Facing a language barrier, Mary is trying to deepen her relationship with her Cantonese-speaking mom. And Sarah J. Shin, a scholar who studies bilingualism and heritage language education, speaks with Juleyka about expanding our vocabulary through low-stakes activities, using technology to express our feelings in our parents’ first language, and modeling for future generations.
Mary Chan hosts The Podcaster's Guide to a Visible Voice.
Featured Expert:
Sarah J. Shin is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Dr. Shin completed her Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Michigan and joined the UMBC education faculty in 1999. She served as co-director of the TESOL graduate program from 2003 to 2016 and has established an international reputation as a scholar in bilingualism, heritage language education, and TESOL teacher preparation. She is the author of English language teaching as a second career (Multilingual Matters, 2017), Bilingualism in schools and society (Routledge, 2018), and Developing in two languages (Multilingual Matters, 2005). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education and The International Multilingual Research Journal. Dr. Shin is the 2017-2020 UMBC Presidential Research Professor. Learn more about her work here.
If you loved this episode, listen to Mom is Upset About Her Gift (Hint: It's Not About the Gift) and She's Opening Up to Mamí for the First Time.
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Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi everybody. Today we have Mary with us. Mary was born in Vancouver, Canada. But we think her experience will resonate with many first-gens in the US.
Mary grew up immersed in the English language. But her mom, who is from Hong Kong, speaks very little English. Since Mary speaks only elementary Cantonese, there's always been a language barrier between them. As an adult, Mary wants to bridge that gap and develop a closer relationship with her mom. She's also trying to model a good mother-daughter dynamic for her own young daughter. Let's get into it.
Mary: My name is Mary Chan. I am a mom to a young daughter. I have a podcast called The Podcaster's Guide to a Visible Voice. I was born in Vancouver in Canada to a mom from Hong Kong and my dad from China.
When I was young, I was in Vancouver's Chinatown. So my community was also people that looked like me. My peers spoke English, while my parents, they spoke strictly Cantonese. And growing up, I wanted nothing to do with speaking Cantonese. I tried not to just because we went to regular public school during the day from 9:00 to 3:00, but then we went to Chinese school afterwards until 6:00. So it just felt like a lot of school and a lot of homework. And Chinese school was very, very strict.
Cantonese was our first language, but English became the dominant language amongst the siblings. And my dad got so mad about that. He would always yell like, "You're not allowed to speak English in this house."
And of course, that never worked. We would just speak more English to each other. And eventually, the less I spoke, the more I forgot.
My mom, she worked three jobs. She wasn't home very often. And when we did try and have a conversation, it would be longer than your typical conversation because she would say, "Oh, you know the container that you put the tea leaves in then we pour the hot water in, can you bring that container over?"
Mary: I just kind of gave up as I grew older. A real-time conversation is really hard. A lot of the frustration that happens is when we don't know what each other is trying to say. "Oh, did you mean this?"
"No, I kind of mean this. Do you know what I mean?"
And then, "No, but it's okay."
Now it's a little easier. With the technology, it's leaving a voice note. I can take my time to think about what I'm actually trying to say before I actually say it. And then if I make a mistake, I can delete it and then start over again. It's so much more freeing feeling.
The difficult part with the language barrier is expressing my feelings. Because I have such an elementary level, I don't know how to express those feelings very well beyond saying happy, sad, angry, very basic emotions. It's hard to talk about my feelings because A, it's just ingrained in our culture to not talk about our feelings and especially in my family. But then there's also, as an immigrant child, you're always helping your parents anyway with all the other things about the society and culture, but you can't help them with their feelings. And when there is a situation where maybe if my dad yelled at her one night and she's crying, but I can't ask her why she's crying. And she might think that I'm too young to understand. And so there was a lot of missed opportunity as a young child to understand my parents. It always felt like our relationship was more transactional than anything else.
But now with my daughter, I want to reverse that. I want to make sure that I have a great relationship with her, that we can communicate. And so I want to model that with her. So trying to now communicate more with my mom. And I think with my mom, we're never really in the moment. We're always thinking one step ahead and wondering, will she understand me? So I don't think we ever get into the full emotion that we would like to get into.
The best time when things are just in flow and we don't have an issue is actually when we're either cooking or grocery shopping. We've always had food as our connector. Sometimes I wait until I visit my mom and then I stock up from her pantry. Or we'll go grocery shopping together and I'll say, "Oh, what's that thing that I need to make the soup? It's a dried vegetable?"
