Transcript

Michelle:

All right welcome back. We are in mini episode number two for our heritage language Spotlight Month. If you are joining us just now and you didn't know that this is a whole series happening for the month of May, that's okay. You still have time. We are only halfway through and we have so much more actually. So to catch you up, the first mini episode went out last week and yesterday our first official Substack essay for the series went out as well talking about how heritage language and foreign language are not the same thing. If you aren't following us on Substack yet, I highly recommend it so that you don't miss the pieces that I publish, but also our guest authors. Substack is a very new place still for me. I'm still getting used to the community there, but I have to tell you that so far it's been giving me so much hope.

I've loved meeting other writers as well. I love meeting people who think deeply and who aren't afraid of difficult conversations that come together to really discuss deep things. I feel that in a time where we're just losing so much of the space for nuance, I'm just so grateful that we have a place for it. I'm happy that other people are carving out the space as well. We cultivate.substack.com. If you haven't subscribed, it is free and will remain so so long as I can help it. Now today's mini episode, oh my gosh, today I really want to get into something we discussed last week in mini episode number one. You might be somebody who listened to mini episode number one and said, "Oh, well, yeah, Michelle, obviously. I know what heritage language is. " Well, I didn't know the actual word for it, but I knew it.

I knew what you were talking about. I got it. My family immigrated to whatever country I grew up with heritage language. I grew up speaking one language at home and I grew up with other people who did as well. So this whole thing is a nut for me because clearly I'm good. Now if you're thinking that, well, I can't stop you from thinking that, but I can tell you that many times our blind spots are hidden where we don't really notice them until we do. So just being born into, let's say, an immigrant family or growing up multilingual or speaking a family language and going to school in another does not mean that you don't have blind spots. I really need us to be clear that just being something does not mean that you get it all. I don't have another way to say it.
I don't have another way to frame it. We don't come kind of prebuilt with this stuff. I mean, life is all about learning. I'm a big proponent of us learning from each other. It's why everything I do has a very individual focus because nationality, ethnicity, ancestry even, which is what we're going to cover today, none of this stuff, certainly not biology, will tell you what a person has gone through or how they think about things, what they've experienced, what they've learned along the way, or how they've unlearned things. So today's episode focuses on the fact that too many people I think unknowingly make the assumption sometimes that just because you were born into the same family means that you come out speaking the same for your heritage language. Now, I'm just going to focus on heritage language because this is the theme. This does not only track for heritage language, this can be for language overall.

What I want to emphasize is that while environment does shape a lot of our language acquisition, it is not the only factor and just living together in the same family dynamic does not mean that you come out the other side the same. I mean, again, we go back to the robot production model that people seem to have.

We're trying to break that here. All right. I recently was back in my hometown birthplace kind of area visiting family and talking with some family friends. And given that I've also lived in a couple other places in the world, I guess every time you go back, people have different questions for you. I don't mind them usually because these are like, it's either family and I'm used to it or it's family friends and I'm also used to it. But I had somebody who asked me a very interesting question. This is somebody who my family has known for years. So she's kind of like my auntie and she asked me in a very kind of curious and very, very just open way. We were speaking in Mandarin and she was like, "Michelle, I just don't quite understand how is it possible that you speak Mandarin the way that you do, despite not having been born and raised in a predominantly Mandarin speaking country." And I don't think I've ever had anybody ask me that directly.

Of course, I've had the indirect kind of people alluding to certain things, whether that be fluency or cultural values or knowledge about certain traditions, et cetera, customs. I think it was really great because it's the first time I actually had a conscious and direct explicit conversation on heritage language and all that it includes. And I also got to understand why she was asking me this question. I don't really want to get into the details of this person's life, but turns out that there were a whole bunch of aunties that were asking this question because they noticed with their kids or they noticed, I mean, we're at the level of grandkids now where people are noticing differences that they maybe didn't have time to notice between their kids growing up. Everyone just kind of, especially if you know the toll of needing to migrate or immigrate to another country and set up life there.

