I have always seen language as a way to build community—with people of similar or very different cultural backgrounds. Learning a language gives you the opportunity to listen, to build a sense of common ground and understanding. Language connects you to your culture and allows others the chance to connect to you. This process, this conversation, allows you, in turn, to come to an understanding about yourself.
Living in a family of mixed cultures meant being exposed to contrasts, in my home life and outside of it. Growing up as a second-generation Asian American, there was a very notable difference between the values that I was taught while growing up and what I imagined a typical family dynamic should be in the United States. What I grew up seeing on sitcoms was very different from what my family was. Reflecting on it now, I can recall moments where I would feel like I wasn’t being heard when I spoke, as a result of me growing up using English when my parents didn’t. I can recall moments where I would feel a sense of otherness in elementary school, during events that celebrated national sports teams, since my parents were never familiar with that aspect of American culture. My parents also had a higher degree of caution and protectiveness than most of my friends’ families, due to the circumstances they grew up with in Cambodia and having to survive many life-or-death situations. I’d always wonder as a kid why my friends’ parents seemed to be more lenient in comparison to my own.
My family held adamant beliefs about prioritizing safety when it came to raising my brother and me. We lived in Lowell for a short time before I was born, but due to the amount of threats to safety at the time, our family felt more relief moving to a safer area for us to grow up in. As a result, my brother and I weren’t fully able to experience a sense of community with many other Asian Americans, since the town we lived in was predominantly White. There was a looming sense of otherness that my brother and I felt grow stronger as we got older. Questions often rose to my mind about the cultural differences between our lives and our neighbor's lives (as well as my classmates’ lives) during elementary, middle, and high school. I think from a young age that this sense of otherness also made me feel an internalized sense of shame when it came to the Cambodian language, whenever my parents would speak it out loud.
I can recall my first exposure to a language other than English as a child… they are faint but still present memories of my parents’ stories. I remember that they were about being immigrants coming from Cambodia, about building an optimistic and hopeful future. Being a child, I didn’t fully understand the actual gravity and emotional weight of the story being told to me. I have other faint memories of dozing off on my parents’ bed on a lazy afternoon, vague recollections of my dad attempting to teach me how to pronounce numbers in Cambodian. Unfortunately, from a young age I had internalized the idea that that there wasn’t much of a need for me to learn it: none of my friends at school spoke Cambodian and we didn’t have that many close family relatives that lived near us at the time. Yet it is more than that. As a child I felt embarrassment about my own culture and the language I grew up so close to. I had no real desire to learn it because it made me feel different.
As an adult reflecting on the influence and impact that my family’s culture has had on my identity, I’m more aware of the importance that language has in fostering understanding and empathy towards others. I know that this is particularly the case for others who feel a sense of internalized shame towards their own culture. Relearning Cambodian has given me a way to reconnect with my own cultural identity and help make sense of my own ethnicity.
My hope in taking Spanish, Cambodian, and Italian, is to be able to help normalizing the presence of languages besides English anywhere I go. I want to be able to normalize it enough that people won’t have to be burdened with feeling a sense of otherness when they participate in their own cultures. I want to allow others to use languages to explore their own identities. Learning a new language allows you to bring awareness to the complex existences of people with diverse backgrounds. It lets you step outside your own cultural sphere and embrace inclusivity, building connections and fostering understanding in those relationships. Hearing different perspectives helps me to grow more as a person, specifically in terms of empathy. I get to learn about cultural values I might have never considered if I only spoke English. A value I hold very high is inclusiveness, and hearing these different voices keeps me from being stuck in a narrow worldview, always reminding me how the world is made of people with rich histories, all with their own stories to tell.