Mary: And then she'll take me to the aisle and tell me what it is. And it seems to be a lot more fun and easygoing when it's food related. Or if I am missing a dish that she used to make, I'll call her up and ask, "How do I make it?"
And then we can have a follow-up conversation after. So it's an easy go-to. I do have enough vocabulary for a lot of the ingredients because she's taught that to me since I was young. But we've never talked about our feelings since I was young. So it doesn't flow as well.
Lantigua: Developing a closer relationship with our parents, one where everyone feels safe sharing their feelings, and where we can see one another for who we really are, well, that's a tall order, even when we speak the same language. So imagine when we don't share a language in common. I'm often the language interpreter between my mom and my kids, and I see how they struggle to communicate, but I also see how clearly they are connected.
So I was intrigued by Mary's situation. It made me think about the role of language in all of our family relationships. And it also made me wonder, what can we as first-gens do to build stronger bonds across language divides? To help us figure it out, I called it an expert.
Sarah Shin: My name is Sarah Shin. I am a professor of education at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I train people to teach English as a second language and to work with immigrant families. I was born in Seoul, Korea and came to the US at age 13. I'm also a mother of two grown sons, both born and raised in the United States.
Lantigua: Simple question, which is, what did you hear as you listened to Mary's story?
Shin: Well, I heard something very familiar to me and to many people that I work with. Language shift in the immigrant family is a well-documented phenomenon. It used to be the case though, that there was what's called a three generation role, with the first generation immigrants speaking their mother tongue from their home countries and very little English, if at all. And the second generation, the children's generation, that's mostly bilingual, so they can go back and forth, they can code switch. And a third generation that speaks mostly English. But more recently, what we're seeing is a complete shift within two generations.
Lantigua: So now we're going from parents who are monolingual in their home language to first-gens who are only speaking English. Is that correct?
Shin: That's right. Without an intervening bilingual generation that can sort of do the translating.
Lantigua: Okay. So language is one thing, culture is another. If there is an absence of language that is shared, how do we transmit culture? Or is culture transmitted in an effective way?
Shin: Yeah, I think our culture is transmitted. I mean, Mary talks about really enjoying cooking and grocery shopping with her mom. They don't have to try so hard, they can just kind of flow, she said, right?
Lantigua: Yeah, I love that she used that word. Yeah.
Shin: Yeah. And so culture is transmitted from all of those kinds of things, by the tone of one's speech, just by the gesture and other things, the holidays you celebrate, the things that you value. All of those things are part of the family culture. And those things are transmitted, but with a language barrier, it becomes a bit more difficult.
Lantigua: So I'm going to just say something that I think a lot of people will be thinking, because I think about this all the time, which is, you're an adult now, you can go and learn the language. Sometimes the obvious answer is the obvious answer. So do you see adult children of immigrants going out to learn their parents' native language. She talked about using technology, which I think is so smart, but you're now capable. You can make that choice.
Shin: I do see a lot of grown-up children that take up their home language, their heritage language. A lot of universities now have heritage language classes. So these are classes that help people like Mary who grew up in a Cantonese-speaking family to sort of reconnect and to relearn their language. It's very, very different from somebody who knows nothing about Cantonese to pick up the language.
Lantigua: Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. So my children are exactly what you described in the first dynamic, the three generation dynamic. So my mother is monolingual in Spanish. I am bilingual, English and Spanish. My children only speak English. But I've got them convinced, and please don't tell them, I've got them convinced that they have the code embedded in them to learn Spanish. They just have to activate it.
Shin: You know, you are not far from science, I'm telling you. You are speaking the truth, woman. There's plenty of research comparing heritage learners to people who are completely new to the language. It takes much less time for them to reach a level of proficiency that takes many, many, many, many more hours for a completely non-native speaker. Because you talked about culture earlier, all the things that are spoken and unspoken, things between the lines that they just get just by virtue of living in a Spanish-speaking household.
Lantigua: Let's talk about the other part of what Mary brought up, which I think is really important, which is that in families like hers, the children are not allowed to go past a certain emotional intimacy with their parents. So there are just things you don't talk about with your parents, there are things that you don't ask them about, especially things that have to do with their relationship as parents to each other. And she is very aware of where that line is with her mother. But because she doesn't have the literal words with which to ask, she's even more limited.
And so I have a two-part question for you. One is, how do we set realistic expectations about thinking that our parents, whether we speak their native language or not, are actually going to be ready to be more emotionally intimate with us and share of themselves more with us? And how do we use language to facilitate that?