I mean, for whatever reason it's always going to be tiring and just these conversations require space and the privilege not be in constant survival mode. I am fully aware of that. I am definitely the first generation of my family to have the privilege to have this space, to make the space and think about these things. I think what's really interesting is that a whole lot of these aunties have started and uncles also, but have started to notice that there's a whole diverse array and kind of again, the spectrum of how their children and grandchildren have sort of turned out. I think it's the first time that anybody from an upper generation was asking me kind of wanting to know better also for a lower generation like a grandchild because I sort of feel like it's always been under the surface for a lot of people like, "Okay, we noticed that there are differences, but we don't know why." So yeah, this was a really, really great ... It was like an honor and a pleasure to actually have this conversation, these discussions.

And because in the conversation I was also being asked things like, "Well, how come my son and my daughter don't have the same kind of output?" One seems more comfortable speaking Mandarin and the other one always defaults to English. How come this one spent most of his or her early years in China but will only speak English these days? And if anything, we thought it would be the opposite, but in fact, the sibling or the cousin or whoever who has never even really been to China is actually the one using it the most. I want today's episode to be focused on this. Okay? I want today on your attention if you please, we are focusing on the fact that you can have two people who grew up in the same exact household exposed to the same language, can still end up having completely different relationships to the language as well as different ways of outputting said language.

So let's say that we have two brothers. Their names for lack of imagination are going to be Alex and Sam. Now, Alex and Sam are a hypothetical brother situation, but they're meant to be an illustration and I guarantee you in some shape or form they exist. So let's say they both grew up hearing the same heritage language at home. Doesn't matter language, it's just they go to school in let's say English or whatever other language and then they walk in the house, they open the door and they hear their family's language. They have the same parents. They have the exact same environment, meaning they have been living in the same city this entire time. Their friends are pretty much the same people. They go to the same school. They basically always, I mean, besides the fact that they're not twins, although they really could be as well again, this does not depend on biology.

They essentially are like environmentally the same, okay, take the same bus, go do the same sports activities. All of the social stuff is basically the same, but over time Alex and Sam start to diverge. And now given the fact that this does not depend on a person's biology, what I mean by that is that it's not genetically encoded and faded to result in a certain way. At least, I mean, evidence does not prove it as such. You might see that Alex is responding more often than Sam in the heritage language. Why? No one really knows. All right, Alex just talks more when he's asked something in the heritage language, he does not witch to English or a different language to respond. As such, Alex gets more practice speaking. He's building more confidence. He is randomly always the defacto translator when his parents ask him to be.

And again, this could be unconscious. It's just like, "Oh, Alex, come here and help me do this. " He seeks out more than Sam. Again, we don't know why we just know that he chose to, all right more opportunities to learn the language even explicitly asking for books, asking for other material because he knows that he's growing up outside of his parents' country of origin and that there's sometimes a wall when he has cousins visiting or goes to travel with his family back to see other family members and he kind of wants to break that wall. He feels like he just wants to understand more and so he's like, "Hey, mom, dad, can you buy me this book? Can you show me this movie? I heard about this. My cousin, whatever told me that. Can we go this summer to visit them?" Et cetera, et cetera.

Now, contrast that to Sam. Sam understands everything. Okay? This is not like a comprehension issue. Sam's surrounded by it like this language so he knows what's happening, but for some reason Sam just doesn't want to use it and there can be so many reasons why. Again, this doesn't really depend on the why it's just more the what, what is actually happening. Of course, you can have Sam meet with someone to get down to the why, but all we know is right now, Sam is using it less. He's hesitating a lot. He decides to respond in another language, again, like English. And so he just naturally through the passage of time will get les practice speaking it. So when he hears himself, he doesn't really like how he sounds perhaps or he just feels like it's kind of foreign and alien. He might also honestly feel like it's kind of tiring because he's having to navigate a whole speech landscape that he's not normally in.

And when his parents say, "Well, no, why can't you speak back to us in our family language?" He feels like they're judging him and he just doesn't want to do it. Okay. There's lots of this like, "Why do I even have to use this language? You all understand me when I speak in English anyways, so come on. " Fast forward a few years and inside the family and inside the larger community of language speakers, be that in the country where they live or another, Alex is seen as more fluent and Sam on the other hand is seen as behind. Now you might say, "All right, well, what's wrong with that? " I mean, natural, right? One's using it more the end. I mean, if Sam really wants, he can go and read more books if he wants later on in life. And that's the part where people always jump when they equate heritage language with any other type of foreign language because with any other type of foreign language, it is not just the language itself, but everything that a language can transmit, understanding a new culture or understanding different types of communication styles or understanding value structures or the geographical distribution of the language speaking world.

