Language Learning with the Novels of Thanhhà Lai

One of the greatest challenges when learning a language is physically opening your mouth and uttering words or sounds that are new. It is daunting. The fear of making a mistake is real, and stories abound about inadvertently saying something that does not make sense or is a serious cultural blunder. Vietnamese American author Thanhhà Lai captures the experience and emotions of immersion in another language and culture in her three books, Inside Out & Back Again (2011), Listen, Slowly (2015), and Butterfly Yellow (2019).

I first read Lai's debut novel Inside Out & Back Again in 2011, right after it was awarded the US National Book Award. I read it in one sitting because I could not put it down. Finally someone had captured the agony of learning another language when living in a new country. The story of ten-year-old Hà's linguistic and cultural adaptation mirrored my own. Through her first-person poems, she describes the puzzling parts of a new language, the challenges of making friends with people who look at you as different, and learning in a school system that does not know how to help the language learning and adaptation process. My journey was not forced like Hà's—I did not move to France when I was ten because of danger. But my language-learning journey was the same. Hà's voice is what makes this book so powerful.

Lai describes herself as a voice-driven author, and it is this that makes her stories of adolescents and teenagers struggling to learn English or Vietnamese compelling for the many students with whom I have read the books. Each of Lai's three novels gives a window into a different aspect of the language-learning experience. In Inside Out & Back Again, Hà leaves Saigon in 1975 with her family and eventually lands in the southern United States, where she begins to learn English (her third language) and adapt to American culture. In Listen, Slowly, twelve-year-old Mai travels back to her parents' home country, where she begins to voice Vietnamese, a language she understands because it is spoken in her California home, but one she has not used to communicate. In Butterfly Yellow, eighteen-year-old Hằng arrives in Texas following an escape on an overloaded fishing boat and time in a refugee camp. She uses her basic school English to look for her younger brother Linh, who was pulled from her arms and airlifted out of Vietnam on an "orphan plane" to the United States in 1975. Her language skills grow along with her cultural understanding as she works on a horse farm alongside LeeRoy, a gentle Texan who dreams of being a rodeo cowboy. And she slowly begins to build a bridge between her memories of her little brother, who adored her, and David, who has no memories of his life in Vietnam as "Linh."

In all three books the misconceptions about the target language are transcribed through free verse or Vietnamese phonics so the reader can begin to understand how complicated it is to train one's ear and tongue to master a whole new set of sounds and words. Lai explains that "when you enter a new language…you have to somehow reconfigure it to your mind so that you understand it" (Worlds of Words). For example, Hà records in her journal the incongruity of pluralizing a noun with an additional s even when the noun already has one:

Glass

Glasses

All dayI practicesqueezing hissesthrough my teeth.

Whoever inventedEnglishmust have lovedsnakes.

(Lai, Inside Out 118)

Hằng transcribes in her mind how to pronounce English words using a Vietnamese pronunciation key. She asks LeeRoy to "Thóc sì-lâu, bò-li-sì"—"talk slow, please" (Lai, Butterfly 41), breaking the words into separated phonemes. Each example of speech gives readers a chance to hear what Hà and Hằng hear as they try to understand and master English.