I found this passage – an interview excerpt from Stories in the Stepmother Tongue edited by Josip Novakovich & Robert Shapard in which my short story Grandma’s Tales appeared. I thought it’s kind of funny and still largely true…

AL—-

The only English I knew up to the age of 11 was “no money, no honey.” I think I learned it from the saigon prositutes whowalked the tamarind tree-lined boulevardds near the Independence Palace – across from which stood my school where I was taught Vietnamese and French.

Back then I thought English was a rather terse and ugly-sounding language – you dont’ have to say much to get your points across but to speak it you risk hurting your throat.

A few months after having arrived from the refugee camp in Guam, my voice broke. I thought it somehow had to do with my having to speak English and nothing to do with my going through puberty . Heck, I didn’t know what puberty was. I was convinced that the harsh-sound words had chafed the back of my throat, shattered my vocal cords, and caused me to sound so funny that my family, distraught as they were with the loss of Vietnam, laughed and laughed. And I, so chagrined by my own voice, stopped talking at home altogether.

it took me a while to figure things out, but by then I had already become an American teenager.

Vietnamese for me is primal. The word chua, for instance, which means sour, invokes a more sour taste to me than the English equivalent. That is, I would salivate more if I heard chua instead instead of sour. But to deal with something like globalization, something abstract, Vietnamese is woefully inadequate.

I can read and write in Vietnamese and I can speak passable french, but English is by far my favorite language. I think I’ve grown in live with it over the years. I am freer to express myself in English than in Vietnamese. The American “I” stands alone wehre the Vietnamese “I” is always a familial one. It is son, daughter, father, uncle and so on and it is understood only in the context of the communal whereas the American “I”...

Besides, there’s more “money” and “honey” in English, and I knew this even before I spoke it. If I were a poet, I’d write poetry in Vietnamese. But for now, for my money, and my honey, English is it…