Take Spanish, for example, right? How many countries around the world speak Spanish. When you learn Spanish, you also learn about all of this history and all of this background. But if you don't grow up with any of these cultures as part of your family structure or your exposure, it is foreign. It is literally like it's coming together with the language, but you have to learn it step by step, right? Versus in this case, Sam and Alex both have been exposed to language and culture. And in some ways, this is also why it's going to be a natural part of their identity, but the relationship to these three categories will differ. And so in a community setting with other speakers of this language, Alex might actually be favored not only for his language skills, but favored because he might be seen also as more culturally competent and that calls in a whole massive aspect to the sort of unseen expectations and burden, I would say, of being a heritage language speaker, things that we just do not talk enough about.

And the difference is, again, not exposure, it's not a lot of these access things necessarily could be, but in this case, it's not, right? In this case, it's just that one kid decided for whatever reason to just gravitate more and the other kid was like, "I just don't want to. " And yet when both of them are speaking, Alex might be more favored because his ability is seen as greater. Therefore, his cultural identity starts to be, I mean, inappropriately so, but quantified in a way by those around him. Alex is seen as the more, again, culturally competent or the more culturally fluent sibling. Now, it could be true in a way that because Alex has absorbed more media and talked more with his family that he might be the better reference point. But again, you'd have to talk with both of them to really get a sense of that just because things correlate does not mean they naturally have a cause and effect type of consequential relationship, meaning how would you know if you didn't talk with these two brothers, how they actually feel about their language, their culture and their identity?

How would you know? This type of territory is so ... I think it can be so emotionally heavy as well because it goes into the whole conversation we're missing on cultural worth. It's getting into the territory of where people try to earn points in a certain culture and they might use language and then they might actually turn it against other family members or turn it against other people in their generation or not to kind of like win validation from I guess the community at large. And also if we think about countries of origin like homeland societies, this is like a whole year long project that I could do on how tricky and how complicated and how sociocultural and psychological and all this stuff gets. But for now, just know that we're focusing on the heritage language lens and therefore we just need to be aware that two people, same family, same exposure, same all this stuff does not necessarily mean that they are the same at the end.
Okay. When we think about heritage language, I think we really need to stop making those automatic assumptions across the board and valuing certain people more or less or assuming that so- and-so had more access than another person or was loved more or reinforced more or any of this stuff. It just doesn't exist in any sort of guaranteed automatic fashion. It is not possible to say that just because somebody grew up to take a group of heritage language speakers and say, "Oh yeah, well, all of you speak like this, or all of you do that, or all of you think this, or all of any of this. " Language and language use can be such a personal choice and all of these false equivalencies are really creating barriers to understanding before understanding is even given the space to take root. So I invite you to go and read the piece that just came out on how heritage language is not foreign language, how this has played out in your own life, I mean, either for you or people that you know.

I want you to ask yourself if you've been making just false assumptions across the board when it comes to people from a certain heritage, background, language, culture, identity, experience, and how you can better approach those conversations. Is there a way that instead of starting from a place of assuming something, is there a way that you can first make the space for that other person to tell you who they are or what they've gone through or what they feel? Instead of imposing a vision or projecting a certain image on somebody else that they need to undo, which naturally creates friction, can you find ways to allow this person to help you see things as they experience them or have experienced them? We talk a lot these days about compassion and empathy, but I really, really don't think we do a good job when it comes to language, culture and identity, especially the identity piece.

I feel that it's very tricky for people to know how to approach it because all we see modeled and everything from standup, which I love, by the way, I don't mind. I love humor and I love being able to make fun, but everything from comedy all the way across the board to our media at large and entertainment and kind of like the go- to reactions and a conversation.

I'll talk more about this stuff in the future, but for now just think about this as time goes on and as we continue the series I am so grateful for everyone listening here. Next week we have a double release, which so much work for me. We have mini number three and we have our guest episode coming up. We also have our first guest article for the series and actually for our Substack overall. Coming out, we cultivate.substack.com. If you haven't subscribed yet or haven't followed yet, you can do both. It is free and it is such a wonderful start to expanding to making the space for all of this work. So I will see you next week for our big, big, big, big week, big. If you're liking what you're hearing so far, by the way, just leave us a quick review or a quick rating.

It doesn't take too long and I will see you in the next episode.