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on not being able to speak my own language

Even though I really didn’t understand much of it (and had to do a lot of research on my own afterwards), Dictee totally spoke to my personal experience of (un)inheriting an immigrant language. I’m not a refugee from Vietnam, but my parents are. They definitely tried to maintain our cultural integrity as long as the could. My mom spoke to me in Vietnamese until her own limited vocabulary could no longer wrap itself around my boundless kindergarten questions. Reading Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s intermingling French and English felt exactly how I feel when speaking and reading my parents’ native language. Understanding bits and pieces, but never enough for it all to make quite enough sense. Honestly, it’s a little inspiring how disjointed this work was–it’s definitely opened the door for my own final project to be not as cohesive as I originally thought.

I think this work spoke to me because of my weird disconnect from my ethnic linguistic identity, and my inclination to migrate to other ones. Last year, I took Latin, which I might consider revisiting for this final project. The Romans used “Salvete!” to greet each other, but it wasn’t just a simple “Hello.” Translated literally, “salvete” means “I hope you are well.” Their way of saying “please” was “amabo te,” which is directly translated into English as “I love you.” Romans asked favors and expressed affection in the same breath! Those little linguistic nuances were what kept me captivated in those classes for all of second year. Thanks to Latin, I’ve had an on-and-off fascination with learning Italian, which is definitely a more romantic derivative of Latin. Maybe I’ll learn enough Italian to work it into this final project, which I’m assuming will end up being a poem of sorts. How is it that so many other languages have so much more evocative ways of expressing feeling than English does? I’m blaming the harshness and the cold of the Anglo-Saxons in Old England.

-sydney