm not saying, by the way, there's a right or wrong at all. I'm actually not saying that you're supposed to work towards one side of these. I am saying we need to stop for a moment and start allowing other people to tell us how they have reconciled with their own heritage language journey rather than always push towards a certain end of the spectrum. Because I will tell you one thing so damn clearly I speak Mandarin fluently, but that does not mean that I do not have issues and judgments and problems hoisted my way, thrown my way because of other people's rules, other people's metrics for how they want to quantify my language and cultural identity. A heritage language is not the same as simply any foreign language.
And again, even if the language is the same, therefore you hear that there is a label called Heritage Speakers, please know this group may help label what these people are, but it does not tell you what their experiences being that thing has been like. The same for nationalities, by the way, and ethnicities. My God, this thing has gotten out of control. Instagram has not helped with this either, just to bring the point home. One is something that you grow up inside of possibly because this is not always the case by the way. Something can be your heritage language, but it not necessarily be in your home environment, but assuming that you did, there is some sort of connection to you that comes through that generational transition or proximity to ancestry in some shape or form. It also generally will implicate your cultural identity. It will implicate some aspect of your own personal history inside of this larger backdrop and because you technically inherit it in some way, you don't necessarily know what is going on when you get it.
I have a piece coming out the title is still under works, but it's basically about this whole point, this so- called gift, the so- called inheritance. It's the reason why the series is called Inherited Interrupted. We receive these things oftentimes without instructions, framework, guidelines, roadmap, any sort of indication of what we're supposed to do with it. And we actually, I don't think many of us know that that's part of it, that it's part of figuring it out for ourselves. That is the identity part. Even if your language use is imperfect, something will always tie you back and that can be such a massive burden, especially as I explained before, it can be used and exploited improperly as cultural identity measures of sort of policing the nuance that we are missing in our language conversations, our language discourse is massive. We are taking for granted so much.
If you are following this new series on Substack and you read the first issue that was titled, No, I didn't learn Mandarin for the Global Economy and you're wondering where that title came from because damn, Michelle, that is new for you to do such a heavy hitting title. Yeah, it is because that actually pissed me off to that point. I actually think it beautifully summarizes a moment that I had. I was coaching gymnastics. I was a gymnast, so coaching was sort of a part-time thing after I graduated college and I remember one day just standing outside the gym and this gym mom heard me on the phone and decided to tell me, if I remember correctly, it was a while ago, that I was so smart for thinking to learn Mandarin because of the rise of China in the global economy. And by the way, these are not people who did not know that I do have ethnically Chinese family roots, so it's not like she thought I was Korean and then was like, "Wow, good job.
You also learned Mandarin because I'm very, very educated on a different Asian ethnicities." No, absolutely not. This was, "Oh, I heard you speaking Mandarin." And I think it's so smart because she told me she was also having her daughter learn Mandarin for that exact same reason. Past me was a little different than present day me. Past me I think was definitely less willing to have difficult conversations mainly because I felt like I couldn't find the words fast enough and I also didn't want to rock the boat as much surprise. This is actually very telling that I allowed this to pass no hate to this woman, to this mother of this gymnast I was coaching, but I just archived that memory because something just did not feel right in that moment because I think she meant it to be complimentary like, "Oh yay, my daughter's also doing this fantastic." It was better than when another mother mixed me up with her daughter's violin teacher.
Okay.
She wasn't the worst offender, but I felt like something was wrong. I felt like I had missed an opportunity to say something, which in this day and age, I would have definitely set the record straight and had just simply said, "Oh, but it's not a foreign language. I grew up with Mandarin and it's actually the only way I was able to talk with my family." I would just simply say that now, but back then I didn't even have people to talk to about how I felt about my language, culture, identity. So I just kind of stood there and said, "Oh yeah, cool." And then left. Maybe because we are still early from my vantage point, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I really do think that the concept of a heritage speaker is still new and nascent. I feel that it's an opportunity to make sure we build in nuance to the conversation before we get into another billion decades of, "Wait, no, I thought that this, but hold on.
No, your sister, that what, huh? Your brother and your cousin, but how come you, blah, blah, blah?" Why don't we just start now to have better conversations on it so we don't have to undo whatever assumptions later on. Why don't we just learn first how to exercise this muscle, this communication muscle? And it is completely incorrect to assume that heritage speakers are supposed to fall, first of all, anywhere inside of this native, non-native, so- called binary, or follow any specific path at all. This is not a podcast about how incredible I am and how everyone needs to be like me because that is probably one of the most uninteresting things to do with my time. This is not about how I learned acceptance from the Chinese community with my amazing Mandarin skills. No, this is not even a, "Oh my God, I navigated everything inside of Western Europe and you can too." There is absolutely nothing here that is anchored in me because this world is beyond me.
This world is full of people living their lives in a multitude of different combinations every single day, whether that be with language, with culture, with traditions and customs and social systems and histories. I use the word heritage speaker because I want you to know the totality and the spectrum of experiences that I wish to highlight. I am not talking about one like there is a template form and especially on a topic that can be so deep and so difficult for people to discus. So like I said at the top of this episode, we are in a triple release week. We had a Substack article come out. Our first guest author wrote and released her piece yesterday. This mini episode came out today and we will have a guest episode coming out in two days on Thursday. You'll hear from my very good friend, Mai. She's unfortunately not on public social media.
You'll see why when we go into the episode, she does not have time. But what I recognize in myself is that even after being friends for upwards of 15 some years, we've had tons of conversations across our different careers, our different moves, our different life phases, but we have actually never had such a candid conversation on how we saw our heritage language and cultural identity. I got to ask her questions that I've never asked her before. Sometimes I feel like with a friend it could be a little nerve-wracking at first because you realize after being so deeply connected for so long, there's somehow a piece that you both missed, but I also think it's a really great opportunity and I have been working harder myself to have more of these conscious conversations inside of my personal friend group, respectfully of course. And I have found it to be beyond illuminating.
I got to hear diferent people over the last year talk to me about things that I never could have guessed. And these are people who I went to school with, who I dormed with, who I saw all the time. And I got to also share a lot about what maybe they've missed as well. And this has not only allowed me to deepen my friendships, but it's enriched the conversation in other areas. For example, friends who are parents, friends who are caregivers, friends who are navigating grief and difficult things across the world, friends who are in the middle of huge life questions, whether it be about family or career. And now I get to see a piece of that that I didn't see before. And now I just feel like the picture that I have of each person is just so much richer and brighter. And I hope that those of you who are listening to this episode will also try to deepen in your own personal connections as well.
However, that looks for you. It doesn't necessarily have to be friends. It could be someone else. But bring these conversations into the world, get real with each other on these things. And of course, tell everyone about the podcast. Of course, we can't do this work if nobody knows about the podcast. We can't keep going if nobody knows we exist. So thank you so much for being here and listening to mini episode number three. As always, make sure that you are following WeCultivate.world on Instagram. It is also the URL of our website. Make sure that you are subscribed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. We're on a ton more platforms as well. Thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you in our guest episode coming Thursday.