Shin: I think there are lots of things that are really working for your speaker and her mom. Number one, I think it's great that they already have something that they enjoy doing together. There is a connection. It's not completely broken.
My suggestion is to just keep doing the things that they both enjoy doing together, by all means. And you can make these moments be even more special sometimes if they're up to it, by adding a twist. So instead of just the mom teaching her how to do something, how to make something, the daughter may teach the mom how to cook her favorite dish, or that they can learn to make a dish that's unfamiliar to both of them. This may provide them with the opportunity to learn some new vocabulary and expressions, and have fun doing it.
And along the same lines, I would recommend adding other sort of highly contextualized activities, doing things that you can see, you can hear, you can taste, you can smell, you can touch, all of these things. Like watching a movie together, maybe with her mom. It could be a drama with subtitles.
And what this does is, for example, dramas, they naturally draw out your feelings in a non-threatening way. And so the idea is to really create opportunities for these kinds of things to come out in a very natural way while learning some useful expressions and vocabulary that you can borrow later on to really talk about feelings when the time is right.
Lantigua: I love these examples. I want to talk about the granddaughter. Because now Mary is raising this daughter and she wants the daughter to have a relationship with grandma. So how can language and culture be shared with her and also make her a participant in this?
Shin: When it comes to language, it's never all or nothing. Any kind of learning that takes place, it's cumulative over time. And we talked about how your sons have latent knowledge, how Mary probably has a lot of latent knowledge about Cantonese. And I think she may actually be able to surprise herself, just kind of like, "Oh, wow, I didn't know I actually could say those things."
And so I think it's a very hopeful message for anyone who has the desire to connect or reconnect with their family members. There are a lot of tools available for you these days. If you just have the desire to do it, and you have a long term kind of a mindset that you're not looking to become very fluent in two months.
I think more fundamentally though, for Mary, it's more than just a language issue. The fact that she desires so much to share her feelings with her mom and use that to model a good mother-daughter relationship to her own daughter tells me that there may have been some feelings of hurt or misunderstandings by either party, or just growing apart over time due to sheer lack of communication. Your speaker can ask her mom to help her express her feelings. And at first, Mary may not even have to say anything to her mom. It may be daunting all of a sudden to start sharing many years of pent-up emotions with her mom. It's just almost impossible.
What I might suggest is doing a little bit of free writing. She may just take out a piece of paper or journal or whatever, and then just kind of start writing her feelings out without worrying about grammar, spelling, punctuation, none of that. This is only for herself. Just write it all out and then do that for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, however long she thinks is necessary.
Put the thing away and come back to it maybe in a few days or so. Reread it. And there may be some nuggets that are just really important. They go, "Oh wow, that's exactly what I want to say." Make some changes as necessary. And when you feel like, oh, yeah, this captures sort of the essence of that first bit that I want to talk about with mom, and not everything, just that first bit, feed it to the translation app. It seems like she knows how to do all that really well, which is great. And use that, and it's not going to come out perfect, but use that to compose a letter to mom.
Lantigua: Oh, okay.
Shin: They can just exchange letters back and forth. A paragraph, just a few sentences. And once they are more comfortable and more aligned with each other, they can help each other open up more to have deeper conversations.
Lantigua: Wow. I love that. It's very gradual. All right, last question is, have I not asked you about something that you think is important to discuss, to talk about? Any other amazing wisdom you want to impart?
Shin: Oh, I don't know about amazing wisdom, but I just want to just say that really kudos, kudos to Mary, and the fact that she is making the effort and she has the desire to connect and reconnect and to really establish a thicker bond with her mom and she wants to do this for the next generation, I think these are just really praiseworthy kinds of sentiments. And I think she's already on her way. So yeah, best wishes.
Lantigua: Oh my God, Sarah, you're a gem. Thank you so much.
Shin: Thank you.
Lantigua: All right, here's what Sarah taught us today.
Upgrade your family time. Plan highly contextual, low stakes activities, things that you already enjoy doing with a parent, but add a small twist. Doing so will give you a chance to learn new vocabulary and you might learn something new about each other, stuff you didn't know before.
Write it out and lean on tech. Use free writing techniques and translation apps to gradually share your feelings and open up to your loved ones when there's a language gap.
And remember, trust your latent knowledge. As a heritage language learner, the cultural know-how you already have will help you reconnect with your family's language whenever you're ready. Yes, the code is in you too.
Thank you for listening, and thank you so much for sharing us.
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything
is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer. Tren Lightburn mixed this episode. I'm the creator and host, Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram, we're @talktomamipapi. Bye everybody. Talk to you soon.